Hard Lines

This is a collection of poetry and prose and drawings by unpublished authors with an introduction by Ian Dury. Although there are no author's biographies, there are pictures of the contributors on the inside cover. They all look to be in their late teens/early twenties and this is reflected in many of the compiled pieces. They represent a look at life from a young person’s perspective. There is a lot of interest in sex and in relationships and less interest in wider society or in the macro-economic environment or in the nuts and bolts of the day to day world, like what are people’s jobs and how do the bills get paid.

Many of the pieces are interesting in what they are not about rather than what they do describe. Taking it as given that the authors could write about whatever they like in whatever style they like, there is a uniformity of a somewhat downbeat tone to the proceedings. There is not much of a whiff of a Jeeves and Wooster here, nor an Evelyn Waugh. The strain is more that of George Orwell or George Gissing or Alan Sillitoe.

The settings, where these are identified, for the pieces and pictures include the bedroom, the kitchen, the canal, the dance hall. There is a focus on the humdrum and the mundane with no room for grand sentiments.

Among the pieces that made the strongest impression on me are “Teenage Poems Crumpled at the Back of My Drawer”, the title of which gives the gist, and “Death at the Dog and Duck” which is a nice arrangement of short phrases spread over the page in separate columns.

I do not know what happened to all of the contributors. Andrew Darlington, Anne Clark and Claire Dowie I have heard of subsequently. I do know very well what happened to one of the contributors because it is me. My piece closes the book, like “The Dead” closes Dubliners. That is a flippant analogy but there is a very pronounced James Joyce influence in my piece. I do not know if the other contributors got to choose what could be included but mine was an extract from a longer set of pieces and not one I would have chosen myself given the chance.

My wife pointed out to me that this book is very much of its time (it was published in 1983, although my piece dates from at least a couple of years earlier). Think Thatcher, recession, unemployment, the music of Joy Division. That is the cultural background to these pieces.

What this book also represents is something that I feel is missing from today’s generations which is a desire to actively engage in the culture. The contributors, I believe, did not see themselves as passive consumers or as distant observers of the culture. They had the desire and the means (usually in the form of photocopied fanzines) to engage in the cultural conversation and this book is just the tip of the iceberg. When you add in non-fiction fanzines and the creation of music, this type of engagement was taking place on a massive scale.

It is as a reminder of times when young people saw themselves as the creators and the curators of the culture rather than its passive consumers that this book has (small) significance. Young people wanted to be involved directly either through the creation of the work or through a critique of the results rather than through a “Wow. Cool” type post on Twitter or Facebook. This could mean that sometimes the overall quality of the pieces created could be sacrificed for the sake of immediacy of impact or for the power of verisimilitude. “I want poetry that is real” writes Andrew Darlington in his poem Manifesto. Ultimately, this book is too true to be good.

Duality in Proust

I have reached the end of Combray, the first part of Swann's Way. I wonder whether Proust is setting up a system of duality in his novel. I have already written about how there are two walks the narrator's family like to take, the Guermantes way and the Meseglise way, and how the Meseglise way and its hawthorns become associated in the narrator's mind with the person of Mlle Swann. Later he describes seeing  her Mme de Guermantes in church and associating her person with the Guermantes walk. He juxtaposes one person with the other in how he considers Mlle Swann looks at him dissdainfully while considering that Mme de Guermantes looks at him with affection. He thinks about how the sights and smells on each of the walks set him in mind of his imagining of the personalities and qualities of the two ladies. Meanwhile the narrator is pondering a future literary career for himself (and produces a tentative early text) but worries that he has nothing of substance to write about:

"suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which despite all my effort, I never managed to discover."

I wonder whether this is to be the narrator's literary purpose, to unpick meaning behind sensation, or to assign meaning to sensation since for the author they will amount to the same thing.

" I would still seek to recover my sense of them by closing my eyes, I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings."

In the course of this first part of the novel the author has travelled from an imposition of his feelings upon sensation, as when the biscuit dipped in milk transports him, to sensation as the carrier, and the protector, as well as the delivery mechanism for the feelings. He has gone from feelings originating within himself transplanted onto sensation, to sensations originating from an external stimulus imposing feelings upon him, even if he is unaware of what these feelings are. This is obscure and I am not sure a correct reading but it is how it strikes me.

"It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope that I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work. "

I wonder whether Proust is setting up his philosophic theme while detailing the narrator's struggles to identify one. This would be neat if it is indeed what he is doing.

Proust sums up by writing that the Meseglise and Guermantes 'ways' (and here he uses inverted commas around ways to make explicit the fact that they represent not just walks but types of being and types of experience) have combined in him groups of different impressions "for no reason but that they had made me feel several separate things at the same time". He foretells how this causes him problems in the future when he, for instance, wishes to re-esatablish an acquaintance without realising that the acquaintance reminds him of a hedge of hawthorns in blossom and it is the latter that he desires to experience.

"When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the 'Meseglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac trees."

In the Glassroom

This is a Roger McGough collection from 1976. The glassroom in the title refers to school. In the poem First Day at School a child wonders what school is like:
                    "What does a lessin look like?
                     Sounds small and slimy.
                     They keep them in glassrooms.
                     Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine."
There are poems about lessons, violence, being the best looking girl, football and being a hooligan.The second half contains other poems that do not coalesce around a central theme and the book ends with the prose piece Kurt, BP, Mungo and Me,

The British Library cataloguing data describes this as children's poetry. Kids should be encouraged to read it, for sure, but I did not see it as children's literature. McGough deploys his customary range of stylistic devices (puns, unreliable narrators, pithy pay-off lines, playfulness in making the text make pictures) to subjects either set in a school or, mostly, using children as protagonists but I did not detect a different tone from that used in his other works with which I am familiar. I have got his collected poems but have not read it so might change this opinion later.    

