Mayfield Music and Arts Festival, 28 April to 13 May, 2018; "Poems of Home and Exile"

A reminder that Jonty Driver, together with another poet, Isobel Dixon, will be reading their poems on the theme: Poems of Home and Exile at the Mayfield Festival on 10 May. The event is at 15:00 hrs in the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Mayfield. For further details click on the link below.

http://www.mayfieldfestival.co.uk/events/poems-home-exile/

March Meeting: by Bill Doherty

Novel and Screenwriting – John Howlett

On 16 March the intrepid membership of the Lit. Soc. defied the rigours of ‘the mini-beast from the east’ to hear novelist, screenwriter and playwright John Howlett discuss his work. He started with the ‘twilight zone’ – a space shared by early memories and family histories; a legacy which extended to a familiarity with and understanding of events which in some instances had even preceded his birth. This well of knowledge was deepened in later life by personal encounters -  with a taciturn head gardener in one of his first jobs in whom he succeeded in busting some dam in the psyche to release a flood of Great War reminiscence. The speaker’s own earliest memory is being carried from his attic bedroom in wartime Croydon to play with his ‘Dinky’ toys under the family’s Morrison table on the ground floor – a fortunate maternal premonition as his bedroom was damaged by a bomb. A trip to Rome in his youth was to provide a Damascene conversion to writing as his creative outlet. The ‘twilight zone’ was to be the kernel of creativity for his roman-fleuve, the six book Harry Cardwell series which opens, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in a military hospital in Italy near the end of the First World War.

One of his earliest and best-known screenplays was for the 1968 film If…,  directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell, which successfully rode the Sixties’ Zeitgeist with its portrayal of schoolboy revolt and full-scale war against the school authorities. The grit for this pearl came courtesy of his days at Tonbridge School where they prophetically branded him ‘subversive’. Howlett made an interesting observation of attitudes to different categories of creative writing in telling how Anderson felt free to unilaterally cut, splice, bend and reshape a screenplay while revering every punctuation mark in the script of a play. John continued to carry a torch for subversion with a piece on the ‘rebel without a cause’, James Dean.

Given his cosmopolitan family background, it was not surprising to hear that our speaker became a self-confessed ‘wandering minstrel’ screenwriting thoughtful, ambiguous and critically well-received TV thrillers in England, Germany and Italy. Happily ensconced in the last of these, he found his professional life disrupted by the political advent of Silvio Berlusconi who   realigned the cultural axis of Italian TV towards Football Italia  and bunga-bunga parties. In a reflective coda, our guest spoke of his personal pantheon of masters of the written word: Lorca, Pablo Neruda and T.S. Eliot. 

This absorbing account of a varied, productive and principled professional career was enthusiastically appreciated by the assembled Lit. Soc. Members.

April 2018 News

Robert Hargreaves Reading Group

There is a change in venue and time for the April meeting. Members of the group should have had a notification of this from Howard Norton.

The Rye Bookshop.

There are a few events coming up in April, Thanks to Emma for providing these details:

On Thursday 5 April at 6pm, local author Peter Davey will be launching his debut novel 'Fraud' - a pacey thriller set in the world of film and publishing.

On Saturday 14 April at 6pm, crime author Graham Minett will be giving an evening talk about his books and writing process, and signing copies of the recently released 'Anything For Her' - a thrilling page-turner perfect for fans of 'The Girl Before' and 'Lie With Me'.

And on Saturday 28 April from 10am, we'll be joined by Colin Bateman, who will be signing copies of his crime thriller 'A Dreadful Trade', set on the coastline of Kent and Sussex.

Monsieur Ka, by Vesna Goldsworthy

Ann Driver writes: “I've just finished reading Vesna Goldsworthy's latest novel, Monsieur Ka. The launch was about ten days ago. It is an enthralling, tragic yet delightful story woven around the lives of White Russian exiles, set in 1947 London. It captures the sense of post war Britain in that coldest of cold winters. Vesna has a breath of knowledge of the history and societies of the counties of Europe devastated by the war and by Stalin's terror, which enriches and informs her work.”

Poem by Jonty Driver, recently published in The Spectator

FOR THE ONE ONLY

As we walk, she says she hears

waxwing, fieldfare and redwing;

you seldom see them now, she says,

but, if you listen, you can hear them sing.

Above, the clouds accumulate

to what may yet become a storm.

The brambles stretch across the path

to slow us down.

We’re coming closer every day

to where things end, that gulping beast

which swallows everyone

as if we didn’t matter in the least. 

And who’ll go first, you or me?

Me, who worries if you go alone

to town? You, afraid I might indulge

(old fool) in this or that, too much, too soon?

Think of something else, you say, something nice.

The oaks have held their leaves

later than the ash, though colours merge –

and somewhere far away a raptor grieves.

C.J.Driver

 

(Thanks to Jonty for permission to reproduce this)

March 2018 news

Best wishes to Alan McKinna for a speedy recovery from his recent accident and subsequent surgery.


