"How Do We Help Writers?" Dr Alastair Niven's talk to our October Meeting

 

The healthy sceptics of the Lit. Soc. embraced the chance to test Auden’s assertion:

 "Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places"

 as the Society held its first face to face meeting for months in the unfamiliar expanses of the New Hall. Alastair Niven addressed us on the theme of helping writers, drawing on his extensive experience with the Arts Council and as a Booker Prize judge. Few expected Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten to be numbered among the most influential books in his literary life but we all had to start somewhere. Scanning the broader horizons of the British literary scene, he informed us that the U.K. had the most books published per capita (1 per 2,700) of any country in the world. 100,000 fiction works (novels, short stories) are published annually although this represents a 30% decline over the last 20 years. In our current plague years, independent bookstores have seen sales increase although the 13% increase in works of fiction has been partly offset by a decline in the non-fiction field. The plethora of publications is problematic in that many publishers cannot afford to market books. It is easier to pitch the work of glamorous, young authors. Our speaker was ambivalent about celebrity writers. While an established public profile might seem an asset, Alastair confessed that he considered recent ghosted offerings from the Clintons and Martina Navratilova as a literary nadir. Those members of the audience quietly nursing private literary ambitions would have been inspired by an unknown writer triumphing solely from word-of-mouth recommendations as in the case of Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Traditionally sales can be enhanced by the literary press e.g. The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement or the review section of the former broadsheet press although this last has been a diminishing asset in recent years. Literary prizes provide an intoxicating cocktail of publicly acclaimed merit launched on a tidal wave of favourable publicity and can transform a writer’s career. Alastair’s stints as a Booker Prize judge each involved reading between 150 and 200 novels although he admitted some judges may have been less dutiful. He made a prescient observation on the post-Booker media ubiquity of Bernardine Evaristo, nicely anticipating a cartoon in the 29 October edition of Private Eye. Evaristo was the first black woman to win the Booker although female Asian authors have had previous successes. An intriguing contrast emerged in the commercial success of two winners whose works were both set in a proletarian Glaswegian milieu. Following his 2020 Booker triumph, Douglas Stuart saw the sales of Shuggy Bain surge from 80,000 to 800,000 while James Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late only managed 40,000. Admittedly, Kelman’s uncompromising Glasgow argot offered no concessions to the mainstream Anglophone reader. In some fields, most notably the Peace Prize, the Nobel judges have made some controversial even contrarian selections and the 2021 Literature prize broke new ground as it was won by the Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the first black African winner. Somewhat embarrassingly, the last African win was the white British-Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007 (born to British parents in Iran). Although arguably a win for the global South, Gurnah’s best known work, Paradise, was published in 1995 and indeed made the Booker short list. This award followed accusations that the Nobel judges ignored the more vociferous critics of post-colonialism many of whom came from the global South.

Literary festivals, book launches and poetry readings provide platforms for publicising and selling books although sometimes mandating encounters in the farthest reaches of eccentricity. The novelist P. D. James filled a marquee with 800 people at Hay on Wye and declined any fee, requesting only a donation to The English Hymn Society. She was disconcerted to learn afterwards that the organisers’ donation was a princely £5! The author Simon Brett was left completely alone for an hour and a half in one festival hall while his organising host went for her lunch.

Our speaker’s conclusion was resolutely upbeat – there is no evidence of the imminent death of the book or of reading. In a lively Q and A session he was positive and open minded on anything that facilitated the public’s interaction with Literature, be it coffee shops in booksellers or even a McDonald’s in a public library.

 William Doherty 

 

Angel Hour, by Ciaran O'Driscoll, reviewed by Gillian Southgate

Ciaran O’Driscoll’s new collection of poetry, ‘Angel Hour’, documents the process of searching for the right words to write; this is a commonplace enough observation to make, since any good poet is embarked on that journey. But here we have the struggle persistently revealed to us, while life, everyday life with all its dramas and frustrations, goes on. ‘And the TV took it on to report the daily numbers of the stricken and the slain/and told us to wash our hands or we’d become statistics’ he says of the Covid pandemic. That remorseless reporting  enhanced ‘my noxious dreams my cancelled travel plans my fears my paranoias envies and oddities’. But when he contemplates the figure of a pot-bellied Buddha in his garden, with a perpetual cosmic laugh ‘that brings everything scuttling back into place’, it makes him understand how the chiaroscuro aspects of existence must be  balanced if quiet of mind, and freedom to let go and ‘see the light’ are to be achieved.

