forgotten classics

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2009-12-06T11:20:00.001Z

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Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)

2007-10-11T10:15:00.001+01:00

Waugh’s moral and satiric novel of the emptiness of riches and fame has clear lessons for contemporary culture’s obsession with celebrity (and particularly magazines like Hello and Heat). In Vile Bodies the aristocrats and bored rich of 1914 London engage in an endless and enervating round of parties, their every move and fashion innovation eagerly followed and swallowed by the public through gossip columns. The vague hero of the novel, Adam, becomes a columnist for a while and undermines the entire process by making people and trends up to amuse himself. ‘Oh Nina, what a lot of parties’ he complains, and the narrator intervenes: ‘(Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …)’. The title is from the funeral service, and Waugh’s vision here is misanthropic, attacking the emptiness and amorality of pre-war life. Without any higher purpose or context for life the foolish ‘Bright Young Things’ in the novel become focussed on the physical, the material and the mundane and fail to escape their vile bodies, instead being doomed to self-destruction. They frequently complain of boredom and become increasingly desolated in their hedonism. One of their number goes mad, another falls pregnant, and in the end their pointless career around Mayfair is halted by the intervention of war. It is not just the young generation who feel the stultifying effects of drifting through history. Prime Minister Outrage, Lady Throbbing and Margot Metroland (the names just on the edge of ludicrous) all find themselves attacked by ennui. Yet they refuse to change; when challenged by an upstart Spiritualist to examine their consciences the response is a type-that-built-the-empire cry: ‘what a damned impudent woman!’ Despite the jokes, of which there are many, it is a very desolate book; a signpost to Waugh’s later masterpieces of pessimism and desperation A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. Adam is, like the protagonists of those novels, hapless and slightly too earnest for the world he finds himself in. The novel’s closing scenes see him seemingly doomed to poverty and possible death on the fields of France. Even love does not really seem to have a place or a saving quality. Vile Bodies is like PG Wodehouse channelling the spirit of Thomas Hardy: melancholic and arch at the same time.

Patrick Hamilton

2007-06-27T10:33:00.001+01:00

Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (1947)

Patrick Hamilton is the great forgotten man of 1930s and 1940s fiction. Hamilton's maybe best known nowadays for the films of his novels and plays - Gaslight with Anton Walbrook, and Hitchcock's experimental film Rope. His prose is assured and impressive, but his novels are about the dark lonely corners of pre and post war London. Hangover Square (1941), generally considered his masterpiece, concerns the grey world of a down at heel borderline alcoholic whose destructive drinking and obsessive relationships combine to fray his fragile hold upon reality. In Hangover Square Hamilton painted London with all its malevolence and seedy dinginess, but it is in the slightly later Slaves of Solitude, set in the commuter town of Thames Lockton (essentially Henley), that he really captures the horror and bleakness of life in the 1940s. Hamilton's protagonists are fearful and anxious, worried and worked upon. Here is a taste of his cynicism from The Slaves of Solitude: ‘When he at last came out the other elderly guests were already setting about their business - the business, that is to say, of those who in fact had no business on this earth save that of cautiously steering their respective failing bodies along paths free from discomfort and illness in the direction of the final illness which would exterminate them’. The novel explores the isolation and horror of suburbia, focussing on the alienation of contemporary society and the enervating effects of loneliness. The Slaves of Solitude is not an easy book, encompassing small minded racism, social bullying and desperation, but it is a precise, nasty piece of work – a vicious gem. The suburbs of London are pointless, bleak, dull places with little excitement or sympathy.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

2007-05-29T13:29:00.003+01:00

Famous now perhaps for a handful of works – Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene was a profound stylist and experimental writer. His minor novels are often things of delicate and strange beauty. The Ministry of Fear is such a text, an odd, enigmatic work about salvation, memory, guilt and loyalty set during the blitz. Greene’s protagonist Rowe is a conflicted, grief-stricken man racked with guilt for the killing of his wife in an act of mercy – in a powerful flashback we see them both tacitly acknowledging what he is doing. Rowe attempts to cocoon himself away from his past and from his present, living from day to day and rarely reaching out to anyone. The war is not his business, and he lives mechanically. The masterly opening chapter begins with Rowe visiting a rather forlorn wartime fête in a Bloomsbury square for old time’s sake and ends with him in a daze looking skywards from the basement of his freshly bombed out house. At the fête he wins a cake which, slowly, it becomes obvious contains something of great value to the Germans, and a series of strange events lead to him being sought in connection with another, more violent murder, before being admitted to a sinister nursing home having lost his memory.

Rowe’s numb existence is disrupted and he is finally roused to action, becoming at least involved in the world around him, if not able to affect things particularly. He repeatedly thinks of himself in a book, specifically a narrative of heroism, but events remain resolutely messy and unpleasant rather than resolving themselves properly; people die randomly, and truth and honour prove to be slippery concepts. The novel’s key atmosphere is menace, the unknown horror that lives below the surface of most people’s lives.

The blitz in this novel is something which Londoners live with, occasionally dying and grieving for those gone, but generally viewing events as something of an irritation which rearranges the road network and prevents them from getting home to central London from the relative obscurity of Battersea. It is this sense of the ordinariness of war, the anti-heroic day-to-day nature of resistance, that is the keynote to the novel. It all concludes in classic Greene fashion – cynically, insubstantially, acknowledging the uncomfortable fragility of happiness. Rowe and his Austrian refugee lover Anna deceive each other in order to stay together, each one knowing the other’s secrets but never revealing them: ‘They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much’. The exquisite bitterness of this conclusion is a fittingly ambivalent conclusion to this novel of hedging, sullen horror.

G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

2007-05-29T13:29:00.001+01:00

Chesterton’s whimsical satire is set in 2004, a world where ‘the people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions’ and therefore history has in effect stopped. Nothing has changed in the century apart from the pragmatic adoption of inertia: ‘that vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had become an assumed condition’. The consequence is tediousness and stability: ‘There was really no reason for any man doing anything but the thing he had done the day before’. In many ways this novel is a response to Chesterton’s friend HG Wells’ Time Machine – it suggests that humankind does not evolve but rather tends towards dullness. People don’t really like change. London is defined by ‘modernity and monotony and civilisation’, a dystopian vision of a future city in thrall to efficiency in which the individual and the historical have no place.

This fantasy of a stultifying future is upset by the appointment of a new King (the system is no longer hereditary but by random election), Auberon Quin. Quin attempts to inspire local patriotism and upset the dourness of life by forcing the London boroughs to wear medieval-style livery and compete with their neighbours. He makes up romantic histories for them, despite their protests. at one stage giving a talk to the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities in which he mourns the fact that so ‘few of them knew the legends of their own boroughs’ before spinning stories relating to the naming of Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge and Hammersmith (he refuses to enter the controversy as to whether Notting Hill ‘means Nutting Hill (in allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it), or whether it is a corruption of Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among the ancients as an Earthly Paradise’). Quin issues a Proclamation demanding that the London Boroughs should be in a state of war with each other, mounting a city guard and skirmishing. Most of them ignore this, apart from one Adam Wayne, provost of Notting Hill. Wayne is a Don Quixote figure, maddened by romances and the desire for his life to be something other than the material drudgery of Pump Street in Notting Hill. He gathers an army and through ingenuity and lunatic commitment subdues the rest of the city. Part of the joy of the novel resides in the harum-scarum fighting through the streets of West London (culminating in ‘the Battle of the Lamps’ ambush on the Portobello Road). Wayne’s standard is the sign from the Red Lion pub, and this sense of the significant in the local, minor and particular is both sweet and mad. The novel is slight but scathing in its attack on pomposity and the madness of nationalism; the jokes about London are cute. Chesterton understands the strange tribalness of London and its unique atmosphere: ‘London, if it be not one of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins’.

