2002

#ABookADayInMay is back! And I didn’t like the first one!

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It’s May again, and that can only mean one thing – I’m doing A Book A Day in May again! I don’t know if Madame Bibi is planning to do a novella a day in May again, as I am merely following her lead with this challenge.

To refresh memories – my aim is to finish a book every day in May. I say ‘book’ rather than ‘novella’ because it’ll almost certainly include some non-fiction, and it’s ‘finish’ rather than ‘read a full book’ because I have a whole pile of half-read books that will come into play. Besides those, I haven’t made any specific reading plans. Part of the fun is choosing the book each morning, spontaneously, matching the mood of the day. (And the number of pages I think I’ll have time to read.)

And I started with Antwerp by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño – written in 1980, finally published in 2002, and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2010. I think my copy was actually a review copy in 2010, thinking about it. The cover boldly quotes Bolaño saying, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp“, which is bold for a publisher who was also issuing a bunch of his other stuff. And also because it’s not really a novel?

Antwerp: Amazon.co.uk: Roberto Bolano: 9780330510585: Books

Antwerp is a series of 56 short vignettes. I’m quite drawn to this sort of fragmented way of crafting a book, as some of my favourite reads of last year demonstrate – though In The Dream House and The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer are both non-fiction. Antwerp is fiction, whatever else it might be, and these vignettes do paint some sort of collective picture – albeit one with such porous edges that the only really safe thing you can say about it, formally, is that it is made of words.

Actually, before we get onto the main part, there is a quick preface by the author – which starts like this:

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

I think that can help us know what we’re dealing with. It’s the sort of experimentalist think-speak that I had a lot more time for when I was 19 than I do now. So I entered the novel (?) proper fearing I might not know what was going on, and so it proved to be. The 55 vignettes take up less than 80 pages in my edition, and many of those pages are only half-filled. Certain characters recur, such as a nameless woman, a pornstar (?), various police officers, and Roberto Bolaño himself, or at least an author of the same name. There are clear themes: police investigation, violence, circuses, rather grubby sex. Maybe there’s even the detective of an actual crime, though I rather failed to pick up the pieces.

I started treating each vignette as a tiny short story, without trying too hard to connect it with what went before and after. And considering they’re things like this, you can perhaps see why:

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

But there were some parts that I loved and went back and re-read, like a poem. I noted down this opening to a vignette:

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we’ll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles.

I keep using the word ‘vignette’, though I have no idea if Bolaño would like it. I got to the end having really appreciated some of the writing, and not at all knowing what the point of Antwerp was. (The city is mentioned, finally, in the 49th of the 55 vignettes – with an anecdote about a man in Antwerp being killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.)

It’s probably the sort of book that would reward a year’s careful studying. Each line could be debated and played with and appreciated. Certainly Bolaño has his admirers. I don’t think I’m likely to become one of them.

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley #ABookADayInMay No.9

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Last year everyone seemed to be reading My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. I couldn’t decide if it was likely to be my cup of tea or not, but I decided to take a chance on Cold Water (2002) when I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Cheltenham. It’s Riley’s debut novel, published when she was only 23.

It’s about a young woman called Carmel McKisco who works in a run-down bar in Manchester. She has recently broken up from a cheerful man called Tony, and she has vague plans of moving to Cornwall for a fresh start. She and a friend also make a plan to track down a musician they used to obsess about, after his bandmate turns up in the bar.

It’s hard to find much to say about Cold Water, if I’m honest. It meanders through different scenes and people, telling you about some of the locals, or what it’s like to walk the nearby streets. The Guardian review called it ‘a series of well-wrought sketches’, and that’s a good description. They are interesting, well-written vignettes that felt consistently like building up a world in which something could happen… but nothing really does. I think a certain sort of reader will love it. I’ve realised that I don’t need a lot of plot in a novel, but I do need some sort of momentum. And I suppose the absence of momentum is sort of the point of Cold Water, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me.

