NEW WRITING / BOOK TALK / NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE READER

Published by The University of Liverpool School of English.

Supported by:

No. 35 AUTUMN 2009

Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

SUBMISSIONS

The Reader genuinely welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, read-

ings and thought. We publish professional writers and absolute beginners.

Send your manuscript with SAE please to:

The Reader Office, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK.

EDITOR Philip Davis

DEPUTY EDITOR Sarah Coley

CO-EDITORS Maura Kennedy

Angela Macmillan

Eleonor McCann

Brian Nellist

Christopher Routledge

John Scrivener

NEW YORK EDITOR Enid Stubin

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Les Murray

ADDRESS The Reader Magazine

The Reader Organisation

19 Abercromby Square

Liverpool L69 7ZG

EMAIL magazine@thereader.org.uk

WEBSITE www.thereader.org.uk

BLOG www.thereaderonline.co.uk

DISTRIBUTION See p. 128

ISBN 978-0-9558733-4-8

COVER Tracey Emin ‘For You’ ; adapted from photograph by Barry Hale

ABOUT THE READER ORGANISATION

Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation

A Reading Revolution!

‘People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to

carry home when day is done.’ Saul Bellow, Herzog

We used this quotation in 1997 in the very f irst issue of The Reader magazine. The Reader Organisation didn’t exist then, it was just a few friends who wanted to open up the exciting experiences we were having teaching the Literature programme in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool. We were running evening and weekend classes for adults willing to read and make real books from Saul Bellow to Chaucer, via Shakespeare, H. G. Wells and Ann Michaels.

Twelve years on and this magazine, which has been in continuous production ever since, is the voice of an independent charity which is bringing about a Reading Revolution: putting great books in the hands of people who need them.

Amongst other activities, The Reader Organisation is currently delivering 128 weekly read-aloud shared ‘Get Into Reading’ groups on Merseyside, and supporting the de-velopment of many more across the UK and beyond, particularly through our Read to Lead training programme. We work in schools, workplaces, community groups and old people’s homes, and a great deal of our work is delivered in partnership with the NHS.

NEWS THIS ISSUE: Get Into Reading has been highlighted in ‘New Horizons’, a new strategy by the Department of Health that will promote good mental health and well-being, whilst improving services for people who have mental health problems (http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/News/Recentstories/DH_097701).

One in four people will suffer poor mental health at some point in their life. Shared reading of great books is a simple way to provide ‘something real to carry home’.

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THE READER

CONTENTS

THE READER

CONTENTS

ESSAYS12 Catherine Pickstock

‘For You’ by Tracey Emin

Neon Installation in

Liverpool Cathedral

14 Philip Davis

The Man Said, No

21 Paul Kingsnorth

The Gathering Storm

54 Gabriella Gruder-Poni

The Reader Gets Angry:

Scenes from a PGCE

INTERVIEW33 Kenneth Hesketh

On the Nature of Things

READING REVOLUTION63 Jen Tomkins

Diaries of The Reader Organisation

65 Ciara Rutherford

Doing

76 Lisa Curtice

Pioneers in the Search for Health

84 Penny Markell talks to Gill Lowther

Calling Librarians

EDITORIAL7 Philip Davis

The Reading Revolution

POETRY10 Face to Face

18 Tom Paulin

27 Les Murray

32 Connie Bensley

42 Nigel Prentice

62 Richard Meier

70 Eleanor Cooke

81 David Sollors

THE POET ON HIS WORK49 John Greening

FICTION43 Richard Flanagan

extract from Wanting

118 Frank Cottrell Boyce

Aaahhh!

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THE READERTHE READER

108 Good Books

Brian Nellist

On the Novels of Iris Murdoch

115 Frank Cottrell Boyce

Books for Your Children:

Philippa Pearce,

Tom’s Midnight Garden

REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS109 William Shutes

The Letters of Samuel Beckett

Volume I: 1929–1940 113 Sarah Coley

David Constantine,

Nine Fathom Deep

THE BACK END124 Prize Crossword

By Cassandra

125 Buck’s Quiz

126 Quiz and Puzzle Answers

127 Contributors

YOUR REGULARS29 Ian McMillan

Time for My Lemon

71 Jane Davis

A World Elsewhere

95 Enid Stubin

Our Spy in NY

98 The London Eye

Be Stone No More

101 Brian Nellist

Ask the Reader

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS89 Adam Phillips

Forsaken Favourites

93 Brian Nellist

The Old Poem:

John Donne, ‘As Due

by Many Titles’

104 Readers Connect

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

106 Angela Macmillan

Books About…

Fathers and Sons

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“The Church has always been a place, for me, of contemplation. I wanted to make something for Liverpool Cathedral about love and the sharing of love. Love is a feeling which we internalise; a feeling very hard to explain. I thought it would be nice for people to sit in the Cathedral and have a moment to contemplate the feelings of love, it’s something which we just don’t have enough time to think about and I hope this work creates this space in time.”

– Tracey Emin On ‘For You’, her installation in the Anglican Cathedral

© Scott Douglas

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Philip Davis

THE READING REVOLUTION

EDITORIAL

n this issue, as you can see from our cover, The Reader is to be found loitering and looking in at the entrance to Liverpool’s Anglican Ca-thedral, accompanied by the artist Tracey Emin and the composer Kenneth Hesketh. Samuel Johnson, that worried and ever-lapsing believer, tells us that a friend of his, invited to offer frank criticism,

once accused him of lack of Christian love or charity:

johnson: And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this – that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?interviewer (helpfully): I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly – and harshly.johnson: And who is the worse for that?interviewer (discomfited, placatory): It hurts people of weak nerves.johnson (fortissimo): I know of no such weak-nerved people!

Exit Interviewer, trembling. Thank you, Mr Boswell. Another Reader in-terview gone wrong.

But in happy celebration of Johnson’s 300th birthday this Septem-ber, this is no issue for the weak-nerved. Nor do we know, or want to know, any such. With Paul Kingsnorth and Gabriella Gruder-Poni, The Reader gets angry – with civilised indifference, with rubbishy teaching –

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EDITORIAL

on behalf of what it loves. Johnson is what he himself calls a good hater, roughing up those who moan or cavil or despair.

interviewer (re-entering, rather hopelessly): What, Sir, do you think of a man who was apt to say non est tanti, it is not worth while, why bother?johnson: That he’s a stupid fellow, Sir. What would these tanti men be doing the while?interviewer: But what reason is there for taking so much trouble over the mere routine pursuits of existence? johnson (in an animated tone): Sir, it is driving on the system of life.

A man at once worried and intelligent has need of more than ‘reason’ – as if everything could be reasoned out in advance before you deigned to do it! Keeping going is, more powerfully, ‘driving on’ for Johnson, too often himself a prey to depression. For knowing the vulnerability of effort, he feared as much as hated what he called those human ‘screech-owls’ whose ‘only care is to crush the rising hope, to damp the kindling transport, and allay the golden hours of gaiety with the hateful dross of grief and suspicion’.

interviewer: And if weak-nerved people listen to the human screech-owl…?johnson: It will burthen the heart with unnecessary discontents, and weaken for a time that love of life, which is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

Even then, notice, this burdensome discontent is only ‘for a time’: some-thing optimistically biological in its tenacity must come back through, even for the timid. This Johnson is so physical a thinker in his use of the language – you can feel that love of life even in the shake of that word ‘vigorous’.

interviewer: And books, Dr Johnson?johnson: The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

This living Johnson says (selectively quoting himself, we believe, from his own life of the poet Gray): ‘I rejoice to concur with The Reader.’ We’ll be putting that on the back cover of our next issue, with the other com-mendations we receive.

Because we need all the backing we can get in support of what we are calling ‘The Reading Revolution’. We may not be in the church but we are unashamedly in the pulpit, preaching the very feel of literature without going soppily pious on you. Make no mistake: we are trying

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EDITORIAL

to change everything about reading habits – beyond the glossy Sunday chatter of the London establishment book pages; beyond the inadequa-cies of an education system that at all levels is emphatically not a system either of life or for life. The Reader is the written voice of The Reader Organisation, in all its outreach work, bringing great literature out of the universities into the communities, the better to enjoy or endure. In this issue and in issues to come, you will see this more and more explicitly – as we report on what we are up to in our outreach activ-ity; provide continuing advice and recommendations to reading-groups and to young readers; pursue the work of bibliotherapy in libraries and hospitals and brain-scanning research laboratories, as well as maintain-ing our usual mix of new poetry, fiction and thought-pieces in order to ensure we are not just talking about literature but actively producing and publishing it, in all its varied reality. This is not simply a magazine any more, it is a campaign.

Editor’s PicksIn this issue Frank Cottrell Boyce gives us his own short story and also provides the first of The Reader’s new occasional series ‘Books for your Children’ (Frank has seven). At the other end of the age-spectrum, Tom Paulin gives us his translation of Sophocles’ blinded old Oedipus at-tended by his daughters, while Angela Macmillan launches her new regular reading list (‘Books About’) by starting with the theme ‘Fathers and Sons’. We have the opening chapters of Richard Flanagan’s new novel Wanting, new poetry by our Australian editor Les Murray, and a new guest panelist on the jury of Readers Connect

VISIT THE READER ONLINE http://thereaderonline.co.uk/

For the latest news from the The Reader magazine and the Reader Organisation’s growing Get Into Reading project, for poetry, reviews and video fun and spotlights on the bookish world at large please visit our blog and leave a comment. You can also subscribe online and find great offers on back issues.

FACE TO FACEPOET BIOGRAPHIES

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Featured on page 70Featured on page 49

Featured on page 32

Meeting with poetI’d like to have had a good natter with Ben Jonson in Bread Street.

Happiest ageWhen imagination was something one took for granted: just before we got a TV, when I was 10.

Overused word‘Only’. Also ‘Huntingdonshire’.

Recommend a bookGeorge Gascoigne is a wonderful, neglected Elizabethan poet: read him if you can find him.

Which poet would you have liked to meet?Probably Byron, but only if I am much older than he is when the meeting takes place, so that I can question him about his love life from a safely detached point of view.

At what age were you happiest?My happiness ebbs and flows but I do remember being especially happy one day when we were laying a garden path.

Recommend a bookRecently I loved The Way We Live Now, a Trollope I had never read before.

Eleanor Cooke John GreeningConnie Bensley

Meeting with poetJohn Donne is my all-time favourite poet, but I’d like to meet Emily Brontë for a walk over the moors.

Happiest ageI was happiest during my late thirties and early forties, I think. But there’s always time…

How many drafts?I re-draft obsessively. (Moral: find a poet-friend you can trust to whip poem from under your pen at the right moment.)

CONNIE BENSLEY

JOHN GREENING

ELEANOR COOKE

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Featured on page 62

Featured on page 42

Featured on page 18

Meeting with poetElizabeth Bishop

Happiest timeOn honeymoon

Overused wordUmpteen

Recommend a bookThe Poems of Kenneth Slessor

How many drafts?Umpteen, at least

Happiest ageMid-20s. I escaped from London to live and work in Italy, and it changed my life.

Recommend a bookLoving, the novel by Henry Green: I read it nearly every year.

Meeting with poetJohn Clare

At what age were you happiest?In my twenties

Richard Meier Nigel PrenticeTom Paulin

Featured on page 27

Meeting with poetGeoffrey Chaucer Happiest ageFourteen, away from home

Overused wordNone, but I’m an explainer

Recommend a bookR. K. Narayan

Les Murray

Featured on page 81

Meeting with poetDylan Thomas in a pub on a rainy afternoon.

Happiest ageI have not yet got through all the ages of man. Live them all without gradation.

David Sollors

NIGELPRENTICE

RICHARDMEIER

TOM PAULIN

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Catherine Pickstock

ESSAY

rom the first distance, it looks like a faintly lurid overspill from the window above, which is full of scattered lights – as if the fragments of rose glass hadn’t quite been able to contain themselves. It hovers over the void below, rather like a flash of Islamic script, perhaps the soft fiery writing

of God himself, a muted warning, a tinted fiat. Looking back from the East transept, just glimpsing the pink glint under the Nave bridge, but too far away to make out the words, the bright caption almost looks magisterial, a condensation of the window’s eruption.

But as one gets closer, looking up from the Well, Emin’s neon in-scription ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me’ begins to shock us. It interrupts the bursting-into-fragments of the kaleidoscopic explosion of the Benedicite window above, and the dark and austere West porch below. What intervenes, slashed through this space, is rose flushed to the banality of pink. Pink’s own powdery embarrassment can least of all endure the flushing energy of neon glow. Thus energised and electrified, pink is exposed, simpering and a little tawdry.

What are we to suppose? Is it just a blush? Is this God blushing, caught out in sending us a Valentine message? It is not what one feels at first, except tacitly. Rather, one senses the uncanny intrusion of the fairground, the disenchanting trailer-park chain of fairy lights with a trailer-park lyric in simultaneous tow. This is the magical appearance of market modernity within a sacred space that has perpetuated into the present the nineteenth century gothic revival. What is presented is hypercapitalism’s transcendence of the contrast between the stable

‘FOR YOU’ BY TRACEY EMINNEON INSTALLATION IN LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL

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and the ephemeral. The pathetically intimate scrawl of western minis-cule trinked-out in pink neon is entirely of a piece with the permanent encampment of the out of town shopping centre, the fringing sugary sprawl of post-modern business parks. Lost, all too safely, in such spaces, what is left for us? Desperate and extreme stances perhaps, pleasure only in the shedding of rich real blood so desolatingly absent there.

Or is this a different pink, the pink of the incarnation, translated into redeemed luridity? Is its pale pinkness an echo of the sentiment that only human physical intimacy is left in a loveless universe and the miracle that this can be real? The miracle that a touch, physically like any other touch, can all the same convey the highest spiritual commu-nication? That a touch can be special, that its wandering cursivity can convey a stamp of character not just unmistakeable like a script, but imbued with a meaning that exceeds language, even though it is only conveyed therein?

The miracle of a loving touch is all of a piece with the miracle of a love-letter – of fiery shapes which burn with more than their geometri-cally-flowing selves, which burn with sense.

And why not in pink? Its pale rose is the colour of flesh itself, and the blush is the necessary awkwardness of all true feeling. ‘I felt you and I knew’: what else can love be but this and what else religion? But is any more left to us than the chances of human love: the arrival (or not) of the Valentine card? Does love still seem in excess of that? Do we know that we are loved? Perhaps not any more; perhaps now only in a lurid way or commercially. For even personal feelings are now sold to us, decked out in a rose that has crudified into pure pink, the least redolent with transcendence of any shade. What can be done with that? How can the cathedral refuse this last sad circus echo of a real dwelling on earth beneath the heavens? The best that can be done with pink is to grind it into powder and shake it like scented snow all over our newly baptised bodies.

But its fluorescence is too resistant for this. It is indignant beneath the rainbow colours of promise and blessing and above the questioning void; it seems crude and unmoved.

To say whether this installation ‘works’ or not would be beside the point. Its singularity is – fortunately – not the self-celebration or mere illustrativeness of ‘art’. Rather its iconoclastic intrusion of pure electri-fied writing genuinely reveals – the absence of the icon, the absence in the contemporary market of any revelation, in the heart of a space dedicated to the revelation of love.

Originally published in Art & Christianity

ESSAY

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Philip Davis

THE MAN SAID, NO

ESSAY

t begins with a man in flight, desperately seeking his way in life. A guide comes to him, pointing the sheerly narrow way to salva-tion. ‘Do you see yonder Wicket-gate?’ says Evangelist. In response are written four of the most simple and fundamental words in the language. ‘The Man said, No.’ Many people admire Keats’s famous

account of ‘Negative Capability’ in his letter to George and Tom Keats (21, 27 December 1817) – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncer-tainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ But the Man confronted by Evangelist has only positive incapa-bility to offer – the reluctant No – even though he recognises that Yes would be the apparently right and better answer.

Evangelist seems to respect this negative honesty, even in its risk of self-condemnation. At any rate, he doesn’t give up on the Man, but offers him a second chance, saying: ‘Do you see yonder shining light?’ In others it might provoke the hallelujah response, ‘Yes, yes, I see the light.’ But Bunyan’s man manages just four more words: ‘I think I do.’ It is robust, even in its felt weakness, but it is not in the least gung-ho. I think I do: however secondary that may feel, it is still a form of belief, perhaps the form of belief, in its very fear personally riskier than a maybe-yes, maybe-no agnosticism.

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This is of course the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Later when Pliant turns round on this Man who has become Christian and asks him, in midst of his continuing trouble, where all this religion of his has got him, the response of the Man is similarly heart-deep: ‘I do not know.’ It is the all-too-knowing Mr Worldly Wiseman who can always say, ‘I thought so.’ Those who suppose themselves healthy-minded need only to be born once, but, says William James, there are other souls who must be twice-born in order to be saved, and such is John Bunyan even in those two responses to Evangelist:

In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of recti-linear or one-storied affair whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which natu-rally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and tran-sient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance… It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (Lecture 8)

In the normal economy of the world, it seems first-order good sense to cling to the natural life, even when it seems in deficit. Punters and in-vestors cling on for fear there is no second life, not knowing for certain any different way without risking, in advance and without guarantee of return, the loss and ruin of their norm. That is what Kierkegaard was to call the ‘despair of despairing’: locked into the first life for fear that there is no second (or, sometimes, for fear that there may be), the desperate continuance itself incrementally adds to the disbelief in any-thing other. It may take a massive personal disaster, a scandal, illness, bereavement, depression, to begin that total recalibration of life that James describes in the twice-born.

Bunyan’s God seems to have great hidden respect and compassion for those who can only say ‘I think I do’, the tentative new beginnings of the second chance in response to His first challenges. So it is in Mark (9.23–4) when Christ says almost temptingly, or testingly, to the father of the epileptic child seeking the miracle of a cure for his son: ‘If thou

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ESSAY

canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.’ To which the father straightway cried out and said with tears: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ It is the second half of that utterance – more than the first, but also impossible without it – which is the real language of belief, precisely for incorporating doubt within itself. Thus too George

Herbert pleading to God at the end of ‘Affliction (1)’: ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.’ For this robust way includes in its tough sense of human fallenness the self-suspicion lest the turn to the second life is no more than psychological compensation for the failure of the first one. Public figures brought down by scandal suddenly born again into charitable good works; repentance reached on the day of execution: beneath the omniscience of God, it is on a knife’s edge of plausibility as to how far these conversions are indeed authentic or inauthentic. Even the protagonist himself cannot be sure. In ‘To Heaven’ Ben Jonson says robustly in his sorrows ‘I know my state, both full of shame, and scorn’, ‘I feel my griefs too’ – but also fears lest those prayers of his to God should be ‘For weariness of life, not love of thee’.

‘Not’, ‘no’, ‘unbelief’: this is the language of positive incapability at the wits’ end of what is human, volunteering to what is almost shame-fully but also involuntarily inadequate. It (whatever is to become its name) all begins, not ends, with No – as in Luther’s great Protestant declaration, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.’

When I say such is the real language of belief, ‘real’ is a word I take from John Henry Newman, in particular from ‘Unreal Words’ in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (5.3). There Newman recalls how to the young man who lightly called Him ‘Good Master’ (‘Good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?’), Christ replied, ‘Why callest thou Me good?’ as though implicitly bidding him weigh his words (Mark 10. 17-18). ‘Words have a meaning,’ says Newman, ‘whether we mean that meaning or not; and they are imputed to us in their real meaning, when our not meaning it is our own fault. He who takes God’s Name in vain, is not counted guiltless because he means nothing by it.’ To mean the meaning, to inhabit and take personal responsibility for one’s words as for oneself: that is the ‘real’ – in my judgment itself a far deeper word than ‘honest’ or ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’, because so riskily committed to its faltering language even as ‘I think I do’ is.

But the reality of such language does not rest merely in its vocabu-

“It is on a knife’s edge of plausibility as to how far these conversions are indeed authentic or inauthentic. Even

the protagonist himself cannot be sure.”

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ESSAY

lary. The great Old Testament example in this respect comes from Job speaking, from the midst of his suffering, of his paradoxical relation to God – thus:

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. (Job 13.15)

It seems likely now that this, taken from the Authorised King James Version, is a mistranslation. ‘Let him slay me’ it begins, but the second clause may be better rendered as the more easily compatible ‘I have no hope’ – though just possibly it may still be ‘in him I will hope’. Even so, literal or not, the Authorised Version retains its place through centuries of usage, in resonant memory of the Hebraic tradition of a loyal oppo-sition to the Lord, of arguing with God precisely through a protesting faith in Him. Thus what is most powerfully real in Job’s saying is the syntax, the English connectives that create it: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.’ It is important that the three clauses are in that order – and no other more conventionally pious or apologetic version – and returning still to ‘mine own ways’, my own personal sense of justice however inadvert-ently flawed, rather than become religiously unreal. ‘Religion’ itself is a temptation; that is why the whole experiential shape of faith has to be self-checking, in that great phrase of Newman’s ‘saying and unsay-ing to a positive result’. But it is even more important that, for all their contradictions and their conflict, somehow – the sentence says, because it is one sentence – somehow all three positions can be held together, and passionately are so in a life. He slay me; I trust him; I maintain mine own ways. It is like a version of what Tertullian said of God – ‘Credo quia impossibile est’: I believe in the reality of this utterance precisely because it is well-nigh impossible.

It cannot be That I am heOn whom thy tempests fell all night.

It cannot be but (he says, in the silent aftermath of wonder) it is: George Herbert’s amazed recovery from the long dark night of depression in ‘The Flower’. ‘I am he’: you could not make it up, you could not reason it, unless you found and felt it on different lines from the normal lines of life and time. In its still unresolved movement through the midst of its own difficulties, not yet anywhere near the point of Herbert’s recov-ery, Job’s ‘though, yet, but’ is profoundly robust, stumbling yet upright, faithful yet defiant with it.

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POETRY

TOM PAULIN

ExTRACTS FROM OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

Tom Paulin writes, ‘I did a version of Antigone for Field Day in 1984, then a version of Prometheus Bound for the Open University classical civilization course. I saw Oedipus Rex at the National last year and thought it would be good to try the two Oedipus plays. I then went on to do Medea which Barry Rutter’s Northern Broadsides in Halifax are going to do next spring. My Antig-one, The Riot Act, was done in Northern-Irish English.’

theseUsAnd how could war break outbetween these nations? OEDIPUSKnow son of Aegeusknow most gentle sonthe gods aloneneither age nor die.But all things elseall-powerful time disturbs.The earth it wastes away.The body wastes and faithdies out tooand so distrust is born.

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POETRY

Little by little the spiritchanges between a man and his friendor between two cities.For some men soonfor others later on.Either their pleasure soursor love comes again.The same with you and Thebes.Between you boththe sweet season holds.But Time Time goes onand no man can ever measure it.Unnumbered days and nights it fathers.And then one daythey’ll tear apart with spearsthis gift of harmonyand all for one slight word.

*

CHORUSThough he has watched the time go bysometimes a man will still desire the world.That man I say he has no wisdom.The hours pass by.They rack up pain.And as for pleasurean old old mancan find it nowhere in this world.Better than thought and speechis never to be born.

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POETRY

Only to see the lightand then go backis second best to that thing.His youthful follies overwhat trouble is there now for man?What will he not endure?But in the endhe comes to impotent old age.There in the twilighthe must live with every bitter thing.I speak the truth nownot just for mebut for this blind and ruined man.He’s like a northern shorebashed by the waves.From the setting of the sunto the bright noondayhe’s trapped and ruined– trapped and ruined both.