 In ‘Tunnels’ he says the essence of achieving equilibrium is ‘to break out to the sunlit world at the far end of despair.’ The sunlit world is elusive, but can be approached by paying homage to other poets and meeting the challenges they face in trying to express an idea, an emotion. Robert Frost’s powerful poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ has a stillness and simplicity that makes the reader feel nature writing has rarely been so distilled, and so plain. O’Driscoll examines the making of a poem so unassuming and so artless, and does it in Frost’s, and his own voices, (‘I didn’t stay with lovely, dark and deep’ ), making the reader share in the complexity of the creative process.

Often, as he has told us, the words the poet is striving for will not come. In ‘Uncreative Pages’ he plays a melodeon to aid or distract him from the elusive ‘shimmering sentence’ he is seeking. Once, he comes close to understanding how it might be mined, in the title poem ‘Angel Hour’, when on holiday, he falls into a light sleep, and a crack of thunder reveals to him a ranked file of angels standing ‘on a road of golden clouds that climbed into the sky.’ Reminiscent of the words of William Blake, they show in metaphor the process of imaginative creation, as well as that other, spiritual world transcending our corporeal desire for wine and ‘appetite’. He glimpses and comprehends how fasting opened visions for saints and martyrs of the church, revealing to them the glories of life beyond the body. When the life of the mind climbs like angels standing on golden clouds, the ‘basis of the poet’s being’ is liberated into creative action, and a ‘visceral shiver of delight’, (From ‘Dead Recital’) confirms the truth of the resulting poetry.

‘My Builder’s Opinion of Light’  is a brilliant (I’m using the word advisedly) exercise in extended metaphor, and works on every level.  The builder is both muse and imagination itself. In order to liberate the mind into creative thought, to find exactly what one is searching to say, the moment when light can be caught is critical, but constantly elusive. But it is necessary to have faith in the process: ‘Be of unspeakable cheer, all that’s serene will come from nowhere,’ the builder/creative mind advises. The poet is transmogrified into a kind of celestial farmer: ‘I see you in star-studded wellingtons, robed in a mantle of the zodiac’, but also as a harvester of ideas, words, the shapes of words, the music of words.

Being a poet is a lonely business, yet it is a business the poet has no choice but to bring alive. The natural world is an actor in this drama of creativity, and many of these poems are suffused with images of light and dark. The political, indifferent world functions both as a source of inspiration and a straitjacket for it: ‘the air ‘went the way of water, health, a place called home’. Despair is always hovering on the edge of the poet’s consciousness, and sun is sought to relieve the mood, even as he acknowledges he is ‘more of a moon man, me’. Maybe so, but there is no more honest poet than Mr. O’Driscoll. Accomplished, bringing integrity to his craft, he is a blessed inhabitant of the fortunate isles of imagination. For all who need poems in order to live, this anthology will bear reading and re-reading.

Angel Hour, SurVision Books, Dublin, August 2021. 90 pp, £10.39 at Amazon.

 

 

 

 

Vlad the Impaler and the Legend of Dracula. Talk by Patrricia Erskine=Hill, 24 September 2021

 

The LitSoc’s Covid Campaign continued with the Third Coming (courtesy of Zoom) of an  established favourite, Patricia Erskine-Hill.  Having previously entertained and educated us with analyses of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the publishing trade in the Venice of the Rinascimento, she moved to the violently contested reaches of late medieval Europe’s eastern frontier and the performatively sanguinary saga of Vlad the Impaler and the role this cultural milieu played in the genesis of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Romance, Dracula.  Accounts of Vlad’s homicidal brutality rode the wave of the early 16^th century print revolution and were Europe’s first horror-schlock best sellers. 

As the political tectonic plates of the Ottoman Empire and the Central European powers shifted uneasily in the mid-15^th century, Vlad emerged as a voivode in Wallachia (now part of Romania), an aristocratic vassal of the Ottoman Sultan.  These feudal lords considered their allegiances as fluid arrangements and were ever ready to sell their loyalty to the highest bidder.  Although remote, this corner shared with the rest of Europe a taste for grisly public executions, especially for crimes against the state.  One regional specialty had women guilty of infanticide or witchcraft placed in an open grave and then buried alive, possibly planting the seeds for later legends about the undead sallying forth from their tombs and coffins.  Vlad’s contribution to the Grand Guignol cocktail of brutality and deterrence was impalement, where a sharpened stake was driven through the victim’s trunk and then implanted in the ground thus giving them a painful three day death.  Creative variations on the theme allowed the stake to be passed from front to back of the thorax or from back to front or advanced upwards from the fundament along the vertebral column with the objective being a long, lingering death.  Stoker seized on Vlad’s patronymic Dracul (of the Dragon) as the title of his book – Dracula. Vlad was a member of the Order of the Dragon, Christian knights pledged to resist Ottoman encroachment and his battles with the Turks have made him a Romanian national hero whose violent ways are considered a necessary evil.  

