Reading Alan Bennett

I’m just reading Alan Bennett’s account of his relationship with his parents, ‘A Life Like Other People’s’, published in 2009. His style is unique; Radio 4, perfectly pitched, and the very essence of ‘northernness’ is in the vocabulary, the flattened vowels in the rhythm of the prose. His voice establishes an affectionate intimacy with the reader. For a homesick northerner it’s as if you’re listening to a favourite uncle, reading you a bedtime story.
I can hear the echo of my grandparents’ voices, Harry and Lizzie, born in the Irish ghettos of Carlisle and brought up with the language of their adopted country. I can still hear my grandfather say to his wife, (who is once again ‘in a bit of a state’), ‘Now then, mother....’, his tone one you would adopt for an over-excited dog, his impatience and exasperation cloaked in resignation. My grandmother wears, like Alan Bennett’s mother, a duster coat, or perhaps a little two piece from C & A. She aspired to Binns, but could rarely afford the prices. She wore glasses with a little diamante exclamation mark at the corners, and always put on a hat even if she was going across the street for a loaf of bread.
Reading Alan Bennett, I’m pitched back into my grandparents' council house on a newly built estate, a sneering teenager poking ridicule at the crocheted crinoline dolls that covered the toilet rolls. On the sideboard were strange crocheted fruit bowls which you had to soak in sugar water and then dry over a basket until they were stiff. She crocheted hats too - which were then stretched over a specially bought ‘shape’, which I think she had ‘sent off for’ as a special offer from Woman and Home magazine. She was obsessively houseproud. Mrs Bennett’s litany of buckets and cloths and mops - each with a separate purpose - was repeated in my grandmother’s house. When she bought a new sofa the plastic cover was only taken off for family ‘dos’ or when the vicar came to call. Her particular enemy was the damp - you could die, she told me, from a chill caught in an unaired bed. She once burnt my grandfather’s Sunday jacket while airing it in front of the gas fire before he put it on.
But unlike Alan Bennett’s home, theirs was a cold, loveless house. If my grandfather ever ventured to show her affection she would shrink away and say ‘Don’t be silly, Harry!’ She told my mother once, while I played on the floor, wide-eyed and all ears, that she ‘couldn’t be doing with It. I put a stop to it after our May was born.’ Sad.

Sad too, Alan Bennett’s tale of repression in post-war Leeds; family secrets that concerned - not aberrant sexuality - but mental illness and its consequences. His account of his mother’s slow slide into depression and then dementia is gentle and humorous as well as tragic.
You can get tired of his style - though this book is too short to cloy. It’s a beautifully told memoir that also gives a frank account of the autobiographical sources for his many plays, sketches and books. Like ‘Talking Heads’ it’s a monologue that reveals as much about the narrator as it does about the subject of the story.

Wallander: One Step Behind

One Step Behind, by Henning Mankell

Detective fiction is one of my favourite forms of relaxation. I love puzzles of any kind and I want to be kept guessing right to the end. I also love being taken into a new and fascinating world by the writer. I’ve read Donna Leon’s Venetian detective stories (love Venice, quite fancy Brunetti, but they’re not always well written) and I’ve read Anne Zouroudi’s Greek mysteries (brilliant on all counts), so when I caught a couple of episodes of Wallander on TV I was keen to try the books.
The hero, Kurt Wallander, is a detective with an Interior Life in the best traditions of Morse and Adam Dalgleish. Wallander isn’t just a cypher to unravel the plot for the reader. He’s overweight, drinks too much, his romantic life is a desert littered with wreckage, and he has a close, though turbulent relationship with his grown-up daughter. But he is passionate about his work.
In the novel, One Step Behind, he is tracking, and being tracked by, a psychopath, whose strange mind-set baffles police profilers, detectives and the general public. Being able to get inside the mind of a psychopath and make it believable is quite an achievement for a novelist - Patricia Highsmith did it brilliantly, and so do Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin. Henning Mankell gives a chilling portrait of a mild-mannered loner, living in a sound-proof room, leading a bizarre double life.
The writing’s good too. Sweden in the cool, almost perpetual, daylight of midsummer comes off the page so vividly you can feel the sand blowing in your face. I will be reading more Wallander mysteries and it’s also convinced me I need to read a few other Scandinavian authors too. Everyone’s talking about Steig Larsson, so he’s next on the list. Oh, and there’s a French author (female) called Fred Vargas I’m told I should try. That list should keep me relaxed for quite some time.
On the TV series - apparently Kenneth Branagh is going to be playing Wallander next, but I don’t think he’ll be as authentic as the current Swedish actor.