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Paul Kingsnorth

THE GATHERING STORM

ESSAY

n September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and the British and other Western governments declared war on Germany. The build-up to war had been apparent for years; everybody knew what was coming. Now, with the war’s official beginning, it was clearer than ever that a cataclysm had arrived, which would affect virtually eve-

rybody not just in Europe but the world over.Yet initially, nothing much happened. Warnings were issued, rear-

mament was stepped up, posters were printed warning people to keep their gas masks with them at all times. But neither the Nazis nor the allied powers instituted an offensive against the other. For almost eight months, life seemed to go on much as before; it must have seemed as if nothing would really change after all. People called it ‘the phoney war’.

Today, we are living through a phoney war of our own. Just over the horizon, now as then, looms something enormous and world-changing. Something which we hear about every day in the media, in increasingly alarmist tones, and yet which never seems to quite arrive. Now as then, life goes on, for most of us, just as it always has.

But now, as then, the phoney war will end. In May 1940 the German invasion of France shattered the illusions of those who had let them-selves believe that the old world order would somehow continue. Today, the ongoing collapse of the global environment is leading us towards the same kind of reckoning. We are living in insecure and unprecedent-ed times, and nothing that we currently take for granted is likely to

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survive the 21st century unscathed – up to and including our civilisation itself. All around us are signs that our way of life is passing into history; that it cannot be sustained; that the lives we have taken for granted are going to change, radically. And yet we go on, most of us, as if nothing is really going to happen at all.

The world is undergoing an ecological crisis unprecedented in mil-lions of years; a frenzy of destruction and radical upheaval, initiated by one species: ours. The root of this crisis is often assumed to be political or economic: if we could just get ‘the system’ right, the logic runs, we could create a more ‘sustainable’ world. But it is not the system that is the problem: it is the assumptions that underpin it. Put another way, the root cause of the global crisis we are living through is an imagina-tive one; it lies in the stories we have told about ourselves and our place in the world.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish

stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predict-ed to rise to 80% by mid-century. And over it all looms runaway climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it.

A civilisation is built not on oil, steel or bullets, but on stories; on the myths that shore it up and the tales it tells itself about its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are – above all, by the story of civilisation itself. This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.

What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we

“We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we

are – above all, by the story of civilisation itself”

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have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment’s legacy – a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world.

Humans have always lived by stories, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason, reality remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry. With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory.

The global crisis we are living through demands a response, and that response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, concep-tual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Writers are needed. But where are they? Where are the novelists who are equal to this challenge? Where are the poets? Many of our writers today are stuck in old grooves. Think of the novels that make the headlines: if you want an idea of what apparently challenges today’s mainstream novelist you may choose between the bourgeois angst of the Ian McEwans or the urban multiculturalism of the Monica Alis; you can choose between the country house or the inner city, but you cannot choose much that goes beyond either of them. In the world of poetry we are still struggling with modernism and pop culture, and the gap between Wordsworthian ‘nature poetry’ and performance agitprop remains largely unfilled.

Believing that the times deserve more than this, a group of us have come together to try and forge a new movement of writers and artists dedicated to looking honestly and unflinchingly at what the future holds. We don’t believe that the future will be much the same as the past, and consequently we don’t believe that yesterday’s writing, or even today’s, is going to be helpful in signposting the years ahead.

We call this the Dark Mountain Project, and its aim is to forge a school of what we are calling ‘Uncivilised writing’. Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compas-sion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project.

Uncivilised writing offers a perspective which sees humanity as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious proces-sion. It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an alba-

ESSAY

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tross, a mountain hare – might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing which puts civilisation – and us – into perspective.

If few writers today are working in this way it may be because the challenge is so very daunting. It daunts us; but we believe also that it needs to be risen to. And there are writers who do, or have done, so. One example is the late American poet from whose work we take the name of our project.

Robinson Jeffers was writing Uncivilised verse seventy years ago, though he didn’t call it that. In his early poetic career, Jeffers was a star: he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, read his poems in the

US Library of Congress and was respected for the alternative he offered to the Modernist juggernaut. Today his work is left out of anthologies, his name is barely known and his politics are regarded with suspicion. Read Jeffers’ later work and you will see why. His crime was to puncture humanity’s sense of self-importance. His punishment was to be sent into a lonely literary exile from which, forty years after his death, he has still not been allowed to return.

But Jeffers knew what he was in for. He knew that nobody, in an age of ‘consumer choice’, wanted to be told by this stone-faced prophet of the California cliffs that ‘it is good for man … To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.’ He knew that no comfortable liberal wanted to hear his angry warning, issued at the height of the Second World War: ‘Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy / And the dogs that talk revolution / Drunk with talk, liars and believers … / Long live freedom, and damn the ideologies.’ His vision of a world in which humanity was doomed to destroy its surroundings and eventually itself (‘I would burn my right hand in a slow fire / To change the future … I should do so foolishly’) was furiously rejected in the rising age of consumer democ-racy which he also predicted (‘Be happy, adjust your economics to the new abundance …’)

The aim of Uncivilised writing is, in Jeffers’ words, to ‘unhumanise our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’ This, we think, is the literary challenge of our age. So far, few have taken it up. The signs of the times flash out in urgent neon,

“I would burn my right hand in a slow f ire To change the future”

– Robinson Jeffers

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but our literary lions have better things to read. Their art remains stuck in its own civilised bubble. The big names of contemporary literature are equally at home in the fashionable quarters of London or New York, and their writing reflects the prejudices of the placeless, transnational elite to which they belong.

But the converse also applies. Those voices which tell other stories tend to be rooted in a sense of place. Think of John Berger’s novels and essays from the Haute Savoie, or the depths explored by Alan Garner within a day’s walk of his birthplace in Cheshire. Think of Wendell Berry or W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver or Cormac McCarthy. These are writers who know their place, in the physical sense, and who remain wary of the siren cries of metrovincial fashion and civilised excitement. They are, in their own ways, examples of what is possible.

The Dark Mountain Project was launched in July. So far we have printed our manifesto, in a limited edition of 300 copies, we have set up a website as a hub for the project and have held a launch event, but these are just the first salvos. We are planning more events, from storytelling evenings to mini festivals, and we plan, in 2010, to launch the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal. Most of all, we are looking to meet people to whom the project appeals. We want to discover new writers and move in new directions. Time may be short, so there is none to lose.

The Dark Mountain Project can be found online at www.dark-mountain.net

LES MURRAY

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LES MURRAY

A Frequent Flyer Proposes a Name

Sexburga drive is a steep mud lanebut Sexburga, she was Queen of Kentfourteen centuries ago. She tried to rule as well as reignbut her tough spear-thanes grated No!She’s but a wife-man, a loaf-kneader:we will not obey a bodice-feeder.No precedent, said Witan. Quite unkentso on Sheppey isle she built a convent.

But now, in an era more Amazon,the notion has come to the jarl of London, white-polled Boris, to move Heathroweast to the marshy Thames outflowso jet-liners may leave their keening cryover the Channel and grim North Sea –and Celtic queens have ruled: Boudicca, Bess,but your Saxon ones still await redress. Savour this name: London Sexburga Airport.

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Hesiod On Bushf ire

Poxes of the Sun or of the mindbring the force-ten firestorms.After come same-surname funerals,junked theory, praise of mateship.

Love the gum forest, camp out in itbut death hosts your living in it, brother.You need buried spaceand cellars have a convict foetor:

only pubs kept them. Houses shook them offwherever Diggers moved to.Only opal desert digs homes by dozer,the cool Hobbit answer.

Cellars, or bunkers, mustn’t sit squareunder the fuel your blazing house will be,but nearby, roofed refractory,tight against igniting air-miles.

Power should come undergroundfrom Fortress Suburbia, and your treasuresstay back there, where few now grow up in the fear of grass.

Never build on a summit or a gully top:fire’s an uphill racer deliriously welcomedby growth it cures of growth.Shun a ridgeline, window-puncher at a thousand degrees.

Sex is Fire, in the ancient Law.Investment is Fire. Grazing beasts are cool firebackburning paddocks to the door.Ideology is Fire.

The British Isles and giant fig trees are Water.Horse-penis helicopters are watery TVbut unblocked roads and straight volunteersare lifesaving spume spray.

Water and Fire chase each other in jetplanes. May you never flee through themat a generation’s end, as when the Great Depression died, or Marvellous Melbourne.

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Ian McMillan

TIME FOR MY LEMON

YOUR REGULARS

sent an email to a mate of mine the other day where I said, rather pretentiously I reckon, that ‘I always return to the Avant Garde as my default mode’. It’s true, though: if in doubt, in art and music as well as poetry, I always look for the stuff I can’t understand straight away, the music that my wife calls ‘squeaky gate music’

and the art that makes people cross because they reckon a kid could have done it with a toy brush. ‘Avant Garde? Aven’t practised’ as my pal Darren said. Well, that may be the case but it certainly makes for fasci-nating listening, looking and reading. Especially reading.

Recently I’ve come across two books of interestingly difficult poetry that have made me see the world in a different way, and maybe that’s all we can ask of poetry. The books are Sills, by Michael O’Brien, published by Salt, and Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems published by Carcanet. I just can’t read these poems in isolation, forbidding as they sometimes are: I find that reading knotty and slippery writing helps me to appreciate the world around me.

In Barnsley, where I live, we’ve got a new bus station, a bold state-ment of intent in a town that’s reinventing itself after decades of neglect. The bus station is brightly coloured, it reminds me of images I’ve seen of Barcelona, and it’s fair to say that it divides opinion. Some people, me included, love it. Some people can’t stand it: they think it looks

I

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YOUR REGULARS

ridiculous, and daft, and arty, and pretentious. Barnsley’s landscape is changing, with a new Digital Media Centre and a new Civic Theatre where I’ve taken my grandson Thomas to see some really lovely chil-dren’s shows. I wandered through town the other day with the Michael O’Brien book in my pocket and when I sat having an espresso at the Aroma Cafe in the Arcade I almost felt like I was in New York or main-land Europe or New England (or at least New Barnsley) with O’Brien. I’d never heard of him until I bought the book, which I did in support of Salt’s scheme to get as many as possible to buy a book to stave off Salt’s financial collapse. I always like to encounter writers I’ve not heard of: all that promise, all that excitement, like the new Barnsley Bus Station in printed form!

In one sense, he’s the less avant-garde of the two; he feels at times like an American Roy Fisher and like him he’s often a poet of place, a poet who tries to pin down the essence of place in a way that the new bus station is trying to do. Here’s his evocation of somewhere in Finistére: ‘The bones of a church lie clean in the sun. // Lines of an old intention / relinquished to its elements / no-one to pollard the trees / salt roses lichens a rash of stone / a fox might live in this watered light.’ A line like ‘the bones of a church lie clean in the sun’ is a good line to keep in your head as you wander down to the bus station. The bus station isn’t like a church, of course, unless you worship the great god Time-table, but in today’s heat you can feel the bones of the building in the rafters, the metal joists. O’Brien’s line solidifies my feelings about the bus station, brings them into sharper focus. His fragment ‘Washington Square’ reminds me to keep my eyes open, to keep looking for the unex-pected and to see the unexpected in the mundane: ‘So much sky in your compact mirror / the arch gave birth to a piano / two anti-nuns descend from the bus’. Anti-nuns, eh? Like those two lasses ready for a Barnsley night out, clambering off the Thurnscoe bus on tottering heels. The arch giving birth to a piano, is somehow like that little three-wheeler Reliant put-putting round the corner of Eldon Street, and I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to eavesdrop on somebody catching the sky in the mirror. And that’s what this kind of poetry can be: a mirror you can hold up to anything, a mirror that can reflect the world back to you.

I picked up the Tom Raworth Collected Poems from a wonderfully eccentric second-hand bookshop near Victoria Station in Manchester where, once I’d bought the book, the proprietor gave me a lemon. Why can’t Waterstone’s do that? Jazz music was playing so loudly in the shop that a woman shouted from the doorway ‘I’d love to come in and buy a book but the music’s too loud!’ I love Raworth for his restlessness, for his ability to try out new forms and discard them just as quickly, for his use of found language and overheard linguistic detritus. The book

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is five-hundred-and-odd pages of sheer delight. His sequence Stag Skull Mounted is really just a list of times and events and memories and de-scriptions allied to those times, which, in the same way that O’Brien makes you think about place, makes you think about the moment you’re in: ‘8.06pm. June 10th. 1970 // poem’, ‘9.25pm. June 10th. 1970 // poem / poem’. So what happened between 8.06pm and 9.25pm? Was one minute (second, moment) worth one poem and the other minute (second, moment) worth two poems? Or was the poem expanding as the evening wore on? And does it matter that we don’t know what the poem is about, or if it exists? Not to me, it doesn’t. It makes me want to fill each moment with a poem, or realise the poetic possibilities of every moment. I’m writing this at 15:44 on a Saturday (you can tell the football season hasn’t started yet). I look up and see washing hanging on the line. My glasses are on the table, resting on a book of nineteenth-century French poetry that my son got me for Father’s Day. Poem.

I know that I’m going to spend a lot more time with O’Brien and Raworth, getting to know them better. Just as I’m getting to know the Bus Station better. Now it’s time for my Lemon!

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CONNIE BENSLEY

‘O Tell Me the Truth’

Will it start with a vague apprehension?Will it come as a pain in the chest –or a place which we don’t like to mention?Will it be introduced by a test?

Will you wake up together one morningbecause it’s crept into the house?Will it strike like a snake without warning?Or play like a cat with a mouse?

Will it come with a wave in the oceanor a leap, or a handful of pills?Will it cause a tremendous commotionor end with that soft air that kills?

Can you fool it by blaming your motheror offering payment in lieu?Please find out one way or anotherand tell me the truth when you do.

after WHA

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Philip Davis talks to Kenneth Hesketh

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

INTERVIEW

What sort of composer are you?

Contemporary Classical with strong modernist affinities which means I’m an increasingly niche composer in an ever-increasingly niche market. But the meaning and reason behind what I do – the sort of gestures and musical statements I like to make – is stimulated by a deep love of the arts in general – and is most often the starting point for my own work. I have always been intrigued by myth and folklore, and the subjective re-tellings of the same story. The idea of ritual inherent in myth, and within its telling, began to interest me during my time as a chorister.

You were a chorister at the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in the late seventies?

Yes, in 1977 when I was nine. It dawned on me recently that the reason much of my work is bathed in generous sustained resonances arose from the acoustical properties of the building. The big echoes of the Anglican Cathedral?

Yes, somehow it seeped into my head. Sound produced in the Cathedral has a seven- or eight-second acoustic delay – its life span. One hears the initial sound and seven seconds later it’s still there in the building, possi-

Described as ‘...a composer who both has something to say and the means to say it’, Kenneth Hesketh (b. 1968 Liverpool) has received numerous com-missions from international ensembles and organisations. A prodigy, he studied at the Royal College of Music, later in America with Henri Dutilleux and was subsequently awarded a scholarship from the Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, at the behest of Sir Simon Rattle. In 2007 he was made Composer in the House with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Hesketh’s music is broad in its range of stimuli, covering classical architecture, medi-eval iconography, poetry and Bauhaus constructivism. He lives in London and is a professor at the RCM and University of Liverpool.

KENNETH HESKETH

VISIT THE READER BLOG TO HEAR SAMPLES OF HIS MUSICwww.thereaderonline.co.uk

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bly coming back at you. It seemed as if the numinous took tangible form in the echo, the dominance of the building, the mist of sound all around you. It affects visitors and worshippers alike. In services, the congrega-tion, choir and organ sound together almost as if the building reverberates sympathetically. A timelessness – sound followed by what seemed an eon of resonance. The grand organ, the grand ceremony, the ritual and the text, the seeming profundity of space and echo, all left their mark on me. I associated emotion with music and text from a very young age.

There was one particular occasion that’s significant: I used to have to set out the service music on certain nights – usually after evensong. Organist Ian Tracey, I think, was practising and there was no one else in the nave, central space or choir areas. As choristers are wont to do, I ran from the furthest bay of the nave up to the altar experiencing a Doppler effect as I did so due to my relative position to the organ’s sound. A shift in pitch occurred similar to when a police car siren approaches and recedes due to the pitch-waves contracting and enlarging. That moment has stayed with me ever since. I try to play with that kind of sound – active musical figures fighting for clarity against a heightened acousti-cal resonance, the music bathing in a reverberating, embryonic fluid.

Was it important that this was a cathedral and not just a fine concert hall?

At that point the Anglican Cathedral was the only place that afforded me real musical training. Singing was already a part of my life, which is why I went to audition there, but after joining I was also given piano lessons and other basic theoretical training. From about the age of ten, I was composing. Would this have happened elsewhere? Probably not. I didn’t have an especially religious background but religion and faith started to mean more as I got older through various Cathedral events, as well as through various friends who were beginning to examine their faith and who they were in regards to a God. I tried to take part in all of that for a while. But I was never really comfortable with it. What has remained with me from that time, and experience of organised religion, is that sense of ritual, the beauty of text supporting music and a sense of tangible numinousity which may lead to another way of experiencing. Is there something beyond that? I would say no. Say something more about your background.

My folks still live in Kirkdale, a hard neighbourhood at least during my lifetime. Moving from that milieu to the more rarefied one of the Cathedral was initially overwhelming. If one shows an aptitude for something, one wants to consolidate upon that and progress, and that would not have happened by staying around Kirkdale. In the Cathedral I was surrounded by quite a few interesting and capable youngsters. It was a case of adapting and keeping up.

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INTERVIEW

What did your non-musical contemporaries think of your involvement in music?

They were bemused. It must have seemed to have no relevance to what was going on around them. A memory from this time outlines the juxtapo-sition of what the local youth were interested in compared to the rarefied, antiquated and seemingly pointless exercise we choristers were in the service of in the huge, however beautiful, concert hall, as I see it now. I was a chorister at the Cathedral during the Toxteth riots in the eighties; we were playing football outside the undercroft when a gang of youths started throwing bricks and bottles and hurling abuse, so we headed back inside – or did some stay and fight for a while? I can’t remember.

Other kids from the neighbourhood surely had no understanding as to why I would find any of what I was doing interesting. Perhaps it looked like some kind of dodge. But for me it was a way to change, a way out. At that and subsequent times, music saved me in various ways.

What did you need saving from?

From aspects of the music profession itself! One example is my attend-ance at music school which was daunting at a young age. They can be unpleasant places; everyone’s extremely focused on developing their talent but don’t necessarily have the social skills to get on with others or to know how, or when, to take others into account. So when things were bad, music – and what music led me to – became a great place of safety. For example, listening to medieval music, which I did a lot at that time, led me to read the original songs of Beuren, the Carmina Burana which Carl Orff set to music, and then the Roman de Fauvel, a fourteenth-cen-tury allegorical poem, and the imagery in the medieval iconography became places where I could retreat from my ‘now’. I suppose I created my own bolt-hole. I am drawn to the antique, whether it be the ribald epigrams of Martial or the beautiful lines of Lucretius. Until quite re-cently certain types of more recent modern culture was something I couldn’t work with artistically. The majority of texts I have set have been ancient or, if they have been modern, as with Dylan Thomas, a poet I love, there’s an archaic Biblical flavour devoid of specific religious meaning. I seem to need stories which are told and made more potent by their distance. The contemporary reading that I do is similar in many ways: Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, My Name is Red, for example or The Saddlebag by Bahiyyih Nakhjavan. They are like modern versions of the composite stories of Boccaccio or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even Hesse‘s Fairy Tales. I’m interested in a central core narrative, some great book or myth or epic out of which other story possibilities emerge yet resonate.

It’s almost like a genetic model.

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Yes, there is a mitosis of idea which, even though it keeps important elements of its parent nature, spreads and changes and my work is certainly influenced by this way of thinking. It’s important that those processes are self-determined. I have to somehow guide each one yet allow for a mixture of the spontaneous with the foreplanned.

You were a prodigy. Born 1968, first orchestral work completed at 13. You had had something played by the Liverpool Phil and Charles Groves when you were just 19.

Yes, my first professional commission. I was in my first year undergrad. But before that I’d written a lot of orchestral music, which had been performed at the Phil Hall by the Merseyside Youth Orchestra, includ-ing a symphony.

Very often with people who have early success or talent, there is a point where they then get stuck and have to stay still. Did that happen to you?

I hit a complete wall when I was an undergraduate at the Royal College. I knew that my writing was shallow and conventional and I needed to give my work a more personal profile. Was it conceivable at that point that you would have stopped composing?

No, but I did think about becoming a hack and using my skills that way, which is a very simple agreement: You do that, We pay you this: Next job. For a while, that was the path I followed but eventually I realised that there ought to be more. I applied to the Tanglewood Music Centre in America, a course run every summer, and my successful application re-set everything. Tanglewood is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home and attracts large numbers of students from all over the world to work with well-known and important musicians, composers and conductors. I worked with people who have since become big forces in my life and friends: Oliver Knussen and Henri Dutilleux to name but two. Though I don’t keep opus numbers, Tanglewood is where my opus 1 was written. That’s 14 years ago.

I was surrounded by intelligent and driven young composers in their early- to mid-twenties. I had no idea why I had been accepted, wonderful as it was. I composed absolutely nothing while I was on the course, apart from a small clarinet piece. I retreated into books and into musical theory and it was the theory that allowed me to feel a way forward and out again. I began slowly to answer important questions for myself – how does one put note on top of note in an individual manner without simply resorting to pastiching previous musical types? How is musical meaning projected through form? Until that time my composition had been grounded in sheer basic ability. I hadn’t done any real apprenticeship. I had been very lucky and yet very unlucky in my youth with early works being performed immediately – it was good to hear these attempts but I never had any

INTERVIEW

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time to rethink. When people say, ‘That was wonderful, let’s have some more of that’ it‘s easy to continue along the well-trod path.

In a piece At God Speeded Summer’s End, which I think you once said was a turning-point for you, the relation of acceleration and retardation is very close. It feels as though sometimes it is holding back a feeling that it’s therefore pushing forward. I kept thinking what does it mean? Is it to do with the sense of ending?

Perhaps it has something to do with rushing towards a void. The desire to jump from a high building which must be fought against. I’m always aware of it – rushing towards, pulling back. Funnily enough, the title of the work is taken from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Author’s Prologue’. 102 lines in total, the first 51 lines of the poem rhyme, in reverse order, with the last 51 – an aural palindrome. ‘At God Speeded Summer’s End’ is the only line that doesn’t change. It opens:

This day winding down nowAt God speeded summer’s endIn the torrent salmon sun,In my seashaken house . . .Out there, crow black, menTackled with clouds, who kneelTo the sunset nets,Geese nearly in heaven . . .

I remember reading it when I was a teenager, re-reading it again when I was about twenty-six, and the torrent of imagery and onomatopoeic effects completely overwhelmed me. It was a marvellous literary reali-sation of a model I’d been groping towards for some time. It seems to me that when the text, the words come into your music, it’s sudden and abrupt and sometimes even scary, like an eruption.

Sudden change, or perhaps more correctly, seemingly sudden change – as it always has to be earned or worked towards – is somewhat alluring. Seemingly compatible materials eventually compete with or overtake one another. A gridiron pendulum is a good analogy. Alternating zinc and iron strips allow the pendulum to swing regularly, one allowing for the other’s expansion. In my work there’s generally one idea set against another in some way, giving both internal cohesion and tension, both providing an inevitable forward movement of the narrative. There is also something restless, possibly disorderly, in my musical thought. Maybe the cathedral’s cavernous space – the bizarre moment of running freely amidst a Doppler effect – has something to do with it. Ongoing change within a consistent core does interest me. The technical matters are to do with discovering a language – not just learning a craft but finding ways to harness what you have. Is that right?

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INTERVIEW

Craft and meaning evolve over time; I get to the structural heart of a work much more quickly these days. Architecture and the study of rhetoric are two of my many interests. Both are ways of supporting and expanding a core idea; a scaffolding that supports the act of creation, which, once removed, leaves you with what has been produced by the mould-shape. Tell me about your piece which I’ve just been listening to, ‘Graven Image’.

