REVIEW: Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson

This is not a book you can read once and absorb its whole intention. I think I have barely scratched the surface of its intention, which I think it is questioning the increasing concept of modernist reductionism. And what Robinson calls the ‘parascientists’ and their exclusion of anything that predates their current theories. Theories which she feels rarely hold up under intelligent scrutiny, and that don’t ask questions whose answers would contradict those theories. She is not anti-science, but believes that many of these more accessible ideas are given more weight by inferring a scientific analysis which is far less rigorous than that used for physical science.


It is difficult to rate a book one barely understands the content of, but the fact that it will provide much food for thought, and its own rigour, despite only having a superficial understanding seems quite obvious.

'Must Try Harder'

I decided when I began this blog that I wasn’t going to ‘waffle’ when I didn’t have anything to say. I can’t really believe I have had nothing to say since April, which only leaves the excuse of laziness – can that be an excuse? My ‘school report’ will now read ‘must try harder’.

Well I have read 35 books since my last entry, among those that impressed me most were John Henry Newman’s ‘The Idea of the University’, a book I came to via Helene Hanff’s ’84 Charing Cross Road’ – she loved the first edition that Marks and Co were able to procure for her. I can understand her delight. The edition I read was not a first, but was still from 1879 (a London Library loan) and as well as the content, the heft, page quality and smell of ‘old book’ were part of the pleasure of its reading. If I could recommend one book to our new coalition leaders and education ministers to read it would be this one. The import of knowledge for its own sake seems to be a resource and desire long lost and undervalued, and Newman makes a fine case for its consideration. This book is as relevant now as it was at its time of writing. I had to buy my own copy in the end, I can’t bear not to own books I love. My paperback isn’t as seductive to hold though as the 1879 edition!

Ahead of going to see the exhibition ‘The Wyeth Family’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery I bumped into a biography of Andrew Wyeth on the Library shelves – the artist in that family whose work I have long admired. Richard Meryman’s ‘Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life’ was insightful and fascinating.

“Oil is hot and fiery, almost like a summer night, where tempera is a cool breeze, dry, crackling like winter branches blowing in the wind. I’m a dry person, really. I’m not a juicy painter. There’s no fight in oil. It doesn’t have the austere in it. The difference is like the difference between Beethoven and Bach.”

Andrew Wyeth in Meryman, R, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, HarperCollins, 1997, p 118

If the exhibition was a little disappointing in that it was made up of works from a single collection, and in my view, didn’t span the breadth of Andrew Wyeth’s work, I did purchase a couple of beautiful books of his paintings.

At first sight, Allison Pearson’s ‘I think I love you’ appeared likely to be a more ‘fluffy’ novel than the kind of novel I might normally pick up, but as a one-time David Cassidy fan (aged 11-13 – why is it necessary to qualify!) I couldn’t resist. She has certainly captured that high-octane obsession young girls were capable of, certainly in the 1960s/1970s, who are trying out their new emotions on safe, feminised, unattainable famous young men. And there was much to amuse in this (autobiographical?) novel of two young welsh girls to women and their passion. But more seriously Allison Pearson captured some of the ages of youth to young adulthood experienced by teen girls. And also the less positive side of the life of fame for a young man, still evolving, who is riding a wave of success, but whose identity was both being consumed, defined and distorted by the media, and whose own natural ‘growing’ arc was being warped by the experience he was undergoing. In the end I felt hugely sorry for Cassidy (perhaps lock up your son’s mother!). The book concludes with an interview Pearson did with David Cassidy in the 1990s, where you can sense a duality of acceptance – whilst wishing to acknowledge the privilege of bearing such an important role in the lives of young girls and women at a very formative age, there is a core of resentment towards the strains and abuses sustained by himself.

Since reading Shirley Hazzard’s memoir on Graham Greene and her most admired novel ‘The Transit of Venus’ I have acquired the rest of her novels and enjoyed the tone and constrained style of both ‘The Evening of the Holiday’ and ‘The Bay at Noon’. I am looking forward to the remaining three volumes on the pile over the Summer holiday.

Also among the Summer reading pile will be: Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, and a re-reading of some of his short stories, comparing them with the volume ‘Beginnings’ which are the stories before they were edited by Gordon Lish. Two volumes awaiting the pressing of ‘send’ in my Amazon basket: Fergal Keane’s ‘Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 - The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire’ and Jonathan Raban’s ‘Driving Home – an American Scrapbook’, both writers whose work I greatly admire. Stella Duffy’s novel ‘Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore’, the first of her novels I will have read, and possibly a trip to India with Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ ... but then again...