Patricia claimed Clontarf-born   Stoker as a fellow alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin where he graduated with a first in   Maths and was an outstanding athlete.  Moving to London, he had a 20 year career managing both the leading actor, Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre.  In researching his first novel, he would have learnt that the vampire thread could be followed over a century of European literature and the legends waxed strongest in Transylvania, then in Northeast Hungary on the periphery of the Hapsburg lands.  He therefore moved Dracula’s castle from Wallachia to there, positioning it at the remote Borgo Pass, connecting Transylvania and Moldavia.  

The novel takes the Exeter-based solicitor, Jonathan Harker, to Castle Dracula to complete the Count’s purchase of some property in London.  Although he never visited the area, Stoker drew heavily on Baedeker guides to give detailed, realistic descriptions of the topography.  As he moves east Harker leaves modernity in his wake; after Budapest train travel gives way to coaches and harbingers of Gothic horror appear – as the coach is passed by Count Dracula on horseback a fellow traveller observes that the dead ride fast. 

Concluding his legal business at the castle, Harker then finds himself under house arrest.  Searching the castle, he finds Dracula sleeps all day in a coffin and leaves the place at night and he watches the 3 brides of Dracula devour a baby.  He effects his escape but arrives in Budapest a raving lunatic and is nursed back to health by nuns.  Bent on revenge, Dracula focuses on Lucy Westenra, a friend of Harker’s fiancée Mina, whose likeness he found among Harker’s belongings.  Having previously declared an aspiration to pass for normal and not seem a stranger in a strange land, he naturally heads for Yorkshire where the spectrum of normality is considerably wider than in the rest of England.   At Whitby, he preys on Lucy, who becomes progressively paler and weaker and bears two distinctive gashes on her throat. Following her death from serial exsanguination, Lucy joins the ranks of the vampires and Dracula begins his assault on Mina. 

In what some critics interpret as a reckoning in which Western science and organisation triumph over those ….doomed to death, though fated not to die,  an intrepid trinity of Harker, Lucy’s American fiancé Quincey Morris and the Dutch vampirologist Abraham Van Helsing range widely to hunt down and kill the vampire Lucy, the 3 brides and finally skewer Dracula himself with a cosmopolitan collection of bladed weapons  whereupon his cadaver turns to dust and his reign as the scourge of reluctant blood donors comes to an end. 

Stoker’s saga has tapped into some global subconscious nerve pathway and has inspired more than 200 films with the likes of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman playing Dracula.  In the course of this, Stoker’s hairy werewolf Dracula has morphed into what one critic has described as an archetypal fin-de-siecle European decadent, a delicate slimmed down Oscar Wilde.  Patricia declined to engage with the myriad psychological interpretations of this Gothic tale leaving Winchelsea’s necessarily silent republican minority to ponder on her revelation that Prince Charles is a significant Transylvanian landowner.

William Doherty

 

A Review of John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace at TOWNER Eastbourne, by Rosie Irvine

“The artist’s main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe, and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have made a habit of looking, of really seeing.”

These words greet the visitor who enters the gallery for this comprehensive exhibition of John Nash’s work. His achievements are displayed chronologically, although the biggest initial impact is made by his paintings from the First World War. Nash served with the Artists Rifles for 14 months from November 1916 until he became an Official War Artist early in 1918, and Over the Top, 1st Artists’ Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917, 1918 and Oppy Wood,1917. Evening, 1918 are famous paintings that recall his active service in the conflict.

John Nash was born in 1893 and grew up in Buckinghamshire with his older brother, Paul who was also an artist and probably the more famous of the two. John was self-taught, and the early landscapes shown here set the tone for his life’s work. He married Christine Kühlenthal, a fellow artist, in 1916 and continued to paint after the War and learnt the new technique of wood engraving. He was a keen plantsman and gardener, and he became an accomplished botanical artist, drawing both wild and garden flowers and providing the illustrations and dustjackets for many books at this time, a number of which are on display here.