Forgotten Classics: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (published 1611)

2007-03-30T10:47:00.000+01:00

In 1500 London was relatively small, c. 75,000; by 1603 this had grown to 200,000 and the city was one of the largest and most dynamic in the world. There was a massive turnover of people – an eighth of the UK population lived there at some point, plus aliens and visitors. London's mercantile prominence was due to its development as a port and growth in trade, and also because of the newly centralised Tudor government which focussed administration, the law and court life on the city. This meant an influx of money and influential people to the city. Between 4000 and 5000 young men arrived each year to begin apprenticeships which took 7 years to complete. This meant that there was a huge youth culture of sorts. The city was a very small area, crammed with life and people; there was a massive disparity of life and wealth, and an increase in crime and poverty.

The burgeoning population, importance and self-definition of the city spawned new genres of writing and drama. Most important is the form known as City Comedy, which emphasised the new power and social, political and economic dynamism of the city, as well as documenting the complex class issues within the community. These plays were written very fast, often in collaboration, and attracted huge audiences who were interested in their local references and fast moving plots. The comedies tended to maintain a unity of time and place, symmetrical arrangement of stereotypical characters and utilised particular recurrent plots - the gulling of fools, the subversion of authority and an attack on pomposity. An excellent example of the genre is Middleton’s and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. The plot is a standard ‘errant son defies father to marry his sweetheart’; the most interesting thing about the play is the title character. Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl, is a cross-dresser who likes wearing male clothing and smoking: ‘One is she/ That roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls,/ That beats the watch, and constables controls’. There is some debate as to what she actually is: ‘some will not stick to say she’s a man, and some both man and woman’ which gets the response ‘That were excellent: she might first cuckold the husband and then make him do as much for the wife!’. Moll’s purpose, though, is actually far more radical simply questioning sexual boundaries. When she fights the mischievous Laxton – and wins – she claims to be fighting on behalf of her sex. She means, she says: ‘To teach thy base thoughts manners. Thou’rt one of those/ That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore,/ If she but casts a liberal eye upon thee’. She wants equality – to be, as she says to Sir Alexander, ‘as good a man as your son’. She claims ‘I have no humour to marry. I love to lie o’both sides o’th’bed myself and again o’th’other side. A wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll ne’er go about it’. She knows her own mind and wants to do her own thing. Marriage, for Moll, is the loss of independence, the merging of the woman into the man. These sentiments introduce a radical agenda, and demonstrate the rise of the newly independent woman – the city gave more power to women either through money or position. Yet Moll’s speeches are really quite unusual, too, in their easy undermining of patriarchal systems and assumptions. This is the true radicalism of the play – in demonstrating quite how easy it is to avoid certain things, or to act in counterintuitive ways, it shows that obedience is simply something that people do rather than something they should do.

john milton

2007-02-21T19:07:00.000Z

Forgotten London Classics: John Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, To the Parlament of England (1644)

John Milton could lay quite a claim to being the greatest Londoner of them all: famous in his lifetime throughout Europe as both poet and prose writer; master of multiple genres including tragedy, epic, the sonnet and the elegy; composer of Paradise Lost (finished when he had completely lost his sight); signatory to Charles I’s death warrant and chief apologist for the regicide; able to compose in several languages and read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian and French; formidable proponent of new systems of learning and social relations in his works on divorce and education; coiner of the word satanic, amongst many others; and fierce advocate of a kind of free speech. Milton’s London was that of the 1640s and 1650s, revolutionary and dynamic decades of intense religious debate, civil conflict and massive social change. Key to this foment was the newly opened and dynamic print culture of the city, and Milton was forefront amongst those who defended the liberated presses.

During the period before 1642 publishing was closely controlled and monitored by the Crown; censorship was a fact of life. However the Star Chamber, which carried out this task, collapsed due to the breakdown of royal authority after the outbreak of the war between King and Parliament in 1642. As a consequence the presses boomed and publication went through the roof. A key element of this was the exponential increase in news. Before 1642 access to news was controlled; the years following saw the birth of the newspaper as we might recognise it in the guise of cheap, populist newsbooks such as Mercurius Britannicus or The Man in the Moon. However, Parliament attempted to reimpose censorship in 1643, and Areopagitica is written as a response to this move. Milton berates Parliament for trying to stem the tide of information.

Milton does not pretend to authoritative knowledge through debate, but merely a better and more enlightened conception. His discussion of the public nature of printed books is situated within a Ciceronian discourse of advice and reasoned persuasion. The forum for debate has a literal and conceptual pertinence; books have a concrete and material status as carriers of thought and opinion, and they inhabit and create a particular space. Milton’s conception of the power of this space, the forum for reasoned debate which will encourage a movement to right government and the perfection of the species, is predicated upon a humanist notion that all books are good and that reason is paramount. It also rests on a notion of free market economics which emphasises that the marketplace will settle according to the demand of informed and intelligent consumers. He does not argue for complete openness – libel and blasphemy will still be dealt with – but claims that a truly free society has an open press. Famously, he saw books as having some kind of vital life: ‘For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are’. Furthermore, he argues that books are almost more important than people; that reason is most useful to a society and the destruction or censorship of reason can destroy us: ‘And yet on the other hand unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. Milton’s impassioned claims for the power of open publication and truth is resonant now; surely debates over the control of information in any kind can benefit from reading his rational, direct, and persuasive writings.