Eavan Boland: Women Writing Outside History

Living and writing in twenty first century Europe, it’s easy to take much for granted where the politics of women and poetry are concerned; to forget that there was a time when the two words existed across a gulf of gender prejudice and cultural assumptions. There are also, in Britain, other problems to be surmounted. As Deryn Rees-Jones writes in ‘Consorting with Angels’, ‘the legacy of British Imperialism, and the divisions and difficulties set up within notions of Britishness in relation to both Black and Asian as well as Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities’ extends far beyond the gender question, and adds another level of complexity.

Reading Eavan Boland’s account of what it was like to become a woman poet in post-war Ireland, confronting all these issues, is fascinating. She clearly felt a lack of permission to write, as a woman, about ‘the feminine’, her body, her experience, her politics. ‘I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. I became used to the flawed space between them. In a certain sense, I found my poetic voice by shouting across that distance.’ She reminds us that there was a time when female experience was considered either an unsuitable subject for a poem, or one of only minor significance - male experience was ‘universal’; female experience ‘domestic’. Boland’s volume of autobiographical essays, ‘Object Lessons’ records her struggle to make her life and her womanhood the central subject-matter of the poem. ‘I wanted there to be no contradiction between the way I made an assonance to fit a line and the way I lifted up a child at night.’

I find a lot of resonances in Eavan Boland’s poetry. I am third generation Irish - part of the Irish diaspora in England, brought up in a welter of story-telling and music, still influenced by it, still aware of the traditions, but with a strong sense of displacement. So, I find her elegiac poems of people and places fill me with a kind of cultural longing, for a history of belonging, that I can never have.

I found the first collection in a second-hand shop - The Journey, published in 1987 - containing titles such as ‘The Oral Tradition’, ‘The Emigrant Irish’, ‘The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon’. It didn’t disappoint. ‘Oral Tradition’, with its account of two women overheard telling the story of a woman who gave birth in the fields, reminded me of my childhood and the whispered conversations of adults, telling the stories of ancestors who had done forbidden things, passing the stories on like heirlooms, forming an unbroken memory line that went back two hundred years.

‘The oral song
avid as superstition,
layered like an amber in
the wreck of language
and the remnants of a nation.

... singing innuendoes, hints,
outlines underneath
the surface, a sense
suddenly of truth,
its resonance.’

I went on to buy ‘Outside History’, published by Carcanet in 1990. It contains the long poem-sequence ‘Object Lessons’, from which her prose volume borrows the title. In it she writes about writing, in ‘The Rooms of Other Women Poets’.

I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,

make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture in the way you use language.

And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of

the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.’

I was fascinated by the story of ‘The Shadow Doll’, which was created by dressmakers to show a bride what her wedding dress would look like, and was kept under a dome of glass.

‘Now, in summary and neatly sewn -
a porcelain bride in an airless glamour -
the shadow doll survives its occasion.

Under glass, under wraps, it stays
even now, after all, discreet about
visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts ...’

Other poems, such as ‘The Latin Lesson’ are directly autobiographical. Forced to learn Latin for university entrance, Boland hated it. From her tutor’s room, struggling with the complexities of the ablative absolute, ‘I could watch friends walking to and from class, carrying tennis rackets and hockey sticks, laughing and talking, free of the burdens and worries of a dead grammar. I envied them.’ But then one day, she suddenly began to understand ‘how the systems of a language which could make such constructs ... Stood against the disorders of love and history..... the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.’ She had realised the power of grammar to reveal minute shades of meaning or organise complex arguments - ‘I had never known words as power.’
Another sequence gives the collection its title, ‘Outside History’, and these poems are about female experience - particularly Irish female experience - unrecorded by history. The images sometimes seem a little cliched but the poet’s personal connection with the subject matter lifts them out of it - the elderly Achill Woman struggling up the hill with buckets of water for a young girl on holiday in the Gael-tacht, a woman sewing by candlelight with a child beside her, the white, unlucky wash of hawthorn in the hedgerows, frosty stars ‘these iron inklings of an Irish January’ that symbolise history’s own distancing from the suffering they witness.