London Library - episode 2

I’ve now been a member of the wonderful London Library for 3 weeks. Luckily three weeks when I have had time to enjoy regular weekly visits. Wandering around its eclectic stacks, borrowing books I have had on my ‘to read’ list for years. Sitting for hours in the reading room and enjoying the peace and quiet; mildly amused by the regular snoozers in the afternoons (sorry gentlemen, well, so far they have all been male!).



I’ve long wanted to read Leonard Woolf’s ‘After the Deluge’ which appears in 3 volumes, and I have now read the first of these and was much interested in how contemporary it seemed. Much of it could have been written post 9/11 (it was actually written in the 1920s). This book fits right into what I had imagined being able to do. To borrow a 79 year old book which hadn’t been off the shelves for 29 years – but no one felt it was necessary to cast it into the oblivion of the pulp machine. Volumes 2 and 3 are in my London Library reading pile.

I am going to post reviews of some of my Library loans here:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/CJM_at_LondonLibrary

I love the heft of the older books, and the smell of library they leave on your hand after long holding. I even think it will reduce my greed for purchasing new books myself. With a million to peruse here, they must have almost every book I may wish to read, and will buy others members request if they don’t already have them. I’ve only purchased 2 books since becoming a member – my general monthly average is 7-10 purchases!

I’ve also been enjoying some very broad and interesting reading among the publications, current and past. They have bound copies of every publication subscribed to, so you can read The American Scholar and The Edinburgh Review, and even take the bound editions home with you to read at leisure.

As well as Mr Woolf, I have John Henry Newman’s ‘The Idea of Universities’, Stefan Zweig’s ‘Romain Rolland’ and Scott’s ‘Waverley’ in the pile. As well as volume 2 of Dorothy Richardson’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ (a woman after Proust’s heart I suspect). All in old editions that may well have been borrowed and read by literary heroes or heroines. That somewhat romantic idea enhances my pleasure in the reading of them.

What having access to writing across the centuries makes me aware of is the variety of styles and tones, slower and more convoluted writing, learning to slow down and read and think in another century is a skill I am enjoying acquiring. Shifting from plot driven to idea driven work is interesting, challenging and beneficial. Learning to expand the definition of what the pleasure in reading can be.

The most frustrating thing for me is perhaps that in the era that many of the books I am reading were written, it was only expected that men of a certain educational background will be reading them, and therefore there are no translations of the primarily latin and French quotes they include. So I feel that they are hiding things from view behind the curtains sometimes. But these books are of their era, and I am a time traveller and I will have to accept certain limitations, or get out the dictionaries (the reading room has all of those!).

Review: I LOCK MY DOOR UPON MYSELF by Joyce Carol Oates [re-read]

The language is slow and lazy and languid. Although less than a hundred pages long, this is a powerful novel, if a quiet one.

It tells the story of Edith Margaret Freilicht (nee Honeystone) – or Calla as she was named by her mother, the name she speaks to herself and gifts rarely to others. Calla Honeystone is a strange child whose mother dies at her birth. She is a wild redheaded child who turns into a strange and introverted woman who is married off to an older man called George Freilicht.

His physicality repels her, but over time and familiarity he touches the pity inside her, and she cedes him access to her body. Bearing him 3 children who are tended by his family as she shows little interest or concern for them. After the painful birth of the third child she reclaims her body, and he is almost as relieved as she to return to a celibate state.

Calla lives in her head, which we, unlike everyone else, are given controlled and limited access too.

When she meets the water diviner Tyrell Thompson who comes to the farm to see if he can earn himself a ‘gift’ in exchange for finding the place to drill for a well, Calla realises he is the broad, tall black man she has been watching by the river. She follows him around the land as, uninvited, he seeks for water on the Freilicht property, opening up to him in ways her in-laws, watching from the windows of the house have never seen her respond to anyone before.

She has seen very few negroes in her lifetime. Occasionally on a visit to the city she has seen some of the younger folk, now liberated from slavery. “...but their blackness, their essence-that had been owned. And now in this city amid the heterogeneous white population of the city they were so relatively few in number-like small dark carp in an immense school of fiercely golden carp, depending upon God knows what precarious law or whim of nature to survive. Like me they are outcasts in this country. No, not like me: they are true outcasts”. [p40]

In Thompson she has found a kind of kindred spirit in his outcastness that whilst she acknowledges is more authentic than her own, she is drawn to him, and soon they become lovers.

Calla has always been whispered about, but now the whispering becomes louder as the rumours and gossip of the relationship between a white married woman and a black itinerant tie the tongues of the townsfolk together.

To tell much more of Calla’s story would be to deprive a new reader of too many of the twists and turns of the journey.

The novel presents us with a woman who is forced into a life that she hasn’t chosen, and yet she does not fight it overtly. She fights by withdrawal into herself, as the book’s title infers. She becomes powerful inside herself, ultimately going her own way, taking the reader’s sympathy with her. However, it is also the case that you can see that even in the quiet path she has taken, she is leaving destruction and damage behind in the lack of engagement, love or concern for the children she has given her husband, as she herself says in one place, she thought he wanted them.