It’s a short piece, just fifteen minutes, and is conceived as a musical ‘stele’ or marker stone, something which marks the having been. I wanted to call it ‘Stele’ but the title had already been used. In this piece, the retracing and embellishment of things is important, as it is in my work generally. One idea may have been previously perceived but elements of that idea progres-sively take over, evolve. Ideas never actually return, something is always just out of grasp. Such will-o-the-wisp ideas are very attractive – seeking furtive patterns in chaos, looking at the night sky and joining indis-tinct dots of light. There are structures in the music that should always materialise otherwise it wouldn’t work, but in live performances, through acoustic vagaries or the unexpected dynamic of individual players, certain things will emerge in different ways at different times. It’s not that we’ll hear more ‘melody’ or ‘harmony’ – different textural elements take on greater importance which in some circumstances are submerged whilst in others are in relief. Those aspects create a dynamic quality in my work.

The emotive quality in my music should communicate, it is a strong need within me. When one experiences any art, one questions it at a deeper level. To agree with it or to be repulsed by it. Such dichotomies I try to project in my work in various ways, for example via density – loud, soft, full, narrow. There are moments when things scream at one and times where one can hardly make out any clarity, it’s too hushed, packed with cotton wool. In trying to make sense of the actual musical narrative the influence of abstract theatre shows itself in my work, a drama working itself out.

That seems urgent and personal. Say more about that loudness and quietness.

I could mention my mother’s deafness caused through meningitis when she was a very young child. When I was growing up there were moments when she would communicate her frustration at her deafness through shouting, just to make herself understood, and at other times through absolute quiet when a situation didn’t require verbal articulation. The memory of sound in the cathedral is a useful example here as well. A loud organ chord is utterly different when you’re standing not five yards away from it compared to when you’re downstairs in the building. One is crystal clear, the other muffled, almost underwater. I think of the build-ing in terms akin to a grotto, an otherworld into which one retreats, is changed, and from which one emerges. The loud and muffled, an often

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grotesque combination, are part of the ritual accompaniment. And when you come out again, what has happened – are you enlightened?

One is shriven, to use an archaic Biblical term! There is a sense of com-pletion, of having divested oneself of a necessary task. You like those encounters that change the human scale.

Yes, I think that’s a very good way of putting it – the changing scale of things. It hits me with greater force the more dizzying the intertwining of threads and conflicts.

At the moment I’m close to giving up the search of finding a story, or text, for my next opera – should I just write the damn thing myself? I know all the ingredients. I know exactly what they would be. Let’s do that. What are the ingredients? The grotto sounds a good place to go and I love the idea of the penitent, the shriven – could we have that in?

Well, certainly someone outside the normalities of life, but someone who combines the possible with the unfeasible. So we need a sort of enclosed area like a grotto or a cave?

Or one room. Has the room got windows? Or just appear to have windows?

There may be doors which lead somewhere but the audience never sees the place: they are means of egress, possibly, but it’s effectively dead space to the audience. We need the enclosure to build something within it.

We’ve selected a living space. To fill it, we could add the dramatic idea of an individual against a collective of others, negative only from the individual’s point of view – perhaps the protagonist struggles with nega-tive human emotions arising from betrayal, cruelty or indifference. Next add the presence of the mechanical – I’m a great lover of automata in general. A very sad minor horologist myself, in that I attempt to put clocks together and get them working. It’s the tinkering with structure that interests me, the interplay of pinion against arbor, against gear, the gearing up and gearing down of the going train, that which both main-tains the energy and directs it to produce movement.

How does the mechanical get into the room in terms of the story?

The protagonist might be a clockmaker or wished he or she inhabited a world of clockwork order: the music will link the two, the clockwork and the human. This reflects something I’m focusing upon more and

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INTERVIEW

more, a concept I call unreliable machines. Machines of course have been the stock-in-trade of composers for many years, from Liadov to Ligeti – reproducing the unchangeable, the programmable in rhythmic gesture or bell-like timbre. But the unreliable machine tries to reinvent its mechanism, to change, but only brings on its own demise more quickly. It works brilliantly for a short time and then fails through some last-minute internal change made by itself. Interesting – the machine tries to make itself more a machine and ends up being more a person and that’s a disaster. It wants to be a free person just as your protago-nist wants to be more like a machine. These are your two things swapping over.

The search after regularity, of order – not conformity! – which is itself, possibly, only one step on the road to entropy, to winding down. It would also be important for the protagonist eventually to try to leave that room, to go through a door to another place. There might be a return but not quite a return, some sort of cycle in which, even so, nothing is ever quite the same again either. That sounds just like your music. Is music a machine?

Some people would say some music is. Would you?

I would say that my music’s construction specifically includes cycles, returns and seeming regularity, a play with unreliable machines, along-side something which is indefinable, sudden, emotional, improvised, perhaps flawed. If the fate of the unreliable machine is that it kills itself, is that what happens at the end of the opera? You are interested in self-determining or self-enclosing struc-ture and yet it’s the very attempt to get out of that cycle which is the fatal fault.

An attempt to leave, to get out, that only rushes one more quickly towards the void? Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s story ‘The Tunnel’ is about that. Passengers are travelling on a train, the train enters an unchar-tered tunnel yet none of the passengers seem bothered by this. The main protagonist asks the conductor ‘Why are we in here?’ He replies, ‘It’s all right, don’t worry’. Eventually the train just goes further into the tunnel, descending helter-skelter into the void. The conductor asks what they should do, and our protagonist says ‘nothing’ to which Dür-renmatt adds ‘with spectral serenity’.

Moving on an unstoppable conveyor belt of existence inexorably pushing one towards an end, a finality, and being aware of that end rushing up towards one – it seems honest, more real and I don’t see that as nihilistic in the least.

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POETRY

NIGEL PRENTICE

Climbers

They tiptoe on the silvery ridges, creepInto the clouds, the air a veil shakingIn flurries of cold and derangement.Each lives the finest degrees of dying, stepBy step; minds fanned fiercer but painstaking,Ticking through intricacies of equipment.

Some blur into blizzards, never again take shape;Or are whipped or tumbled like washing; or plunge,Clamped in a great crevasse. One falls asleepStaring at an ice-wall, and stays for months.

Those who return teetered on a few thin wordsThrough a speechless realm to the blinding showOf a glass. Walk daily through our living worldNot word-perfect in ecstasies of snow.

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Richard Flanagan

ExTRACT FROM WANTING

FICTION

he war had ended as wars sometimes do, unexpected-ly. A man no one much cared for, a rather pumped-up little Presbyterian carpenter cum preacher, had travelled unarmed and in the company of tame blacks through the great wild lands of the island, and had returned with

a motley cluster of savages. They were called wild blacks, though wild they most certainly were not, but rather scabby, miserable and often

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It is 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is running through the long wet grass of an island at the end of the world to get help for her dying father, an Aboriginal chieftain. Twenty years later, on an island at the centre of the world, the most famous novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, realises he is about to abandon his wife, risk his name and for ever after be altered because of his inability any longer to control his intense passion.

Connecting the two events are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin – then governor of Van Diemen’s Land – and his wife, Lady Jane, who adopt Mathinna, seen as one of the last of a dying race, as an ex-periment. Lady Jane believes the distance between savagery and civilisation is the learned capacity to control wanting. The experiment fails, Sir John disappears into the blue ice of the Arctic seeking the Northwest Passage, and a decade later Lady Jane enlists Dickens’ aid to put an end to the scan-dalous suggestions that Sir John’s expedition ended in cannibalism.

Dickens becomes ever more entranced in the story of men entombed in ice, recognising in its terrible image his own frozen inner life. He produces and stars in a play inspired by Franklin’s fate to give story to his central belief that discipline and will can conquer desire. And yet the play will bring him to the point where he is no longer able to control his own passion and the consequences it brings.

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RICHARD FLANAGAN© Bronwyn Rennex

FICTION

consumptive. They were, he said – and remarkably it did now seem – all that remained of the once feared Van Diemonian tribes that for so long had waged relentless and terrible war.

Those who saw them said it was hard to believe that such a small and wretched bunch could have defied the might of the Empire for so long, that they could have survived the pitiless extermination, that they could have been the instruments of such fear and terror. It wasn’t clear what the preacher had said to the blacks, or what the blacks thought he was going to do with them, but they seemed amenable, if somewhat sad, as broken party after broken party were embarked on boat after boat and taken to a distant island that lay in the hundreds of miles of sea that separated Van Diemen’s Land from the Australian mainland. Here the preacher took on the official title of Protector and a salary of £500 a year, along with a small garrison of soldiers and a Catechist, and set about raising his sable charges to the level of English civilisation.

He met with some successes, and, though these were small, it was on such he tried to concentrate. And were they not worthy? Were his people not knowledgeable of God and Jesus, as was evidenced by their ready and keen answers to the Catechist’s questions, and evinced in their enthusiastic hymn-singing? Did they not take keenly to the weekly market, where they traded skins and shell necklaces for beads and tobacco and the like? Other than that his black brethren kept dying almost daily, it had to be admitted the settlement was satisfactory in every way.

Some things, however, were frankly perplexing. Though he was weaning them off their native diet of berries and plants and shellfish and game, and onto flour and sugar and tea, their health seemed in no way comparable to what it had been. And the more they took to English blankets and heavy English clothes, abandoning their licentious naked-ness, the more they coughed and spluttered and died. And the more they died, the more they wanted to cast off their English clothes and stop eating their English food and move out of their English homes, which they said were filled with the Devil, and return to the pleasures of the hunt of a day and the open fire of a night.

It was 1839. The first photograph of a man was taken, Abd al-Qadir declared a jihad against the French, and Charles Dickens was rising to greater fame with a novel called Oliver Twist. It was, thought the Protec-tor as he closed the ledger after another post mortem report and returned to preparing notes for his pneumatics lecture, inexplicable.

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FICTION

On hearing the news of the child’s death from a servant who had rushed from Charles Dickens’ home, John Forster had not hesitated – hesita-tion was a sign of a failure of character, and his own character did not permit failure. Mastiff-faced, full-bodied and goosebellied, heavy in all things – opinion, sensibility, morality and conversation – Forster was to Dickens as gravity to a balloonist. Though not above mimicking him in private, Dickens was immensely fond of his unofficial secretary, on whom he relied for all manner of work and advice.

And Forster, inordinately proud of being so relied on, decided he would wait until Dickens had given his speech. In spite of Forster’s ongoing arguments that recent events excused Dickens from the necessity of addressing the General Theatrical Fund, he had been un-wavering that he would. Why, even that very day Forster had called on Dickens at Devonshire Terrace to urge him one last time to cancel the engagement.

‘But I’ve promised,’ said Dickens, whom Forster had found in the garden playing with his younger children. He had in his arms his ninth child, the baby Dora, and he’d lifted her above his head, smiling up at her and blowing through his lips as she beat her arms up and down, fierce and solemn as a regimental drummer. ‘No, no; I could not let us down like that.’

Forster had swelled, but said nothing. Us! He knew Dickens some-times thought of himself more as an actor than a writer. It was a nonsense, but it was him. Dickens loved theatre. He loved everything to do with that world of make-believe, where the moon might be sum-moned down with a flourish of a finger, and Forster knew Dickens felt a strange solidarity with the actor members of the troupers’ charity, which he was to address that evening. This attraction to the more disreputable both slightly troubled and slightly thrilled Forster.

‘She looks well, don’t you think?’ Dickens had said, lowering the baby to his chest. ‘She’s had a slight fever today, haven’t you, Dora?’ He kissed her forehead. ‘But I think she’s picking up now.’

And now, only a few short hours later, how splendidly Dickens’ speech was going, thought Forster. The crowd was extensive, its atten-tion rapt, and Dickens, once started, as brilliant and moving as ever.

‘In our Fund,’ Dickens was saying to the crowded hall of actors, ‘the word exclusiveness is not known. We include every actor, whether he is Hamlet or Benedict: this ghost, that bandit, or, in his one person, the whole King’s army. And to play their parts before us, these actors come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death itself. Yet –’

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FICTION

There was a stuttering of applause that stopped almost before it started, perhaps because it was felt bad taste to draw attention to Dickens’ being there just two weeks after his own father’s death. A failed operation for bladderstones had left the old man, Dickens had told Forster, lying in a slaughterhouse of blood.

‘Yet how often it is,’ continued Dickens, ‘that we have to do violence to our feelings, and hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, so we can bravely discharge our duties and responsibilities.’

After, Forster took Dickens aside.‘I am afraid . . .’ Forster began. ‘In a word,’ said Forster, who always

used too many, but now realised there was one he did not wish to utter.

‘Yes?’ said Dickens, eyeing somebody or something over Forster’s shoulder, then looking back, eyes twinkling.

‘Yes, my dear Mammoth?’His casual use of Forster’s nickname, his presumption all this was

just banter, the pleasure of the performer at the success of a perform-ance—none of it helped make poor Forster’s task any easier.

‘Little Dora . . .’ said Forster. His lips twitched as he tried to finish the sentence.

‘Dora?’‘I am,’ mumbled Forster, wishing at that moment to say so many

things, but unable to say any of them. ‘I am, so, so sorry, Charles,’ he said in a rush, regretting every word, wanting something so much better to say, his hand rising to emphasise with its customary flourish some point never made, then falling back to the side of his body, his big body that felt so bloated and useless. ‘She was taken with convulsions,’ he said finally.

Dickens’ face showed no emotion, and Forster thought what a splendid man he was.

‘When?’ asked Dickens.‘Three hours ago,’ said Forster. ‘Just after we left.’It was 1851. London’s Great Exhibition celebrated the triumph of

reason in a glass pavilion mocked by the writer Douglas Jerrold as a crystal palace; a novel about finding a fabled white whale was published in New York to failure; while in the iron-grey port of Stromness, Orkney, Lady Jane Franklin farewelled into whiteness the second of what were to be numerous failed expeditions in search of a fable that had once been her husband.

JOHN GREENING

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John Greening

KNOTTING AND UNKNOTTING

THE POET ON HIS WORK

ince the early 1980s, we have lived on the borders of Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire – although poetically speaking I have remained in a Huntingdonshire of my own making – and while this is not good territory for walking, there are certain inviting cycle routes. One of

these takes me past the hamlet of Knotting. Extraordinary enough for its name, this tiny settlement has contributed considerably to the history of English poetry. Not only is it associated with the Cavalier Waller and the hapless Laureate Pye, but it was here that Martin Booth (who died five years ago this February) established his Sceptre Press in the late 1960s and proceeded to bring out 160 booklets by some of the biggest names of his age, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney among them. Lucky the browser who stumbles on one of these finely produced pamphlets today.

Yet I felt myself lucky yesterday in Charing Cross Road when I chanced on The Knotting Sequence, a book published in New York in 1977, a wonderful long poem by Booth celebrating the hamlet where he lived – total population (after his son was born there), 28. I had heard of this poem and even had a chance to look at it while visiting Penelope Shuttle (another of the poets Booth published), but never thought I would own a copy as it seemed to be selling for absurd prices online. For all its in-debtedness to those same authors he published (particularly Hughes) The Knotting Sequence deserves to be remembered. It is peculiarly evoca-tive of this part of England:

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THE POET ON HIS WORK

a rowof dying elms

the crack of frost

the cry of lapwings

And the very sparseness of the verse, learnt from certain Americans, lets that wind from the Urals into the language. If it is Hughes’s Crow who comes to mind in ‘who owns these screams? / who lives to scream so? / who dies in such screaming?’, it is Geoffrey Hill’s Offa who dominates elsewhere. For Offa, however, read Cnot:

at last aplace with noenemies

said Cnot settlingthere, unawareof the sun’s bite and the moon’s pull andthe snow

The above is a complete poem, one of several without title, some of them apparently merging so it is unclear (since there are no capitals or full stops) whether one section has ended and another begun. There is something here that reaches beyond the stylistic mannerisms of the period, and which Booth has achieved by paring his language down, fit for a landscape soon to be shorn of its elms and its hedgerows. Booth’s poems depend heavily on enjambment. Sometimes the line-breaks seem to be all that is keeping them from prose – and his critics will see in this a foreshadowing of his later decision to turn to the novel – but they are not prose. There is a powerful music embedded here, as when he writes of Knotting church:

under thecentrebeam, Bunyansang

The sound of ‘under’ is echoed by ‘centre’, and ‘beam’ bumps satisfy-ingly against ‘Bunyan’, setting up that solitary monosyllable, ‘sang’. As

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Booth’s lines teeter on the edge, they sing indeed: a harsh song of the 1970s, a voice that has not dated any more than Bob Dylan’s.

A Knotting Sequence weaves us in and out of time, to Cnot’s era and back again, knotting and unknotting, reminding us that past and present are inseparable (‘you / share this / place with // me’): there is a dynamic dialogue of letters, insults, backstabbings and tokens of affec-tion between the poet and his alter-ego. Sometimes the ‘not’ in ‘Cnot’ seems to define him; but the poet too can be grumpily negative. Neither speaker can quite be pinned down. When Booth is happily boozing with a friend in ‘The Blasphemers’, he cannot avoid remembering his fore-runner: ‘Cnot / lying in the fields / demanded / mead’. Elsewhere, the death of his dog moves him to ask Cnot to

lovehim byproxy untilI joinyou a hundredmetres fromhereand feedhim moreof the bones healways found infurrows andditches

yours

The overall effect of The Knotting Sequence is of a broken mosaic, the kind still lying under many fields in Eastern England; but Booth’s poems are not impenetrable fragments of modernism, rather pieces of passionately felt loyalty to a place, a role. Here is Bedfordshire Booth watching a muntjac escapee from Woburn ‘stutter and / cough through / the dusk’ or imagining the author of Pilgrim’s Progress preaching under the tree that goes to restore Knotting’s church; Everyman Booth trying to start his car, complaining about the twisting Anglo-Saxon lanes, jetting off to Vienna or New York (but thinking all the while about an ash-tree he planted at home); Hunter Booth after rabbits or hares; Naturalist Booth studying mushrooms, noting a Little Owl or a peregrine, the timeless cutting and digging processes of farming, pondering the crassness of human attempts at improvement (‘what / disgrace of / beauty suggested to / the Eastern / Electricity Generating / Board, to / erect a grey / relay transmitter / box upon / a stiffened / pine pole in / a direct line between

THE POET ON HIS WORK

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THE POET ON HIS WORK

my / study and / the histories held with- / in the / church-tower...’). And here is ‘forefather Cnot’ barking back about what a bad shot the poet is, repeatedly asserting his prior claim to this bit of England, defying the Normans, the Nazis, the Americans, spanning his ‘god-place’, the fields, ‘with/two/wide fingers’ and remarking of the church that ‘we don’t / really need / this holy / building’ while getting on with his dark age life: counting his wives, minding the land, establishing a place in history.

* * *

Some years ago, after a Good Friday walk with my family around a new nature reserve in Knotting, conscious of so many shades at my elbow (even Robert Southey had connections with this tiny place), I wrote the following poem. It is, I realise now, an excessively literary piece of work, revelling too much in its own wit and allusion (Pye strikes me as par-ticularly indigestible), but the very name ‘Knotting’ suggested a proud show of filigree, conjuring Elizabethan gardens and Arthurian quests. Nor could I resist the fact that merlins were rumoured to haunt the area, that Booth’s press had been called ‘Sceptre’. ‘Knotting’, then, became an exercise in what Charles Tomlinson has called ‘healing artifice’.

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THE POET ON HIS WORK

KnottingIn memory of Martin Booth (1944-2004)

A merlin chasing a skylarkas I pick through the black-thorn, teasel and oakset-aside, and think

of that sixties press, the Sceptre,publishing all those futurepoets here; then of Waller,once the plot’s owner,

preserved in a verse enclosureby his ‘Go, Lovely Rose’.A stream leads through hedgerowsto a sump. And, of course,

Pye, Pitt’s infillLaureate, whose serialdullness ripened allthe way to Southey – he’ll

have adopted a manor here,forgotten like Cavalierand post-war pamphleteer. But who to ask? I’m aware

of a low protective laughfrom the church tower, a halfrestored memorial’s gravesilence, the only relief

St George, some windowssmashed in a barn, a gardengrowling and (invisible underhis son’s bonnet) a father

who ignores our Easter outingto this once and futurecommon land. Knottingtightens around its nothing.

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Gabriella Gruder-Poni

THE READER GETS ANGRY

SCENES FROM A PGCE

ESSAY

wo months into a PGCE in English, I noticed that the Year 9 students in my school, considered one of the best in the county, had trouble with basic vocabulary: ‘envy’, ‘lament’, ‘fiend’, ‘distinguish’, ‘negative’ and ‘eternal’ were Greek to them; no wonder they found reading frustrating. So I brought from

home a stack of vocabulary books that I had used in middle school. With their witty exercises on usage and notes on etymology, these books had awakened in me a love for the English language. In the spirit of sharing a good book, I lent one of the volumes to the convenor of my PGCE. A few months later, instead of returning the book to me, Mr. F— summoned me to his office. ‘Why did you lend this book to me?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you would be interested’. Far from being interested, he was outraged. The book was ‘dreadful’ and ‘frightening’. Wouldn’t learning new words make the students better readers and writers? Not at all; the books were ‘boring’ and ‘dangerous’ because they did not include all possible definitions of the words. Hoping to placate him, I said, ‘If you don’t want me to use them, I won’t’. ‘Oh, you certainly won’t,’ he ex-claimed, ‘They’ll never need these words!’ I left the interview with those words ringing in my ears. Never need words like ‘assail’, ‘assimilate’, or ‘mishap’. Why not? Didn’t he expect them to read or to write when they left school? I began to suspect that my students’ ignorance might be a consequence of attitudes like those of Mr. F—.

One of his objections to learning vocabulary was that it would take up valuable class time. If one hour a week on vocabulary was too much, what, then, was there time for in school?

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ESSAY

Year 6: ‘Literacy Hour’The students read a biography on the website ‘biography.com’ and then gave one-minute presentations on what they had learned. Unfortunate-ly the website, sponsored by a television station, directs the reader to profiles of entertainment celebrities. So the students spent half an hour madly clicking from one celebrity to another. One of the few students who didn’t choose a pop star was a boy from Sudan who had been a refugee for most of his life. He chose Nelson Mandela. Maybe because Liban was shy about speaking in public, or maybe because English was his third language, he gave a confused presentation. ‘He was very brave’, he kept repeating, without saying why Mandela had spent decades in prison. I was sure the teacher would pick up where Liban left off. I re-member well the homilies my primary school teachers in the US and in Italy gave on exemplary lives, on civil rights workers, and on the people who had sheltered Jews in the Second World War. I was moved by these stories, and often we students came back the next day with our own tales, having quizzed parents and grandparents. But this teacher said nothing more about the life of Nelson Mandela. Instead she stood up and gave her own presentation – on Sean Connery.

Year 8: Text TypesThe class was broken into pairs; each pair received an envelope contain-ing pieces of paper with the names of different ‘text types’ written on them. The students then had to tell each other the order of the planets following the conventions of a randomly selected ‘text type’. For an hour the children said things like, ‘Add Mercury to Venus and stir’ (recipe) or ‘Great pass from Earth to Mars!’ (rugby commentary) or ‘Turn left at Jupiter and go straight until you reach Saturn’ (travel directions). Text MessageThe year before I enrolled in the PGCE there had been a small scandal in the press surrounding a student who text-messaged an essay to her teacher. It was agreed that those who criticised the student were old fogies. By contrast Mr. F— encouraged us to come up with ‘creative’ ways to ‘integrate’ mobile phones and computer games into lessons.