Here, anyway, is a bit I did like – to give you a sense of her writing:

Margi first started having nights out in Manchester when she was fifteen. At the Hacienda they called her ‘the garage flower’ and would let her in for free. Not unpredictably, she fast acquired a much older boyfriend. Mark Dalton. He was thirty-six. He liked people to see them out together at clubs so everyone would wonder what a pretty young thing like her was doing with him. And Margi liked the idea of this too. She liked him to look old, crumpled and unshaven. They went out together and had drunken, jealous rows. They caused scenes. She started staying at his place in Chorlton most nights, and she says every morning they’d take their caff breakfast, beans on toast in a polystyrene tray and cups of thick tea, into Southern Cemetery, sitting together on the wet grass and talking lofty nonsense. I’m sure it wasn’t every morning, but what the hell. And it was this Mark, so she says, taught her the importance of always making a good entrance and a better exit. “The entrance is important,” he’d say, “but the exit is crucial.” When he finished with her, unceremoniously, she returned to his flat and left an orchid on his doormat, with a note instructing him to think of her while he watched it wither and die. “Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…” she shrugs.

Was this a good exit from Margi? Maybe it was. Where was she? My heart thrummed in my stomach all afternoon. I felt uneasy and a little ashamed that I was thinking about it so much. I knocked on the door of her flat that evening on my way into work but there was no reply.

I don’t know how this sort of style and structure compares to My Phantoms or Riley’s other work – but she is good enough a writer here that I would try her again in a different mode.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

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The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

When I saw that Kim and Cathy announced that they were running a year of reading William Trevor, I was keen to join in. While I hadn’t read any of his books, he had long been on my peripheries – I thought of him as a short story writer, but turns out he was quite prolific at the novel too. Throughout 2023, Kim and Cathy will be covering many of his books (you can see the schedule at either of those links above), but I think they’re happy for anybody to join in with any Trevor at any point. So I went for the only one I had on my shelves at the time (though I have subsequently bought The Boarding House) – and that is The Story of Lucy Gault from 2002. Here is the opening paragraph:

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers’ heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

We are in Ireland in (as that quote says) 1921, one of the peaks in the long history of antagonism between the Irish and English – and anybody who sympathises with either side. Captain Gault lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter Lucy in a large house surrounded by beautiful woods and sea. Lucy loves the countryside and the sea, often sneaking out to the sea against her parents’ knowledge and command. Against this backdrop of natural idyll is a tense current of violence. It is Captain Gault wielding a gun in that opening paragraph – but the men who are trespassing on his land had already poisoned his dogs, and intended to burn down the house.

Not wanting to cause any further ill feeling, though, Captain Gault goes to apologise to the young man and his parents. As he explains, the warning shot wasn’t meant to hit home. But they refuse to accept his apology, and the situation has become unmanageable. Knowing that he and his family could be murdered any day or any night, Captain Gault makes the decision to leave the country.

On the day they are meant to leave, though, Lucy is nowhere to be found. And then her clothes are discovered on the shoreline.

Desperate in grief, her parents make the difficult decision to leave the house and all the memories of her – escaping to safety, but broken.

Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried them with a century’s weight?

“Oh, my darling!” Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. “Oh, my darling, forgive me.”

Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers, though this does happen quite early in the novel. There is twist that is both glorious and tragic. Lucy is not drowned: she had been hiding in the woods, hoping that they would have to stay in their home if she went missing. She is soon found, dehydrated and injured from a fall but otherwise ok, but there is no way to get in touch with her parents. They are travelling in Europe, away from all contact. And so she continues to live in her Irish home – while they, still believing her dead, start a new life for themselves far away.

We skip forward in time and see Lucy as a young adult, but I shan’t spoil anything else that happens in the novel. There is a melancholy to the whole thing, and something that feels peculiarly Irish in the tone, though that is difficult to pinpoint.

Am I a Trevor convert, then? Well, I’m sorry to say that I’m not sure. I found individual sentences and paragraphs beautiful – the one I quoted above is mesmerising – but there was something about the whole that left me a little ambivalent. I certainly didn’t dislike The Story of Lucy Gault, but I felt a bit underwhelmed by the experience.