This is also a novel about the African American experience. Although not blatant in its exploration, in a handful of paragraphs Oates subtly weaves a powerful chunk of that experience into this story.

Joyce Carol Oates is probably one of the least formulaic writers working over the past 50+ years. Each novel varying in style, genre, intention. There are themes, she often writes about the disenfranchised, she is concerned especially with the lives of those with the least. She is often poking around in the darker corners of people’s worlds, where death and violence lurks. This is one of her more linearly written novels, whose size is deceptive.

She rarely writes comfortable novels and often writes novels it is hard to feel warmth for the characters, sometimes even hard to empathise with them, but what Oates almost always does is permit you to understand what even the most difficult of characters does and why. If she does not do this, she does not do it with intent.

THE LONDON LIBRARY : I died and went to heaven

If there is one improvement I might suggest to make the London Library ‘absolute heaven’ instead of just ‘heaven’ it might be that as well as coffee, they sold chocolate! But perhaps its better they don’t!  

I had the delicious opportunity of visiting this wonderful literary institution last week as a precursor to becoming a member and (as if there was ever any doubt) my desire to join was only heightened. When time was up, my eyes were casting about to see if there was any dark desk I might hide beneath in order to get locked in overnight! 

This is the library I dream about. A library that has books that may not have left their place on the shelves for 30, 50, 100 years, but is still there, winking at the passers-by and ever optimistic that its time will come to be liberated from its regal home and taken out again into the big wide world for a visit. 97% of the books in this 1 million plus book collection are available to be taken out on loan by its members. This isn’t the library for you if you are only interested in the latest editions to the publishing cannon (although a small number of new books are purchased each year to keep the collection growing), nor if you are seeking specialist research in a narrow field, this was a collection of books gathered to feed the intellectual hunger of the literary masses during the 19th & 20th Centuries. Started by Thomas Carlyle because he apparently found he waited too long for his requests at the British Library, it has been the treasure-trove and retreat of many of the great writers and readers since that time. Unlike the British Library you walk the stacks yourself, peruse, browse and then retreat to a reading desk, an armchair or a computer desk and submerge yourself in your new find.

As well as an extraordinary collection of books, the library subscribe to a fascinatingly broad collection of periodicals. I can see myself losing a day just grazing some of these, from Anatolian Archaeology to the Dublin Review, The Norfolk Ancestor, to World Interiors, the Wildean and back again! And nothing gets thrown away, weeded or remaindered. Periodicals are eventually bound and shelved, books suffering from the wear and tear of being lovingly read and enjoyed receive restoration and tlc.

The annual membership fee for a regular person on the street might feel like an ouch at £395, but it is payable in instalments (monthly or quarterly – if I’d known that earlier I’d have probably joined years ago!), and there is a supported membership for those who would find the full membership too much of a burden. When I think about it, it’s probably my book budget for 4 months, on a good year, so.... Will it reduce my book budget in the long run? Unlikely. Unfortunately if I love a book I have to have it in my own collection, perched and ready to dive into my outstretch hand at the drop of a bookmark! However, it will lead me to new horizons, and even lost horizons perhaps, as this looks like my very own Shangri-la! In April I hope to become a member, and I imagine it will be for life (though not all at once!).


 http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/index.htm

Photograph (c) London Library 2005, taken by Shira Klasmer

Review: Trespass (Rose Tremain)

Tremain is one of those writers whose books are often very different, and this is definitely the case between this novel and her prize-winning last novel. That’s not to say that this isn’t a prize-winning book.

Set mostly in France, the story revolves around two sets of adult siblings. English Veronica and Anthony, and French Audrun and her brother Aromon. The thing that links both sets of siblings is that they are all damaged by their upbringing and by careless parents. They all harbour self blame and some of them are constantly attempting to compensate for acts they feel responsible for.

It is quite hard not to give too much away with a novel of this kind. However as the novel progresses you discover that each character has suffered and been responsible for a trespass. The trespasses may be literal or figurative, metaphorical but, all the same real. Anthony, dissatisfied with his now less than celebratory life decides to visit his sister in France, and when he gets there begins to feel his only chance of creating a future is to leave his old life behind and move to France. His search for a possible home leads him to Audrun and Aromon. The book opens with one kind of scream, and in a sense concludes with another.

At one point I was very put in mind of Dirk Bogarde’s French novels (though as it is years since I read these it was a ‘sense’ more than anything concrete), but no sooner had I thought this, than he gets himself a mention, in his role in the film Death in Venice.

This is a deftly structured novel which keeps you page turning. You become deeply involved with these deeply disturbing stories.