2007-02-01T22:37:00.000Z

toying with evelyn Waugh (vile bodies) and the poetry of the Bluestocking set (Hannah More, et al) for the next column. the bluestockings are extremely important but I’m not happy with writing about them as a group as it is kind of tokenistic. Waugh is a tart, vicious writer that everyone thinks is cute (generally because of Brideshead).

went to see a play that was lost then reclaimed last week, Noel Coward’s Vortex (starring mr Will Young). really quite shockingly bad as a piece of drama. nice set, though. maybe I’ll do something theatrical for a change – there are loads of fab plays that haven’t been thought about for ages (Fielding’s Grub Street Opera, or Shelley’s The Cenci).

tech stuff

2007-01-25T21:00:00.000Z

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/claim/bz6bnmkmxs" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

manchizzle

2007-01-23T22:46:00.000Z

woo! woo! I (or this blog) just got blogged (http://manchizzle.blogspot.com/) which is the first time I’ve seen the site linked and with a very nice write up, too, from a blog I like. so there.

julie burchill

2007-01-19T15:38:00.000Z

Forgotten London Classics: Julie Burchill, Ambition (1989)

Burchill’s loopy first novel takes us from Bangkok to Sun City to New York whilst its heart remains squarely in London. Susan Street is the fast-talking, hard-bargaining, label-wearing, luscious heroine of a book of which the Literary Review said ‘Civilisation will not lightly forgive her’. Whether Burchill cared what the stuffy, masculine Review thought is unlikely, but this is a snappy, populist, inyerface, gloriously foul-mouthed, hammered and unapologetic whirlwind of a book which probably unknowingly wrote the template for Girls Aloud. Street works for the newspaper Sunday Best and is hoping to become the first woman editor of the paper. The new owner of the paper has other plans for her, however, which mainly include sexually humiliating her to the point that she breaks down and stops being all uppity. ‘I’m going to have fun breaking you, Susan’, says the media mogul Tobias Pope, and his subsequent Herculean seven tasks include various orgies that teeter on the edge of gang rape, having ‘SOLD’ tattooed on her forehead, becoming a Thai stripper and being hung from the ceiling of a Lesbian club in New York. From the bravura opening sequence when Street wonders what to do having shagged her boss to death through the various tasks she is presented with Burchill suggests that her protagonist is in control of the situation and effectively leading Pope on, allowing him to think he has the power whilst actually rather enjoying the whole thing herself. This does not really persuade the reader, but the energy of the novel drags them ever forward. Similarly the presentation of Susan as some kind of hard-edged feminist does not really square with the character from the provinces so desperate to succeed she will accede to any request made by the strangely attractive Pope. She is his possession, both financially and bodily, and it seems counterintuitive of her to see their competition as something she has some power over. In the end the novel just about fails to escape its generic origins: despite the sexual rapaciousness and explicitness, Susan finds herself in love with (you guessed it) Pope’s son who marries her and gives her the job she finally wanted. It is a globetrotting romance by any other name, a trashy airport novel that kind of undermines its origins but probably doesn’t care. Burchill’s scattergun approach is exhilarating and oftentimes extremely funny. The novel kind of stands the test of time, although the sex seems tamer a couple of decades later and the obsessive desire for success rings a little uncertainly. Certainly the London presented here – all image obsessed (and the description of the clothes in the novel are themselves worth cherishing as historical documents) and shiny new bars – is seething with familiar life. Street taxis around, shops, argues and has sex; but she mainly drinks, and the novel suggests that the lifeblood of the city is in its new bars and clubs. Similarly it presents to us a newly burgeoning demographic of rich, educated, single, independent women (of varying sexualities) beginning to tear up the city and make it their own.

2007-01-18T09:48:00.000Z

The latest LFC is out in Time Out (on Julie Burchill of all people) and I’ll pop it up as and when. Just added a few links including the Manchizzle, my fave Manchester blog and 43, lovely writing about bus journeys (and winner of the Manchester Blogging Awards). The next column is going to be on Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and thereafter I’m uncertain, I think I want to go further back, possibly into the C18 or C19 (Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox or Walter Scott are in the forefront of my mind).

Graham Greene column, Jan 07

2007-01-11T12:07:00.001Z

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

ManClassics/ TO column/ etc

2007-01-11T12:07:00.000Z

Little to report at the moment. Still chasing Time Out Manchester for ManClassics and a possible tie-in event with the Manchester Literary Festival: watch this space. Spent the Christmas period working on two more Time Out London columns: Julie Burchill’s Ambition and John Milton’s Areopagitica. Something of a contrast between them, you might say. I’m also working on the Cassell 1000 Key Moments of the 20^th Century the commissions list of which will more than keep me in Forgotten Classics – Knut Hamsun or Bohumil Hrabal anyone? – but as an activity it has prompted me to think about how many things are lost even if they are considered seminal. The book also suggests that literary history is something of a chronological ascent towards the contemporary (although it has welcome digressions along the way and a good dollop of populism). This kind of listmaking is useful and a key cultural phenomena but I’m ambivalent about being involved in it…

2006-11-01T17:51:00.000Z

eeek! haven’t done owt for ages, far too much on with remembered books to spend time here. I’m currently reading The Name of the Rose, which is about books which should never be remembered (or possibly that should never be forgotten) and also reading Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear for Time Out, which is masterly. I’m also in the early stages of planning a column for the new Time Out Manchester (wahey!) on ‘Manchester Classics’ so any suggestions as ever welcome…..

sterne, hope, braddon

2006-10-06T12:49:00.000+01:00

just whilst I think of it, three lovely novels which aren’t looked for various reasons:

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey – always in the shadow of Tristram Shandy, this is playful and sweet and as complex as that novel

Anthony Hope, Rupert of Hentzau – the sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, another swashbuckling epic

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret – the secret is pretty obvious, but this is a charming piece of Victorian sensationalism

Time Out Derek Raymond column

2006-09-25T21:40:00.000+01:00

Forgotten Classics
Derek Raymond, He Died with His Eyes Open (1984)

Derek Raymond, the pseudonym of Robin Cook, is generally credited with creating a peculiarly British kind of noir. His bracing books are nasty, dark and violent, and it is probably no surprise that his crime novels were first appreciated in France before becoming popular in Britain. His books have the sensibility of the best of French noir from the 60s and 70s, amoral and filled with everyday evil like a Manchette novel or a Melville film, but with a particularly British sensibility. The novels are set in dirty, seedy London and the characters are washed up failures, prostitutes, thieves and perverts all trying to get ahead in a vile, hopeless country that is falling apart. Yet even in this dross there can be a certain lyricism, and Cook’s prose can make amazing stylistic leaps without once losing its balance: ‘He spoke with a South London accent that guttered in his throat like a flame in a cracked chimney’.
He Died with His Eyes Open starts with a body being found just off Hanger Lane, and is set in drinking clubs and broken blocks of flats from Battersea to Lewisham. The body is that of a failed near-alcoholic writer, Charlie Staniland; the mainstream police do not care to investigate too much, and the responsibility falls to a minor officer from the Department of Unexplained Deaths. Staniland left behind his thoughts on numerous cassette tapes, and it from these that the detective pieces together his tragically pathetic life as well as the multiple banal reasons for his death. The scenes and the characters have a pleasingly authentic heft to them, and Cook deploys the tropes of the noir in such a strongly British way – snotty and unpleasant, dull, drab and pointless – that you barely notice the generic rules being adhered to. The country he presents – or, rather, the vicious city that he gives us – is covered in dogshit and full of broken people going nowhere. He anticipates James Ellroy and David Peace, amongst others, in his terrifying drive to see (and show us) the skull beneath the skin.
Cook once claimed that having an ‘Eton background is a terrific help if you’re into vice at all’ (having dropped out at sixteen), and he certainly lived a life of faded grandeur and near-criminal Soho bohemia in true public school style. He was variously a pornographer, novelist, gambler, Italian anarchist politician, labourer and smuggler; he spent time in prison in Spain, and hung out with friends of the Krays and with Beat poets. The character of Staniland in He Died with His Eyes Open, the doomed romantic toff with a love of the lowlife, draws on Cook’s own biography in many ways. Much of the book is given over to transcripts of the murdered man’s taped meditations on the bleakness of life and a world without love. The unnamed detective certainly becomes entranced and influenced by Staniland’s words, and claims that ‘He had made me care about what I was in a way that I didn’t know I could’. Staniland’s outlook on life becomes increasingly depressed, and the pun of the novel’s title refers to his physical state in death but also the fact that he attains an insight into existence which leads him to seek to end his life; his murderers claim he nearly begs them to kill him, so disillusioned has he become.
The protagonist’s journey, buffeted by demands for vengeance and a thirst for truth, is not towards understanding and rapprochement in this book, as you might expect from a detective novel, but to a bleak understanding of the emptiness of everything and the banality of evil: ‘He had framed the question that finally mattered in the two lines he had quoted on a cassette […] What shall we be,/ When we aren’t what we are?’ He Died with His Eyes Open is, like Get Carter, a supreme example of how nasty Britain actually is.

