I have been reading Strike the Father Dead by John Wain. It was first published in 1962 and came to us at 199 High Road Knighton as the monthly selection from World Books in, probably, the July of 1963. I have no recollection of its contents, no memory of actually reading it in those days. That happened from time to time. My professional engagements came in fits and starts. Perhaps the book arrived during one of those gluts.
I picked it up again now because I’d often seen its title among those pointed out as part of the new wave of postwar writers collectively known as the Angry Young Men. Just how Angry and different it was, was something I wanted to find out for myself.
It is by way of being the autobiographical memoirs of three people. Alfred is a Professor of Classics at a not very well endowed provincial university. He is a widower. Eleanor is his younger sister, foster-mother to Alfred’s son Jeremy. I am immediately impressed by the very high quality of the writing. Each of the characters has an individuality which comes out quite splendidly with each of their contributions to the narrative. Albert is a survivor of the battle of Vimy Ridge. He writes with the academic precision of a man schooled in Edwardian times. Eleanor is almost a twittery type, of an era when the man was the breadwinner and the woman prepared the meals and kept the house in order. Jeremy rebels against his father’s claustrophobic regime, runs away from school, survives as a jazz pianist in wartime London. The year is 1943. The worst of the blitz is over. Flying bombs are not yet ready for their unmanned assault. Jeremy spends most of his time playing in jazz clubs. He develops a personal style leaving Trad behind but avoiding the seduction of the avowedly Modern. After the war he escapes to Paris and has considerable success along with Percy Brett, a jazz virtuoso partnering on the valve trombone. There’s more to come, but I’ll not spoil things for those who choose to engage with the book for themselves.
Observations? I did not find the kitchen sink drama I had expected. This is a cracking good tale, jam-packed with verisimilitude. No frothy lightweight entertainment by a Noël Coward or an Ivor Novello. The recesses of my mind say Balzac or even Bizet. A polished account of real people living everyday lives. If anything, I become aware of the turning of the page as generation succeeds generation. Alfred’s father enjoyed the comfortable assurance of a Victorian clergyman. Alfred himself is part of that lost generation whose mental outlook was ever conditioned by those too elderly to take up arms in 1914. Jeremy is part of the generation which rejected Winston Churchill in 1945. Harbingers, in their turn, of massive social change. And that’s about it. I must look along my shelves and see whether I still have other exemplars of that particular ambitus. I must admit, I do tend to look back (not ‘in anger’) and compare my memories with those who committed their thoughts to paper as new flowers grew from the ashes of austerity.
© francis cameron
oxford, 18 january 2009
Sunday, 18 January 2009
NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS
exercising creative imagination
I have been reading Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus which was first published, by Chatto & Windus, in 1984. It is a fantastic story. 'Fantastic' being the operative word. Let me give you some idea of how that comes to pass.
Fevvers is an aerialiste, the star of the circus. The place is London. The time : the fin de siècle decadence of Victorian England. But Fevvers is no ordinary aerialiste. She claims to have been hatched rather than born. She is a true daughter of Leda. There is no need to specify her father. Her human body has grown a veritable pair of wings. That is sufficient testimony. She flies, elegant and graceful, from high wire to trapeze and then to wheresoever she chooses.
Into her life comes Jack Walser, a young reporter originally from California. His mission : to unmask her for the fraud she is. In pursuit of this mission, he joins the circus as a clown, an august in wet white, as it sets off for Petersburg. There he is caught up in more fantastic adventures. The tiger tamer plays on a grand piano, right there in the cage, while her young female partner dances with her chosen tiger. The clowns perform their time honoured routines. The vodka flows. Disastrously.
The circus sets out on the railroad across Siberia. In the depths of winter, the train is ambushed. Blown up.
For Fevvers there are sideshows with a women's collective jailbreak, a gang of forest-dwelling male outlaws, and shelter in a desolate conservatoire of music with but one professor and no students.
For Jack Walser there is unconsciousness, separation, amnesia and eventual lodging with a Shaman where he begins to experience more than one level of absolute reality. For him there is now 'no difference between fact and fiction'. Instead there is 'a sort of magic realism'.
And there we have it. Magic realism. Lo real maravilloso. A company of writers wherein is inscribed the name Angela Carter.
It would not surprise me to find readers who take up Nights at the Circus and enjoy it simply as a story too good to be true. An escapist fantasy. Something far beyond the bounds of reality. But here's the paradox. It really is a true story. A true and faithful record of something that actually happened. Something ready to be appreciated in its true light by anyone open to receive. Here are displayed characters plot and landscapes conjured up in a reality created by the author and set down by her in writings to weave the essence of her magical spell. A magical spell ready to be unwound by all those with eyes to see and ears to hear. A silent incantation which opens the way to realities beyond reality. The words are all there. Between two covers. We have only to take them up and begin at the beginning. We shall be buffeted by clowns as they cavort. We shall smell the stench from the tigers' cage. Stand on one side as the rails buckle and the train shatters. Move with the Shaman from one reality to another. Even pause with him in the spaces between realities.