Review: Pollard (Laura Beatty)

This is a beautifully crafted, evocative and alive debut novel. We see Anne fleetingly as a misplaced adult at the opening of the book, the village outsider. But this is the story of a child who doesn’t even fit into her relatively mis-fit family, who seeks solace in the wood near where she lives. Leaving home aged 14 with nothing but a wheelbarrow of miscellaneous tools and objects liberated from her father’s shed, Anne takes up residence under a Pollard Ash tree in the depths of the wood. She learns how to survive within the wood, she learns how to prosper and to grow.

Foraging one day Anne meets Steve who lives with his aging mother and runs the local dump, and with whom she strikes up a friendship of support. Steve teaches her some of the survival techniques he has learned in the armed forces. In return for food and companionship, Anne works at reinvigorating some of the detritus that ends up at the dump, and with her care and attention Steve can sell it on to earn a living. It gives her a purpose and a connection, however tenuous, to the world outside the wood.

Gradually, in the wood, she is no longer an outsider to herself. She fits, she has a place in this fertile and living place. And Beatty makes us hear and breath and smell the wood. Only when the world outside encroaches within her world does Anne become insecure again.

Anne and the wood are sculpted with great warmth. As are some of the friendships she makes. I did feel however that the ending needed something else. We needed to be more fully led back to the life of Anne in adulthood, as this was not fully drawn at the outset, and I did feel I’d been left hanging a little at the close of the novel.

Review: The Spectator Bird (Wallace Stegner)

In the first few pages I thought we were back in ‘Angle of Repose’ territory with a man looking back on his life, and I guess on some levels we are. However ‘The Spectator Bird’ takes a different direction. Stegner is skilled at setting down layers of soil and dust and sand. Seventy year old Joe Allston, a retired literary agent lives with his wife Ruth, and they are chugging along, Joe watching the changes of old age on his neighbours and himself, when out of the blue he receives a postcard from a friend from the past. The memory sends him back to a series of diaries he made when twenty years earlier he and his wife spent several months in Denmark, the place where his mother originated from.

From this point there are two stories running, the story of now, as Ruth persuades Joe to read to her those notebooks each night, she sitting snug in their bed, and he sitting in his usual reading chair. The second story is the story contained in those notebooks of the complex intertwining of lives and histories as they become ensnared in the life of their landlady in Denmark, and coincidences occur that wind the history of Joe’s family with hers.

In the here and now, Ruth is on a mission to find out the truth of something that she never knew for sure, can she find out? Will it change anything if she does? In the past, and the past within that past, there are traumatic discoveries, gains and losses that I don’t feel I want reveal. Each reader should discover those twists and turns for themselves. But what I will say is that sometimes the journey made me a little breathless.

Both ‘Angle of Repose’ and ‘The Spectator Bird’ were written by Stegner in later life, and testify to the intensity and acute detail he achieved in describing the life of an aging person. The fragility and the strengths, the richness of life and the frailness of the body. And in most instances the determination to go on. To continue to that final, inevitable moment.

With both these novels, very shortly into them, I knew that they would be novels I would be reading again. I am an inveterate re-reader, and possibly 10-17% of books I will read again, but very few leave me knowing I will re-read them when I am barely half way through them.

Samuel Beckett – The Life

I have been submerged in several volumes about the life and work of Samuel Beckett, poet, novelist, playwright and critic, his most famous work is probably ‘Waiting for Godot’, but includes novels such as ‘Murphy’, ‘Molloy’, and plays such as ‘Endgame’ and ‘Krapps Last Tape’. I’ve just read Deirdre Bair’s ‘Samuel Becket – a biography’, ‘Beckett Remembers, Remembering Beckett’ edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, a collection of unpublished conversations with Beckett, and reminiscences by his friends and those who worked with him. Cambridge has published the first (of four) volumes of Beckett’s letters, and ‘Images of Beckett’ by John Haynes (photographer) and James Knowlson (biographer).

   

I remember being fascinated by Beckett from my late-teens (my mid-teens having been taken up with an obsession with another Irishman, Oscar Wilde – but that’s for another entry). Beckett was then already in his late 60s, with his almost iconic look. There was definitely something charismatic about the man and his complex and often contradictory desire for privacy, whilst both being very visible and active in regard to the production of his work. In both the biography and the recollections, he refuses interviews, gives instructions, talks to those who will produce his work saying ‘you can ask me anything about my life, but don’t ask me to interpret the work’ or at other times, saying that the life has nothing to do with the work. Often he gave individual performers incredibly astute guidance about a character in his work, having said it wasn’t his job to interpret it.