He Died with His Eyes Open is republished by Serpent’s Tail in September

Under the Net

2006-09-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954). There is a great sequence about the problem of language: 'The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods'. Murdoch's novel combines sharp wit with a disarmingly lowkey but dextrous prose style ('Astonishingly soon the daylight came, like a diffused mist') and there is a constant philosophical inquiry underlying the entire project. She's a perfect forgotten classic, well known but unread.

A Confederacy of Dunces

2006-09-11T08:13:00.000+01:00

The ultimate, I'd argue, forgotten classic - John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces follows the fortunes of the horrific Ignatius C. Reilly as he waddles around New Orleans dispensing misanthropic wisdom, avoiding work and arguing with his mother. Reilly is an awful, horrible creature with little to redeem him other than a savage, black wit and an unshakeable belief in himself. He is a true Rabelaisian character, fat and greedy and sexually twisted. Reilly is awful but his cynicism allows Kennedy Toole to examine in some depth the plodding, bleak grimness of life. This use of a character in such a blunt and Juvenalian satirical style is often described as Swiftian. Indeed the title of the novel itself is from Swift - 'When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him' - and sarcastically sums up Reilly's attitude to the world as well as poignantly reminding us that the novel itself was never published in the authors' lifetime but came out some years after he committed suicide. He was posthumously awarded the 1981 Pulitzer prize.

Patrick Hamilton

2006-09-11T08:03:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading The Slaves of Solitude (1943) by Patrick Hamilton, the great forgotten man of 1930s and 1940s fiction. Hamilton's maybe best known nowadays for the films of his work - Gaslight with Anton Walbrook, and Hitchcock's famous experimental film Rope. There is an article on filming Hamilton's work (mainly about Rope) by Iain Sinclair here. Hamilton's prose is accomplished and sparkling, but his novels are about the dark lonely corners of pre and post war London. Hangover Square (1941), generally considered his masterpiece, concerns the grey world of a down at heel borderling alcoholic whose obsessive drinkign and relationships combine to fray his hold on reality. Hamtilson's protagonists are fearful and sensitive, worried and prevailed upon. Here is a taste of his cynicism from The Slaves of Solitude:
'When he at last came out the other elderly guests were already setting about their business - the business, that is to say, of those who in fact had no business on this earth save that of cautiously steering their respective failing bodies along paths free from discomfort and illness in the direction of the final illness which would exterminate them'

Derek Raymond

2006-08-22T17:08:00.000+01:00

The next column is on cult crime novelist Derek Raymond's first 'Factory' novel He Died With His Eyes Open (1984). Serpent's Tail, bless 'em, are bringing out all of the 'Factory' novels this year in new editions. Derek Raymond was a pornographer, smuggler, gun-runner and lapsed gent whose stylistic innovations and hardbitten style created a new 'British' noir that you can still see in the work of novelists like David Peace. His novels take place in the unpleasant bits of London you generally never hear about - Lewisham, Battersea, Catford, Hanger Lane. The books are gritty and unpleasant, but satisfyingly so - they show a world you know is there but were trying hard to ignore...

washington post

2006-08-07T14:46:00.000+01:00

occasional series on forgotten books at the Washington post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artsandliving/books/columns/jonathanyardley/secondreading/

alan sillitoe

2006-08-04T10:45:00.000+01:00

Naomi's book blog

2006-08-04T10:44:00.000+01:00

fun site: http://www.stevebrownsound.co.uk/naomi.html

2006-08-01T17:05:00.000+01:00

I’m toying with Iris Murdoch (Under the Net) or Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies/ Decline and Fall) for the next column. Despite the memoirs and the film and the various attending hoopla, Murdoch is unknown both as novelist and philosopher. Her first couple of books are great oddities about morality and action. Waugh is another of those novelists from the early Twentieth Century whose name recognition outweighs his popularity. I think he is a giant of British writing but you’d be hardpressed to find someone who had read more than Brideshead Revisited. His Men At Arms trilogy is really stunning, the early novels are punchy and satirical and funny, and even late strange pieces like The Loved One deserve to be compared to Graham Greene for their black humour and amorality.

However at the moment Derek Raymond’s He Died With His Eyes Open, just about to be reissued by Serpent’s Tail, is leading the running. Time Out want the column to be more London-based but I’ll be keeping the blog more general than that.

holiday reading 2

2006-07-28T12:20:00.000+01:00

Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Prone Gunman, trans. James Brook (to be republished by Serpent’s Tail in November)

Manchette is the master of stripped-down, masculine French noir. Much like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville*, whose clipped, amoral style he echoes, Manchette deals with the intricate details of criminal life whilst eschewing any emotion or judgement. The Prone Gunman follows professional assassin Martin Terrier (often just referred to as ‘the man’, his anonymity and amorality reflected in a stylistic trick) as he attempts to go straight. His employers, naturally, desire him to stay on and chaos follows their attempts first to reclaim him and then to control him. The novel is cool, taut and brief. Manchette is generally underconsidered – as, indeed, is the French tradition in general – when noir or hard-boiled fiction is discussed (flashier Americans generally dominate) but he is well worth taking a look at.

*if you don’t know Melville, seek out Le Cercle Rouge or Le Samourai.

Zane Grey

2006-07-28T11:47:00.000+01:00

I just picked up a 1957 pulp edition of The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey, a real boy’s own tale of border and frontier. Here is the opening: ‘So it was in him, then – an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. He was the last of the Duanes, that old fighting stock of Texas. But not the memory of his dead father, nor the pleading of his soft-voiced mother, nor the warning of this uncle who stood before him now, had brought to Buck Duane so much realization of the dark passionate stain in his blood. It was the recurrence, a hundredfold increased in power, of a strange emotion that for the last three years had arisen in him.’ Powerful, hard-boiled stuff!