A-Level classThe students drew illustrated maps of the places described in the book they were reading. In another lesson, the teacher picked objects out of a bag and asked her students to explain their significance in the book; then she covered all the objects with a cloth and asked the students to make a list of as many objects as they could remember.

Two overriding themes emerge in this sample of characteristic lessons. First, there’s the pursuit of topicality: ‘Students are interested in mobile

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ESSAY

phones and celebrities; therefore, we’ll give them lessons about mobile phones and celebrities.’ There was no notion that education ought to expand one’s horizons, or that students might enjoy being introduced to new ideas. The teachers were fatalists: the students are as they are, and we’re not going to change them. But their fatalism was self-righ-teous rather than regretful. Once I prepared a worksheet on paragraph

structure for my Year 8 students, which included a paragraph on Leon-ardo da Vinci. The teacher objected that Katherine, the weakest student in an outstanding class, ‘Won’t have heard of the 1500s or of Leonardo’. To me that seemed an excellent reason to introduce Leonardo; for the teacher, it was self-evidently a reason not to do so. His own handouts for the class concerned hair care and school policy on stationery. I began to wonder if the real reason for the banishment from the classroom of anything that smacked of culture was the lack of interest not among students but among teachers. For the students, especially the younger ones, regularly showed themselves to be curious about subjects other than gadgets and celebrities.

The second theme is an absolute lack of faith in words. Pictures, objects, role-plays: these were considered memorable and compelling. But not words. Methods that didn’t involve words were approvingly called ‘learning by doing’, and I can see the importance of varied methods in many subjects, but not if they exclude the spoken or written word. What does ‘learning by doing’ mean in the study of English, a subject that consists of words? How can one ‘do’ English without reading, writing, and discussing?

My supervisors were deeply sceptical of any teaching that involved explanations; when they spoke to students they gave instructions, never explanations. To use an analogy: in teaching addition one might walk a class through some examples: 2 + 1 = 3, 3 + 3 =6. Then one might give the students problems to solve on their own: 3 + 1 = 4, 2 + 3 = 5. In the schools I worked in, the problems students were asked to solve were identical to the ones the teachers had given as examples: i.e. one would tell the students that 2 + 2 = 4, and then ask the students to solve 2 + 2. How could one gauge if a student had understood a concept or was simply parroting what the teacher had done, I once dared to ask. The answer: ‘In a comprehensive school the example must be identical to the application’. There was no opportunity for the student to practise or to understand; a student had just one chance to mimic what the teacher did. It struck me that English was being taught as if it were factory work; in manual labour

“The real reason for the banishment of culture was the lack of interest not among students but among teachers.”

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ESSAY

there’s no great difference between practising and mimicking.To give a concrete example: I was to teach the semicolon to a class

of Year 8 students – a very good class. The semicolon, I said, was used to join two closely-related clauses – I had explained what a clause was – for balance or contrast. For example: ‘Pools cool us in summer; fires warm us in winter’. ‘The concert was over; the band went home.’ After discussing the examples and taking their questions I asked them to write sentences with semicolons. By the end of the lesson I was satisfied that they understood, but somewhat nervous because my lesson was not identical to the one outlined in the notes the supervising teacher had given me. As the students packed up I asked one boy, ‘Do you feel you understood?’ The boy nodded and I must have betrayed some anxiety because he added, ‘Don’t worry, miss! You’re a good teacher!’ The supervising teacher thought otherwise. This article is not a brief of self-defence but my supervisors’ criticisms of my teaching are worth mentioning because they are so revealing. In this case, I was reproved for not having given a formula for the sentences students were to write. ‘You have to consider why they need the semicolon for this project.’ ‘Surely

they’re learning the semicolon not just for this project’, I thought. This was not the worst of my crimes though. Mr. B— warned me against exposing secondary school students to ‘abstract ideas’, a reference, I suppose, to ‘balance and contrast’. What is an abstract idea? Don’t the basics of arithmetic and grammar involve abstractions? I think he had in mind any kind of learning that went beyond mimicking formulae; he might as well have warned me not to expose the students to ideas, full stop. He recommended teaching the students one use of the semicolon each year all through secondary school. There are really only two uses of the semicolon, and as I was trying to figure out if he could possibly be serious he said something much more shocking: ‘This is a mechanical way of writing, but it will get them a C at GCSE, which is all these stu-dents need to do what they want to do in life’. But these were very good students! And they were only twelve years old – how did he know what they wanted to do in life?! I listened in shock as he tried to impress upon me how dim the students were, how useless to explain ‘ideas’ to them.

After that lesson I was forbidden to teach that Year 8 class again. Oc-casionally I heard Mr. B— regaling his colleagues in the staff room with tales of the stupid things his students had said. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Do you take no responsibility for your students’ ignorance?’

“He might as well have warned me not to expose the students to ideas”

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ESSAY

I mentioned the students’ limited vocabulary. They were equally held back by their ignorance of grammar. If I pointed out that a sentence lacked a subject or a verb, they had no idea what I was talking about. Not teaching grammar is like not publishing the laws of a country. If I have to introduce a grammatical concept when a student has made a mistake I seem arbitrary and pedantic. If, on the other hand, I point out a mistake to a student who has some understanding of grammar, the student himself can explain what’s wrong and fix it. The mistake, not the student, is in the dock. But grammar is so out of fashion that even the teachers don’t know it. In my nine months in secondary schools, I heard grammar terms mentioned twice. Once, Mr. B— talked about the ‘passive tense’ (not ‘voice’), and on the other occasion Ms C— asked, ‘What is the noun in this sentence?’ when she meant ‘subject’. To be sure, ‘subject’ and ‘noun’ are related categories, as are addition and multiplication, but a teacher should know the difference.

There’s one last good reason to study grammar: it’s a way to get used to a specialised vocabulary, to words that don’t obviously correspond to things, in a word, to abstractions – Mr. B—’s bugbear. As such, the study of grammar is preparation for adult life: in one’s role as citizen, worker, tenant, or patient, one occasionally needs to stand up for one’s rights, and it’s essential not to be intimidated by bureaucratic language. By studying grammar, students learn that technical terms are not magic spells.

Curiously, Mr. F— recommended that we introduce our students to Polari, a kind of slang spoken by gay men in London up to the 1960s. The examples he gave of Polari were funny and intriguing, but I had to wonder why Polari took precedence over words that the students might come across in books and use in their own writing. I suspect that my supervisor considers a linguistic standard a pernicious notion. He has co-authored an article entitled ‘Silencing Differences? Teaching the lit-eracies of class and sexuality in the US and the UK’. I quote:

Relying on a postcolonial interpretive frame, we will examine how academic literacies seek to produce normative identities – aligned with the transparency of self in a self/other relation – that connect all too well with public and corporate narratives about the purposes of schooling. Specifically, we argue that movements to standardise literacy education far from provid-ing the equal playing field of the meritocracy they are purported to offer only continue to disenfranchise those already most marginalised from schooling by undercutting students’ critical potential to alter culture rather than conform to it.

Which is Mr. F—’s real reason for wishing to keep students in ignorance: this perverse belief that illiteracy is something precious that ought to be preserved, or the contempt for students that he betrayed to me?

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My first officially-observed lesson came at the end of a Year 9 unit on war poetry. I chose excerpts from All Quiet On the Western Front and The Good Soldier Svejk to read and analyse. The students were clearly engaged and interested; even the observer said so. Nonetheless, the texts I had chosen were ‘too hard’ and class discussion was ‘not an acceptable’ format. Why? Not all of the students were contributing, and since they weren’t taking notes, they wouldn’t retain anything of the discussion. But ‘listening skills’ are actually part of the National Curriculum. My offer to teach note-taking – skills I was taught at age nine in an ordi-nary state primary school in Italy – was not welcomed. The ban on class discussion was a big disappointment. I had enrolled in the PGCE in

the hope that I would be able to practise this essential skill, and I had looked forward to getting to know my students as students, as think-ers. How was that going to happen if we weren’t allowed to exchange ideas and interpretations? I suspect that the reasons for the ban on class discussion go beyond the question of how many students were partici-pating or taking notes; my supervisor harboured a deep antipathy to debate. In one unpleasant interview Mr. F— said, ‘It’s clear that you’re cooperating, but it’s clear too that you still have your own ideas. This must change.’ I admitted to having opinions. That wasn’t enough for him. ‘They’re beliefs, not opinions … You’re wrong, you’re just wrong.’

My lesson on All Quiet on the Western Front was finally deemed unsat-isfactory because I wasn’t thinking enough about ‘the students’ needs’. My supervisor never elaborated, but soon I came to see that many stu-dents did indeed have desperate needs: about one third of them could barely read. Before my year in a comprehensive school I hadn’t under-stood what functional illiteracy was; I’d never imagined that there were so many intermediate stages between not reading and reading. Many of my students were mired in a twilight zone between literacy and illitera-cy: they knew the letters of the alphabet (if not always their order); they could sound out most monosyllables; and they could understand short, simple sentences consisting of short, simple words. Anything beyond that and they were at sea. This meant that anything that might engage their interest was too difficult, or at least, too difficult to be enjoyable, and so they fell further and further behind.

One might imagine that a lot of time would be devoted to remedial reading. Nothing could be further from the truth. Widespread illiter-acy was an acknowledged fact in the school, but it was never treated

“Widespread illiteracy was an acknowledged fact in the school, but it was never treated as an urgent problem”

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as an urgent problem; while at the university education department, student illiteracy was politely ignored, even though it governed (often arbitrarily) every assumption about what was and was not possible. The lessons I observed were geared to the weakest students, but not in the sense of teaching them what they needed to know – to read – but rather of keeping them busy, and occasionally enabling them to pretend they could do what in fact they couldn’t do.

For the first time in their lives, the students in Year 10 were to write a literary essay. Not the department’s choice; the directive came from above.The chosen work: Frankenstein. Not that the book ever entered the picture. Students watched a breathless video on Mary Shelley’s life; they were given synopses of selected chapters; they made PowerPoint presentations on the synopses. After a few more activities designed to familiarise them with the plot they were deemed ready to write their essays. The teacher supplied the department’s essay outline, which detailed not only the topic of each paragraph but also the content, including examples and quota-tions to be used. Students could even request fill-in-the-blanks ‘writing frames’. No wonder the teacher saw no connection between class discus-sion and writing. The students weren’t composing their own essays. The outline was a hodge-podge of ingredients the department knew exam-iners would be pleased to see. Carla, one of a handful of students who decided, on their own initiative, actually to read the novel, wrote a long and thoughtful essay. ‘She puts us to shame’, I thought. The teacher’s reaction, ‘You know Carla – always does more than she has to.’ And yet Carla and dozens of students I met like her poured themselves into their work time after time, with little or no encouragement. It was like unre-quited love.

I couldn’t help thinking that every activity was assigned to mini-mise the vast difference between the good students and the students who were lazy or who could barely read. The bar was set so low that

no one could fail to get over it. In fact there was no notion of ‘failure’ – the teachers had given up that (negative) incentive to work hard. And therein lies the paradox: if one honestly believes that all students can reach the same level, one also has to believe in hard work, for there’s no other way to overcome differences in achievement. But hard work had been thrown out of the window. The lack of a sense of urgency about student achievement could have been justified if the teachers thought talent was all that mattered – the talented child will do well in any event – but one thing is certain: the teachers I worked with were indifferent to talent. When schools don’t do their job, the importance of background

“The teachers were indifferent to talent”

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is magnified: students from illiterate families are much more likely to remain illiterate in a school that expects the minimum from them. Eve-rywhere I encountered the same poisonous combination of classism and anti-intellectualism. Schools in the late nineteenth century were the cat-alyst for social mobility, but the schools in which I worked were devoted to nothing so much as social stasis.

In May, I met with the parents of my Year 7 students in routine parent-teacher conferences. I had prepared reading lists, and planned to say to each parent, ‘Nothing will improve your child’s writing skills more than reading. Here’s a list of books he or she might enjoy’. I did this with the first family but after they left, Ms E—, my supervising teacher, said to me, ‘Don’t give that list out to anyone else. This is a comprehensive school, and these are working-class families. They don’t go to the library regularly.’ Well, I’d be happy to give them an excuse to go to the library, I thought. I did however get permission to offer reading suggestions to students, if they approached me individually. Over the next few days a steady trickle of students came up to ask for the list.

The parent-teacher conference was a revelation, because I saw that some of these supposedly bovine parents were sceptical about what was going on in school. Turning to Ms E—, they said: ‘Couldn’t you assign more homework? His little brother, who’s seven years old, gets more homework than he does’. ‘She’s starting to read books like Black Beauty and Tom Sawyer.’ (‘Those are on my list!’ I thought to myself.) ‘When I was her age we were reading the Iliad. I guess times have changed.’ (This last statement was from the mother of a girl who seemed to be in a constant state of suppressed impatience, and no wonder: when I gave her the list, she told me that the last book she’d enjoyed was Life of Pi.)

Four years will pass before these children are asked to read a book cover to cover in school, four delicate years between childhood and ado-lescence, when a child’s natural curiosity must become habitual if it is to survive. Young people lose their thirst for knowledge if there is no intellectual sustenance. Yet every time I suggested teaching a topic that might begin to make up for years of wasted time, I was told it was impossible because this was a comprehensive school, because these stu-dents weren’t like me or the people with whom I had gone to school. A school that takes all kinds should not be able to argue that its students have to be treated like invalids.

The professionals who supervised me subscribed to two contradictory beliefs: that they had nothing to teach the students, no knowledge to impart; and that the students’ origins were their destiny. I’m convinced of the contrary: I’m sure I have a great deal to teach my students, but I do so in the expectation that one day they will be my intellectual equals.

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POETRY

RICHARD MEIER

To A New Teacher

Between the old job, which half-killed you, andthis new one, the career you’ve planned

so long now, you have summeredhalf with Homer, half with the mud

of our young garden. What I loveyou will say, typically, is how he’ll give

each warrior, however briefly mentioned,all his gaze, his whole attention,

then lead me outside and straight ontowhat’s been uprooted, what’s been planted…

You who’ve camped out on the outskirts ofyour own life long enough,

you who know how hardthey often are to tell apart –

the living, the unliving thing –

you’re leaving Limbo now, in your own style:simply, amply, with your book, your trowel.

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Jen Tomkins

DIARIES OF THE READER ORGANISATION

THE READING REVOLUTION

can’t paint you a picture of a ‘normal day’ at The Reader Organisa-tion because there isn’t one.

Recently I found myself at the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Meeting. ‘What’s all this then? What is The Reader Organi-sation?’ I hear a gentleman behind me as I stand by our stall at the

conference. I explain that we use books to give people something real to carry home when day is done, to quote Saul Bellow. ‘Ah, so you get people to read to make them feel better? What if they can’t read?’ he chal-lenges. ‘Reading is exclusive, rather than inclusive.’ But we read aloud at our meetings. Anyone, whatever their reading ability, can be involved in a Get Into Reading group. A spark lights and my interlocutor gets the idea entirely, ‘So, the focus isn’t on anyone’s problem, it’s on the book – a focus away from the problem but still about the personal response.’

Later that day I met a psychiatrist who also works as a librarian on a Royal Navy submarine. Do you know the two types of books most read by officers on a submarine? There are the epic classics such as The Odyssey and War and Peace but then, more unexpectedly, Mills & Boon novels, and the really romantic ones at that. The librarian’s explanation is that the epics provide a useful parallel to their huge journeys while the Mills & Boons supply a tenderness that is much needed when surrounded entirely by men in a metal machine at the bottom of the ocean.

Shortly after my psychiatric encounter, I found myself doing a pres-entation with my colleague Amanda Brown to the Chief Executives of Bibby Holdings, a Liverpool-based shipping firm with global influence. One man speaks his mind: ‘I don’t read poetry. I hate it actually. I was totally put off it at school.’ Okay, this is going to be tough, I think, as a nod of consensus goes around the room. We read the poem, ‘Well Water’ by Randall Jarrell, and a few individuals start tentatively to take part in a discussion, but not the man who hates poetry; he is still quiet. After a few minutes he comes back into it: ‘If you want to say something,

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just say it. Don’t put it into flowery language and make us interpret it.’ Speaking as a business man, he has a point. But, to quote Mamet, you can’t bluff someone who’s not paying attention. Literary language allows us to communicate in a more powerful way, ‘you cup your hands / And gulp from them the dailiness of life’ (‘Well Water’). To my great surprise, after taking part in the session, the man’s parting comment was an admission, to all in the room, that he kept a folder full of quotes from novels, biographies and essays in a file at work. This is something that I don’t think he would have shared with his colleagues in other circumstances. William Morris said, ‘It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.’

We’re reading Paradise Lost in my Get Into Reading group at the Blue-coat. It’s a journey we’re undertaking not without fear. Here Sin (Satan’s child, and bride) is speaking:

Pensive here I satAlone, but long I sat not, till my wombPregnant by thee, and now excessive grownProdigious motion felt and rueful throes.At last this odious offspring whom thou seestThine own begotten, breaking violent wayTore through my entrails, that with fear and painDistorted, all my nether shape thus grewTransform’d: but he my inbred enemieForth issu’d, brandishing his fatal DartMade to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’dFrom all her Caves, and back resounded Death.

Just before this passage, we discover that Satan ‘gave birth’ to Sin in Heaven, ‘a goddess armed / Out of thy head I sprung’. Now we learn that Sin gave birth to Death, Satan’s son. ‘But Sin doesn’t need to really exist, it’s just that Satan’s given birth to the idea of Sin’ was the response from a group member called Eliot (or so I’ll call him here), who often says little in the discussion. At this point he started to understand the text as an allegory for being human. The insight that Satan can ‘think’ of Sin and that it is this created thought which will be what eventually infects the human race: this was an inspiration in the group that week. ‘Oh, and I hope you notice that Sin’s a woman!’, he added.

Here’s a selection of poems for you that we’ve recently enjoyed in the group: ‘I Am’ by John Clare; ‘Telling Stories’ by Elizabeth Jennings; ‘Trust’ by D. H. Lawrence; ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins; and ‘The Seed’ by Hal Summers. Try them yourselves.

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Ciara Rutherford

DOING

THE READING REVOLUTION

t is by doing a thing that you become it, said Aristotle. Students in the School of English at University of Liverpool have recently taken part in a ‘Reading in Practice’ project (funded by the English Subject Centre, Higher Education Academy) which has placed them in The Reader Organisation’s ‘Get Into Reading’ groups in

the local community. Here they reflect on how participation in shared reading groups has made more dedicated readers of themselves and of others.

In the second year of her English studies, Katie Baker visited the Mossley Hill Hospital which specialises in treating people with advanced dementia. Here she experienced at first hand how literature can help people with neurological prob-lems rediscover old memories:

Often, the literature that was most popular with the group members were poems which evoked happy and positive memories for them. Because of the condition from which they suffered, reminiscence was an important tool for everybody within the group, often suddenly seizing their interest in something from their past which connected them to themselves, to the poem and to one another. Frequently we would read a piece of literature together that would spark off memories and often a conversation between the entire group – sometimes even a group recita-tion. It was gratifying to realise that the literature I take for granted has

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the ability to reach people who may not otherwise have had experience of it. In this way, communities can be created from people that can find common ground in literature, even if they have never really taken a great interest in reading before. By the time I finished at Mossley Hil, I really felt that we had become a proper reading ‘community’, and it was always a pleasure to hear people telling stories from their past as a result of the literature we had read together. I learned that ultimately reading is a great help, even for people who have become mentally isolated, in gaining trust and coming together.’

Maria Shmygol, also in her second year as an English Literature student, led a reading group in a mental health day centre.

‘One of the rewarding and mentally stretching things about the project for us was that it encouraged us to engage with literature that wasn’t part of our university syllabus and perhaps even discover texts that we had never read before. During the first few weeks of being a group-leader at the Crown Street Mental Health Day Centre I brought along some pieces of literature that I had personally enjoyed in the hopes that I could share them with my group – a few poems by Christina Ros-setti and a short story by Anton Chekhov, which, as I rather awkwardly found out, were not the best things to start a group off on. I found my salvation in several poems by Yeats, Wordsworth and other ‘greats’ with whom the group was already familiar, though initially I was not. The reading material was really well received, especially Coleridge’s ‘To Nature’, which provoked a discussion about individual experiences of nature and the seasons. One regular member of the group who was usually shy had a go at reading the poem and stayed to discuss it, which was a pleasing surprise because he didn’t usually stay in the group, pre-ferring to sit in his room.’

In her 3rd year of undergraduate study, Emma Hayward visited the Lauries Centre in Birkenhead, for people with mental or physical health problems. At the Centre Emma discovered how enthusiastic her group members were, and how much they enjoyed debating the texts they were reading:

‘“I am going to have withdrawal symptoms” announced the group member who had just closed Great Expectations. Although it was the end of a book it was my first time volunteering with the Get Into Reading project at The Lauries Centre in Birkenhead and I was astonished by this person’s complete conviction and engagement with the novel. For him, reading and discussing this novel each week had become necessary, not

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just desired. I soon learnt however, that it was not just a withdrawal from Great Expectations, or from Dickens in general, but a withdrawal from any book, play or poem that was to be concluded.

Reading back over my journals of my time with the group, I re-discovered just how much each member connected with the works we were reading and not solely on an emotional level but on a liter-ary, philosophical and academic level as well. The members of this group absolutely relished telling me why they disagreed with me, why they thought something in the book did not work or indeed why they thought it did. I wanted the group to become exposed to so much more literature, knowing that they had the potential and willingness to tackle any genre and subject matter. On my final day I was sad to say goodbye to the people I had argued with so enjoyably. The most profound thing that I learnt during my placement was how successful reading aloud and together really was. Each new voice pulled something out of the text that other group members were not conscious of. As I left then, I was not only sad but also a little envious because they got to stay and read the next chapter together.’

(At a recent Reading in Practice conference, showcasing the volunteer work, Emma spoke of how her experience of the reading group right at the end of her degree had made her aware of withdrawal symptoms of her own. She has now returned to full-time postgraduate study on the MA in Contemporary Literature.)

Eleanor McCann visited the Kevin White Unit, a drug detox centre. She saw there the potentially therapeutic benefits of reading.

‘As a group, we have used books as a tool for instantly engaging with strangers, as a resource for broaching delicate, deeply personal subjects and even as a kind of medicine: at the Kevin White Unit, a drug detox centre that I visited, the reading group gives a period of respite to people suffering from the initial stages of withdrawal. To watch an illiterate man there listening intently as a text is read aloud and suggesting per-ceptive ideas about what he has heard is truly magical. The Get Into Reading project has allowed me to see that reading can offer a common ground and give people an opportunity to do something both challeng-ing and healing even during times of adversity. As an English student, it has been so rewarding to implement my learning in a vocational way, a way that really does matter. It’s so easy for undergraduate students to get sucked into the “let’s get wrecked” culture: this kind of project means you don’t have to settle for that.’

THE READING REVOLUTION

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THE READING REVOLUTION

Helen Sheridan is basing her third-year dissertation on her experiences in a reading group in Windsor House acute psychiatric unit, researching the therapeu-tic benefits of shared reading.

‘I have been visiting Windsor House every week for 6 months. It is quite a transient group, with people sometimes attending for only 3 to 4 weeks, and the levels of concentration and attention vary greatly. It is not unusual for a group member to say the reading group experi-ence is the most relaxed they have felt all week or even in a long while. One member of the group, who had not read for a long time and was nervous about joining, read aloud for a short period and was reminded of her love of reading and how it gave her a refuge from the real world and what was going on around her. People rarely read aloud, but when they do, you can see their confidence grow and grow! It was especially encouraging when a woman who was not a native speaker of English decided to read aloud. It was a real struggle, but at the end you could see the sense of achievement in her face.’