It becomes clear with such reading that Beckett himself didn’t always know what he wanted. And certainly in the work, he didn’t always understand its meaning, whilst he did appear to have a clear intent. What I also perceive is that it wasn’t dangerous to Beckett, he didn’t fear not understanding or having a clear interpretation. He was a writer writing. It was his job, and there is no law that dictates that creative beings have to fully understand everything that they do. In fact, I think it is quite common for them not to.

In the smallest of nutshells, distilling the near 1,400 pages I have read in the past 10 or so days (and I am still reading the letters and ‘images of Beckett’, and haven’t yet started on reading and re-reading the work), here is something of Beckett’s life: he was born in Dublin in 1906, he has said in April of that year, but the certification suggests May, although because it was common that registrations took up to a month, April is as likely to be the accurate month. He grew up in a reasonably well-to-do environment, his father ‘Bill’ a rather boisterous and successful businessman, if not very intellectual, and a rather assertive and commanding mother May. His childhood, with his brother Frank, and at different times a number of cousins who were being raised by his parents, seemed a relatively happy one, and very much an outdoor life, full of walks and outdoor play. The pleasure in walking remained with him throughout his life.

The problems appear to begin with the onset of adolescence and early manhood when his desires begin to diverge from the expectations of his parents. His health was always unstable and very soon his psychological disquiets began to show themselves in physical ways, he was constantly, from early adulthood, subject to cysts and other pustulations which left him in pain and discomfort and often totally debilitated him, along with colds and viral infections, and possible pneumonias that confined him to bed for long periods.

At the outset he was not a natural scholar, but following in Wilde’s footsteps he starting at Portura School, before going on to Trinity. However at some stage his passion for Latin languages took hold and by the time he left Trinity he was a highly respected graduate with expectations of joining the faculty. His tutor arranged for him to receive a lectureship in Paris, after which he returned to Dublin to teach at Trinity. He did not stay at this work for very long. It became very clear to him (as well as his students) that he was not cut out to teach in this formalised institution.

Beckett seemed to have no expectation of becoming a writer until early adulthood. He wrote a few poems and some criticism. However in Paris he became involved in supporting the life of James Joyce who by then was already almost totally blind, and along with a group of other Irishmen he helped Joyce with his work on what was to become ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.

What did become apparent to Beckett whilst in Paris was that ultimately he didn’t want to live in Ireland, and that Paris was to be the place for him. This was where he would begin his writing life. It was also almost unavoidable if he were to free himself from the web of his mother May’s life and desires.

I don’t think it is an overstatement to believe that this relationship with his mother was possibly what really formed the life of Beckett. It certainly framed it in the early years. May wanted Beckett to be a respectable academic, and preferably at her side. The situation intensified when Beckett’s father William died, and his brother Frank took over the business. Beckett returned to Dublin on a number of occasions, possibly suffering from guilt that he was unable to be the man his parents, especially his mother wanted. But his health would give out and he had to make a break for it again. Ultimately, he had to stay away.

Around this time Beckett did undergo some psychotherapy, and amongst the things that he mentioned was a belief that he had experienced memories from inside the womb. After hearing Jung speak on the existence of such experiences and their impact, Beckett seemed to become fascinated by this pre-birth or not fully born concept.

About Beckett’s intimate life relatively little has been written. During these years between Dublin and Paris he had strong feelings for a cousin Peggy, who lived in Germany, and with whose family he visited when fleeing Dublin. There is also the complex situation with Lucia Joyce, which seems primarily to have been on her side, but the existence of this connection has followed Beckett around. Casual relations as a young man are mentioned, but he has been recorded as saying that intimate relations weren’t about love but about ‘fucking’. Ultimately he became attached to a French woman called Suzanne, who for much of their time together subsumed her personality, needs and desires to support him in his early writing career, organising much of his domestic life and being the interface between him and possible producers and publishers of his work. This relationship worked well until Beckett’s literary reputation began to form, and acceptances led to the need for him to expand on his intentions, therefore becoming less reliant on her. Although it was almost always Suzanne who turned up at the first nights of productions of his work, reporting back to him at an after show party or at home. The couple lived and remained together, if often living separate lives, even at the time of their marriage, which Beckett decided on as a means of ensuring that in the event of his death, Suzanne was suitably taken care of (she was sixty when they married and he 3-4 years younger). In their latter years they holidayed regularly together, getting away from the pressures of the life of a famous man. They remained a couple until her death shortly before his own, although Bair, in her book, mentions the probability of relationships with certainly one if not more other women in his latter years.

Beckett’s writing life primarily took place in Paris and in Ussr-sur-Mer where he built a small bungalow as a retreat from the busy life he underwent in Paris. Although he has primarily become perceived as a playwright, Beckett himself tended to speak of his earlier and later prose work for which he was most proud. What he undeniably knew was that he was a writer, it was what made him tick, what formed him, what was almost beyond his control. He was a sculptor of words, be they spoken words in theatre or off of the page. And in both places, he was primarily a monologist. There are hundreds of academics who have spent years analysing and interpreting Beckett’s work. During his lifetime he was sometimes amused by the interpretations and understandings that they imposed.