Perhaps this is my well-documented lack of affinity with historical fiction – I have found novels written during the Troubles much more vivid than those written about it much later – or perhaps I just haven’t quite clicked with Trevor for one of those undefinable reasons that can oddly distance us from a novelist that we should like, in theory. I’m certainly not giving up on him and I look forward to trying The Boarding House, but I have to admit to being left a bit cold by Lucy and her sad life.

Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

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For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.

The Pelee Project by Jane Christmas

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When Post-Hypnotic Press sent me codes for various Betty MacDonald audiobooks, they kindly threw in one for The Pelee Project (2002) by Jane Christmas. Having listened to it, I can see why – it has a very similar premise to Onions in the Stew. But it is also extremely different – largely, I think, because of when it was written.

Jane Christmas is in a car crash that should have killed her, but somehow she walked away unscathed. But it was one of those wake up calls that happen more often in fiction than in memoir – she realises that she has been living on the edge for too long, with a fast-paced Toronto career, several failed marriages and relationships, and children that she doesn’t manage to spend enough time with.

Long story short – she moves to Pelee Island for a year, with her teenage daughter, with a contract to write a column about the experience for the newspaper at which she had previously been a copyeditor.

On the island, she has to get accustomed to its vagaries. Milk (bagged! Canada!) has to be pre-ordered, and the shop is only open at certain, fairly unpredictable, times. Everybody knows everybody, and many of them have lived on the island all their lives. It is a close-knit community that also has to serve tourists in season – but she is not there in season; she has come during winter.

Christmas writes engagingly and often amusingly about her experience – her confusion, her settling in, and the friends she makes. It quickly becomes clear that she is changing her views on life, and only her engaging tone stops it becoming too twee in its “rural life saved me” aesthetic. If it were fiction, it might have crossed that line.

This was the early days of the internet (or at least the early days of it being a big deal), so she gets instant feedback on her columns in a way that Betty MacDonald could never have done. But a more significant difference is the tone. MacDonald highlighted all the hilarious mishaps of her life on an island – whether a fridge floating away or a neighbour dumping her savage children on her – while Christmas is all about psychological transformation.

She keeps talking about the ‘new simplicity’. As somebody who has lived in villages and a city, I can tell you that nothing is simpler in the countryside. Christmas’s fast-paced career-driven life seems entirely like a normal job, and her ‘new simplicity’ is simply a long holiday. For people who have jobs on the island (i.e. all of them), their life is just as likely to be fast-paced, except they have less access to shops.

As somebody who loves living in a village, I do find the whole city vs village thing (where ‘city’ is all modern and ‘village’ is all atavistic) somewhere between disingenuous and insulting. I didn’t mind too much in this book, as I had to just choose to let it go, but it’s all rather odd – and not something you’d find MacDonald doing. There are only two main differences I’ve noticed about the way people live in a village and the way they live in a city – people are friendlier to each other in a village, and it’s not as convenient to get a pint of milk.

Perhaps an island is a bit different, and maybe it was even more different in the early 2000s – I don’t know. But it is interesting that Christmas (admittedly winningly) turns her memoir into some sort of self-help book, whereas MacDonald just writes a very funny book. Christmas later became a nun, and wrote the brilliantly-titled book And The There Were Nuns all about it, so perhaps the island was one step on some sort of spiritual journey? Whatever it was, it was enjoyable to listen to – even if not wholly convincing as an exploration of the ‘new simplicity’. (And, yes, I listened to it as I commuted from my village to my not-at-all-fast-paced career in the city.)

Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur

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Literary FeudsI have a guilty love for celebrity gossip that I have had to quash, because it so often comes with paparazzi and invasiveness and all sorts of immoral things like that. So I take my need to find out the squabbles between famous people to those who are either dead or were happy to flaunt it, or both. I’m talking Bette Davis vs Joan Crawford levels. And so I was completely tempted by Literary Feuds: a century of celebrated quarrels – from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe (2002) when I saw it in Maryland last year. I’ve just written ‘Maryland’ on the inside, so I don’t actually remember where I was, but perhaps Thomas would be able to tell me.