When reflecting on our experiences the overriding feeling amongst us was that suddenly our study of English literature was no longer purely academic. In the reading groups there are no pretences or qualifications to be met; literature is there to be explored and enjoyed through honest, individual responses. One of the most rewarding aspects of the project is being able to share literature that you love with people who might not have touched a book in years. There was a mounting awareness amongst us that we were now able to use our learning vocationally and that reading groups were having a profound effect on our relationship with literature.

Rob Lewis put it like this:

‘I am now a bit clearer about what it is that literature does for us that is so important. I’ve always known but never really had to, or felt the need to, express it in a clear way. Exam papers and essay questions are usually more particular and less philosophically orientated. But I see how in reading a story or a poem a voice speaks to us and it happens only in our own mind… We don’t have to worry about what other people think or say about what the voice means, what matters is that each of us has our own receptive inwardness, a relation that is subjective and unique to us. Because of this we can allow literature to say things to us that it would be too uncomfortable to hear from some other voice outside of us. Literature can work safely, without being seen or heard, without

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drawing attention from those outside. Therefore, it is safe for us to let it in, to allow it to affect us whilst maintaining a degree of control, we can always put down or close the book, or choose a different one. And in doing so, we find the world is still there, mostly as we left it and so realize we can safely go back to the private voice that tells a tale that helps to make sense of, helps to re-write, helps us to think about what to write next, in our own life-story.’

The most important aspect of the project was the impact literature had on the members of our reading groups. One of the most gratifying and positive things that happened was seeing how the reading each week opened up the members of the group. It enabled them to reminisce and tell stories from their past, it enabled them to make conversations with people they may otherwise not have spoken to, and above all, it enabled them simply to come together, to have something in common and to take something from each piece that mattered to them. When members of the group said things like ‘that was the most relaxed I’ve felt all day’, or just simply that they will come back next week, you know that your time has been well spent. We hope this account of the project will serve as an inspiration for students or members of the public who have thought about getting involved in Get Into Reading, and demonstrate that projects of this kind ought to be a vital aspect of any English Lit-erature degree.

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POETRY

ELEANOR COOKE

Model

It hurts where his mother held his hand.He isn’t afraid. He wants to seewhat the accident’s done to him.

He isn’t prepared for the machines, the hoist; something that could be his father. The nurse smiles: ‘Your Daddy’s a modelpatient.’ A tube tickles Oscar’s arm, gurgles and moves of its own accord,

readjusts. Back home, the housebegins its whispering again.

Oscar takes paper, pens, a straw.He makes a man – wires, tubes, a face – and writes in felt-tip pen, Alive.

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Jane Davis

A WORLD ELSEWHERE

YOUR REGULARS

o Shakespeare’s Coriolanus declares as he leaves the city of Rome, where he has been brought to task and ban-ished by the people for whom he fought and suffered. His cry is familiar in its force, but though we may all want to believe in ‘a world elsewhere’, we’re generally stuck with

this world. It is a metaphysical as well as a practical problem: Coriolanus doesn’t say ‘there is a place’ or ‘city’ or ‘career’ or even ‘life elsewhere’; leaving Rome, for him, is leaving the ‘world’. This one moment, in a play about a man of action, is all about the need of belief. He needs to believe that in turning his back on Rome (everything he believes in and lives by), he will find another place to believe in and live by, elsewhere.

Being human means living in and through the mixture of outer reality and inner experience that is consciousness. The place where we may be most human is on the line between those two realms, the inward and the outward, signified in Coriolanus’ speech by the colon following ‘thus I turn my back’. It marks a moment of silence or gather-ing thought. It is here that we have the possibility of acting on belief and thus changing external reality; the place where an idea may turn into an action. It’s on this level that, while most of us aren’t soldiers, Co-riolanus still works for us; we fight for things in which we believe, even if only internally or in small-scale ways. The warning signs of belief are

“Despising,For you the city, thus I turn my back:

There is a world elsewhere.”

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small but insistent. When reading or watching the news, as we see or hear of human stupidity, corruption or war, that feeling, ‘there is a world elsewhere’, will be with us. But on this enormous scale the instinct that rises (‘thus I turn my back’) can have little effect in terms of creating a new world: we often simply switch off and go back into the smaller world of personal experience. As the play becomes the tragedy it is, we understand that Coriolanus cannot actually inhabit ‘a world elsewhere’: Rome and he are inseparable. And yet the phrase resonates. If only in memory, hope or imagination, we need that possibility.

The growing good of the world depends, as George Eliot tells us at the end of Middlemarch, on ‘unhistoric acts’ that are performed in the realm of personal experience: you don’t leave school, you join the sixth form council and push through a piece of legislation that allows whatever it is that was driving you mad about school to be changed; you don’t hand your notice in, but fight your boss at staff meetings, month in month out, and force a change of policy; you don’t leave Rome, you fight it. World-creating acts may be even smaller than this, too. The mass of men perform regularly and unspectacularly what Wordsworth calls ‘that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love.’ In the Nazi concentration camps, ordinary Germans (people who fell in love, got married, looked after their aged mothers, walked dogs and taught their children to read) who had become ‘Nazis’, con-structed a world in which it was almost impossible to perform such little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness. Everything human depends on these acts, as Primo Levi demonstrates in If This Is A Man:

An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy, and brought me the reply… I believe it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his pres-ence… that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

I say ‘ordinary Germans’ to press myself into remembering that these were people like myself – not inhuman, not without feeling, but vulner-able to social pressures and human weakness. I say it to press myself to remember that when we are not performing unremembered acts of kindness, we are probably performing little, nameless acts of unkind-ness and it is only by a sort of moral or social luck that our unkindnesses happen in a setting which doesn’t encourage them. Bruno Bettelheim,

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the child psychologist and psychoanalytic thinker, was incarcerated in Dachau for eleven months before escaping to the USA during an amnesty declared in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Thinking over how his incarceration had changed his psychoanalytic views, Bettelheim writes of the interface between inside and out:

Only dimly at first but with ever greater clarity, did I come also to see that soon how a man acts can alter what he is. Those who stood up well in the camps became better men, those who acted badly soon became bad men; and this, or at least so it seemed, independent of their past life history and their former personality make-up.

Those are my italics on ‘how’ and ‘what’; those questioning words point to the dynamic relation of idea and action: a sort of reversal and confirma-tion of Nietzsche’s bewilderingly circular aphorism, ‘We become what we are’. Or what we believe we are. All of which is to say that human beings are believing animals, and that what we believe changes reality, including the nature of the human beings doing the changing. Beliefs matter.

Ideas flower when people believe in them and therefore live them. ‘Oh brave new world, that has such creatures in it,’ cried Miranda, meeting for the first time a bunch of (not very reputable) outsiders to her world in The Tempest, and she believes that as she says it. It is her grown up and disappointed father, Prospero, who mutters ‘‘Tis new to thee’ from another place of belief altogether. And so to the Peckham Experiment. I don’t remember when I was last so excited by an idea in a book, though I am old enough to understand that some more experienced people will be muttering ‘‘Tis new to thee’ as I gaze in wonder and imagine all kinds of possibilities. A colleague gave me some books she thought I’d be in-terested in – one looking a bit like a 1970s’ geography textbook, one like a parish magazine, another something from an out-of-date sociology collection. A few weeks later I set myself to have a quick read and found these old-fashioned looking books exploding with interest. Inside their very ordinary covers, they were books like brain-changing drugs. ‘Wow’ I kept saying (my vocabulary not being as good as Miranda’s at the end of a busy working day), and ‘this is an amazing story!’

The Peckham Experiment deserves a novel (someone write it please) or at the very least a biography of its two founders, Drs G. Scott William-son and I. H. Pearse. (For an introductory account read the piece which follows this by Lisa Curtice on page 76.) The people who conceived the idea are dead. The practical reality they created to demonstrate and ex-periment with their idea is dismantled. But the idea is alive: there it was between those not too attractive covers, shining, brilliant, way ahead of its time. Ahead of us, too.

YOUR REGULARS

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In The Peckham Experiment (1943), which documents the work, Innes H Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker write,

So vivid was the life, so illuminating the understanding that came to those who worked and moved in and with the ex-periment, that it remains unobliterable. The war, passing like the black shadow of an eclipse across the world, has caused the experiment to be suspended, but live and vibrant beneath what is now a scorched earth, ‘the Centre’ lives to thrust up in a new age. It has already proved itself a ‘living structure’.

How startling to notice the date and to realise that at the very time Nazism was creating death factories, this pair of British doctors were conceiving the idea of ‘health centres’. The two ideas, though on very different scales – large-scale mass destruction and small-scale social health, seem to be at opposite ends of the same belief spectrum. I was really moved by the sense that the physical centre was simply a physical manifestation of the more enduring and powerful thing: the idea. ‘The Centre’ was not bricks and mortar but the idea itself alive in hearts and minds. In Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham Experiment by Alison Stallibras (Scottish Academic Press 1989), I was arrested by this sentence from the Prologue:

This book describes a social experiment of nearly fifty years ago, famous in its time but now only hazily remembered, that urgently needs to be recalled and understood. For there is a chance that the knowledge of human needs and possibilities that was gained from it could, if widely absorbed and applied, improve the overall capability of human beings to deal with the avalanche of social, economic and ecological problems that threatens to destroy mankind.

I was reminded of Doris Lessing’s tone and voice in Shikasta, which fici-tonalises the world as a planet called Shikasta which is being developed by a higher power, Canopus. Canopean agents are sent to Shikasta to bring new ideas, or reignite old ones:

For long periods of the history of Shikasta we can sum up the real situation thus: that in such and such a place, a few hundred, or even a handful of individuals, were able with immense difficulty to adapt their lives to Canopean require-ments, and thus saved the future of Shikasta… Handfuls of individuals rescued from forgetfulness were the harvest for the efforts of dozens of our missionaries, of all grades, kinds and degrees of experience on a dozen planets. These handfuls, these few, were enough to keep the link, the bond.

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YOUR REGULARS

Doris Lessing’s Shikasta idea is one I’ve found continuously useful for thirty years. Her achievement in this novel series is to have set up a structure which can account for a Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha, but which also gives value to the seemingly pointless life of a failing village schoolteacher or even to a person incarcerated in the secure ward of a mental hospital. It is good to be thus reminded that one or two people – representatives living an idea – can change reality, even in the most difficult of circumstances, as Primo Levi testifies. The Peckham Experi-ment, proposing a fundamental shift in medical attention from illness to health, might well be an episode in Shikasta. You can almost physically feel that living idea in the Pearse and Crocker book. In Biologists in Search of Material (1938) the two instigators of the project, Drs Williamson and Pearse, write ‘Man’s vaunted “conquest of nature” is the expression of a power complex – vain humbug. Nature is that which we obey. The scien-tist is deciphering the rules we have to obey. Every rule disclosed has had within its own power to ensure obedience’, a thought sited somewhere between Nietzsche and Lessing, very well understood by Shakespeare but not often visible in social, educational or medical policy. That such thoughts had been translated into practical action – basic human prac-ticality, concerning lungs and reproduction and varicose veins – seemed to me staggering. Here was a model from which to learn. What could our idea – the Reading Revolution – gain from such powerful practical thinking? I wanted to go and visit but alas, though the Peckham Health Centre survived the war, ironically it did not survive the creation of the NHS – a different, cruder, set of ideas shaped the national agenda and the experiment was closed in 1950. So, the physical reality has gone, though, to quote another great thinker, Czeslaw Milosz:

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,That appeared once, still wetAs shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,And, touched, coddled, began to liveIn spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

The beliefs that shaped that practical Peckham reality are still very much alive, awaiting your touch when you read the books – here is a world elsewhere and full of promise, consolation, inspiration:

At least there is something of a consolation that such excellence had been. What has been good is a promise that in other places, other times, good can develop again… at times of shame and destruction, we may sustain ourselves with these thoughts.

Shikasta

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Lisa Curtice

PIONEERS IN THE SEARCH FOR HEALTH

THE READING REVOLUTION

PRELUDE

Peckham, South London, 1935: a small booklet is distributed to homes in the neighbourhood of St. Mary’s Road inviting families to join a club, The Centre. Part leisure centre, part health centre, the Centre offered its prospective members the opportunity ‘to develop their health and hap-piness’. For a shilling a week the whole family could use the swimming pool and gym, take part in numerous activities such as billiards and dancing, and have regular health checks or ‘health overhauls’, as they were called. The residents were being offered an alternative health in-surance, and the chance to become active agents in developing a lifelong predisposition to healthy living. The prescription for health devised by the founders of the Centre was to give babies the best start possible, to provide families with an environment in which they could enrich their leisure time together and to offer the members of the community infor-mation, access to preventive health care, and a place to learn how to live fuller lives. It became known around the world as ‘The Peckham Experi-ment’, which was also the title of a successful book, published during the war, which described the evolution of the Centre and its ambitious rationale to conduct a community experiment into human health.

ORIGINS

The Peckham Experiment had begun some years before when two doctors opened a terraced house as a ‘family club’. Dr George Scott Wil-liamson, a doctor and scientist who had previously conducted research on the thyroid, conceived the idea of a study into health. Medical re-search focused on disease but he wished to describe the state of health and investigate how to develop it. His life partner, Dr Innes Pearse, had been a child health doctor in the East End of London who had found

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that merely treating the children and parents who were ill was insuf-ficient to overcome the effects of adverse life circumstances on their health and outlook. Together they widened the net and sought to make changes to the environment in which people lived out their lives, and to investigate whether this led to better health and well-being, not only for those who took part in the Experiment, but for future generations. They thought of themselves as human biologists.

The first club, in Queen’s Road, Peckham, was modest in comparison with its successor, but contained the seeds of ideas for an innovative approach to delivering primary health care. The doctors offered health consultations to member families and there was a club room and a social secretary to co-ordinate activities. Opening hours reflected the commit-ments of working people. By 1929, 112 families had presented themselves for examination. The doctors, however, concluded that their intervention had not been far-reaching enough. They had looked for health, but what found were very high levels of ill-health, even in people who had not yet developed major illnesses. Williamson and Pearse took the decision to shut down the club in Queen’s Road, to rethink and to start again.

Then began years of thinking, planning and raising funds. It was judged impractical to set up a controlled research study which would attempt to alter the working conditions of men and women, and so leisure was selected as the field for intervention and study. An Associa-tion was formed (The Pioneer Health Centre Ltd, now known as the Pioneer Health Foundation), with research funding obtained from the Halley Stewart Trust. By May 1935, a purpose-built modernist build-ing was ready to become The Centre and be inhabited and shaped by Peckham families. The invitation to local families put it like this:

It is new. It is the first of its kind in the world. Eyes are turned to it from all over the world to see what progress it makes. If it succeeds, the idea will spread, and the Centre will be the first of a long chain of centres. You have the chance to co-operate in this great experiment. You have the chance to contribute your experience and feelings to its working-out. You have the chance to influence it, to make it grow in the right way.

THE CENTRE IN ITS HEYDAY

It was often the children who took the lead in persuading their parents to join the Centre. The facilities on offer, the swimming pool, with its Olympic diving board, the equipment such as the roller skates and the freedom to try out a whole range of new activities, must have dazzled. Young couples too found incentives to join, for Dr Innes Pearse offered

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advice on preconceptual health and care throughout pregnancy. There was a nursery which enabled parents to take part in social activities and which also had an educational function in demonstrating good practice in child rearing. The founders were particularly keen to attract young people, but initially teenagers ran amok, spinning ashtrays along the cork floors and putting the glass walls at risk. However over time a more stable social pattern emerged. Children could approach a member of staff for a ticket to use equipment or an activity. This was a control-led way to provide them with autonomy and also doubled as a handy research tool for monitoring the activities that individuals and families were taking up. Paul Rotha’s film, The Centre, made after the war for the Central Office of Information, shows that days at the Centre developed a rhythm; for example, children would come on their own after school and were joined later by parents after work.

The Centre was bursting with innovation in the way it approached its investigation with member families. Innovation was based on emergent principles which the doctors and their team were constantly refining, and which in turn grew out of their observations and the experiences of member families. Self-direction was a key principle. People were not told what to do, even after a health consultation. They were given informa-tion and exemplars and left to make the decisions themselves. Those who left were not sought out, rather the staff waited to see if they would have a change of heart. The doctors theorised that people themselves were the best leaders. Rather than employ expert teachers to lead classes in badminton or swimming, they encouraged members to teach each other. Scott Williamson hypothesised that given opportunities, people could be drawn into a more active lifestyle and greater engagement with their neighbours, but to drive them towards it would be counter produc-tive. ‘Health is more infectious than disease’, he said.

The theory of health that Scott Williamson developed was that health was a product of an interaction between a person and their environment. Like any living organism, a person draws nurture from their environment and it is in the quality of that relationship that the potential for health improvement lies. Williamson and Pearse were not determinists, they trusted in people. Their idea was to cultivate the ‘social soil’, to provide sufficient opportunities to enable a community of families to take better charge of their health and well-being and to experience what it would mean to have a richer life of education and activities. Whether in the self-service cafeteria, with its unpasteurised milk and organic food, or in the unique family health consultations, where all members of the family were advised what was positive about their state of health, the members found themselves challenged by new experiences. The genius of those who ran the Centre was to provide these experiences in a way that

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enabled members to explore when they were ready to do so and in the context of relationships between family members and neighbours.

The research focus of the Centre was an idiosyncratic combination of scientific examination of the well-being of members, based on rigorous tests of physical function, and qualitative observation of the behaviour patterns and activities of individuals and families conducted by social observers. There was constant discussion of the meaning of what was happening amongst the doctors and staff, and also with member fami-lies who called their newsletter, ‘The Guinea Pig’. The Experiment was a hypothesis, rather than a plan; the doctors did not know in advance how the community would work, rather they waited to see and to learn from what people did when given the means to take charge of their health.

Evidence from the testimony of members, as for example in the interviews published by Alison Stallibrass in ‘Being Me and Also Us’ suggests that, in its relatively short life, the Centre succeeded in es-tablishing a dynamic that offered its members a peculiarly rewarding experience that they were able to draw on throughout their lives. The spirit of the place seems to have had to do with the lasting friendships and the relationships that people formed there, the confidence and the energy unleashed by facing new challenges. Above all, people lived the changes, rather than being told what they could or should be doing, and so they seem to have integrated the new information into their lives.

Most descriptions of the Centre start with the remarkable building in which it was housed. I have left this until last because, although it is the most visible aspect of the Experiment, it was the vehicle, and not the driver, for realising the aspirations of its founders. Characteristi-cally, Scott Williamson turned down the first plans and commissioned an engineer, Owen Williams, the creator of the Boots’ factory in Not-tingham to deliver the design he required. The result was an impressive triumph of muscular strength and airy transparency. A concrete frame supported a glass-walled structure which created a light and open inte-rior. The concrete pillars were left plain and the spaces were open and flexible. A central swimming pool was at the heart of the building and members could look into it from the cafeteria and across to the long gallery. The windows could be thrown open to the outside and children played inside and out; even the flat roof was in use. The whole was a hive of activity, described as resembling a liner when lit up at night.

FAME AND CLOSURE

During the war the Centre had to close; some families went to the farm which had supplied the Centre with fresh produce, but the building itself became a munitions store. With the equipment dispersed and the

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building needing work, the doctors were reluctant to reopen the Centre immediately after the war, but the members were determined and the doors were opened before a viable financial plan was put in place. Books had been published and Scott Williamson and Pearse had lectured abroad and the fame of the Centre was at its apogee. It was to become celebrated, not only on film but through a constant flow of visitors, as a model of British post-war social reconstruction. A poignant indicator of the importance of the Centre to its members was that when children ‘graduated’ from the nursery, their parents were reluctant to see them move to a traditional school, so members started up their own school within the Centre, which continued even after the Centre had closed. Yet the community in the immediate vicinity of the centre had been partly dispersed by the war and further support for the research programme was not forthcoming. Despite a high-profile campaign, the Centre closed its doors in 1950. Though community activity continued there as the Frobisher Institute, the original Experiment was over.

LEGACY AND RELEVANCE TODAY

At the time it must have seemed like failure as the NHS moved in quite other directions, focusing on the provision of treatment services. The doctors’ post-war plan of a network of health centres with land attached to grow organic food was out of kilter with the dominant national mood. However the closure of the Centre did not end the influence of the Peckham Pioneers. In the immediate aftermath there was an attempt to start a community on Peckham principles in Coventry and, although that was never realised, many community and public health initiatives since have been inspired by the focus on people as co-creators of their own health. It would be wrong to imprison the creative potential of the Peckham Experiment by over-stating its equivalence with policies or ini-tiatives that are current today. Its importance lies rather in its continuing capacity to encourage people to rediscover for themselves the principles of right relationship, healthy living and individual and community empow-erment. Nonetheless fans of the Experiment can be encouraged by the contemporary search for sustainability, by increased awareness amongst policymakers that investment in prevention pays and by a growing re-alisation that a risk-averse culture stifles the well-being of children and of neighbourly mutual care. There may never be another Centre, but the time for the doctors’ prescription may have arrived at last.

Information and resources about the Peckham Experiment, including publica-

tions, can be found at www. thephf.org

POETRY

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DAVID SOLLORS

Stillbirths, Ely

The one gift, motherly, to thesebirthed to nothing, unearthedan eavesdrop from the bishop’s Easter sermon,far enough from Heaventhat they never emptied their lungsto praise God or take His nameas a curse, close enough to breaththat almost- mothersheard and believed in their cries,wrapped their skin and bonea night or two in rags thenhid them in the lee of the church,blessed,perhaps, by cast-off water from its lead.

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POETRY

A Man with No Known Family, Living Simply

At the five-bar gate he tells youhow this year favoured the blackberries.God was generous. Last yearthe onions were huge in their parchments.Then he ate well;onions and potatoes baked in the ashes,hot and buttered. And you thinkhow good it seems, how good,that in an Ireland of subsidies and malls,motorways and real estate,a man can live so close to providence.And what you do not know is the way he hidesthe letter that came three years ago,in a good year for apples,from Canada:

Sister Stephen died last week. We found your address in her diary.

Sister Stephen; born Roisin Muire.His alter, his twin, was never Stephen. Andyou do not know, because he does not tell,

how he remembers her, all frock and pigtailsand her moutha wanton bruise of blackberry juiceand how he remembersthe way she’d say I’m Charlie’s marocking and nursing a doll improvised from spoons and sackrags,and how he remembers the wayshe grew past him as she becamea woman retreating into herself and thenretreating into a silence deeper than herselfand then retreating into the deep silenceof North America, exiled with a man’s name and a visionary precept:

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To live truly,first it is necessary to die to the world you have known.

And he does not tell youof the nightshe sat at the hearth, half drunkand tried to call her backacross the ocean, backacross the yearsto him, his little other –

Stephen, Roisin, Rosie, Sister, self,

and came back,finding nothing but the Sacred Heartglowing like an emberand a sieve of mushrooms draining by the sink.

POETRY

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Penny Markell talks to Gill Lowther

CALLING LIBRARIANS

THE READING REVOLUTION

Quaker Homeless Action (QHA) runs a variety of projects including a mobile library that visits homeless centres in London. I interviewed the co-ordina-tor of that project, Gill Lowther.

Tell me about the mobile library.

It was founded by a literary agent who is a Quaker about ten years ago. She wondered what aspects of life homeless people are excluded from and realised that voting and books were two key ones. Books were her life and she knew that, with no permanent address, homeless people usually would not be able to borrow books from public libraries. So QHA bought an old Post Office van, fitted it out with shelves and filled it with books. When the mobile library started, the van visited four centres and offered to lend books for two weeks at a time, without fees, without ID, and without any penalties if the books weren’t returned. It became a much sought-after service because we treated homeless people like ordinary members of the public – they were not in receipt of charity but were on an equal footing about what interested them. We now visit seven centres.