 Although I always imagine McGough reading his poems aloud in his distinctive voice, my favourite works in this book are those that rely on being experienced on the page for their full effect. Spaced-out Summer Poem is just that - a poem about summer with big spaces between all the words. Autumn Poem is spread across the page in a flying V mirroring the classic migration formation of birds. Words...Poems has gaps in the text for the reader to insert his or her choice of words or poems.

 Rhyme fans will not find much to love. The poems are mostly in blank verse and when rhymes do occur they are fairly prosaic. Partly this is part of McGough's Poet of the People schtick similar to how he will suddenly reference somewhere like Stockport and partly it is dictated by the subject matter of the poems (and to be fair sometimes the narrative voice of the poems which are often of the uneducated and dispossesed) where the grandly florid style would be inappropriate and condescending.

 The concluding text piece is an enjoyable account of three lads on a spree but constantly let down by the failings of the author (the Me of the title). Owes an obvious debt to Tristram Shandy and At-Swim-Two-Birds but nicely carried off.

 All in all, it's not Summer With Monika but what is. Not bad for £1 from Grinny charity shop.

The Joy of Books

The previous video's big brother.

Organizing the Bookcase

By way of relief, here is a fun video that is literary related.

What are you thinking of?

Progress has slowed on reading Proust. I got Anthony Horowitz's "House of Silk" for Christmas and have spent the last couple of days reading that. It is a new Sherlock Holmes story and pleasing in that it does not bring anything to the narrative not already present in Conan Doyle's original stories. It does suffer from the same problem as Doyle's own longer Holmes stories in that it is necessary to the plot for Holmes to be absent for a long stretch and the pace slacks in comaprison with when he is present. He is such a powerful engine in driving the plot forward and in maintaining the reader's interest.
Horowitz does toss in a seemingly random "the game's afoot" but steers clear of anything "elementary"; recognising, no doubt, that this remark does not feature in the original stories.
That aside, Horowitz hits his marks well with a good denouement and surprising resolution of the disparate elements. He also resists giving a revisionist version of the Holmes myth and just occasionally refers to things known only from a reading of the complete stories (such as the death of Watson's wife and Holmes' ultimate fate). I am not against a revisionist reworking of Holmes, the myth is strong enough to carry these added readings. I like both the Seven Percent Solution and They Might Be Giants, for instance. And even Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Hound of the Baskervilles. The transposition to modern times in the current BBC version is interesting, though I am not convinced that any modern Holmes would have quite so much truck with electronic media. In its essence of motive, commission and trail of evidence, crime has not changed much in 100 years. The use of DNA evidence being the biggest single change There is enough material in the stories for a gay and also a marxist reading, less so for a feminist reading, I think. Doyle steers close to social satire on occasion also. But Horowitz sets up his book as a continuation in the spirit of Doyle and maintains his consistency throughout the narrative.
I have also been watching the Basil Rathbone Holmes films which show Holmes investigating crimes in Canada, Washington DC and are mostly set in the 1940s (so Holmes on at least one occasion battles the Nazis). That none of this jars is again testimony to the elasticity of the myth. I was particularly pleased to come across my favourite Holmes moment. At the very end of "Sherlock Holmes and the Woman in Green" Watson asks Holmes "What are you thinking of?" and Holmes says "I am thinking of all the young women that can come and go in safety in the streets of London tonight". You can watch this here.

To my knowledge this exchange does not occur in the original stories and is an invention of the Hollywood scriptwriter but I think it is a highly emblematic exchange. First, Watson asks Holmes what he is thinking. This is something you would normally only ask a very close person, your spouse or partner. I have never asked a friend what are they thinking and certainly not a male friend. But Watson thinks nothing of it. Holmes' response gives us his raison d'etre and his justification for hero status. Without his being aware of why he does what he does he is no more than a highly irritating smart aleck.
I saw this film years ago on the telly and this quote stuck with me. I was delighted in the 1980s when I heard it used in the introduction to a song by the Mighty Ballistics Hi-Power called "Springheel Jack" as this brought together two of my favourite pieces of Victoriana (Holmes and the legend of Springheel Jack - what a shame the great detective never took it upon himself to investigate the latter's activities). A terrific song whose message against exploitation echoes that of Doyle and is in turn repeated by Horowitz. What a shame that nothing much seems to have changed. The song is here.

The Colour of Hawthorns

One day, the narrator and his family decide to walk down Swann's Way. The narrator hopes to catch sight of Swann's daughter, Mlle Swann, who has made an impression on him. He spots a basket and a fishing line by the lake and thinks he is about to have an encounter when "I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers".

The narrator stands there, enjoying the scent of the flowers, trying to preserve the memory of it, denying himself the scent and then returning to it with renewed vigour. Then his grandfather calls him over to have a look at a particular pink hawthorn. "High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the alter on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour; but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the quality of the hawthorn tree which, whenever it budded, whenever it was about to blossom could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone".

Suddenly, the narrator is unable to move as when a deeper kind of perception requires the participation of our whole being. He has seen a girl with red hair carrying a trowel. "I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble, and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body". Clearly, this is well overwrought for modern tastes. Proust has just described his senses of smell, taste, touch and hearing as leaning out through his eyes. He hears that the girl's name is Gilberte.