Holiday reading 1

2006-07-28T11:20:00.000+01:00

Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

This lovely piece of English faerie draws on all manner of archetypes in order to tell its story of an England threatened by an ancient evil. There are wizards and dwarves and shape-shifters and strange goblin type characters called Svarts. Garner’s tale takes place on Alderley Edge and the surrounding area, and demonstrates a clear love of the countryside but also a sense of its eerieness. Colin and Susan are saved from strange pursuers by a Wizard who relates them the legend of Fundindelve, where a virtuous army sleeps awaiting the hour that they must fight Nastrond. They are guarded by strong magic sealed within Wierdstone by Firefrost, but the Wierdstone has disappeared and must be found lest the world be destroyed. It is a neat adventure story with cave rescues and duels, but also an attempt in many ways to distil the darker tones of Tolkein into a children’s book.

Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

2006-07-27T12:22:00.000+01:00

Alan Sillitoe is generally included as part of the ‘angry young man’ movement of the late 1950s, novelists and dramatists who wrote with passion and polemic energy. He is also part of a wider cultural phenomenon of 1955-65 which focussed attention on the working-class. From the mid-50s onwards the post-war boom, increased prosperity and the beginnings of a youth culture fostered various movements which were interested in attacking the establishment and representing the lives of those ordinary, dispossessed workers who were generally ignored by higher culture. This interest collects together figures as diverse as Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz (whose ‘Free Cinema’ documentary movement was massively influential), Ken Loach, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Keith Waterhouse, Nell Dunn, and John Braine. This fascination with the rawness of working-class life provoked debates which still rages – is making the anti-hero an icon just a way of controlling them; is sensationalist presentation simply caricaturing?

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a raw, aggressive novel that is unapologetic in its presentation of ‘real’ life. Its opening demonstrates how the protagonist, Arthur Seaton, could teach contemporary binge-drinkers and ASBO-holders a thing or two: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the topmost stair to the bottom’. He then drinks another pint and then vomits in someone’s face before fighting his way out. Arthur works at a lathe in a bicycle factory, making just enough money to drink his way through the weekend. He fishes, fights, sleeps with other worker’s wives, goes to the pictures, drinks, works. He has no ambition to speak of other than to look after himself. He hates anyone with any pompous authority, and only looks out for himself and, at a push, his family.

Arthur’s bleak outlook on life is fuelled by experience in the Army and at the hands of the factory; he is a cog in a wheel, ignored by society in the main. It isn’t until he is badly beaten by soldiers that he reflects on the emptiness of his existence: ‘He felt a lack of security. No place existed in all the world that could be called safe, and he knew for the first time in his life that there had never been any such thing as safety, and never would be, the difference being that now he knew it as a fact, whereas before it was a natural unconscious state’. After this event he settles down a bit more, finding a single girl to get engaged to. He reflects at the close of the book ‘Well, it’s a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don’t weaken’.

Little happens in the novel, but its portrayal and celebration of working-class life eschews mere caricaturing in order to say, in an up front way, this is how it is and we don’t care what you think. The prose is flat, in the now, inflected by dialect, rarely more than perfunctorily descriptive. It is marvellously sharp and direct. Sillitoe never romanticises, and rarely editorialises; the novel is more interested in the politics of putting this life centre stage. A brilliant section near the end of the novel consists of the Christmas celebrations at Arthur’s aunt’s house. Sillitoe manages to make them bittersweet and inclusive, communicating a sense of belonging and rightness that is at once moving and alienating. In comparison the horrifying scene of his married lover taking a scalding bath to abort a child is uncompromising and harsh. Sillitoe and his contemporaries are now read as period-pieces, but this searing novel shows that they were vital, exciting voices that exerted huge cultural and social influence.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman (1926)

2006-07-27T12:16:00.000+01:00

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a true polymath – New Yorker short-story writer, scholar of Tudor Church Music, biographer, poet translator of Proust and writer of guide books. She was an ardent Communist and openly lived with the poet Valentine Ackland for nearly 40 years. She is a great English writer and one that should be remembered far more than she is. Her writing is clear and sharp, and her novels are immensely distinctive. Lolly Willowes is her first book, a subversive fantasia in which women are urged to take power and resist ‘an existence doled out to you by others’. It is magical in a kind of faerie way, celebrating the sometimes mundane reality of the supernatural and its ability to transform the everyday.

Laura Willowes, from a good if unexciting county family, comes to live in London after the death of her father. Lolly is the name given to her by her various nieces and nephews, the children she spends her time looking after on behalf of her brothers. The real Laura Willowes, with all her thoughts and ideas, is lost in family duty. She spends some twenty years in London being virtuous and slowly having her natural verve dulled and diminished. Finally Lolly has a revelation and sees her family household in London for what it really is: ‘half hidden under their accumulations – accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring feet on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact’. Her new resolve and distress at the way that London has sapped her leads her to take lodgings in the Buckinghamshire village of Great Mop. Lolly reverts to her real name of Laura in the countryside (Lolly is what she is when an aunt and therefore defined by others). She finds a quiet independence and mounting self-definition in the sleepy village. She throws away her map of the countryside, rejecting masculine defining knowledge for a countrified understanding of the local area, an empathy with the place she lives in. She is alone on the hillside in the dark when she comes closest to understanding the great sadness and horror in her soul; the experience leaves her ‘changed, and knew it. She was humbler, and more simple’.

Yet she is not left to herself, and her nephew Titus soon comes to live in Great Mop in order to write a book on Vasari. He is nice but boorish, a man who loves ‘the country as if it were a body’. His unacknowledged assumption of such ownership contrasts clearly with Laura’s unconditional love: ‘Most of all she hated him for imposing his kind of love on her. Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love in her own way’. Yet she is not meek any longer; soon after this she rather innocently makes what she thinks is a compact with the devil to maintain the quiet solitude she loves (the devil’s form is initially a kitten who bites her). Satan agrees to rid her of Titus (he sends bees and a fiancé from London) in exchange for her soul. Her choice to become unsocial, to reject London and the masculine city is evoked in her turn to the devil (‘But in the moment of election, under the stress and turmoil of the hunted Lolly as under a covering of darkness, the true Laura had settled in all unerringly. She had known where to turn’).

The devil is a rather pleasant character, more protective than anything else – he is the ‘loving huntsman’ of the title. Indeed, for all that he is referred to as Satan he is much more like a pagan figure such as Pan, a shepherd of lost souls. Laura considers herself to have become a witch, and attends a midnight pagan Sabbath with the other villagers. The social freedom at this ceremony leads to a number of new relationships (not least the wonder of dancing with Emily, the ‘pasty-faced and anaemic young slattern’ who dances ‘with a fervour that annihilated every misgiving’; she and Laura become ‘fused together […] the contact made her tingle from head to foot’). This energises and liberates Laura, and she escapes the strictures of duty, family, order and civilisation. She tells Satan how much need women have of him: ‘Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence soon becomes a nuisance’. Warner uses the figure of Laura to suggest that women are controlled through their relationships with men, that they have no liberty to express themselves. Making her central character a witch, and a witch who is quite happy to be one, undermines centuries of male caricaturing of the unfettered desires of women as devilish. Laura cries ‘Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair’. The dullness of everyday life for women ‘settles down on one like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down […] there is a dreadful kind of dreary immortality about being settled down on by one day after another’.