How many people visit each week?

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It fluctuates depending on the weather, and which football match is on. In some centres only three or four people come in a visit, at other centres you might get a dozen. We have to balance up what makes it worthwhile: quantity or quality. On a good week about 25 people might use it.

Where do the books come from?

Originally they came from the contacts that the literary agent had; now they come from various sources. Libraries are acutely aware of the fact that they can’t lend to homeless people. They get round it by giving books to us. A librarian in Richmond called me after they’d been weeding out their stock and invited me to come and take as many books as I wanted, so I filled my car. Orion Publishers offer me books: I can specify the kind of thing we need and they do their best. Waterstone’s give all the books damaged in transit to charity, and I could go at any time and ask them for books too. We also buy some books, such as English dictionaries.

Books also come via various unsolicited publicity we’ve had: some articles in the Guardian, and other papers. We were on a Radio 4 pro-gramme where Mariella Frostrup interviewed me and various homeless people. And we were on Songs of Praise. After publicity people call or visit the website and offer us books. It can be complicated: books can be unsuitable. We don’t censor on subject matter, but very large books are not suitable for itinerant people and we don’t want duplicates or tatty books.

What sort of books do you have?

A range of fiction and non-fiction. In non-fiction, for example, our biggest sections are History, Biography, Spiritual, Poetry and Drama. We can’t supply many Art books because they tend to be very big. There’s a very large section in Language – especially as the number of foreign-ers has increased, particularly from eastern Europe. I racked my brains about where to get books for them from, and eventually I went to Grant and Cutler – the foreign language bookshop on Great Marlborough Street – and asked if they had any books to give me, or to sell at sale price. They donated their entire sale stock to us. Those are mostly in Western European languages though, so I made enquiries and found that the main Polish centre was in Ravenscourt. They donated a few boxes of Polish books.

What books are most popular with your readers?

It’s hard to say. Anything and everything. Stephen King. But people are just as likely to ask for Thomas Hardy or Shakespeare. We can never get enough True Crime, about the Krays etc., or books that reflect the lives of the homeless. Dictionaries are really popular for people learning

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English. They don’t often come back, but we don’t mind donating them. We can’t do specialist books – some people are doing courses or degrees in Plumbing or Philosophy – but we can’t supply everything they need.

What’s the most unusual request for a book?

There was one lady who came in and requested a Latin Grammar. And once I received a message saying that an old gent wanted an encyclo-paedia. We didn’t have one, but I had two at home, so I went back and got one of them and gave it to him. His face lit up, he hugged it to himself and said ‘I shall take this with me everywhere’.

You could multiply these little incidents many times over. Mari-ella Frostrup spoke to a young man who was looking for a book by Roald Dahl. She asked why and he said ‘because I have a little group of friends who can’t read, and I read them bed-time stories as they tuck themselves up in their sleeping bags under the arches. I don’t want anything too frightening because some of them have had very difficult backgrounds, so Dahl is about right’.

What sorts of people come into the library?

This is a question of what sort of people are homeless. The answer is you or me. I sat next to a guy on the steps of St John’s in Waterloo and asked if he wanted a book. He said to me ‘who is your favourite author?’ I gave him a few inadequate answers, and he said ‘my favourite is Victor Hugo’. It seems that he’d previously been an academic.

Many people have fallen on hard times. I met a young man from Denmark, his wife had locked him out and he’d had to leave. Lots of people come from divorces, lots of young people who’ve escaped from situations with step-parents. Personally, I know people who have or who could have become homeless: when they were between jobs, had no money, were unfocussed, or on drugs. It’s easy to become homeless and not easy to become un-homeless.

I think it’s sheer coincidence if you get through life without being homeless. It’s not necessarily that these are feckless people. Does a chaotic life lead to homelessness or does chaos come afterwards? It’s too easy to become homeless. There are students, academics, choreographers.

What are they reading for?

Some read to forget. Some read because life out there is boring. Some read for the same reasons as you or me. Many are better read than I am. Some have traumatised lives and can’t concentrate. Some can’t read, others don’t have glasses. Even if an optician visits the centre they find appointments hard to keep, so we take reading specs out with us in the van.

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What kinds of conversation do you have about books?

We chat about what they’ve read, their dogs, the Big Issue, spiritual issues sometimes, who are the Quakers?, whatever they want. When I think ‘what do we require of our volunteers?’, to me it’s just that they can relate to people equally.

Where do your volunteers come from?

Over the eight years I’ve been co-ordinator I’ve never advertised for vol-unteers. Because the best people, the most committed ones, are those who come to me or who seek us out. Up until now we haven’t had a formal process for taking on volunteers. I have had an unofficial system, which, in a nutshell, is making it as difficult as possible! Last time we were out with the van a young lady came up and said ‘I’ve seen this van around, I like what it does. How can I volunteer?’ I said to her ‘I’m going away for a couple of weeks, if you’re still interested when I’m back then here’s my telephone number’. If a person can hold their interest and keep the phone number then they are really committed. Now we have started an application form process as we need to be squeaky clean.

We’ve got about 34 volunteers. Some do just one day a month, others more. We have two ex-homeless people who are volunteers, and a new volunteer who is a multi-linguist who will be great with the Eastern Europeans.

Where else would you find mobile libraries for homeless people?

Over the years I’ve had enquiries about whether there’s a scheme in such-and-such town or how you set one up. I suggest they go to the public library and see if they can work together with them: some libraries are doing wonderful things. If the person contacting me isn’t affiliated to any religion I ask if they might consider going to the Quakers and ask if they’re doing anything. And if not, perhaps they might consider setting up a group themeselves. The first one was in Bristol, in Bedminster. It’s fixed, in a centre, and is called the Park Bench. There are sister centres in Bristol too – they have their own modus vivendi and are doing well.

Quakers in Coventry run one mainly working with asylum seekers, and a second one with mums and kids. Again they’re fixed, not mobile. On the Isle of Wight they have three little branches. There are various others. Recently in Truro Meeting House, they had a supper club for homeless people and wanted to do this too. I said they could take along a basket of books and offer them. If people want them then take another basketful, and if it takes off then start cataloguing them and getting tickets.

There’s a member of QHA who went to Bangladesh. She’s started two rickshaw libraries for special needs children. Now she’s also got

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one on a London bus, and one on a motorbike. One of our ex-volun-teers went to work for Book Aid and found out that they run something similar in Kenya, on camels. Then a friend who’s a librarian at Finchley sent me pictures of one on donkeys in Venezuela! It’s marvellous what people are already doing in little corners, without trumpeting about it.

What effect do you think the library has?

Occasionally people will say ‘it changed my life, made me feel that I’m worth something again’. On a less dramatic scale what I hope the library will do for them is to help rebuild their self-esteem. The aims of this work are to help restore their self-respect, to integrate them into public life, and to treat them as equals. And to continue to replicate wherever and for as long as it is needed.

Contact www.qha.org.uk for more information

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Adam Phillips

FORSAKEN FAVOURITES

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

e sometimes fall in love with people for the very things about them that will eventually drive us mad, or at least drive us away. It can seem, in retrospect, that quite unwit-tingly we had been doing a kind of psychic

alchemy; there were things about this particular person that we were so freaked out by, that so disturbed us, we turned them into enchant-ments. The once charming became utterly irritating. We had come across someone – or something: a novel, a poem, a piece of music – so appall-ing to us that we had to get over ourselves and we called it, at the time, falling in love. Later, in the aftermath as it were, we might think of this kind of falling in love as, say, counter-phobic, strangely self-destructive, and so, strangely self-revealing. There are the times when falling out of love seems more interesting than falling in love, because we are not simply bereft, we are baffled; we seem to have lost something we never really wanted; we seem to have been misled.

There is of course always the pressure to avoid the lurking disil-lusionments, the bad faith of having to keep faith with oneself, of wanting to believe that all our relationships have some valuable neces-sity about them. These self-betrayals, if that’s what they are – the loves we really regret – are tempered when we fall out of love with writers, or

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ADAM PHILLIPS

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rather, with their work. What were we like if we liked this? is a less daunt-ing, more easily interesting question about writing that has absorbed us in the past than about lovers or friends whom we have fallen out of love with, or just lost interest in. And yet clearly our aesthetic pas-sions are somehow of a piece with, not substitutes for or alternatives to, lovers and friends and family. The patent difference, though, is that in relationships with other people everyone is changing all the time; with writing, we change, but the words on the page don’t. In this sense art never betrays us; we can only betray ourselves. Sons and Lovers is exactly the same book we read when we were sixteen, but we are not exactly the same person when we reread it.

Nothing reveals our resistance to giving up on past pleasures, our unwillingness to notice that we are not getting the pleasure we wanted, more than rereading the writers we loved in adolescence. These are the writers that are like lost loves, the writers who made us feel so promis-ing, the writers who conspired with us to love our own excesses. And by the same token they are the most perilous writers to return to. ‘You’re the one I’ve been looking for / you’re the one who’s got the key / but I can’t figure out whether I’m too good for you / or you’re too good for me,’ Bob Dylan sings on Street Legal. When a writer just doesn’t work for you anymore, Dylan’s questions are among the questions you’re left with.

So when I was invited to write on this subject, I was dismayed that the writer who came to mind was Dylan Thomas. A writer, it seems, I have become too good for. The poem that came immediately to mind, perhaps appropriately in the circumstances, was ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ a poem that, if you grew up in Wales in the Sixties, was everywhere. I remember the revelation of reading it – or rather, hearing it as I read it – as a fourteen-year-old; the fact that it was a poem about death wasn’t a problem for me then, because I thought it was a poem about going out in the dark, something I particularly liked. I couldn’t wait to go out at night, and Thomas was giving me his strange bardic encouragement. When I learned later at school what the poem was really about, it seemed even better: better as in deeper, graver, more portentous, more grand. And Thomas’s poetry was inextricable from the legends and stories about him. Welshness was so alien to us as second-generation émigré Eastern European Jews, and Thomas made it seem all rather alluring in his slap-dash, slapstick, and apparently naïvely-sophisticated Celtic fluency. If you thought, as I did then, that the Visionary Company was the only company worth keeping, Thomas was the bard of choice. Partly because he wasn’t T. S. Eliot, and partly because he clearly had no idea what his poetry was about: his was an obscurity immune from academic interpretation. His seriousness, I

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thought then, was even greater than Arnold’s, his on-the-side-of-life-ness even profounder than Lawrence’s. Reading the poetry, or hearing him read it in his plummy upper-class English accent, was powerful and obscurely moving, and left you nothing to think about.

Virtually everything that I valued as an adolescent – other than his face in Augustus John’s great portrait – annoys or bores me now. His poetry seems, more often than not, like a calculated self-parody, with the joke being on us when we were moved by it. It would be more real-istic to say that I let myself be tricked by Thomas’s poetry; not that he, in any sense, wanted to do this to me – how could I know? – but that a sense of being tricked is what I have been left with. It is as though, in retrospect, I would like to have been more foolproof, a terrible thing to want. Our disillusionments must be the key to our tastes. The mystery is why such vehement unmaskings are required. Why we can’t just move on.

Originally published in The Threepenny Review.

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Brian Nellist

THE OLD POEMJOHN DONNE, ‘AS DUE BY MANY TITLES’

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

As due by many titles I resignMyself to thee, O God, first I was madeBy thee, and for thee, and when I was decayedThy blood bought that, the which before was thine, I am thy son, made with thy self to shine, Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid,Thy sheep, thine image, and, till I betrayedMy self, a temple of thy Spirit divine;Why doth the devil then usurp on me?Why doth he steal, nay ravish that’s thy right?Except thou rise and for thine own work fight,Oh I shall soon despair, when I do seeThat thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.

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t’s four hundred years on Helen Gardner’s reckoning since Donne sent the six poems to the Earl of Derbyshire that begin what we now know as the Holy Sonnets and this is the first of them. En-thusiasm for the form that had flourished in the 1590s may have died down but 1609 was also the year in which the greatest of the

sequences appeared and maybe Donne knew of Shakespeare’s sonnet 146 ‘Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth, / My sinful earth these rebel powers array’, the word which can mean both dressed up to the nines but also marshalled for battle. I mention that because Donne’s poem also has this metaphor of continuous warfare within confused allegiances. He had served himself as a soldier with Essex on the expedition to sack Cadiz in 1596 only three years after his brother had died in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest. ‘Resign’ in the first line is both a legal term (‘due by many titles’) but also a word for military surrender. He is an ancient city built long ago by its rightful owner and rebuilt when ‘I was decayed’ (the Redemption). Yet it has been given up to the enemy, ‘I be-trayed / Myself’; yes, the line ending insists, it was I myself who did it.

I know that for many readers today the language of religion and sin, though the word isn’t used in this particular poem, is at best irrelevant and at worst alienating. We believe in the freedom of the individual in a horizontal world without those vertical demands, the hope of glory and the sense of shame, intruding on our exploration of it. Well, we gain and we lose and religious poetry gives us entry into that loss and reminds us of a human reality. If we gain liberty we lose also a sense of life’s seriousness and urgency, not simply through fear of death but through the terrible consequence of earlier actions. This poem is full of violently active verbs, ‘usurp’, ‘steal’, ‘ravish’, ‘rise’, ‘fight’, that leave the individual in the centre of them almost helpless as a result of the wrong choice once made, ‘betrayed’. Donne, the frequenter of plays in his youth, knows how to utter the voice of revulsion with that power-ful ‘Oh’ in line 12. Yet the appeal is founded not on his sense of God’s unfairness but our own injustice. He attempts to blackmail God (‘I shall soon despair’, unless –) yet knows, in the end, he can only appeal to love. As in some of his secular poems love and hate interchange in a reverse order; he belongs by right to the hater but appeals, against what he has himself ceded, to God, the lover of souls. The struggle is to be continued throughout the later ‘Divine Meditations’.

Donne used to figure larger in our reading, I think, than he does now but even then he was read too selectively. For their astonishing psychological depth go further and look for example at ‘A Litany’, more of the Elegies than ‘Going to Bed’, certainly the satires, especially I and III, and the epistle ‘To Sir Henry Goodyer’, for instance.

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iven New York’s current climate of malfeasance, larceny, and ordinary corruption – Mr. Madoff has been sentenced and remanded to a medi-um-security prison in Atlanta, Georgia, and divers politicians are issuing one-line resigna-

tion letters and nose-diving into dishonourable retirement from public life – one would be hard-pressed to find some tale of dishonest living to gladden the flinty heart. But you know I’m on the case: submitted for your disapproval is the slender, elegantly designed Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel.

In the seventies and eighties, Israel had carved a respectable niche for herself as biographer of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgal-len. Her books sold well and were taken seriously as documents of the Golden Age of Popular Culture. Commissioned to write a ‘warts-and-all’ book about Estée Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, Israel found herself caught ‘twixt mighty opposites: having accepted a handsome advance to write a scabrous tell-all timed to coincide with a pious hagiography, she found herself being offered even more money by Lauder’s lawyers, Roy Cohn among them, to write nothing at all.

She makes the wrong choice – so easy to do in the world of publish-ing – and grinds out a watered-down, unauthorized bio that pleases no one, gets crummy reviews, and sells badly, the trifecta of literary disaster. Unwelcome and unemployable (as she notes wryly, the writing of books hardly prepares one for the marketplace), she drifts along on and off welfare as a superannuated ‘temp’, proofreading for a legal publishing outfit (and I saw the best minds of my generation working

Enid Stubin

OUR SPY IN NYCAN YOU EVER FORGIVE HER?

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the midnight shift at Matthew Bender to pay the rent) and, snubbed by the editors and agents who used to flatter her at expense-account lunches, takes to what the A. A. crowd calls ‘drinking and dialing’. Rep-resenting herself to an assistant as Nora Ephron, she waits for the eager ‘Hiya, Nora’ before shouting ‘Star fucker! Is that one word or two?’ and hanging up. A ‘secretarial pissing contest’ with one of Esther Newberg’s assistants renders the hardened agent ‘pre-cardiac’.

Living in hopeless squalor, unable to pay for her beloved cat’s medical bills and desperate to avoid complete penury, Israel uses her formida-ble talents and the casual security policies of several research libraries to invent letters from the likes of Fanny Brice, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, and Noel Coward, providing herself with a separate manual type-writer for each notable. The results? Hundreds of autographed letters that provide vibrant glimpses into the hearts and minds of characters already lionized by the celebrity-crazed culture and exploited by the autograph dealers who bought Israel’s confections cheap and sold them dear. But that’s only Trimester One, as she terms it; worried about dealers twig-ging to her confabulated ‘memorabilia’, she moves on to Trimester Two and infiltrates university libraries up and down the Northeast Corridor to steal letters in their holdings and replace them with forgeries. Acquiring an accomplice to sell the purloined letters, she manages to sell some to the ferretlike autograph dealer blackmailing her. In a wonderful scene at a bar, Israel, terrified of exposure and arrest, blithely assures the dealer that she can pay him the amount he demands and, once he leaves, tells the bartender, eyes averted, ‘His wife found out about us.’

It’s the stuff of a caper film, at once larky (Israel’s word) and dark; Israel’s immersion into a subject’s life, managed through biographies, the loosely guarded archives she rifles though, and her own ventriloquist’s skills, fills her ear with voices she can mimic brilliantly: Louise Brooks’s jaundiced, insider’s view of Hollywood (‘But finally nothing that breaks up the monopoly of time-honored bullshit can prevail’); Noel Coward’s knowing self-evaluation as a songwriter (‘My major problem is grammar, not verbs. For that, I must apply not the ear but the arse’); and Lillian Hellman’s imperious froideur and proprietary control of the Dorothy Parker estate (‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, but this is the decade of the illegal dump’). But Israel invariably has the last word – and laugh – on Hellman: ‘She was a difficult woman; happily, her signature was easy.’

This is a story of literary theft, to be sure, and it speaks of voyeurism and possession. But it’s also a celebration of the delights of mimicry; Israel acknowledges the biographies that capture their subject so per-fectly that, following their lead, she can clone speech and observation as vividly as the personages themselves might have done. Her work, disrup-tive and piratical, is also the stuff of imaginative tribute: in the close of a Coward letter about Marlene Dietrich’s towering vanity and humorless-

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ness, Israel creates a line that limns both: ‘ “Unteachable, I suspect,” Coward might have written, but he did not.’ It’s with unalloyed pride and pleasure that Israel cites her own imitation appearing ‘as practi-cally the eleven o’clock number’ in an important edition of Coward’s letters: ‘For me, this was a big hoot and a terrific compliment.’ If Dorothy Parker’s ‘epistolary legacy is spare’, leave it to Israel to concoct a raft of letters covering the Hollywood years, ‘because the ur- letter was headed with her Norma Place address.’ Reading the definitive biographies, Israel becomes an after-the-fact researcher – and the real thing herself.

She summons up the strategies and ploys of a marginal life in the big city – selling books at the Strand for pocket money; peddling pa-perbacks from a bridge table on upper Broadway and, at the sight of a neighbor, deftly wheeling the table into the street and pretending to hail a cab; selling a valuable handwritten note from Katharine Hepburn about Spencer Tracy’s death (‘Anna paid me $250 for the letter, which I needed more than I needed Hepburn’s tears’). Sentiment and nostalgia fuel the appetite for her forgeries, and dealers accidentally tip her off to the very qualities a prized letter should include.

As in any caper movie, the feds close in. For Israel, the confrontation takes place outside a ‘fancy kosher deli’ – I recognize it as the now-defunct P. J. Bernstein’s on Third Avenue and 70th Street – after she has consumed a pastrami on rye. Frantic to divest herself of any incriminat-ing evidence, she shreds mounds of notes and drops off her ‘gang’ of typewriters along a stretch of Amsterdam Avenue, fantasizing an escape to Fort Lauderdale, holing up in her mother’s ‘cheesy bedroom closet, coming out for pot roast and an occasional swim’. Her lawyer assures her that she will likely serve no more than ‘a year and change’ in prison. At her moan of anticipatory terror and grief, he counsels, ‘You’ll bring a book.’

Given the ‘unsexy’ nature of Israel’s crimes and her immediate guilty plea, a prosecutor finds it hard to summon up outrage (‘How about elevenish tomorrow?’), and a judge gives her five years’ proba-tion and six months’ house arrest, along with the admonition that he never see her again ‘in this context’, which Israel sees as ‘not a total rejection’. Contrition? Israel considers her invention of the line ‘Can you ever forgive me?’: ‘As I wrote it, I imagined the waiflike Dorothy Parker apologizing for any one of countless improprieties, omissions, and/or cutting bon mots… apologizing with no intention whatsoever of mending her wayward ways.’

In a press release, Israel confesses, ‘I have no regrets.’ Why should she? The letters she crafted at forty dollars a pop recalled their sub-jects to life and gave them voice. Her inspired if larcenous ventriloquism questions the very nature of authorship and authenticity. It’s an act of generous mischief.

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THE LONDON EYEBE STONE NO MORE

YOUR REGULARS

he success of Kevin Spacey’s artistic directorship of the Old Vic is still in dispute, though everyone is agreed that he can bring in the big names, and thus, big audiences. Me, I’m keen on big savings, and the Old Vic sell great seats for a tenner if you’re young enough, so though I’m

guilty of not taking full advantage of the wealth of theatre on offer in London, I’ve been going pretty steady with the Old Vic for a couple of years now. And I have seen some very high-quality productions. I had to be shushed and held down in my seat while watching Gaslight – throb-bingly tense Victorian thriller with a magnetic Kenneth Cranham as an eccentric detective. I sat in the front row to see a brilliantly entertain-ing Speed-the-Plow and was rewarded with the spit and sweat of Kevin Spacey himself, alongside Jeff Goldblum (less greasy in real life).

So when I was given an early tip-off that Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project (a company of British and American actors) would be perform-ing another Shakespeare/Chekhov double-bill at the Old Vic this spring, I took notice and booked tickets as early as possible. Having said that, I’ll go and see any company performing The Winter’s Tale. I played the three parts of First Servant, Servant (they are different!) and Mopsa in a production at university, and I defy anyone to bring less presence to the roles. But as I spent most of the play and the many rehearsals waiting in the wings, I came to know the lines very well, particularly the speeches made by Hermione at her trial. They are not particularly beautiful, except in their simplicity. But as a counter to the erratic whirlwind of Leontes’ paranoia, his wife’s words, so perfectly expressing her thoughts and situ-ation, seem almost miraculously ordered.

I’ve always thought that, in the right conditions, a whole audience could be made to doubt reality in that last scene when the statue seems to

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come to life. Perhaps we all know that Hermione did not die of grief, and the statue is not a statue, and that it is all an elaborate piece of theatre set up by Paulina. Yet the burden of sixteen years rests on this bit of the-atricality, there is so much regret and wonder and fear expressed, and so much urgency and carefulness in Paulina’s speeches – an audience should forget and start with surprise when the statue moves at last.

In this Old Vic production, the stage was set with a child’s bed, rugs, cushions, a desk and table piled with books, papers and toys – a family home about to be ripped apart by dark imaginings. While Hermione made her playful, clever speech to Polixenes, Leontes paced the stage, watch-ing, his back to the audience, only turning to speak when his thoughts were in full flow: ‘Too hot, too hot…’ Simon Russell Beale played Leontes with growing panic, like a man out of control, so ridiculous and pathet-ic in his suspicions that the audience laughed at him. He was petulant with his amazed courtiers and patient wife, desperate for approval then enraged when it did not come. This skittishness became sinister when Leontes gave the order to have his new born baby killed. There is a neuro-logical condition called prosopagnosia, or ‘face-blindness’, which renders people unable to recognise faces. The sudden suspicion that overpowers Leontes seems like this, a blown fuse in the brain, a failure of connection between nerve endings, denying the family resemblances.