In the Second World War he became an Official War Artist once again, along with his friend Eric Ravilious who died on service in Iceland in 1942. A work by Ravilious is displayed here, along with 2 paintings by his widow, Tirzah Garwood, painted in John’s garden. After the war, John and Christine moved to Bottengoms Farm near Wormingford in the Stour Valley in Suffolk, where they lived and worked for the rest of their lives. Nash doubted his own talents at this time, but his friend Edward Bawden wrote to encourage him: ‘Go back to the essential J.N. which is preserved in the early work and see whether some of the subsequent refinement couldn’t be discarded…in those early days you had a much more obvious interest in rhythm which nowadays is less noticeable because of the “conscience” you have for naturalistic detail.’It seems that Nash followed his friend’s advice in his Stour Valley landscapes such as The Barn at Wormingford, 1951, Winter Landscape, early 1950s and Frozen Ponds, 1953, all of which are on display here.

The Nashes travelled widely in the United Kingdom, and more rarely in Europe, and the results of these travels are also displayed, but I think it is the paintings of his own particular locality that are the most successful. John worked well into his eighties and died in 1977.

This is the first major exhibition of Nash’s work since a retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1967. A substantial biography has been published to coincide with the exhibition – Andy Friend: John Nash: the Landscape of Love and Solace 2020, Thames & Hudson Ltd. This book will enable those who are interested in John Nash’s long life and career to learn much more about him.

(The exhibition closes on 26 September)

Lucky Dip, by Richard Thomas (Austin Macauley, 2021, 291pp, £11.99) Reviewed by Hugh Arbuthnott

The title of this memoir is well-chosen. Richard was a diplomat, a dip, and although the Diplomatic Service did its best to work out career plans for its staff, circumstances and other peoples’ careers often got in the way. You put your hand into the Lucky Dip and had to accept what came out. Sometimes you were lucky, sometimes you weren’t. Richard was one of the lucky dips according to his book, happy with all the jobs he drew out of the bran tub.

 He was born in February 1938. Like many other parents who could afford it or who had the right connections, Richard’s sent him and his elder sister to Canada in 1940 to escape the bombing in England. They returned in 1944 when a long connection with West Kent and East Sussex began. His parents ran a National Association of Boys Clubs’ school in Cranbrook which trained boys in the arts and later on ran the theatre and Ellen Terry’s house at Smallhythe. Among other places in Kent and East Sussex, the family later lived in Winchelsea.

One might say that Richard’s luck started when he went to private schools and then to Merton College, Oxford. It was also his luck to be in the last cohort of young men called up for National Service in the Army where he seems not to have been overworked and was an extra in the film Tunes of Glory.  

Richard’s account of his adult experiences jump about in time which make it difficult sometimes to follow what happened when, but overall it is in chronological order. His diplomatic career started in the CRO, the Commonwealth Relations Office, later merged with the FO to become the FCO now the FCDO; the reader has to swallow alphabet soup throughout the book. It is worth the effort because his entertaining account of his life as a dip well illustrates the many jobs that dips do but also the fun and the adventures they have and the famous people they meet. Richard rightly praises his wife who, like so many dips’ wives, worked unpaid with him in his job and therefore for the British Government.

 

Richard’s jobs were in London in the CRO, then the FCO and in British Embassies and High Commissions abroad. He was in Paris as a member of the British delegation to NATO before its Council moved to Brussels to join SHAPE. He was in the High Commission in Ghana, Accra, where he married his  wife, Catherine, an Australian. When in the High Commission in India administering an aid programme, he also helped to set up schools in Bhutan. In the Embassy in Prague he formed links with opponents of the communist regime who later became the government.  When Ambassador to Iceland, he was involved with NATO again but there was a severe domestic upset when the residence butler murdered his (the butler’s) boyfriend in the residence basement and went to prison. In Sofia, also as Ambassador, his Embassy was giving practical support to Bulgaria as it became a liberal democracy after the collapse of communism. Catherine helped the many orphans left in dreadful conditions by the communist government. Richard also once had the tricky task of entertaining Robert Maxwell who had business interests in Bulgaria. His final job was as High Commissioner in a string of island mini-states in the Eastern Caribbean where he had to manage a large staff covering development and the battle against drugs gangs.

 If you wonder what diplomats do, Richard’s book will tell you at least what one of them did. But it is also full of personal details and experiences which make it lively, interesting and amusing.