This book is basically a who’s-who of people I’ve never read, I’ll be honest. It’s worth listing them all, in case you can’t make out the words on the book cover. Ready? *clears throat*

Mark Twain vs Bret Harte
Ernest Hemingway vs Gertrude Stein
Sinclair Lewis vs Theodore Dreiser
Edmund Wilson vs Vladimir Nabokov
C.P. Snow vs F.R. Leavis
Lillian Hellman vs Mary McCarthy
Truman Capote vs Gore Vidal
Tom Wolfe vs John Updike

Now, I’d heard of all those people except Bret Harte, and knew at least a tiny bit about all of their lives, but the only two I’ve actually read complete books by are Gertrude Stein (not a success) and F.R. Leavis. I did try to read Lolita once, which was… also not a success. The focus is certainly heavily towards Americans, presumably because this is an American book, rather than because American authors are more predisposed to feuds.

I guess my point is, you don’t need to know and love these authors to find this book interesting. Each chapter looks at the two authors in question, developing how far they’d got in their careers when their paths crossed, and then talks about their initial relationships. What I hadn’t expected, going in, was how many of these pairings started off as friendships – particularly Hemingway and Stein. Literary Feuds ended up being sadder than I’d imagined, as it’s much less fun to read about friendships turned sour than it is to read about catty, knowing enmities.

So, some feuds centre about ambitions – Dreiser and Lewis fell out over which of them won a Nobel Prize, which isn’t a sticking point I’ve ever had in a friendship (though, as a – for the time being, at least – member of the EU, I am a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, donchaknow). Leavis launched an extraordinary attack on Snow, for the presumption of trying to find some common ground between literary scholars and scientists – and Arthur has fun in this chapter, highlighting what a ridiculous character Leavis ultimately was. The most extraordinary feud, I think, was between Hellman and McCarthy – which centred around a libel charge Hellman initiated after watching a McCarthy TV interview.

But Arthur isn’t a gossip merchant. What makes Literary Feuds such an impressive book is the amount of research Arthur has put in. Each chapter is essentially the work of a biographer; he may not give us every moment of the sparrers’ lives before and after the feud, but what he does say gives the impression that he knows it all. And, what’s more, he throws in something of the literary scholar too – assessing, on occasion, which author has been more deservedly remembered; analysing which are the authors’ greatest successes and biggest failures. As I say, I’m a newbie to most of these authors, so these segments provided useful tips for future reading – particularly in the Lewis/Dreiser chapter.

So, I came to the book shamefacedly looking for gossip. What I found was much more than that – intelligent, empathetic analyses of authors’ lives and works, alongside the storytelling ability to outline the issues each pair encountered in an enjoyable, page-turning way.

Land’s End – Michael Cunningham

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While I was cat-sitting for a friend recently, I read (or finished) five books in quick succession, and it wasn’t until I got there that I realised that three of them were books I got when I was in Washington DC last October. I mean, I bought so many books there that I was almost inevitably going to find them about my person somewhere (I jest…). I wonder if it’s worth keeping track of how longer I have books on my shelves before I read them, and see if 15 months is the optimum time…

Anyway, I bought Land’s End (2002) because I’ve been wanting to read more Michael Cunningham ever since I loved The Hours back in 2003 or thereabouts. I’ve only got as far as watching Evening, the adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel for which Cunningham wrote (or, rather, rewrote) the screenplay. I have to confess that I was also sold on the Cunningham because of this:

Thomas/My Porch informed me that signed Cunninghams are ten a penny Stateside (they have pennies in the US, right? Whilst we’re on that, how confusing is the tax thing there? You just have no idea how much you’ll have to pay when you get to the till). But this is something fun and rather special. And I had my fingers crossed that the book would also be fun and special…

It’s a non-fiction book about Provincetown, Massachusetts – the very tip of Cape Cod. My horrendously inadequate geographical knowledge was, for once, approaching adequate – as I had heard of Provincetown, and knew of its peninsular qualities and unusual character. For why, you ask? A couple of my favourite vloggers (Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart) went there during their HeyUSA tour, as you can see here. From which I learned that Provincetown is full of creative people and drag queens (with, presumably, some overlap).