Simon Russell Beale is worth watching in any play. He says the lines as if you were hearing the thought processes of a real person, a believ-ability which is particularly fascinating when he is playing Leontes, who cannot believe in anyone. He refuses Hermione’s denial of guilt:

leontes: I ne’er heard yetThat any of these bolder vices wantedLess impudence to gainsay what they didThan to perform it first.

hermione: That’s true enough;Though ‘tis a saying, sir, not due to me.

Though Rebecca Hall was occasionally a little strident as Hermione for my liking, she said these lines perfectly, twisting round in an attempt to catch Leontes’ eye and fix it on herself, to untangle her real situation from Leontes’ mockery of it. But Leontes did not look and would not hear. He defies the oracle, the news of his son’s death arrives, and Her-mione is taken away lifeless. Faced with the finality of death, Leontes realises his mistakes, his ‘evils’ as he later calls them, as smoothly and quickly as waking from a dream. Too easily. So just as quickly, he begins to rely on Paulina and the ritual of daily mourning to make him feel his loss – as if rewiring the circuit; relearning proper responses now that he knows he cannot trust himself.

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In that final scene, the statue stood with her back to the audience so we would witness the awe of the observers, looking out. Leontes who would not make eye contact with his fellows before is transfixed now:

O, thus she stood,Even with such life of majesty, warm life,As now it coldly stands, when first I woo’d her!I am ashamed: does not the stone rebuke meFor being more stone than it? O royal piece,There’s magic in thy majesty, which hasMy evils conjured to remembrance andFrom thy admiring daughter took the spirits,Standing like stone with thee

There he goes getting what is real and what is imagined all mixed up again, but this madness is as much a pleasure as an affliction. The words circle and repeat until they seem to bring Leontes to a standstill, turning him into the same insensible block who would not hear truth at his wife’s trial. He must be brought to consciousness again. Like an experimenting scientist, Paulina provides the vital spark: she requires him to awake his faith, which alone will do since reason has been no help in the past:

Music, awake her: strike! ‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more: approach;Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come;I’ll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away;Bequeath to death your numbness, for from himDear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs […] Nay, present your hand:When she was young you woo’d her; now in ageIs she become the suitor?

Sinead Cusack’s Paulina was aggressively reasonable in her coaxing, and I wasn’t sure this worked with lines as strange and reckless as ‘Come / I’ll fill your grave up’. The language is of life and death and redemption; it is energetic and commanding because the outcome is still not clear. If Paulina’s speech lost any sense of the miraculous on this occasion (the au-dience chuckled knowingly), Simon Russell Beale rediscovered it with ‘O! She’s warm!’ – spoken with such feeling that it brought tears to my eyes.

My brief fling with amateur dramatics was enough to discover how little control I had over my voice and actions on stage. Despite exhaustive rehearsals, in live performance I could still speak my well-learnt lines with an entirely unexpected tone or expression, changing their effect on the scene. The very best actors seem to possess an almost supernatural control over their voice and actions, like craftsmen who can cut breath, presenting life and emotion as something studied and yet always new.

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Brian Nellist

ASK THE READER

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I have a problem with poetry. The classic English novel I have always read and loved for the reality of the situations and di-lemmas it presents and the depth and warmth with which its

characters engage with one another and with life. But poetry has always seemed to me too involved in self-conscious artifice, coldly preoccupied with its own being there, a kind of verbal constipation. My wife however reads little else; for the sake of our marriage can you advise me?

Yes, you have a genuine ailment though fortunately, it’s not like Swine Flu contagious. But poets themselves have long recog-nised the problem. Philip Sidney, for example, at the start of

Astrophil and Stella, writing love sonnets with their tight structure and rhyme scheme, has the lover trying to find inspiration by reading other poets’ work until the Muse tells him ‘Look in thy heart and write’. So art itself, the Muse, recommends spontaneity. Three hundred and fifty years later the American poet, Marianne Moore, starts ‘Poetry’: ‘I, too, dislike it; there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle’, and what a pernickety business it was for her since she wrote lines on the basis of counting the syllables in the line. Poetry can seem more concerned with the artful and literary than with the situation it is addressing.

Yet all writing involves the shaping of words even as I write now since even such nerveless prose as I can manage involves selection and the ordering demanded by grammatical structure, the need without spoken emphasis to have the stress fall on the right words. That tension between speech and writing involves the difference between the impro-

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vised and the considered, the immediate and the reflected upon and is present in your words as in all writing. Poetry honestly admits the gap between the loquacity of our conscious mind and the greater depth, the discovery of hinterlands of significance, that writing involves. Lan-guage works upon us in ways other than purely rational statement, as political rhetoric confesses, for example. The movement regulated into a rhythm or metre, the music of verbal sounds, the conscious disloca-tion of grammar, the submerged influence of image and metaphor all involve the further reaches of language to touch and develop the further reaches of the mind.

Such pontification means little without example. When Ben Jon-son’s eldest son, also a Benjamin, died of the plague in 1603 aged seven, his father, being a poet, wrote an epitaph for him:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

The reader used to poetry would expect a slight pause somewhere near the middle of the line. Here, however, it’s delayed right to the end, to the last two syllables because poetry is oral, dramatic, and you must hear the breaking of the voice with its suppressed emotion. The conflict between the ceremonially correct gestures and the personal feeling is enacted not explained. Yes, ‘farewell’ as at a funeral, which by its for-mality does indeed help our grief, but oh, the loss, the end of ‘joy’; and, yes, wouldn’t you just know it, by claiming too much I’ve lost it all, ‘My sin’, and yet I’m still talking to you ‘loved boy’. The poetry doesn’t analyse as prose would; it performs.

But surely, you might reply, grief can’t find time for rhyme and regu-larity of metre. Yet, even in the midst of a catastrophe, our minds crave understanding beyond the disorder not expressed as argument, there can be none, but because that is the way our minds are structured. In the last four lines of the little poem the father must say goodbye to his child:

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much.

Now there, I can almost hear you say, that’s what’s wrong with poetry, that self-consciousness that turns the child he’s just lost into a poem. And I’d reply; no, you’re wrong. He’s on your side. For Jonson, despite all his ambition as a writer and his actual achievement, it all counts for nothing beside his son. The unexpectedness of the line makes the hair bristle. Moreover, the poem doesn’t end there as though he wanted to

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close with a clever trick. Poetry inhabits the feelings it expresses and uses its formality often enough to contradict it. Here the poem ends with apparently a lesson learned the hard way but feel the bitterness of that contrast in the final line between ‘loves’, the natural attachment, and ‘like’; which seems now the stronger feeling. And the dead child is made responsible for that unbearable dichotomy, ‘For whose sake’. How right therefore that these are ‘vows’, promises born of the occa-sion but of course impossible to keep. The mingling of resolution and recognition, bitterness with love, is only made possible by the form, is only possible within the formality and breaking of that formality that constitutes the poem.

I’ve been misled by the interest of an individual instance into for-getting your general problem. We read at different speeds; you don’t attend to your novels with the brisk desire for information that you scan your newspaper. Poetry needs a still slower more attentive reading and above all not a silent reading. Even if you don’t want actually to sit there reading aloud to yourself, hear the words in your head in the theatre of your own mind. Above all you must feel for the tension between the analysable content and what the poetry actually does which will differ from what it apparently says. Rhyme and rhythm, those structures you dislike, are inherited, stand within a tradition, represent the formalised voice of a community, so don’t despise them, but what should concern you is the particular way the individual poet responds to that collective, how he or she resists, complies, celebrates and breaks away from it.

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READERS CONNECTWITH

OxFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

DANIEL DEFOEROBINSON CRUSOE

A castaway, alone on a desert island: this is the classic example of the great human test. Considerations that have become second nature in civi-lised England – shelter, food, comfort, luxury, company – are transformed back into primary questions of survival, both physical and psychological. Can Crusoe re-make some sort of home for himself on the planet? Will he

lapse back into an animal state? This novel, pub-lished in 1719, still makes the reader ask strange questions, big and small – should Crusoe bother to wash and shave? could a man alone on a desert island even be said to have a face since there is no one there to see it?

Samuel Johnson said there were three books of which he never tired: Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, all different forms of quest. What he loved about Crusoe was the ex-pansion and contraction of secure boundaries, the ebb and flow of advancing desire and retreating

fear. At first the protagonist makes a small defensive shelter within a cave on the worst part of the island. Then, his sense of security gradu-ally established, he begins to venture forth, even making a boat strong enough to go round to the more fertile side of the isle. But the journey is so perilous that he is glad to come back to what he only now calls home, however poor he had thought it before. Here he is, desperately lonely, suddenly finding on the sand a human footprint not his own – is he happy, relieved, excited?

My key affliction had been that I seemed banished from human society, that I was alone, circumscribed by the bound-less ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemned to what I called silent life

To have seen ‘one of my own species would have seemed to me a raising from death to life’. And yet when he actually finds the print, what is amazing to him is his own reaction:

that I should now tremble at the very apprehension of seeing a man, and was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearance of a man’s having set his foot in the island.

Today we fear what yesterday we desired.

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THE JURY

STAR RATINGS***** one of the best books I’ve read ** worth reading**** one of the best I’ve read this year * not for me but worth trying

*** highly recommended 0 don’t bother

Drummond Moir, once of Edinburgh, works for a London-based publisher

Although tedious occasionally, Robinson Crusoe is truly a classic: initially popular as an adventure tale; wildly successful in post-revolutionary America as a story of triumphant self-sufficiency; ammunition for both proponents and critics of imperialism. For modern readers it is the ultimate parable of downshifting, proving that happiness can be found on the slimmest of shoestrings.* * *

Eleanor McCann is an English student at Liverpool University and student editor on The Reader magazine

In an unusually discouraging university lecture I heard this book dismissed as tedious and so was sur-prised to find it absorbing and fast-paced for the most part. Defoe raises questions of morality with an in-creasingly Christian outlook: as when Crusoe spies on the feasting cannibals. Disgust dissolves and Crusoe apprehends, with self-reproach, that in judging them he succumbs to the savage in him.* *

Lynne Hatwell (dovegreyreader) is a Devon-based community nurse

It was always going to end in tears but somehow I hoped this might be the moment for the eighteenth century and me to hit it off. Sadly mistaken, Robinson Crusoe proved as impenetrable and distracting as any-thing else I have attempted, another time perhaps but not this one. *

Jo Cannon is a Sheffield GP and short story writer

Robinson has Asperger’s Syndrome, which insulates him from the horror of his plight. His wife, the book’s only female, appears and dies unmourned in one sen-tence. Friday functions merely as servant, admirer and covert homo-erotic interest. Emotional detachment renders the proselytising slaver an unsympathetic, pompous narrator. His racist victories are distasteful now. And the descriptions of DIY drag.

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Virginia Woolf, novelist

There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is concerned with petty things. He belongs to the school of great plain writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent, though not most seductive, in human nature.* * * * *

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Angela Macmillan

BOOKS ABOUT…FATHERS AND SONS

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Richard Madeley has recently published his autobiography, Fathers and Sons, by no means the only (or the greatest) book by that name but it got us thinking. One might imagine there would be a long list of novelists taking on the subject of the relationship between fathers and sons. Of course there are lots of books in which a father and son are among the characters but not many writers seem to want the issue to be central to the fiction. If you think about it, there are stacks of books about mothers and sons, or about daughters and fathers, but even Dickens is reluctant to explore the complexity of father and son. Here are some of the novels, memoirs and poems on this theme that we want to recom-mend. Please let us know if you can suggest any others.

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (OUP, ISBN 978-0199539116)

‘This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs’. Gosse’s parents were Plymouth Brethren, his father a marine biologist. After the death of his mother, when Edmund was just seven, he was brought up almost in isolation by his loving but strict father. The writing of his autobiography becomes a very moving account of the inner life of feeling, and an extraordinary account of a vanished world.

Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (Oxford World’s Classics, ISBN 978-0199536047)

In the arrogant and ardent young Bazarov, the book’s central character, we find the human need for faith, friendship and human love conflict-ing with the political and philosophical ideas of nihilism when ideals

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have to be lived out in real life. But through Arkady, Bazarov’s acolyte, and Arkady’s father Nikolai, we see that freedom and human values can coexist together and bridge the generations.

Philip Roth, Patrimony (Vintage, ISBN 978-0099914303)

Philip Roth abandons fiction in this unsparing and unsentimental account of his father’s slow death following diagnosis of a brain tumor. A grim subject, written not without humour and always with a power-ful energy.

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0571218011)

The story of Irishman Willie Dunn fighting for King and Country in WW1 while, at home in Dublin, his countrymen are rising against the British. At the heart of the novel is his relationship with his policeman father: loving, tender and heartbreaking.

Marilynne Robinson, Home (Virago, ISBN 978-1844085507)

If you read nothing else this year, read this utterly absorbing exploration of the nature of hope and forgiveness. A companion piece to Gilead in which religion is once again central.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, ISBN 978-0330447546)

A father and his young son walk through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Nothing of value remains except the love and need they have for each other. In turns terrifying, and tender. This is McCarthy at his best.

William Wordsworth, ‘Michael’ (from Lyrical Ballads, Longman, ISBN 978-1405840606)

In old age, shepherd Michael and his wife, Isabel have a son, Luke, much loved. Troubles come and faced by the prospect of losing the land that had been their all, Michael decides Luke will leave to make his fortune and safeguard his inheritance. The boy never returns. Every day, to the end of his life, Michael goes to work on the sheepfold they had started to build together, ‘There is a comfort in the strength of love; / ‘Twill make a thing endurable, which else / Would break the heart’.

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GOOD BOOKS

RECOMMENDATIONS

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RECOMMENDATIONS

The Novels of Iris Murdoch

Last week, in the fi rst of the new series of University Challenge, all eight contest-ants failed to recognise a photograph of Iris Murdoch. This year marks the tenth anniversary of her death. For those who have not read any or those who might like a reminder, Brian Nellist suggests why we should continue to read her books.

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 refl ective 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 fi ction 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 fi gures of power, both what it was like to exercise such in-fl uence 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 confl icting inner pressures. There’s always an intense excitement in her books as they move, especially in the earlier works, between some-thing 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 Unoffi cial Rose. But the greatest achievement is really the long later novels where the power of the almost magically endowed pro-phetic fi gures 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, stimulat-ing 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

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VERBAL BOOTY

ou know I can’t write at all’, Samuel Beckett wrote to his friend and main correspondent Thomas Mc-Greevy in 1931, when he was aged 24. ‘The simplest sentence is a torture.’ The young Beckett laments his perceived inability throughout the letters collected in

this volume, covering the years 1929 to 1940. ‘This writing is a bloody awful grind’, he complains; ‘The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous.’ Although Beckett says, ‘I can’t write anything at all, can’t imagine even the shape of a sentence’, in his letters he is finding his creative voice. As the editors suggest in their General Introduction to this, the first of four projected volumes:

The writing of letters constitutes for Beckett both a warm-ing-up exercise and an end in itself, an act of writing often as exciting as anything he is composing with a view to publication.

Despite the bloody awful grind of it, writing is explicitly as neces-sary to Beckett as is living, which itself comes in for complaint. ‘This life is terrible,’ he has decided, ‘and I dont [sic] understand how it can be endured.’ The letters often act as a long list of physical maladies – many very real – alongside writerly maladies. Many are reflections upon the indolence which so worried his mother. ‘Perhaps I may prepare some-

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929–1940 eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009ISBN 978-0521867931

William Shutes

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thing,’ Beckett supposes, ‘– but do something… no.’ The reader often finds him ‘perfecting [his] methodology of sleep, and little else’, ‘con-strained to do nothing’. In his more melodramatic moments, Beckett refers to ‘motion itself [as] a kind of anaesthesia’, as ‘what we all do, struggling to ensure our dying every second’. In such a state, physically suffering and unable to write, he found it difficult ‘to reach a tolerable arrangement between working & living’. Like life, though, writing, an end in itself, comes to be seen as vital, suggested by Beckett with regard to a poem of his:

Genuinely my impression was that it was of little worth because it did not represent a necessity. I mean that in some way it was facultatif [optional] and that I would have been no worse off for not having written it.

‘I cannot get away’, he writes five years later, ‘from the naïve antithesis that, at least where literature is concerned, a thing is either worth it or not worth it. And if we absolutely must earn money, we do it elsewhere.’ The identification of living with writing shows Beckett following the course of a strictly literary life.

This extraordinary ‘stew of LETTERS’, then, tells a narrative of Beck-ett’s life as a writer. In the 1980s, he himself authorised Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, General Editor of the project, to publish ‘those passages only having bearing on my work’. Due to this stipulation, to the impossibil-ity of locating all his letters so soon after his death in 1989, and to the fact of there being over 15 000 extant letters, the four-volume collection will be a selection, rather than a complete edition. This first volume sees Beckett travelling between Paris and his dreaded homeland Ireland, around Germany and through London. He writes to Sergei Eisenstein, requesting admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography; considers training to be a commercial pilot; and is stabbed in Paris by a pimp called Prudent. The novel Murphy, the short story collection More Pricks Than Kicks, and the study Proust are just three of his publications in this period. These are not the statistics of an indolent writer’s life.

Amongst the letters can be seen the accumulation of material taken from real experience: ‘ “butin verbal” ’ [verbal booty] which finds its transposition in the poems, fiction and, beyond this collection, drama. On the 8 September 1935, he reports watching ‘little shabby respectable old men’ ‘flying kites immense distances at the Round Pond, Kensing-ton’. Then, on 22 September, ‘The kites at the Round Pond yesterday were plunging & writhing all over the sky.’ He continues, ‘The book [Murphy] closes with an old man flying his kite, if such occasions ever arise’ (which he has confirmed they do). Descriptions of his mother’s temporary residence, as being within sight of her dead husband’s resting

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place, foretell the scenario of the novella Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said) over forty years before its composition.

Fittingly, in a narrative of the writer’s life, the selection opens with a letter to James Joyce, the friend and teacher whose artistic spectre haunts Beckett throughout this period and beyond. A problem repeated by Beckett’s early critics, it was no less obvious to the young writer that his work bore the indelible imprint of his Irish forebear. He admits of his story ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’, ‘of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours’, but vows ‘I will get over J. J. ere I die. Yessir.’ After all, Joyce was ‘froissé dans la perfec-tion’ [crinkled up in perfection] ‘dégueulasse’ [enough to make you throw up], and, as Beckett conceded in 1931, ‘Unfortunately for myself that’s the only way I’m interested in writing.’ By 1938, though, he writes to McGreevy, ‘I don’t feel the danger of the association any more.’ The letters concisely demonstrate the development of a style which was very much Beckett’s own, self-confessedly ‘hard to follow, & of course deliberately so’. ‘In spite of what I wrote to you concerning the impos-sibility of working,’ he writes to his cousin Morris Sinclair, ‘I have just been making the most outlandish efforts to write what nobody wants to hear.’

Beckett is remorselessly self-deprecating in this way, variously de-scribing his work as ‘samples of embarrassed respiration’ and as ‘the latest hallucinations’. He thinks Murphy ‘reads something horrid’, ‘a most unsavoury and not very honest work’. Yet out of such nihilism comes what is now known to be characteristically Beckettian. What he sees as ‘the only source I have, the only source of reference, my own bloody self’ becomes his materials. As he says later, ‘how lost I would be bereft of my incapacitation’. Themes of suffering and loneliness in his oeuvre develop herein.

It is, though, the extended discussions of art and aesthetics which provide the highlight of this book, showing Beckett actively finding a style with which to approach his themes, so as to build upon ‘Goethe’s opinion: better to write NOTHING than not to write.’ Beckett’s natural erudi-tion and his remarkable memory combine in his analyses of paintings seen in European galleries. With the impressive scholarship of the editors, providing locations and even catalogue numbers of the paint-ings in question, a tour could, and perhaps should, be made of the works whose effect on Beckett was no less than to develop his aesthetic.

Although his immersion in the Old Masters was immense, it is his comments on Cézanne, with whom he says painting ‘began’, which suggest his aesthetic for ‘a mechanistic age’. In Cézanne’s work, Beckett sees landscape to be stated as ‘a strictly peculiar order, incom-mensurable with all human expressions’. Man is alienated from his

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surroundings, and senses, moreover, the ‘incommensurability… even with life of his own order, even with the life… operative in himself’. Beckett figures this alienation as ‘the deanthropomorphizations of the artist’. Elsewhere, he complains, using a similar register, ‘No sooner do I take up my pen to compose something in English than I get the feeling of being “de-personified.”’ His task became to verbally negoti-ate a sense of nothingness and loneliness, to write, as it were, about nothing and nothingness. ‘[I]t can only be a matter’, he proceeds, ‘of somehow inventing a method of verbally demonstrating this scornful attitude vis-a-vis the word’, to convey ‘the silence underlying all’.

Beckett saw the English language as ‘more and more… like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it’. Volume I of The Letters of Samuel Beckett triumphantly represents the young writer’s arrival at this design, which of course his work went on to fulfil. Hints of future modes of approach – ‘I have the feeling that any poems there may happen to be in the future will be in French’ – demand that the further volumes arrive soon. At once scatological and profound, sympathetic and scurrilous, Beckett’s early letters, with ‘a little seriousness in the stress of irony’, are trag-icomic, very much like the subsequent works whose ‘sadness always adds to beauty’.

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Sarah Coley

David Constantine, Nine Fathom DeepBloodaxe, 2009

ISBN 978-1852248215

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hen Dante reads the message on the gates of Hell, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’, he finds he doesn’t understand (or maybe he’s playing for time) and he asks his guide Virgil what it means. In Cary’s

old translation Virgil clarifies the meaning thus: “Here thou must all distrust behind thee leave; / Here be vile fear extinguish’d.” Along with hope, you also leave behind mistrust and fear, and that is the way to walk through hell. In place of a sustaining and dreamed-of future, there is now a pressing need for clarity of the senses and judgement, and an attention that does not look away.

Nine Fathom Deep is not a hell but it is this world seen as if according to those other-worldly principles. The first poem, ‘Photomontage’:

Against a photograph of the two of them in their eightiesInto the bottom righthand corner of the frameWhen he was dead and she was beginning her absenceShe set a photograph of herself at eighteenBlack and white, she cut it outFrom somewhere, she cut round Herself so she was nowhere and aloneLaughing. Nobody commentedBut there it is and see,It says, how I looked when you fell in love with meAnd I with you and didn’t we bear it out

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To the edge and over the edge of doom?Her montage in the dying living room.

‘Nobody commented’, there’s nothing in the way, just the picture of the laughing girl set against the picture of the couple in their eighties. This bare witness, ‘and see, / It says’, carries the moment from long ago that was strong enough to have travelled forward and made a lifetime. It’s poignant because the woman is ‘beginning her absence’, suffering from dementia but I love the simple ‘fell in love with me’ that actually and impossibly rivals ‘over the edge of doom’.

There’s much in this collection that on the face of it is dark subject matter for poetry but the clarity of attention transforms it. In ‘Fishing over Lyonesse’ – a doom nine fathoms deep – the poet imagines the fish below listening in ‘down the trembling line… to what holds humans / Together, what keeps them from disassembling / Over depths well known to be unfathomable.’ The answer is that what holds them together is the same thing that might make them disassemble. Three times, like the re-percussion of an illness, or a pull from a bottle, Constantine mentions together the living and the dead, the widest possible aperture for us, as his friend Hugh Shankling talks of people he has known:

I see more clearly Where we are, in relation, how much we needMutual aid, the telling of stories and to wrap Our precious dead and our precious living closeIn a welcoming house, Atlantis on dry land, The good and peaceable, cheerful, funny,Close and ordinary.

The thought of that which you fear to lose, the close and the ordinary, the precious stories, and the recognisability of some person who has been, is also what can keep you from coming unstuck.