Laura creates a life for herself by forsaking the things that male society would have her love: children; family; home; ancestry. She finds happiness in the countryside, in becoming a witch: ‘to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure’. The whole experience is ‘to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others’. This liberation is all the more shattering in the novel due to Warner’s careful setting of the scene. Over half the book outlines the cloying dullness of Lolly’s life before she becomes Laura again; the ‘settling down’ experienced by other women is clearly shown to us before being joyously shed. Warner celebrates the ability of the English countryside to effect a revelation in one’s self-definition. She writes in a tradition, stretching back to Rabelais, of the revolutionary spirit of carnival, but also adds to a very English way of thinking about the pagan spirit of the land. Lolly Willowes is a piece of English whimsy much like Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill or the Piper at the Gates of Dawn section of The Wind in the Willows; celebrating the raw, slightly frightening power of the country spirit. It is a deeply satisfying, sweet book, which has extremely important things to say; it is also a stylistic gem, a gentle, great novel.

Alan Sillitoe article

2006-06-21T14:30:00.000+01:00

there’s an article on Sillitoe at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1183500,00.html

sillitoe alleges that he wasn’t part of the Angry Young Man movement (he was in Mallorca), but his work definitely sits well with the work produced by the writers associated with that idea; he certainly belongs to the upsurge in working-class writing of the late 50s and 60s by both men and women.

July's column: Alan Sillitoe

2006-06-13T19:41:00.000+01:00

So whatever happened to Alan Sillitoe and all those cracking working-class writers from the late 50s and early 60s? Where is Arnold Wesker and who reads Up the Junction? Was it just a passing post-war boomtime phase that got trampled by the 60s? It isn’t just books: films by Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, the Free Cinema documentary movement, even Billy Liar languish unseen although much-loved.

TV go home

2006-06-13T19:37:00.000+01:00

this bit of cute revolutionary thought from July’s choice, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:

‘Television, he thought scornfully when she’d gone, they’d go barmy if they had that taken away. I’d love it if big Black Marias came down all the streets and men got out with hatchets to go in every house and smash all the tellies. Everybody’d go crackers. They wouldn’t know what to do. There’d be a revolution, I’m sure there would, they’d blow up the Council House and set fire to the Castle’

Lolly Willowes

2006-05-31T21:42:00.000+01:00

I have just finished my column about Warner’s Lolly Willowes. I’ll post a longer version in a couple of weeks after it is published. It really is a great novel, and deserves more attention (you can buy the latest (if 10 years old) Virago edition on Amazon, there’s a search box below, hinthint). Warner, too, is someone that deserves a whole lot more attention. She was a lesbian communist biographer poet novelist, who also wrote a guidebook to Somerset. What a great lady. Her seven novels are relatively easy to find in libraries or booksites. She also wrote a large number of short stories.

She was for a long time the lover of Valentine Ackland, a relatively unconsidered poet and another worthy of our attention. They wrote poems together, publishing Whether a Dove or Seagull in 1934 (an article about Ackland is here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1778230,00.html and one of her lovely poems is here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/poetry/story/0,,1778987,00.html).

robert mccrum

2006-05-28T12:44:00.000+01:00

Robert Mccrum has written in the Observer today about the decline of the
Great British Literary Novel
(http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1784465,00.html). There are
many things in his piece that I don't really agree with (his account of the
decline of the 'literary'/ 'English' novel in the 60s either allows Tom
Wolfe too much influence in the UK or ignores the Americans like Thomas
Pynchon and John Updike). His account of the rise of the celebrity author is
interesting. The concept that the writer is bigger than the work and that
the novel has become in thrall to the culture of celebrity is suggestive and
problematic at the same time. In particular, for this blog, it raises the
possibility of 'instant' forgotten classics, books that have mayfly lives
due to the dynamics of celebritisation (his example is Gautam Malkani's
Londonstani, hyped and paid for but quickly forgotten; you could add books
like Alex Garland's The Beach, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, DBC Pierre's Vernon
God Little, all interesting works on various levels and indicative cultural
phenomena but unlikely to last particularly, kind of Chantelle lit.).

great american novel

2006-05-28T12:24:00.000+01:00

hear some of my friends and other people I don't know talking about novels:
http://www.radioopensource.org/the-great-american-novel/

non-fiction

2006-05-28T12:17:00.000+01:00

It is interesting to think about forgotten classics that aren't novels - an
obvious one for me is drama (it is a big Shaw anniversary this year but is
anyone doing anything to celebrate him?). I was also thinking about big
non-fiction books. This might include critical academic milestones - does
anyone read F.R Leavis or G. Wilson Knight any more? I read AJP Taylor ages
ago but is he now at all important? Academia is obsessed with moving on
sharpish and I'll admit that I view anything published before 1980 with
suspicion... How about in science, where things aren't just discounted but
disproven? However, I'm more motivated to think about popular non-fiction
books, which can be extremely time-specific (the kind of equivalent of
Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, those books you come across in second hand
shops or on market stalls and realise sold millions of copies though you've
never heard of them) or just overly fashionable (will anyone understand the
fuss made of Schott's Miscellany in 10 years). There are, however, loads of
volumes of popular history and science and travel and biography and literary
criticism that have been unfairly overlooked and that we should revisit -
Antonia Fraser, Lytton Strachey, Bruce Chatwin, Pevsner, William Shirer, to
name just a few....

Sylvia Townsend Warner

2006-05-22T15:51:00.000+01:00

I'm going to be writing about Lolly Willowes (1926) for June's column; in the meantime, here is the website of the charming society dedicated to her work: http://www.townsendwarner.com/

excellent booksites

2006-05-19T18:04:00.000+01:00

bookmunch.co.uk

spikemagazine.com

go read!

The expanded version of my Time Out 'Forgotten Classics' column for May: William Somerset Maugham

2006-05-16T10:48:00.000+01:00

Forgotten Classics: W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale; or, the Skeleton in the Closet (1930)

William Somerset Maugham was the epitome of the professional writer. After the runaway success of his first novel, Lisa (1897) he would write for a living for a further 65 years. As such he is both important as much for his popularity (which was vast) as his longevity (his final book of memoirs appear in 1962); at a conservative estimate he wrote some 55 books, often two or three a year. He was also a prodigious playwright. His books were immensely popular and sold hugely; the scale of his reach as a writer is wide.

Maugham is significant because of his eye for detail, his clipped prose and his cynical, aloof authorial voice. He was criticised by the modernists yet he outlived them all to witness the end of empire and two world wars. In Cakes and Ale he says of his fictional eminent novelist Edward Driffield ‘His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work […] it was his longevity’. Maugham said that he himself was ‘in the very first row of the second raters’. Such modesty belies his ability to write directly and with such assurance. Furthermore, it is clear from Cakes and Ale that Maugham had a very sharp eye for the absurdities of English cultural life.

Cakes and Ale is a delightfully tart, meandering meditation on what it means to be an author. It is a fine novel that should be read; furthermore, Maugham’s comments on the fickleness of literary celebrity and longevity are prescient and amusing. He sees clearly that books are famous because of who tells you to like them, and that authors are ‘good’ because they are said to be.