The Rye Bookshop is hosting a book launch with local crime author Chris O'Donoghue on Saturday 31st March.  The time is yet to be confirmed, but it will most probably be in the afternoon. The author will be promoting his new book "Blood on the Shrine"

Next Literary Society meeting, Friday 16 March:  Novel and Screenwriting – John Howlett

John Howlett is a novelist, biographer and writer for film, television, radio and stage.  The creator of “If”, he has recently completed the Harry Cardwell Series, six novels that follow lives through the20th century. Here is a link to his Wikipedia page, where his work is listed: CLICK HERE 
He also has a website and blog where you can find more about him and his work:  CLICK HERE

(Please note that this meeting will be followed by the Society's AGM. If you have not yet received the agenda, please contact Hilary Roome)


Thanks to Pamela Voice for drawing attention to  the following "Venice in Peril" March Lecture:
 

Alan Hollinghurst, Booker prize-winning novelist and author of the recently published, 'The Sparsholt Affair', on how Henry James wrote about, and experienced Venice, leaving us with some of the most luxuriant and evocative prose ever written about the city.

At the Society of Antiquaries, 19 March, Burlington House, London W1J 0BE. Doors open 6.30pm, lecture at 6.45. £18 for Friends, £20 others

Unfortunately, this event is already sold out, but if anyone is lucky enough to have a ticket, perhaps they could write a short review for the blog.

For more details CLICK HERE

Childhood

This was the theme of the "members' evening" at the Society's February meeting. Contributions were of varying length from Biggles and Just William to a one-liner about the complaint from the child after his first day at school that he hadn't been taught much, and would have to attend the next day. Hilaire Belloc and Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, the choice of two members), were among the other authors chosen. Below is a contribution by Kim Zanes, written for the occasion, with a rapid tour of her favourite childhood reading:

Miss B, Miss Potter, small animals, the National Trust and her rare Herdwick sheep.

The Little Prince in French and in English, something to speak

The Beano and the Dandy on Saturday morning

Swallows and Amazons imagining at playtime

Piggy on the island with the Lord of the Flies

Enid Blyton and of course, her Famous Five

The Gruffalo and all of the monsters inside

Harry Potter’s wizardly adventures, read by children worldwide

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham’s adventure surprise

Scheherazade tales for a thousand and one nights

Arabian Tales, magical carpet flights

The biggest, the first that I read, was Lord of the Rings

Alice’s adventures of wonderful things

The Jungle Book & Riki Tikki Tavi a valiant young mongoose

All the Anansi Tales no matter how crazy or obtuse

 But My favourite of all, The Tiger who came to Tea

Most of all of them I STILL, wish that had been me

Kim Zanes February 2018

"A QUESTION OF MUSIC CRITICISM" a talk by Bryce Morrison at our January meeting

Bryce Morrison is best known as a music critic and broadcaster.  But he is also a pianist, teacher, and adjudicator of piano competitions.  In the course of this multi-faceted career he has met a great many well-known people, a generous selection of whom he mentioned in the autobiographical conclusion of his talk, which focussed finally on his friendship with two pianists, the late Eileen Joyce, whose performance legacy he is intent on preserving, and Alfred Brendel, despite the latter’s acerbic opinion of composers whom Mr Morrison admires such as Mendelssohn, Fauré , Grieg (“music for chambermaids”) and Rachmaninov.

For Mr Morrison, who detests the expression “classical music”, and claims to dislike musical snobbery (a dig perhaps at his friend Brendel?), “music is about everything”, and he began his talk by citing Mendelssohn’s view that “music isn’t too vague for language; it’s too precise”.  Hence there will always be a question about music criticism. Members of an audience may well express their views about a concert they’ve just heard, for or against, but ephemerally.  Critics on the other hand publish their views, and thus expose themselves to criticism of their criticism, with subjectivity difficult to avoid.

Many writers and musicians, including Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Sibelius and Noel Coward, saw no point in criticism, while others, including D H Lawrence, T S Eliot and Dr Johnson, regarded it as indispensable, if elusive, with music criticism, in Mr Morrison’s view, the most elusive of all.  He suggests that critics should themselves be performers and should avoid criticising works that they themselves have never performed (conditions that could surely rule out much of the critical fraternity, as well as discussion of premieres?).  Music, he believes, is for ever as new as it was when it was composed; thus lofty denigration of “old hat” composers is merely snobbish and consequently worthless.

A good critic is knowledgeable, committed, enthusiastic, able to write well, with talent and understanding, and a desire to point people in the right direction rather than merely to score points.  Many pianists, obsessed with their own genius or technique, find it hard to be objective.  But there have been exceptions, all of them excellent critics, including Schumann, Barenboim, Debussy and even Liszt – and presumably Bryce Morrison, though he was modest enough not to point this out. 

Richard Thomas