It is magic. Real magic. The magic of creative reality. Such stuff as dreams are made of as we go once more a-roving so late into the night.
© francis cameron
oxford, 5 december 2008
Saturday, 17 January 2009
the prize
I have been reading The Prize by Irvine Wallace which came to me as part of my World Books subscription in 1964.
It employs a common structure. Take half-a-dozen or so apparently unrelated people. Introduce each of them in turn, then proceed round and round with episodes in each of their stories. A crucial event brings them together in the same time and place. They interact with each other with twists and turns as the excitement builds towards the dénouement. A grand final peroration is optional. Wallace exercises this option to send a message to the wider world.
Five of the principal characters are about to become recipients of Nobel Prizes. Their backgrounds are exposed for inspection. We are introduced to the supporting cast of players. Count Bertil Jacobsson, the Assistant Director of the Nobel Foundation is the anchor man. The majority of the action takes place in Stockholm with a considerable emphasis on the names of streets, districts and buildings, as though the author is obliged to show a detailed knowledge of the locality. The year is not specified. It reminds me of those theatre programmes where the action takes place in Time : the Present. On the other hand, there is notably careful specification of the exact time of day at which each event takes place and, as we approach the crucial date of the Tenth of December, there is a growing sense of an inevitable diachronic intensity spreading out to take in events maturing more or less simultaneously in different parts of the city.
In places the writing resembles high-class journalistic reportage – as though Irvine Wallace had a file drawer neatly filled with 5 x 3 index cards queuing up, each waiting their turn to be copied into the text. As a result, I find the characters more like the contents of a collection of dossiers than lifelike beings created in the mind of the writer. As to the city itself, I am left with little more than an impression of a northern winter’s cold and darkness – quite appropriate, for this is the time of the Cold War between the Eastern Bloc and the West.
So what is the story about? I find it difficult to say. The craftsmanship of the writer is there. Certain characters express their individual thoughts in extended paragraphs but most of the time we are concerned with the interaction, the verbal and emotional duelling between the two characters temporarily occupying centre stage. The basis of this duelling is, more often than not, the unresolved sexual tensions between a man and a woman. I recall some other novels by Irving Wallace that I read in the ‘60s where the sexual element is very near the surface. In my recollection of those days, sex was something we frequently read about but seldom actually talked about – and certainly not in public. A message that seeps through from Wallace is that there are more open and enjoyable ways of sex than are commonly experienced in his home country.
I certainly enjoyed this book back then in the 1960s. Today I marvel at the craftsmanship of a best-seller writer; feel that the profusion of topographical detail was almost a requirement of the times; notice that while attitudes to sex are freely scattered, descriptions of sexual activities are almost entirely absent. Such are the fashions of passing time. I did feel a need to keep turning the pages until I reached the final page when we could almost have added that reassuring bedtime message :: and they all lived happily ever after.
© francis cameron
oxford, 17 january 2009
It employs a common structure. Take half-a-dozen or so apparently unrelated people. Introduce each of them in turn, then proceed round and round with episodes in each of their stories. A crucial event brings them together in the same time and place. They interact with each other with twists and turns as the excitement builds towards the dénouement. A grand final peroration is optional. Wallace exercises this option to send a message to the wider world.
Five of the principal characters are about to become recipients of Nobel Prizes. Their backgrounds are exposed for inspection. We are introduced to the supporting cast of players. Count Bertil Jacobsson, the Assistant Director of the Nobel Foundation is the anchor man. The majority of the action takes place in Stockholm with a considerable emphasis on the names of streets, districts and buildings, as though the author is obliged to show a detailed knowledge of the locality. The year is not specified. It reminds me of those theatre programmes where the action takes place in Time : the Present. On the other hand, there is notably careful specification of the exact time of day at which each event takes place and, as we approach the crucial date of the Tenth of December, there is a growing sense of an inevitable diachronic intensity spreading out to take in events maturing more or less simultaneously in different parts of the city.
In places the writing resembles high-class journalistic reportage – as though Irvine Wallace had a file drawer neatly filled with 5 x 3 index cards queuing up, each waiting their turn to be copied into the text. As a result, I find the characters more like the contents of a collection of dossiers than lifelike beings created in the mind of the writer. As to the city itself, I am left with little more than an impression of a northern winter’s cold and darkness – quite appropriate, for this is the time of the Cold War between the Eastern Bloc and the West.
So what is the story about? I find it difficult to say. The craftsmanship of the writer is there. Certain characters express their individual thoughts in extended paragraphs but most of the time we are concerned with the interaction, the verbal and emotional duelling between the two characters temporarily occupying centre stage. The basis of this duelling is, more often than not, the unresolved sexual tensions between a man and a woman. I recall some other novels by Irving Wallace that I read in the ‘60s where the sexual element is very near the surface. In my recollection of those days, sex was something we frequently read about but seldom actually talked about – and certainly not in public. A message that seeps through from Wallace is that there are more open and enjoyable ways of sex than are commonly experienced in his home country.