The novel consists of two stories that are interwoven. The narrator, a minor novelist called William Ashenden, is asked to lunch by a more significant (or critically acclaimed) writer Alroy Kear. Kear has been asked to write the biography of Edward Driffield, an eminent novelist who has recently died (Driffield is generally assumed to be a portrait of Thomas Hardy, though Maugham denied this strenuously). Ashenden had known Driffield in his youth, and the occasion of the memoirs prompts him to think back to his experiences with the eminent writer and, more importantly, with his vivacious muse (and first wife) Rosie.

Driffield wrote vigorous realist novels in his youth and stuffier books in his later period, and after he stopped writing became acclaimed as the best writer in English. His status as the grand old man of English letters is mainly due to the influence of various tasteful women, and particularly his second wife. She forces him to act the part (even though he really doesn’t want to). He is banned from the local pub and forced to have dinner with wealthy aristocrats as befits his station. When he visits as part of one of these parties, Ashenden is surprised by Driffield winking at him and poking his tongue out when no-one is looking. Cakes and Ale, then, counterpoints Ashenden’s memories of the reality of events with the creation of a literary myth. Driffield’s novels have been made tasteful, and his reputation is going to be furthered by a memoir that, in Kear’s words, will be ‘like a portrait by Van Dyck, with a good deal of atmosphere, you know, and a certain gravity, and with a sort of aristocratic distinction […] a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside’. The writing, he concedes, will require ‘tact’. It is this ‘tact’ that Maugham finds contemptible. What becomes clear in the reading of the novel is that Ashenden is writing his own version of events down in order to prick the particular pompous bubble that Kear is creating for Driffield. When told that he used to sing music-hall songs Kear comments ‘After all, when you’re drawing a man’s portrait you must get the values right; you only confuse the impression if you put in stuff that’s all out of tone’.

The title of the novel demonstrates Maugham’s contempt for this obscuring of reality (and constructing a ‘tasteful’ author to worship): ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ is Sir Toby Belch’s riposte to Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Maugham uses the reference to mock a virtuous literary establishment attempting to ignore the rude reality of the working- and peasant- class writer. The ‘Skeleton in the closet’ – Rosie Driffield – represents the raucous, vital, festive spirit of England (she is something of a caricature) which is being stifled by the good taste of the contemporary critic and novelist. There is also something wistful in the writing of the novel that suggests that in looking back to former lives one realises that, yes, the festive time has been lost.

The events of Cakes and Ale are very closely related to Maugham’s own life. He was effectively an only child (his siblings were much older), brought up by his Uncle in Whitstable following the death of his father. He spent five years in London training to be a doctor. In these respects the novel is similar to Maugham’s earlier Of Human Bondage; Maugham himself is explicit about the similarities between the novels in his preface, written to answer the furore that greeted the initial publication. Cakes and Ale is not, he clearly says, about Thomas Hardy; ‘all the characters we create are but copies of ourselves’. The characters are composites, he argues, claiming that he is not attacking anyone in particular. The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that he is attacking no single figure but mocking the entire preposterous collection.

His enduring legacy is to be found in the Somerset Maugham award for new fiction.

radclyffe hall

2006-05-12T09:44:00.000+01:00

From Andy M: Oh the memories of reading, and re-reading Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Actually - the first 3rd, a fairly trad., Victorian 'country house' Bildungsroman is almost readable. It gets worse though - Id say to the point of unreadability, but it has the same sort of fascination that road crashes or surgical documentaries have. Someone was going to write the first lesbian campaigning novel; pity it's Hall. Well meaning in its day, but truly truly grotesque! Go read it.. .

Also: Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale: forced to read it by a stodgy, gout-suffering lecturer while I was at university: totally loved it! Its got - in a long segment - an entirely gripping account of the impact of the Siege of Paris.

Is it worth pondering on the 'why' of 'forgotten classics' as well as the 'what'? In Bennett's case (and vanloads of other popular late 19thC / Edwardian writers) it is the academy's obsession with so-called literary modernism (and that opens a can of class-based elitist worms!).

Time Out column, May

2006-05-11T11:39:00.000+01:00

May's Time Out Forgotten Classics column on Somerset Maugham is in this week's issue. I'll post a longer version of the column here early next week, meantime there are some thoughts on Maugham in April's archive.

sylvia townsend warner versus alan sillitoe

2006-05-10T11:55:00.000+01:00

Tough decisions about June's Time Out column: lesbian stalinist
(warner) or working class hero (sillitoe)? I'm inclined to Warner as I
think she is a great writer and I'd like to not write my first two
columns about men (that said, I'd be writing my first two columns about
writers from the late 20s/ early 30s which is similarly problematic); I
think Sillitoe is a staggering writer and deserving of great praise
(plus Saturday Night Sunday Morning can remind us that binge drinking
asbo culture isn't exactly new). Fans of Sillitoe (and indeed, Sillitoe
himself) might query whether he is a forgotten or neglected writer; I'd
argue that I teach an awful lot of students who are interested in
working-class culture, masculinity and Britishness, and few of them
have read him (although they all should).

I've also been thinking about how skewed my view of all this is,
writing from an academic perspective. I have colleagues who have read
all of Warner (and indeed who write about her), and colleagues who
spend their life working on obscure novelists from the eighteenth- to
the twentieth- centuries. Just who are we keeping these writers alive
for? (that is a rhetorical question, btw).

Finally, Adam Thorpe's new collection of short stories (Is This The Way
You Said?), out from Cape in June, has a couple of fun stories related
to this blog including 'Green Trainers', about a postgraduate toiling
to understand a long forgotten Edwardian poet, and 'Karaoke', about a
poet discovering a 'lost' Victorian novel which turns out to be simply
a tissue of classical quotations and not the 'English Proust' that he
was hoping for.

Satanic Verses

2006-05-09T17:25:00.000+01:00

I have read Satanic Verses and I loved it. I have to confess that it was not at all what I was expecting and that really it rivals Midnight's Children.... It was one of those books I thought I *should* read but not that I would actually enjoy it.

Lost Books

2006-05-05T16:24:00.000+01:00

The NY Times has a review of Stuart Kelly's 'The Book of Lost Books', which sounds good, on books lost to posteirty: 'Homer's "Margites," a humorous epic about a fool, who, in Plato's words, "knew many things, but all badly"; the Arthurian epics contemplated by both Dryden and Milton but never written; Laurence Sterne's never completed "Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy," which concludes with one of the most famous unfinished sentences in literary history ("So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre's —") ; Lord Byron's supposedly explosive "Memoirs," which his publisher, executor and biographer had burned because, as one critic put it, they were "fit only for the brothel and would have damned" the poet "to everlasting infamy"; the novel, provisionally titled "Double Exposure" or "Double Take," that Sylvia Plath was reportedly working on before her suicide in 1963.'

