There were two reasons why I set out to read the book. The first was a sense of obligation. The book was signalled for our October meeting. The second reason was much older. Heart of Darkness was a classic. It had survived for more than a century of earthtime. Such survivors are there to be studied and admired. Joseph Conrad’s reputation relies on his Polish origin and his outstanding command of the English language. That is what made him a classic. For me, his words printed on the page rose up. An impenetrable thicket redolent of cigar smoke and leather-covered easy chairs for the comfort of gentlemen in their clubs along Pall Mall.
I went in search of a first edition. The library had a handsome run of Blackwood’s Magazine. Here was a doorway to revelation.
1826 came forward in two leather-bound volumes. Two discoveries : William Blackwood published his monthly magazine in Edinburgh; it was a veritable miscellany designed to provide permanent reading material from the wider world for the benefit of Scottish gentlemen of leisure. It was avowedly political. A Whig counterblast to Tory intransigence. Huskisson and Grattan took me back to history lessons in the VIth Form. ‘First Love’ began : “I shall never forget the first time I ever drank rum-punch after having been smoking cigars.”
The two fat bindings of 1899 were tributes to increasing prosperity. William Blackwood & Sons were now of Edinburgh and 37 Paternoster Row, London. Here was John Buchan in January. Here the Heart of Darkness divided, like Gaul, in partes tres : February March April. And, on page 818, the grandiloquent exuberance of Lord Jim : “I was hindered by the oriental voice within the court-room expostulating with impassioned volubility.” Elsewhere : the Carlist cause in Spain; The Preservation of African Elephants; Californian gold discoveries; Game-fishing in the Thames; Mr Lecky on Mr Gladstone; Sir George Trevelyan as a historian; a biography of George Borrow; The Sins of Education; Christian Science ‘Quackery’; and much else besides. There was a military feel about it. Lt Gen Sir Henry Brackenbury, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., wrote at length from Salamanca; there were Lessons of Russian Aggression still to be learned; the necessity of the Boer War to be questioned; inappropriate equipment of British troops in Afghanistan to be lamented. Plus ça change .. ..
I have at last an explanation for Conrad’s thicket. The writing of fiction requires its own subset, its own particular register of the English language. It is like unto the conjuring of a magical spell designed to create that state of έκστασις [ékstasis] where the reader ‘steps aside’ from the everyday consciousness of physical reality into the metaphysical reality of the author’s original creation. I find myself unable to tune in to Conrad’s idiosyncratic wavelength. The yellow mellowness of London’s gas lighting and the swirling opacities of pea-souper fogs are but faded memories of Harcourt Street before I moved away. Coal-fired steamships and the blood red maps of Empire are no longer current currency. I wander all too easily among the unending landscapes of lo real maravilloso. Time’s wingèd chariot is standing at platform nine.
© francis cameron
oxford, 27 september 2008
Saturday 27 September 2008
BOOKS ON THE BROAD
books on the broad
On the first Monday night of the month, I go to Books on the Broad. It’s a ‘reading group’ hosted by Blackwell’s in their bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. Numbers present have varied between 12 and 20. Last night the age range began, I guess, in the mid-twenties and went upwards from there. Again I guess: probably the majority present are aged 50 or more. Men are in a minority. Just 3 or 4 of us.
The general idea is that during one month we read our ‘set book’ – it’s always a novel – and then we meet on the first Monday of the next month to talk about it. Put like that it looks a strange thing to do. I joined partly to meet a new group of people but more particularly to be led to books I otherwise might not have read. Somehow I suspect it just provides an evening’s entertainment in congenial company for some of those who attend. We meet at 6:30 with an 8 o’clock exit. I find I’m home in time to watch whatever BBC1 has on offer at 9 pm.
I ‘discovered’ the group in June, read the chosen book, and wrote a brief review which I took with me for the first Monday in July. The book was Annie Proulx : The Shipping News which I remembered from the short list for one of the literary Prizes and for a film version I’d seen on the telly a long time back. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. It seemed to me like the work of someone who’d been to a Creative Writing course to learn how to do it and then diligently applied the lessons she’d learned when she wrote her novel. I was not surprised to find I was in a minority of one so far as Books on the Broad was concerned.
On August 4th, we talked about Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction novel originally in Polish and the book of two films. Another text which didn’t particularly beguile me. Without a self-imposed obligation to read the whole thing, I would never have reached the end. I found it a monotone monologue without a beginning or an ending. It was first published in 1961 (in Poland). I found a sense of an undefined but continual threat lurking in the background and speculated that this was the very real possibility of imminent nuclear war which many people felt in the early 1960s.
And so to last night when we were assumed to be familiar with Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, her first novel (published in 1950). It’s set in southern Africa (where she lived from age 5 until 1949) and is about a youngish single women who was influenced by gossip to get married. It was a disaster which ended only when she was killed. I found the book very well written and have since read two more of hers. The Sweetest Dream (2001) and The Golden Notebook (1962). I found Golden Notebook especially good and quite unlike any novel I’d ever read before. Maybe it can go on our ‘reading list’ sometime in the second half of next year.
On the first Monday night of the month, I go to Books on the Broad. It’s a ‘reading group’ hosted by Blackwell’s in their bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. Numbers present have varied between 12 and 20. Last night the age range began, I guess, in the mid-twenties and went upwards from there. Again I guess: probably the majority present are aged 50 or more. Men are in a minority. Just 3 or 4 of us.
The general idea is that during one month we read our ‘set book’ – it’s always a novel – and then we meet on the first Monday of the next month to talk about it. Put like that it looks a strange thing to do. I joined partly to meet a new group of people but more particularly to be led to books I otherwise might not have read. Somehow I suspect it just provides an evening’s entertainment in congenial company for some of those who attend. We meet at 6:30 with an 8 o’clock exit. I find I’m home in time to watch whatever BBC1 has on offer at 9 pm.
I ‘discovered’ the group in June, read the chosen book, and wrote a brief review which I took with me for the first Monday in July. The book was Annie Proulx : The Shipping News which I remembered from the short list for one of the literary Prizes and for a film version I’d seen on the telly a long time back. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. It seemed to me like the work of someone who’d been to a Creative Writing course to learn how to do it and then diligently applied the lessons she’d learned when she wrote her novel. I was not surprised to find I was in a minority of one so far as Books on the Broad was concerned.
On August 4th, we talked about Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction novel originally in Polish and the book of two films. Another text which didn’t particularly beguile me. Without a self-imposed obligation to read the whole thing, I would never have reached the end. I found it a monotone monologue without a beginning or an ending. It was first published in 1961 (in Poland). I found a sense of an undefined but continual threat lurking in the background and speculated that this was the very real possibility of imminent nuclear war which many people felt in the early 1960s.
And so to last night when we were assumed to be familiar with Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, her first novel (published in 1950). It’s set in southern Africa (where she lived from age 5 until 1949) and is about a youngish single women who was influenced by gossip to get married. It was a disaster which ended only when she was killed. I found the book very well written and have since read two more of hers. The Sweetest Dream (2001) and The Golden Notebook (1962). I found Golden Notebook especially good and quite unlike any novel I’d ever read before. Maybe it can go on our ‘reading list’ sometime in the second half of next year.
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