He spent much of the final third of his life working on productions of his plays in an attempt to find what he felt was the most accurate interpretations, he also spent time translating his work from one language to another (generally French or English or vis-versa, with occasional work on German – all these languages he spoke fluently, as he did Italian). My impression is that ultimately some of the German productions became the closest to his desires, as the actors were able more to subsume their own egos and simply become the voices of the characters he gave them.

My overriding sensation about the man (aside from his talent as a writer), from this reading, is of a man of great humanity. For someone who apparently guarded his privacy to the extreme, he had an extraordinary gift for friendship, loyalty and for supporting fellow creative spirits. He was at the bedsides of both his parents and brother when they died, and whenever he knew about it, at those of a number of his friends.

He had a passionate interest in literature, art and music, all of which fed into his own work, music often being spoken of as being something he used in his work. One memory of him mentions how he almost conducted elements of a performance out of an actor, using his hands and fingers quietly to indicate his desire. He has been described by many who knew or worked with him as a ‘gentleman’ and someone who had the old graces. He certainly had a power of will which he imposed in regard to productions of his work in which he was involved, but he was always aware of the needs of the artists he was working with, and hated to undermine them or withdraw from them their individual creative power. Many have said that although he was probably the most controlling of directors of his work, in a way, in being so, it liberated them even more.

He had the greatest respect for his adopted country, and remained unpolitical in part because he didn’t want to endanger his life in France. However he showed his support of this nation during the second world war by being a part of the resistance movement over a period of two years. Something he spoke of very rarely, likewise the awards he received both for those activities, and in honour of his writing work, including the Nobel prize. Beckett spent his final months in an old people’s home, dying in 1989.

Deirdre Bair’s biography concludes ten years before the death of Beckett, but the book edited by the Knowlsons has reminiscences right to the end of his life. However I will probably read Knowlson’s own biography of Beckett later in the year. I plan to read or re-read the works of Beckett throughout the year.

REVIEW: Must you Go? My life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Frazer

On some levels one might perceive this volume as a rather dull and mundane offering, primarily comprising selected entries from Antonia Frazer’s diaries. It is however very much a proof of a profound and satisfying romance, and all the dull and mundane things that that comprises to anyone outside of that romance. Harold Pinter and Antonia Frazer were two people who were very deeply in love with each other for the whole of their lives together.

It is also a volume of chatter and snippets that communicate in passing the lives of two working writers, whose own lives cross the lives of other working writers, creative minds and historical and political participants. It encapsulates an era in their possibly expansive if narrow milieu. And of their internationalism. Both Pinter and Frazer are engaged with what is going on in the world, and it matters to them.

As a record of the mind of Pinter, I would suggest that you revert to his work, however it does give you a sense of his persona, not as exclusively serious as his media image or work might infer. Though I think anyone who watched the wonderful two-part ‘Arena’ documentary about him, would have already gleaned this. Harold was a fine mind, a serious thinker, and a fully rounded human being.

What does this volume communicate of Antonia Frazer? It tells us relatively little of her as a writer, although the mention of some of her work is there. It does though show a woman with a deep capacity for appreciating the qualities of those around her. Almost everyone she meets she taps into their core and takes pleasure in their company. Even the difficult people, like her own ‘dada’. She isn’t a surface person, and enjoys and has a powerful capacity for friendship. Both she and Pinter were very definitely social beings, whilst their work and personalities also demand intense concentration and solitude as a counterpoint.

The final part of the book is unavoidably weighted with sadness at Pinter’s diagnosis, and subsequent decline. It offers a testimony to his courage and fortitude that he survives seven years and for many of those years remains as active as his body permits him.

Reading what we don’t enjoy - 1

I have recently begun to think about the experience of reading and to interrogate myself more fully about how I feel about reading books I don’t enjoy. I’m not here talking about badly written books, in fact I am talking about exactly the opposite. I am talking about extremely well written novels, particularly.

Of course most readers during their lives read difficult books, and books about extremely uncomfortable and unpalatable subjects, generally non-fiction books about areas we wish to educate ourselves about in order to formulate and hold an opinion. However, how do we feel when a novel we read leaves us unsatisfied, despite the fact that we can clearly see that the writer has great skill, clear intention and has very probably succeeded in achieving what he or she set out to do?

Sometimes this distemper I have with a novel may simply evolve out of the fact that I have absolutely no empathy for the characters represented. For me, empathy, if not ‘like’ is important in at least some of the characters. This is not to say I am always seeking characters that reflect me, or an idealised version of the person I would like to see in the mirror.