I certainly enjoyed this book back then in the 1960s. Today I marvel at the craftsmanship of a best-seller writer; feel that the profusion of topographical detail was almost a requirement of the times; notice that while attitudes to sex are freely scattered, descriptions of sexual activities are almost entirely absent. Such are the fashions of passing time. I did feel a need to keep turning the pages until I reached the final page when we could almost have added that reassuring bedtime message :: and they all lived happily ever after.
© francis cameron
oxford, 17 january 2009
Saturday, 27 September 2008
CONRAD'S THICKET
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
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
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.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
daily daily
ic swince þearle
my day begins with texts in old english
today I am absorbed in the colloquia of aelfric
he that was abbot of eynsham round about the year 1000
he set out to familiarise his trainees with the latin language
to that end he wrote a series of imaginary conversations
with local craftsmen and traders
others have transformed his latin into old english
this is the only text I know which throws light
on the ways and means of ordinary people
in reply to the question
hwaet dest þu
the inevitable reply is along the lines of
ic swince þearle
swincan is full of meanings
ic swince þearle comes across as I really do work very hard
but ic swince can also mean I struggle
and I think of myself
and my struggles with some old english writings
this week’s task has been to focus on the description of beowulf’s funeral
ic swince
I really do
I really do struggle
I diligently parse every single word
but to convey connected thought into modern speech I cannot
still less am I able to respond with lines
half lines
of rhythmical verse
even imitative alliteration eludes me
I struggle
ic swince þearle
I really do
giese leof
my day begins with texts in old english
today I am absorbed in the colloquia of aelfric
he that was abbot of eynsham round about the year 1000
he set out to familiarise his trainees with the latin language
to that end he wrote a series of imaginary conversations
with local craftsmen and traders
others have transformed his latin into old english
this is the only text I know which throws light
on the ways and means of ordinary people
in reply to the question
hwaet dest þu
the inevitable reply is along the lines of
ic swince þearle
swincan is full of meanings
ic swince þearle comes across as I really do work very hard
but ic swince can also mean I struggle
and I think of myself
and my struggles with some old english writings
this week’s task has been to focus on the description of beowulf’s funeral
ic swince
I really do
I really do struggle
I diligently parse every single word
but to convey connected thought into modern speech I cannot
still less am I able to respond with lines
half lines
of rhythmical verse
even imitative alliteration eludes me
I struggle
ic swince þearle
I really do
giese leof
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
to þam wife cwæð god
þu bist under weres onwealde
and he gewielt þe
I am at my morning exercise. I’ve made a cup of coffee and am sitting up in bed with an extract of Aelfric’s Old English translation of part of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden which I am rendering (!) into current dialogue.
Mitchell & Robinson have kindly provided alongside for comparison King James’s Authorised Version and a Latin text which I take to be Jerome’s dubious vulgar rendition. The Old English makes its point with greater fervour.
god said to the woman
you are under your man’s command
and he uses you
None of the mollycoddling flimflam from KJ’s boys ‘he shall rule over thee’.
Still less of Jerome’s ‘sub viri potestate eris et ipse dominabitur tui’, though I must admit dominabitur associated with sub viri potestate does evoke a certain kind of folksy imagery, sitting up in bed as I am illuminated by rosy-fingered Dawn’s early light.
Aelfric was a monk, Abbot of Eynsham, no less, and he really didnt want to make the Book of Genesis open to men of the common herd lest they imagine they were free to copulate, as did the patriarchs, with their sisters and daughters for the better increase of the better part of the population; nor indulge themselves with assorted concubines as well as a plethora of wives and a side order of nubile serving wenches. Nonetheless he does make a point.
Was there something about knowing which side his bread was buttered?
þu bist under weres onwealde
and he gewielt þe
I am at my morning exercise. I’ve made a cup of coffee and am sitting up in bed with an extract of Aelfric’s Old English translation of part of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden which I am rendering (!) into current dialogue.
Mitchell & Robinson have kindly provided alongside for comparison King James’s Authorised Version and a Latin text which I take to be Jerome’s dubious vulgar rendition. The Old English makes its point with greater fervour.
god said to the woman
you are under your man’s command
and he uses you
None of the mollycoddling flimflam from KJ’s boys ‘he shall rule over thee’.
Still less of Jerome’s ‘sub viri potestate eris et ipse dominabitur tui’, though I must admit dominabitur associated with sub viri potestate does evoke a certain kind of folksy imagery, sitting up in bed as I am illuminated by rosy-fingered Dawn’s early light.
Aelfric was a monk, Abbot of Eynsham, no less, and he really didnt want to make the Book of Genesis open to men of the common herd lest they imagine they were free to copulate, as did the patriarchs, with their sisters and daughters for the better increase of the better part of the population; nor indulge themselves with assorted concubines as well as a plethora of wives and a side order of nubile serving wenches. Nonetheless he does make a point.
Was there something about knowing which side his bread was buttered?
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