Cunningham’s view of Provincetown is not as an insider or an outsider. He definitely defines himself in opposition to the tourists, who make the streets jam-packed during the summer months, so that getting groceries is almost impossible. But he does not live there all the year round, despite owning a house there; he prefers the anonymity of New York. Because Provincetown is apparently the gossip capital of the East, and everybody knows everybody. The year-round population (Wikipedia tells me) is around 3,000; this goes up to twenty times that number in summer.

I have trouble with travel literature. Visual descriptions don’t work for me, and writers of travel lit often want to give purple depictions of flora and fauna. But a genre I do love is memoir, and Cunningham treads the line between the two – falling, thankfully, more heavily into memoir. Or, rather, he describes Provincetown through a personal lens, rather than the anthropologist’s. If he is neither insider nor outsider to the town, then he is closer to the former than the latter.

The beautiful setting I read it in.

There is plenty for the anthropologist in Provincetown, though. Its character differs strongly from the surrounding area; it is (Cunningham says) the refuge of the outsider and eccentric. Some of those outsiders (and I now realise I’ve overused that word) are from the LGBT community, and – um – anything apparently goes in Provincetown. Cunningham very casually describes the beaches where you’ll find men having sex in the undergrowth, and those where you won’t. He mentions (and repeatedly re-mentions) this with such calm that it seems like a normal thing, to find people having sex when you pop down to build a sandcastle. Hmm…

But once we’ve left all that behind, I felt more at home in Provincetown – with its focus on art, friendliness, community, and (yes, I confess) gossip. Cunningham does a great job of explaining why he finds the town so special, more from the warm tone he uses than the facts he states. He incorporates the history of the town – did you know that the Pilgrim Fathers landed there first, before heading off to Plymouth Rock? – and its primary exports, but it is the affection with which he writes that really sells Provincetown.

I say ‘sells’; I still don’t think I’d go out of my to visit, still less live there, but anybody writing with wisdom and passion about their favourite place, and the experiences they have lived there, will win me over. From meeting his partner (and not forgetting his dramatic ex-partner) to the 2am gatherings outside a place that sells middle-of-the-night pizza, Land’s End is a curiously charming and almost old-fashioned depiction of a not-at-all old-fashioned place. Here is an excerpt to finish with, and to give you a taste of how he combines the personal and the observational:

If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune grass running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, through the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune grass and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.
What a beautiful image, and moving reflection.

Anybody read this? Or been to Provincetown??

The Crafty Art of Playmaking – Alan Ayckbourn

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I loved hearing about your favourite theatrical experiences on the previous post!  Lots of us seem to cherish special moments of seeing our acting heroes.  I restricted myself to one – otherwise I’d have had to include Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, Judi Dench again in All’s Well That Ends Well, Tamsin Greig in Much Ado About Nothing, Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles in The Rivals… etc. etc.

Well, all is revealed – the book, which I’ve realised I actually mentioned the other day, is The Crafty Art of Playmaking (2002) by Alan Ayckbourn.  I actually bought it earlier in the year, and when I started I hadn’t even remembered that the play I was about to see, Relatively Speaking, was by Ayckbourn.  It wasn’t until I turned to p.3 and saw the play mention (and, er, spoiled a bit) that I realised I should put the book to one side until I’d seen the play.