Nor is it that I demand characters with whose opinions I will agree. After all the pleasure of reading is very much about finding oneself in original and often different environments and situations to those we experience in our own lives, about learning to understand through fantasy the lives and imaginations of others. It’s about being able to understand their personality and life arc, and, despite that they themselves may not, to understand their motives, or to understand something about not always being able to understand their motives. And yet, even being able to achieve the above criteria, sometimes I am not satisfied.

I have recently read two novels that fall into this category by the writer Joyce Carol Oates, a novelist for whom I have great respect and from reading whose work I often achieve great satisfaction. In the past she has taken me to all kinds of places, offered many satisfying, pleasurable and often uncomfortable situations, and yet in these two instances I have had real difficulty in obtaining pleasure from the work I am reading. In ‘The Tattoed Girl’ it very much was about finding characters that for me had little saving grace, despite that I understood what had led certainly some of them to behave in the manor they did.

In the novel I am currently 2/3rds through, ‘Little Bird of Heaven’ I can’t say that it is lack of empathy, although the characters involved are very dissimilar to anyone I know or may wish to spend much time with. I do think that some of my discombobulation may be because there is a great deal of repetitiveness in the novel. And yet I can clearly see that this is an intentional part of the construction of this novel, as Oates is engaging us in how we perceive over a period of time, how what we understand can and often does change, so by revisiting incidents and feelings at different ages, the layers of knowledge and understanding shift and change. And may even become less clear, rather than more transparent. The repetitiveness is also created by the fact that the same actions are perceived by different individuals in the story.

I don’t yet know whether this constant repetition is what has alienated me from my reading pleasure zone. In this instance my investigation is still ‘live’, but I am interested to hear what others think about not enjoying a particular book.

Review: I Lock My Door Upon Myself (Joyce Carol Oates)

I have rarely read such a ‘big’ short novel as this novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Under 100 pages in length yet it addresses the complex inner life of a woman, the issues of race and the varieties of love.

I want to read this novel again before posting a full review, but I found it a very powerful and potent read.

The added, unexpected, delight for me was that the secondhand copy I had bought was once upon a time owned by one favourite writer (A S Byatt) and signed and dedicated to her by another favourite writer (Joyce Carol Oates). I’m afraid Antonia, if you were wondering where it was and wanting it back – no way! As I read it I imagined ASB reading it on the flight home from Princeton, she turned 3 page corners down, and probably read the whole on the flight! Well, that’s what my imagination creates. Perhaps her companion on the journey read it!

Foibles 1

I am sure if I think about it I have many reading foibles (not to mention other foibles) – actually, I just love the word FOIBLE.

So what foible is this? I always like to keep some work of a dead writer unread, to know I have something fresh ahead. Only last year I finally read F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ – it was the novel I was holding back on. Don’t panic (well I won’t) – I still have a number of his short stories that I haven’t read.

I have some essays, poetry and letters still of Oscar Wilde’s and loads and loads of Dickens, a little of George Eliot, 2 Virginia Woolf novels, and thankfully many of her essays and letters. That is just a small example from the dead writers I admire, I don’t want this to become a list!

Owning a Personal Library (1)

I’ve never thought of owning a personal library as a particularly original thing. I have a number of friends who also have a lot of books, but for the most part, when I mention my book collection, people look at me somewhat aghast. One or two people think that their collection of 50 or so books is quite a lot. When they hear of my over 4,300 they seem amazed. I am only amazed that I can get that many books into a one bedroom flat – so is my friend in the flat below, who expects to come home and find one day that she now lives in the sub-basement!

Having the opportunity to own a personal library is a great gift, and a privilege. I know that when I am gone it will all be dispersed, my siblings have libraries of varying degrees of their own. I don’t have any children. But knowing that I have books at my beck and call, whenever I want to reach for them is a joy. Knowing that half-way through one book – finding a reference to another – very often I can lift my hand and find that book and read the relevant passage in full, is a wonderful thing.

I often buy books when I know it will be years before I will read them. I’ve worked out that on average, a book not read in the first year of purchase is likely to sit winking at me for 12 years. I will buy anything that looks good relating to particular topics, and I continue to buy books by favourite authors and often stop reading them for long periods. Then start again with the latest volume, leaving half a dozen between the first I read and those I read now. A little glut of possibilities I can return to when I can’t wait for the next new offering.

Some evenings I wander round the room taking up books from this pile or off of that shelf (yes, there are piles, or teetering towers I have to own!). Sometimes they get moved to other piles. Or I make connections, or start pulling collections of related books together – is that a look of horror that they aren’t already in some kind of order? 