It's at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/05/books/05book.html?ex=1147492800&en=13837b24e08b9a0e&ei=5070&emc=eta1%22

classix nouveaux

2006-05-05T11:47:00.000+01:00

While I was on the staff at Time Out I tried to get people interested in doing a series: Time Out London Classics. We would reprint great London novels and short story collections that had fallen out of print for one reason or another. My first suggested titles included the following:

• I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond (or one of the other Factory novels)
• Robinson by Christopher Petit
• Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes (or another MacInnes novel)
• High Rise by JG Ballard
• The Body by William Sansom (also his collections of stories)
• After London by Richard Jefferies
• Vail by Trevor Hoyle

Time Out had already ventured into fiction in partnership with Penguin. Maria Lexton had edited The Time Out Book of London Short Stories. I added volumes for New York and Paris as well as London Vol 2. Then there were two volumes of Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing, published by Quartet. But, alas, no one at Penguin could be convinced that Time Out London Classics was a good idea. One or two of those books are back in print now anyway, and I have no idea if they qualify as classics. I hate the idea of a canon and would worry if a book I championed was coralled into one, but I'd rather good books be in print than available only from secondhand bookshops according to luck.

time out column

2006-05-05T10:45:00.000+01:00

The May time out 'forgotten classics' column will come out in the next week's issue, hopefully; a few days after i'll post an extended version here on the site.

In conversation yesterday a friend suggested Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for the column, on the basis that no-one read it at the time and really no one is particularly bothered with it now (especially when the earlier novels are so much better). Other suggestions I've had recently include Boris Pasternak, Carson McCullers, Edmund Crispin and Michael Arlen.

It is interesting watching people make their decisionsn and finding out what is close to their hearts.

Out of print classics

2006-04-28T15:09:00.000+01:00

I've been given a timely nudge and reminded that everything I'm talking about at the moment is unashamedly populist - ie. still in print. Any thoughts on stuff that is actually nearly impossible to find?

dead white men

2006-04-27T14:23:00.000+01:00

I've been worrying that the blog might be re-fostering a sense of the canon; ie. the idea of 'classics' is pretty dubious, politically, and the majority of writers are dead, middle-class, european white men. I guess the point is more that writers should be 'underread', rather than 'underrated'. Anyways, here are a few suggestions of anti-/ non- canonical writers or novels to supplement things:

BS Johnson, House Mother Normal
Jean Rhys, Sleep it Off, Lady/ Tigers are Better-Looking
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat
Stella Gibbons, Bassett

Persephone Books

2006-04-26T09:26:00.000+01:00

Persephone books is a brilliant shop/ website/ publishing house dedicated to reprinting forgotten 20th century classics (mainly by women). They publish writers from Noel Streatfield to Eleanor Graham. The full list of their publications is at:

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/complete_book_list.htm

unfortunately remembered novels

2006-04-25T17:11:00.000+01:00

Further to our project of unearthing unremembered and unjustly neglected books, what suggestions for books that really shouldn't be read but are?

further suggestions

2006-04-25T17:10:00.000+01:00

A few more really not particularly fashionable writers that we might revive:

George Bernard Shaw (surely due something - it is the 150th anniversary of his birth this year, is anyone celebrating?)

George Gissing

J.B. Priestley, Good Companions

Jack Common, Kiddar's Luck

HG Wells, The History of Mr Polly

GK Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill; The Man Who Was Thursday; The Club of Queer Trades

Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale

And some more...

2006-04-24T18:11:00.000+01:00

Emile Zola, Therese Raquin (in a brilliant penny dreadful 'bodice-ripper' copy)

Alan Sillitoe, Saturday and Sunday Morning (aren't Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn et al due a big revival?)

Anything by Georgette Heyer

Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie

Andre Gide, The Vatican Cellars

Edna O'Brien, Girl with Green Eyes

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (bitchy warts and all brilliance)

James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain

Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings

Other choices for columns

2006-04-24T17:58:00.000+01:00

I went home this weekend and raided my mum's mid-60s University English student bookshelf for some more top books that haven't seen the light for a while. Here are those that I came up with:

Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (Mansfield is an absolute genius)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (required reading when I was 14; post-the fall of Communism what has happened to Solzhenitsyn's reputation?)

John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner

Cesare Pavese, The Devil in the Hills

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (everyone's seen the movie and read the memoir; who actually buys the fiction?)

Edgar Mittelholzer, The Jilkington Drama

Anthony Hope, Rupert of Hentzau

Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

choices

2006-04-20T13:40:00.000+01:00

I'm now casting around for books for the June column. Favourites so far are:

Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
Sylvia Townend Warner, Lolly Willowes

maugham

2006-04-20T13:14:00.000+01:00

This month's column in Timeout (mid-May) is going to be on Maugham's Cakes and Ale (1930), a book which itself muses on the price of literary fame, the vicissitudes of being a novelist and what makes for a good writer. Maugham, as the various quotes already blogged demonstrate, muses on ideas of quality and longevity. His novelist characters (Alroy Kea, the narrator, and Edward Driffield) represent three very different types: successful (but cheerfully middling in quality); cynical and withdrawn; and eminent. Their various qualities give the lie to the fact of transcendent and uncontextualised quality - they are jobbing writers, self-conscious about their profession and in many ways mocking those (critics, readers, the reader of the novel itself) who would see more in their novels than is there.

Maugham's matter-of-fact narrator, when discussing the qualities which have contributed to Driffield's literary fame, has this to say about beauty: 'No one has been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty [...] Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore'. In saying such things he suggests that popularity and critical acclaim (and literary production) are social, cultural phenomena; books are good because we make them so, or because we impute something particular to them. In the end, they are as good or as useful to us as a glass of cold beer.

Maugham's urbane reductionism flies in the face of notions of genius and sublimity. He was a professional writer in the style of Trollope - knocking out his paragraphs with a clear sense of purpose rather than an address to higher ideals of beauty and humanist perfectibility. He was a cynic, but in realistic rather than negative fashion.

forgotten classics: Cakes and Ale

2006-04-18T23:02:00.000+01:00

another Maugham quote on 'classic' novels and the afterlife of the writer:

'The critics can force the world to pay attention to a very indifferent writer, and the world may lose its head over one who has no merit at all, but the result in neither case is lasting [...] The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the know. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen still-born from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.'

forgotten classics: Cakes and Ale

2006-04-18T11:50:00.000+01:00

from W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale (1930), probably subject of my first monthly Time Out column:

'I've been writing for thirty-five years now, and you can't think of how many geniuses I've seen acclaimed, enjoy their moment of glory and vanish into obscurity. I wonder what's happened to them. Are they dead, are they shut up in mad-houses, are they hidden in offices? I wonder if they furtively lend their books to the doctor and the maiden lady in some obscure village. I wonder if they are still great men in some Italian pension.'
'Oh, yes, they're the flash in the pans. I've known them.'
'You've even lectured about them.'

Useful websites

2006-04-12T16:53:00.000+01:00

Reprinting neglected women's fiction:
persephone.co.uk

Excellent reviews:
bookmunch.co.uk

Reprinting and reissuing excellent/ important old classics:
serpentstail.co.uk
canongate.co.uk