When I went back to it, I found The Crafty Art of Playmaking an invaluable companion to seeing Relatively Speaking, but it is a fascinating book for anybody interested in the theatre whether or not that have recently watched one of Ayckbourn’s plays.  I’ve written before about my interest in the theatre, but usually (when I read theatrical books) is acting memoir from the twentieth century, or similar.  Other than when actors take a step into the director’s chair (that metaphor fell apart) have I read much from that side of the fence, and I don’t think I’ve read anything particularly thorough about writing plays, although A.A. Milne’s autobiography has a brilliant section where he traces a few of his plays back to their roots.

That is where discussion of Relatively Speaking starts, but I don’t really want to say what he writes, in case it spoils it for you… well, look away now if you don’t want to know, ok?

Initial inspiration – that essential starting point – comes in all shapes and sizes.  Years ago I had the tiniest idea for a situation wherein a young man would ask an older man whether he could marry his daughter.  The twist was that the older man didn’t have a daughter.
And there you go!  From there, Ayckbourn takes us through the various considerations which led to the play being set in two locations, and certain key plot points, and the like.  He also talks about many of his other plays, of course, but (having just seen this one) it was the dissection of Relatively Speaking which I found fascinating.

Throughout the book, Ayckbourn highlights ‘Obvious Rules’, which number from 1 to 100.  Some are not obvious, but it’s a nice conceit to structure the book, and tends to summarise what he has discussed, with examples, in the previous section.  So, we have things like ‘Use the minimum number of characters that you need’ or ‘Don’t let them go off without reason’ – and thins which aren’t really quite rules, like ‘You can never know too much about your characters before you start’.  It works well to keep the playwriting process grounded and achievable, while also showing that you can’t (or shouldn’t) sit down one afternoon thinking that, with a pithy epigram or two, a play will more or less form itself.

The second half of The Crafty Art of Playmaking (and the reason why it’s Playmaking rather than Playwriting) concerns directing.  This was slightly less conceptual, because, instead of make-up characters and potentially infinite plots and dialogue, Ayckbourn is writing about lighting designers and wardrobe mistresses and the like.  He does seem to lump entire professions into single characteristics (wardrobe mistresses – or was it costume designers? – are apparently prone to hysterics; assistant stage managers are universally level-headed; sound engineers are over-ambitious, etc. etc.) but is perhaps being a bit tongue-in-cheek.  Hard to say.

Obviously there is a significant difference between a playwright and a director.  Well, there are many.  But a chief difference is that anybody can try being a playwright from the comfort of their own desk.  They might be appalling, but all they need are pen and paper (or electronic equivalent).  The director must have actually persuaded someone to let them have a job – and, while Ayckbourn does describe the various ways that might happen, it is with a tone of incredulity that it possibly could.  And once it has, I suppose one is no longer an amateur.

Ayckbourn’s model of the director is very power-hungry and micromanaging, but perhaps that is a necessity.  Almost every section seems to end with ‘but don’t let them make any decision without consulting you’, or something similar.  A director in this mould, who trusts nobody to do their jobs properly, would be a nightmare.  But for the first-time director, I suppose it is wise not to be ridden over roughshod.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this two-angle way of looking at playmaking is the contrast.  Ayckbourn often wrote and directed (writes and directs?) his own plays, but it is intriguing to see how he treats the potential director in the first half of the book, and the hypothetical writer in the second half.  All I can say is, he must be sometimes rather conflicted when he is doing one or the other! Incidentally, his plays are almost exclusively called the sort of unmemorable things one expects plays to be called.  Six of One, As You Were, After A Fashion, A Matter of Fact… those are all made up by me (as far as I know!) but you understand the sort of thing.  Bits of expressions, or everyday sayings, and entirely forgettable titles – curious for someone so inventive!

I found the director half of the book a bit harder to get my head around, as it is further from anything I have ever done or would ever want to do, and he is very coy about actual experiences in this area (very few names and dates, and lots of ‘an actress once said…’) but anybody thinking about going into directing would, I think, find it invaluable.

I don’t intend to be either a playwright or a director, but I found Ayckbourn’s book a fascinating glimpse behind these processes – and I think anybody interested in the theatre generally, let alone Ayckbourn specifically, would find a lot to like here.