When I moved into my current flat 17 years ago, A-H fiction went on one particular set of shelves, but after that it became a bit of a free-for all, and since, I have added and added. Related books do tend to find themselves roughly in the same place. Every now and then when I think I want to read a particular topic or writer I shift one lot of books and re-locate them, and create what Anne Fadiman in her delightful collection of essays ‘Ex Libris’ calls an “odd shelf”. Shelves with books that tend towards a particular passion or obsession.

I generally know where almost all my books are, unless I’ve had a sort-out! So far I only have 2 missing volumes – ie books I have suddenly thought I wanted to put my hand on and .. er.. can’t!

I fantasise about my perfect library. The house that will hold my treasured collection in perfect style. I watch property-porn on the tv. Top of my criteria, were I to go house hunting with ‘Escape to the Country’ would be a fitting space for my books. I’ve seen one or two homes that would fit the bill. What is the perfect space? Well it wouldn’t necessarily be only one room. I would like much of the collection in one room, with a few nooks and crannies for various parts of the collection elsewhere. Poetry would always be housed in the bedroom. Why? Well I tend to think of poetry as being bound to the spirit and inner being, and I link that most with the experience of sleep and dreams, the unconscious and imagination.

Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) [Re-read]

I first came to African American writing when I was fourteen years of age in 1974. I had a mixed race English teacher who allowed us to read books not on the curriculum if we knuckled down to the work on the timetable.

She introduced us to the work of James Baldwin and I fell in love. I fell in love with the wonderful language, and the complex lives that were so far from my own life. I also fell in love with the gappy toothed smile of the little man Baldwin turned out to be. Reading Baldwin led to the works of other African American writers as they became available to us, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Wiseman and others.

The lives of African Americans in the 1970s wasn’t so much better than in the 1960s and before, and segregation issues were still alive and prospering, after all, Martin Luther King’s dream had not that long been let off like a balloon into the ether. In my 20s I had an African American friend, only a few years older than myself, who told of how she had been chased out of school by her white friends fathers wielding baseball bats and violent dogs on chains. However, this isn’t the world of Hurston’s characters.

‘Their Eyes were Watching God’ is probably the most famous novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. I came to her work via an essay in Alice Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’, in the 1980s. Walker was partially responsible for the resurgence of Hurston’s career, although by then Hurston had been long dead.


Written in 1937, the novel is split (unequally) into three parts, the three marriages of Janie, the main character, who is a mullatto (mixed race person), whose mother may well have been raped by the son of her white ‘employer’.

The story is told retrospectively, with Janie sitting on the porch stairs telling her best friend Pheoby what has happened to her and why she has returned. The chattering town’s folk will learn about Janie’s story by word of mouth via her friend. The writing is rich in patois which resonates in your ear, and you float along as if on a wave of melted caramel.

Janie was raised by her grandmother who enforces a marriage to a much older black man of station when Janie reaches 17, just before her own death. She wants to know that Janie is safe before she dies. After a number of unsatisfactory years with Mr Killicks, Janie leaves town with Joe, who has his eye on being a man of power in the first black town that is beginning to form itself. He marries Janie and takes her with him, however his own enthusiasm for position does not lead Janie to the kind of life she expects.

It separates her from the people of the town because Joe demands that she stand outside of the lives of the ordinary town’s people as she is the Mayor’s wife. Joe transforms the village, but his efforts are as likely to get him resented as thanked, and Janie is seen as standoffish and high and mighty.

After Joe’s early death, Janie, now in her forties, is wooed by a man who comes to the town called ‘Tea Cake’ and she goes with him to find work in ‘the muck’ in the Everglades or Glades. A hard working, hard life kind of place where people flock during certain seasons to harvest beans. Their world is harsh but satisfying, full of community and warmth, where Janie and Tea Cake’s home is the centre of entertainments, dancing, music and dice. However the workers do not heed the signs when the Native American Indian’s start to leave the area warning of a hurricane, and they leave it too late to leave the area and many die in the floods that follow. Janie and Tea Cake survive, but Tea Cake is bitten by a mad dog and a month after his return he suffers wild rages and jealousies, and madness that lead to his death.

The novel title is taken from a line during the hurricane, when they are watching what nature is about to do next, 'their eyes were watching God'.

Janie returns to the town in which she was the Mayor’s wife to reclaim her home there and settle down and tell her story.

Hurston’s writing is deeply entrenched in the oral tradition, and much of her work is anthropological, ethnological and steeped in the folk tradition. She collected folktales and songs and studied old religions including voodoo.

There is a very fine biography of Hurston by Valerie Boyd called ‘Wrapped in Rainbows’, and Hurston wrote an autobiography ‘Dust Tracks’. As well as novels and anthropology she also wrote plays and short stories. Her voice can be heard on the disk which accompanies a delightful volume of facsimile documents about her life ‘Speak, so you can speak again’, published by Doubleday, 2004.