In ‘The Silence between the Winds’, Constantine watches smoke from a fire rise and a butterfly decide to take flight in the momentary stillness between the winds:

But seeHow all things cannot help rememberingWhat they like doing in still weather. SeeThey lift up, look around. The wiseSit tight, of course, their only pleasureJudging which of the unwise think this will last for everAnd which know it won’t.

In Constantine’s poems things and people behave as they would behave, and that is the peace you must find in them. Wishing for more or for longer is a limitation.

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Frank Cottrell Boyce

BOOKS FOR YOUR CHILDRENPHILIPPA PEARCE, TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

e’re reading Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philip-pa Pearce in our family and the thing that gets everyone talking is the skates. At the climax of the book, Tom and Hatty – the ghostly girl he finds in the magic garden –

go skating on the frozen river Cam. A mixture of sheer momentum and absolute joy makes them go further and further – further than they meant to. They end up in Ely and have to get a lift back in a horse and carriage. Hatty is the only person who can see Tom, so no one makes a space for him in the carriage. And as they ride on into the night, Hatty starts to fall in love with the driver. As a result she loses the ability to see Tom. It was loneliness that made her sensitive to Tom’s presence. It’s not this kissy stuff that people are interested in in my house, though. It’s the skates. Tom doesn’t have any skates of his own. So Hatty says that after the expedition, she’ll hide her skates under the floorboards and with luck they’ll still be there in Tom’s time – a hundred years in the future. Tom goes to look and there they are. So when Tom and Hatty go skating they are in fact wearing the same pair of skates. Wow! Doesn’t that break all the rules of everything?! One of my children points out that Bill and Ted do this with the key. But it’s different here because the skates are so emotionally loaded. Their presence shows that Hatty carried on thinking of Tom, and believing in him, after she lost the ability to see him. And also because they show that some things survive even when great things – like the garden – are lost. These feelings all

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come to a head in the final scene of the book, which is one of the most powerful scenes I’ve read anywhere. Young Tom is about to leave the flat in which he’s been staying with his aunt, when the old lady who lives upstairs asks to see him. Tom goes in and realises that the old lady is Hatty. It’s an electrifying moment – and completely unexpected because until then you’ve assumed that Hatty is a ghost. In fact, as Hatty says, it was Tom who was the ghost. Or, more accurately, we are all ghosts. When I read it as a child, I was appalled by the idea that the attractive young girl could become the old woman. Now I’m older I can see that the scene is full of joy. The old woman had carried these memories in her heart and now they were there alive again before her. Everyone who has had children knows that this is both commonplace and mysteri-ous. You hold vivid, recent, precious memories of them, which to them turn out to be vague, shadowy impressions from a mythical past. But somehow it doesn’t matter. Somehow the garden is there even if you can only get to it when the clock strikes 13. Or when you’re thrilling your own children with a book that thrilled you.

Tom listened as she began her tale; but at first he listened less to what she was saying than to the way she was saying it, and he studied closely her appearance and her movements. Her bright black eyes were certainly like Hatty’s; and now he began to notice, again and again, a gesture, a tone of the voice, a way of laughing that reminded him of the little girl in the garden. Quite early in Mrs Bartholomew’s story, Tom suddenly leaned forward and whispered: ‘You were Hatty – you are Hatty! You’re really Hatty!’ She only interrupted what she was saying to smile at him, and nod. Tom’s Midnight Garden, Ch.26

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Frank Cottrell Boyce

FICTION

AAAHHH!

here are a dozen priests at the altar but the priest in the middle is Father Gerry. All is still. It’s midnight, on Christ-mas Eve, in the Church of the Manger in Bethlehem, just coming up to the Elevation of the Host. The sanctuary bell rings. ‘Hoc Est Corpus’. A meditative silence flowers. This

is it. The most pregnant moment of the most pregnant Mass on the most pregnant feast in the most pregnant Church in Christendom. If you don’t taste the Real Presence now, you’ll never taste it. Father Gerry listens to his heart and finds that it is humming, ‘No, you’ll never put the aaahhh in gravy without Bisto.’

After Mass he talks to Father Damian. They are leading their Archdi-ocesan pilgrimage together. They have been inseparable since seminary. ‘Dame, did you get anything?’ ‘Socks. Lynx. Soap. A prayer book. Like I might not have one.’

‘I mean, during the Mass, did you … you know, feel it?’‘What?’‘The Presence.’‘What Presence? I never felt any presence.’On New Year’s Eve, Gerry slipped out of the Archdiocesan finger

buffet at the Hotel Jolly Jerusalem and walked alone to Gethsemane. Surely there, where Christ Himself had wept, he would receive some reassurance. He knelt where he could see the stars. He tried to imagine the Bethlehem star. Would it have been visible in daylight? It would have been so easy then, to look up and see a million tons of evidence in the sky. Please God let there be some presence in the Universe other

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than my own bloody consciousness. He began his long vigil.It had verses, that Bisto advert. One verse about each member of the

family. He was trying to recall the one about Dad. What did Dads do? Gerry’s own Father had died in a car crash when he was eight. When it comes to gravy, what can beat… something was moving behind him. Other pilgrims? Bandits? Terrorists even? He swung round. There was a gentle glow in the olive branches, as though a luminous rosary had been left hanging there. The glow moved. ‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’ A sing-song, fluting voice replied, ‘Pax Vobiscum…’ and then they came.

They were slender and frail. Their eyes had that look of abstracted intensity you get if you have been driving too long. Their skin was pale. They wore long white floaty robes and little, tinselly haloes hovered over their heads. Angels. Had his prayer been answered?

Not exactly. Not angels, but aliens. When you looked closely you could see that, though dressed the same, they were of many different species. They had come from every quadrant of the Galaxy. They all spoke perfect Church Latin. ‘What do you want?’ asked Father Gerry. ‘Well… to start with, Confession and Communion,’ said the one at the front, ‘My spiritual director died on the journey. Haven’t had the sacra-ments since.’ They were all Catholic.

Obviously this was very exciting but Gerry couldn’t help being slightly disappointed. Of course they could be the answer to his prayer in a roundabout way. Just not angels, that’s all.

There was a good deal of interest in the press and in the streets. But the Church is good at discretion and the alien Catholics were soon safely behind the Vatican wall. Gerry and Damian went with them. The alien Catholics had asked for Gerry to lead their ‘pilgrimage’.

In the Vatican, they were questioned closely by the Pope Himself. Gerry and Damian were thrilled to meet him on such terms. Damian had seen him at a public audience once and Gerry had seen him as a boy, the time he came to Manchester. Of course that was a different Pope. For both of them, meeting His Holiness face to face was just as unexpected as meeting the alien Catholics.

‘How did you get here?’ asked the Pope.‘Via Frankfurt,’ said Damian, eager to talk. ‘I was talking to our New Brothers and Sisters,’ said the Pope. New

Brothers and Sisters was now the official nomenclature. Gerry winced whenever he heard it. His own brother had died in the car with his Father.

‘Sorry.’‘In flying saucers,’ said the New Brothers and Sisters.‘But… how? Did you travel faster than light? What kind of engine?

What fuel source?’ asked the Pope, who had once been an engineer.

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‘Faith is our fuel source,’ said New Brother Number One. ‘The Power of Faith. We just pray about it and the flying saucers go.’ The New Broth-ers and Sisters were very big on Faith.

His Holiness was clearly impressed. ‘And the Good News, how did you come to hear it?’

‘You surely remember,’ said Brother Number One, ‘that both our Blessed Lord and His Holy Mother ascended into Heaven. Well they stopped off on the way, at our planet and lots more. They’re still doing it as far as I know.’

They talked long into the night. The Pope asked our New Brothers and Sisters what they wanted. They told him they wanted him to anoint one of their number a Bishop so that their Bishops too could claim direct lineal descent from Saint Peter. The Pope was pleased to do it. He said to Father Gerry, ‘Who would have thought? Did you ever imagine?’

‘Never in a month of Sundays,’ said Gerry. This was a good enough reply. It’s also a line from the Bisto advert, which began to run through his mind as soon as the Pope and the aliens started going on about the role of the Oil of Chrism in Ecclesiastical History.

Later Gerry and Damian showed the New Brothers and Sisters round St. Peter’s. One of them stopped in front of the Pietà and said, ‘Now that is one chuffing amazing likeness.’ Damian had been giving them English lessons. On questioning it turned out that the Immacu-late Heart and the Immaculate Conception had turned up on this New Brother’s planet after the invention of photography. He had snapshots of both of them. He showed them to Gerry and Damian. Our Lord and Our Lady were standing one on each side of the alien, with their arms round him, leaning into the middle of the picture, grinning. ‘Queued for two days to get that took,’ he said. ‘Look they’ve written on the back.’ On the back it said, ‘To Cosmos from Jesus and Mary.’ Jesus and Mary both looked pretty much the same as they did in the Pietà. But less stressed.

The snaps were published in the papers. There was a great upsurge of piety throughout the World. The New Brothers and Sisters provided reassurance, excitement and inspiration. Their Faith-Powered Space ships became places of pilgrimage. People would test their own Faith by trying to make them work. As time went by, more and more succeeded. Father Gerry, however, never put his faith to such a test.

When the Pope died, Father Gerry’s close association with the New Brothers and Sisters was enough to get him elected to the Holy See. He took the name Thomas. He made Cosmos Cardinal. Damian – now in charge of Vatican finances – restored the Holy See to wealth by making a series of lucrative franchising deals with car manufacturers. The Ford Franciscan became the most popular car on the planet. Its specialised

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engine meant that it ran on a phased combination of Faith and petrol. Very few people had enough Faith to fuel an effective ignition system, almost everyone had enough for motorway cruising.

Everyone in the World felt good. Earth was suddenly the centre of the Universe again. And the new Pope Thomas was the centre of the Earth. But the terrible Truth was that Thomas still didn’t feel that much. Inside. He looked up at the stars and knew now that they were full of Catholics but… bulk was not the answer. Whenever it was quiet, his mind still silted up with old jingles.

In particular, he found Cosmos’ enthusiasm embarassing. One af-ternoon, they were in the Sistine and Cosmos started to complain about the frescoes, ‘They’ve got nothing to do with religion. They’re all about the cult of the artist. It’s just Michelangelo showing off. Really speaking they’re idolatrous.’

‘I thought you liked the Pietà.’ ‘Yeah I like the early stuff but this is really over the top and self-

important. You should paint over it.’‘You can’t paint over the Sistine Chapel!’ ‘Why not? You’re the Pope.’ ‘It’s been there the best part of a thousand years.’ ‘So Heritage is more important than the living well of Faith.’ The Living Well of Faith, I ask you. ‘Want to know what I think about this stuff? I think all that post-

Vasari Artist voodoo has blinded everyone. It’s created a situation where you are content to allow this chapel – the panting heart of our Uni-versal Faith – to be used as an exhibition hall for the celebration of homosexuality.’

‘What are you on about?!’ ‘Look. Look around you. Adam looks like one of the chuffing Village

People. I’m telling you, a bucket of whitewash is the best thing for it.’ There was no point arguing. Tom whitewashed the Sistine Chapel.

Today, said the editorial in Osservatore Romani, the Holy Father has cut the chains of History. Thomas was hoping that someone would object but no bugger did. He looked up at the whitewashed walls and tried to imagine the muscular bodies beneath. All he could see was whitewash, though he knew intellectually that the bodies were there. This seemed to him to sum up his spiritual life.

He tried to talk it over with Damian, who was his confessor now, for reasons of security. ‘I don’t feel anything inside,’ he said. ‘I can see that things are going well but inside … nothing. Even my memory … it’s clogged with crap. I can’t remember the words to the Hail Holy Queen but I can do the whole of the Bisto song and the theme to the Flashing Blade.’

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‘Oh that was a great show,’ said Damian. ‘Who could forget that?’ and he started to sing it. ‘You’ve got to fight for what you want, for all that you believe…’

Thomas joined in, in the heat of the moment. They bounced up and down on their seats, riding imaginary horses, like the two musketeers in the title sequence. Afterwards, Damian gave him Absolution and an Apple iPhone in Papal white. ‘You said your memory was going. This is the ultimate information sculptor,’ he said. ‘It’s got a five hundred year diary so you can leave little messages for the next twenty popes. It’s also – you’ll love this – got an electronic Lectionary. No more pissing about with bookmarks. You switch it on and all the readings for the day are there. It even gives you key words for your sermon.’

That evening at Mass, he saw the camera closing in on the iPhone and realised that it was another of Damian’s product placements.

He said the words of the Offertory, ‘O Lord we offer you this day this Warburton’s bread and this Gallo Brothers’ wine…’

The next thing that happened of course was the total collapse of World Banking. Every account was wiped clean. Not that the money vanished. There were still tills full of cash and vaults full of gold but no one knew whose it was. All the data had gone. There was chaos, and fighting but above all there was praying. Praying like Heaven never heard before. Maybe during the Black Death or something.

Tom knew that it must be something to do with Cosmos. Cosmos was only too chuffed to take the blame. ‘Yes I looked into cyberspace and saw that it was a mess. So I introduced this virus. It rearranged the whole thing along the lines suggested by Thomas Aquinas. Pornography and money are both under Mammon, for instance.’

‘How did you design a virus? You don’t know the first thing about computers.’

‘I just said a little prayer and it all seemed quite simple.’ Tom could see that this was a miracle. That this must mean the virus

was the will of God. But it was intensely irritating just the same.The Vatican accountants set about trying to redistribute the wealth

but by then it was too late. Factory workers had tasted the sunlight and were not going back to the dark. Stressed-out executives were feeding their families with vegetables from their gardens. With no cars and no television, communities were being reborn. The make do and mend skills that the homeless millions had acquired were suddenly at a premium. The homeless millions became mendicant consultants. Pollu-tion stopped. Nation states dissolved.

Damian said to Tom, ‘We’re the only coherent authority left. We could clean up. We’ll start by buying up the airlines.’

‘What for?’

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‘Well we’ll be able to move around the World. We can hold it all together.’

‘But what for?’‘I’ll get back to you.’Damian got back to him three days later. ‘You’re right. I mean, I

know you’re right; you’re infallible but I mean this time, you’re really right.’

‘How d’you mean?’‘Well you know what this is don’t you? World peace. Zero industrial

growth. Total faith, hope and charity? It’s only the chuffing Kingdom that’s all. It’s the Kingdom of God. And to think I almost ruined it. I’m off, Tom. I’m back to Widnes to live in a cave and just BE. I’m leaving all this behind. A big white underground salt cave. You should come.’

‘Well…’ The fact was Tom really liked that Papal White iPhone and he was really getting into the art collection. ‘I’ll catch you later,’ he said.

He did think about that cave near Widnes but what if he went into it alone and found nothing there but the ancient advertising jingles that still rattled round his head. What if, when there was no other dis-traction, that was all there was? He was still not sure. In the cave, he thought, he would be nothing but lonely. That was how he felt when he contemplated eternity. Lonely. Like a God that could not create.

A few days later the official Toyota Martyr of Pope Thomas II, hit a wall in Lungoteverre and he found himself hurtling towards the wind-screen. The glass shattered round his head, like the water in a swimming pool and he plunged headfirst, not into the Roman suburbs but blue-ness, limitless, expanding blueness. He swam through it for days until he came to a set of turnstiles. They were like the turnstiles at Widnes rugby ground. And off to the side, a nicely polished door with a flunky in front of it, like the one that led to the directors’ box. He knew instinc-tively that this one was for Popes. As he went through, Saint Peter was waiting.

‘What did you think?’ he asked. Before Thomas could reply the air was full of a bright, brassy sound.

A music so pitched that each cell of his mortal body reverberated like glass. And the tune was the Bisto advert complete with all its words, including the verse about dads. Thomas listened.

Hearing these words restored, he was drenched with relief. And at the last remembered with a stabbing vividness, the day on the beach. His Mother, his Father, his Brother, himself. All four playing, madly yelling this song, and each filled to bursting with the joyous pointless-ness of His Presence.

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THE READER CROSSWORDCassandra No.27

ACROSS

9. According to the song he never swings alone (4, 5)*10. See 19 across11. Flying arrows for example or side never unaccompanied (3,4)12. Activity performed up an alley but not in Walter’s case (7)13. Initially I made a mistake searching for these religious leaders (5)*14. Possibly Atlantis splits to provide irriga-tion (9)16. Cross sections of the medieval church? (6, 9)*19 and 10 across. Fantastic extra-terrestrial (3, 2, 4, 5)21. Policeman keeping the peace in vulgar daily speech (5)22. No coral to be found in this tourist resort (7)23. Commotion after almost heroic bold-ness (7)*24. See 21 down*25. Sometimes happy to begin with? Always (4, 5)

* Clues with an asterisk have a common theme

DOWN

*1 and 4 down. Basic requirement for 9 across one would have thought (8, 2, 4)2. No offence taken in this leading role (4, 4)*3. See 22 down*4. See 1 down5. These pre-emptive strikes slap butter all over the place (10)6. Brief exchange for this self-descriptive clue (3, 5)7. Vehicle to be found back in Nagasaki or Timbuktu (6)8. Often given a bad name (1, 3)14. A Jehovah’s Witness may have this point of view (10)15. Thinks ill of the patronage of a princess (10)17. Can right fist rotate when blood supply is obstructed? (8)18. Mixing her paint to produce a flower (8)20. Volatile Scot in alarm (6)*21 and 24 across. He turns up when fig and ham are cooked over straw (6, 5)*22 and 3 down. Get these in before the monas-tery or the bar closes (4,6)23. Having splashed out can sound depressed (4)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

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GRAND DESIGNS

BUCK’S QUIz

1. ‘Caverns measureless to man’ are situated in which city?2. The Marabar caves echo ‘Boumm’ in which novel of empire?3. In which Jacobean house did Kipling write ‘If’, Puck of Pook’s Hill and ‘The Glory of the Garden’?4. Who meets his end crushed under the falling wall of The Grotto of Locmaria as he holds it up in order to allow his friend to escape?5. What significance does Lyme Park have for literature?6. Who lived at Max Gate?7. Which husband and wife both wrote poems entitled ‘Wuthering Heights’?8. Name the four heirs who mismanage Castle Rackrent.9. Darlington Hall is the setting for which Booker Prize-winning novel?10. Which Cathedral connects Henry Fielding, Thomas Hardy and William Golding?11. Both the residence of the author and the title of one of his books, this dwelling was previously known as Fort House. Which house? 12. Where was Christine Daae taken when she was kidnapped?13. From where does the narrator flee aghast as he witnesses the bloody and enshrouded body of Madeleine fall upon her brother causing him to die of terror? 14. Who, as punishment for her disobedience in burying her brother is herself buried alive in a rocky vault?15. An Anglican minister and a teenage heiress transport a fragile edifice across the outback. What is it?

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THE BACK END

PRIzES!The winner of the Crossword (plucked in time-honoured tradition from a hat) will receive our selection of World’s Classics paperbacks, and the same to the winner of the fiendishly difficult Buck’s Quiz.

Congratulations to Pamela Nixon from Oxford who answered all ques-tions correctly in Buck’s Quiz, and to Tony Anstey from Birkenhead who is the winner of the Crossword competition.

Please send your solutions (marked either Cassandra Crossword, or Buck’s Quiz) to 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG.

ANSWERS

CASSANDRA CROSSWORD NO. 26Across1. Back 3. Telepathic 10. The long 11. Goodbye 12. Emporia 13. Ibizan 15. Raymond Chandler 16. The little sister 21. Philip 22. Marlowe 24. Conquer 25. Nearest 26. Breakaways 27. Play

Down1. By the crate 2. Cheaply 4. England’s top draw 5. English yeomanry 6. Aeolian 7. Hobnail 8. Crew 9. Journo 14. Pruriently 17. Enhance 18. Ill luck 19. Inroad 20. Too well 23. Scab

BUCK’S QUIz NO. 341. Julius Caesar 2. The Caretaker 3. Waiting For Godot 4. An Ideal Husband 5. The Woman in Black 6. Medea 7. She Stoops to Conquer 8. The Rivals 9. The Admirable Crichton 10. Uncle Vanya 11. Talking Heads 12. A Streetcar Named Desire 13. Waiting in the Wings 14. Pygmalion 15. King Lear

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Connie Bensley lives in London, and the most recent of her six poetry collections is Private Pleasures (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). She was on the judging panel for the Forward Poetry Prize in 2004.Eleanor Cooke has published five collections of poetry. She has worked as a writer in schools, university departments, galleries, and in the community; and as an editor. She has four children, and lives with her husband, the artist Hugh Child, in south-west Cheshire.Frank Cottrell Boyce has won several awards for his novels and screenplays, and lives in Liverpool with his wife and seven children. His third novel, Cosmic, was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.Lisa Curtice is a Trustee of the Pioneer Health Foundation and Director of the Scottish Consortium for Learning Disability. A former academic researcher, she believes in everyone’s capacity to contribute.Richard Flanagan. Born 1961 in Tasmania. Novels include Death of a River Guide (1997), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998) and Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2002), winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). Wrote and directed film version of The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Wanting (2009), is set in Tasmania and England in the early nineteenth century.John Greening was born in 1954 in London. His Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 ap-peared last Spring. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008. He is currently completing a book about Elizabethan love poets.Gabriella Gruder-Poni is a teacher living in New York City. She has written on Andrew Marvell, and is currently translating an Italian children’s classic, Il Gior-nalino di Gian Burrasca, by Vamba.Kenneth Hesketh is a composer commissioned and performed throughout Europe, Canada and the US. RLPO Composer in the House 2007-2009 and RCM and Liverpool University Professor, his work is critically acclaimed and recorded.Paul Kingsnorth is the author of Real England: the battle against the bland (Por-tobello, 2008). His debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. www.paulkingsnorth.netGill Lowther has tried her hand at various things, but settled with teaching, which she loved. She enjoys being a mum, playing the saxophone and trumpet, floral painting, and co-ordinating the QHA library van.Penny Markell runs Get Into Reading groups in London, mostly in the East End. She works in libraries, at a centre for the homeless, and in a mental health ward.Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and has been a freelance writer/performer/broadcaster since 1981. He presents The Verb on BBC Radio 3 every Friday night.Richard Meier lives and works in London. A number of his poems appeared in Carcanet’s Oxford Poets Anthology 2002. He hopes that some kind publisher might publish his collection in the not too distant future.Les Murray works a day a month on Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. Other days he moves around in time a lot.Tom Paulin is a poet, essayist, editor and lecturer and was a regular panellist on BBC’s Newsnight Review. Publications include The Invasion Handbook (Faber 2003) and The Secret Life of Poems (Faber 2008).Adam Phillips psychoanalyst and author of eleven books, including Side Effects and Houdini’s Box. He writes regularly for The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The Observer, and is General Editor of The Penguin Freud Reader.

CONTRIBUTORS 35

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Catherine Pickstock is a Reader in Philosophy and Theology at the University of Cambridge. She has written books and articles in the area of philosophical the-ology. Her current project is a book about theory, religion and idiom in Platonic philosophy.Nigel Prentice lives in Warwickshire and is an EFL teacher by trade. Poems pub-lished in Poetry Review, Smiths Knoll, The Rialto and other journals. A collection is ready for publication, but he has yet to seek a publisher.Ciara Rutherford has just graduated from Liverpool University with a degree in English and Modern History. Having returned to her home city of Leeds she plans to travel so she can spend an extended period of time reading in the sun. William Shutes has written reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and The London Magazine. He is currently researching the paintings and other artwork of Roger (Syd) Barrett.David Sollors. Born 1964 in the West-country. By training and a different name a lawyer and father to four daughters. Numerous contributions to magazines and occasional internet/library projects and readings. Currently working, slowly, towards a first collection.Enid Stubin is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Humanities at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

THE BACK END

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