But my favourite Boland poem comes from her 1994 collection ‘In a Time of Violence’, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize . I like it because it describes perfectly that brief pause that seems to come at dusk, when you stand in the half-dark, hearing children calling, the first bats beginning to flit across the sky and all time seems to be suspended and the ordinary seems invested with significance.

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.

Apples sweeten in the dark.

In her prose essays, Boland describes what was for her an epiphanic moment. It’s a summer evening in a Dublin suburb. ‘I am talking to a woman in the last light. I have just finished cutting the grass at the front, and we are outside, between her house and mine .... She lives across the road from me. Her children are teenagers. Mine are still infants, asleep behind the drawn curtains in the rooms upstairs. As we talk, I feel the shadow of some other meaning across our conversation, which is otherwise entirely about surface things. That it is high summer in my life, not in hers. That hers is the life mine will become, while mine is the life she has lost. And then the conversation ends. I turn to go in.’
But once inside, sitting at her table in the upstairs room, she finds herself unable to write about her experience. ‘It is in the foreground of the poem that the difficulties exist. That the poem falters. Where the women stand and talk - deep within that image is, I know, another image. The deeper image is that shadow, the aging woman, the argument that the body of one woman is a prophecy of the body of the other. Here, at the very point where I am looking for what Calvino calls "that natural rhythm, as of the sea, of the wind, that festive light impulse," the exact opposite happens. I cannot make her real. I cannot make myself real.’ The book, Object Lessons, is really Boland’s attempt to answer the question ‘why’ as well as her search for a solution and an account of the distance she has travelled between that moment and the present time.
Though declaring herself neither a ‘separatist nor a post-feminist’, she ends the book by stating that ‘the personal witness of a woman poet is still a necessary part of the evolving criteria by which women and their poetry must be evaluated. Nor do I wish to imply that I solved my dilemma. The dilemma persists; the crosscurrents continue.’
I find this very sad, and wonder how true it is that women’s poetry is still undervalued and marginalised because its subject matter is seen as ‘minor’ rather than universal. I have spent half my life chronicling the struggles of woman writers to be published and recognised, from the 17th century Duchess of Newcastle (A Glorious Fame), through Dorothy Wordworth and Sara Coleridge (A Passionate Sisterhood), to Christina Rossetti (Learning not to be First) and Catherine Cookson. Are women writers still unequal? Am I misguided to think that is all in the past? In 2010 I’m not aware of any glass ceilings as a writer. But perhaps I owe that sense of freedom to women like Eavan Boland and my other literary ancestors.

Eavan Boland, ‘Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our time’, Carcanet, 2006

New and Collected Poems, Carcanet, 2006
The Journey, Carcanet, 1987
Outside History, Carcanet, 1990
In a Time of Violence, Carcanet, 1994
Deryn Rees-Jones, ‘Consorting with Angels’ (essays on Modern Women Poets) Bloodaxe, 2005.

Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters is one of the finest contemporary novelists - whatever she writes is a pleasure to read. Her plots are intricately thought out and her characters utterly believable. The Little Stranger is not as detailed or enthralling as Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet, but still a compelling read. Hundreds Hall is the haunted grange of all our imaginations. It is the decaying relic of a dying way of life - symbolic of the fate of the landed gentry after two world wars and the rise of socialism.
Dr Faraday, the narrator, is a working class boy, raised to a higher social level by scholarships and education, but not entirely comfortable in the social no-man’s land between classes. His mother had been a nursemaid at Hundreds Hall before she married, so when he is called to attend a member of the household, he never expects to become on intimate terms with the aristocratic Ayres family.
His life becomes increasingly entwined with the neurotic, widowed Mrs Ayres and her two children - Roderick, heroically injured in the war, and Caroline - a young woman aging towards spinsterhood, trapped in her role as family lynch-pin. Sarah Waters has the ability to carry you into the minds and emotional centres of her characters. Faraday’s social ineptitude is beautifully done and his ingrained attitudes - so typical of the period - are toe-curlingly believable.
At the centre of the novel is a tale of gothic horror and psychological drama, which may or may not have a Freudian solution. It calls into question our whole attitude to mental health issues and the definition of insanity. The novel is haunted, not just by the paranormal manifestations of Hundreds Hall, but by all those eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic novels - Castle Rackrent, Northanger Abbey, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw and many others. But this is a post-modernist novel too and it turns in on itself unexpectedly, using the gothic conventions in new ways and playing on our twenty first century knowledge of psychology.
Sarah Waters is never tempted by the sentimental options. She charts the social revolution of the years immediately post-war - the birth of the NHS, the fall of the landed gentry, the rise of the middle class - and gives the story exactly the right ending. Dr Faraday’s fascination with the aristocracy echoes our own - the same fascination that funds the National Trust and keep the stately home industry going.

Faraday continues to visit the deserted hall in its progress towards ruin, hoping ‘that I will see what Caroline saw, and recognise it, as she did. If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed - realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.’

The Poetry of George Szirtes: Pt 2

The Burning of the Books and other poems

Bloodaxe, Sept. 2009

One of the sequences in this collection is called The Penig Film. Penig was a concentration camp in Hungary during World War II and George Szirtes’ mother was imprisoned there as a very young woman. On his blog, George has a photograph of her standing with one of the soldiers who liberated the camp. Although she married someone else, she named her son after this man. A fragment of film from the Penig Camp was discovered recently.

In the poem, George describes watching the film, ‘a small thing, wound down to a few/inches, running across your life on the screen’. He wonders if any of the faces on the celluloid belong to his mother.

‘And so in Penig, in the unexpected sighting
of a moment that she, who is at the centre
of this poem yet not there, lost in its low lighting,’

The poem is a dialogue with Clio, muse of history, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Goddess of Memory) here portrayed as something of a cool media babe.
..................................You are not her lover
after all, merely a figure she meets while staging
one of her periodic out-takes in an ordinary place
on cheap location.’
Like a hardened journalist, Clio ‘does not/believe in getting involved.’ The poet, the protagonist, is left to write his own script.

‘Go on working in the dark, in the long night
of the empty cinema, I’ll leave you to it now.
I must catch my beauty sleep. I have an early flight.’

The poem reminds us that History can so easily become

‘that which propriety requires, the tidy sum
of tidy greynesses in an official film, shot
by army officers on an afternoon, glum

as the century’s mood, emerging from your cot
of earth, mud, lime and bone, to rise, or be carried
to a hospital from the place Clio forgot......'

The most powerful section of the poem is the last section ‘Excuse’ where Clio considers how history can be edited like a movie to fit any particular point of view. ‘Everything’s allowed.’
.........................................We can
say what we like about the past. We can raid

its archives, find films and texts, select a span
of it, cut and re-cut, splice, add soundtrack;
we can resurrect the voice of woman and man,

slur it, dub it, subtitle, caption it, run it back
so it sounds like prophesy, use it as prologue
or epilogue, render its subtle grey as black
or white,’

The past is always ‘delayed present’. ‘The past is no excuse’.

Part of the power of the poem is in its tightly controlled structure. Like a number of the poems in this collection, it’s written in terza rima. George Szirtes - ‘Poetry without shape is not poetry’ - is a master technician, choosing to write in some of the more challenging forms, finding a framework for chaos. Meaning and structure represent ‘the triumph of civilized values over barbarity. I think here of the barbarity that overtook my parents’ generation, that is never as far from us as we believe or hope.’ Language can be used ‘to exercise a degree of control over our otherwise inexpressible, inarticulate, inchoate lives.’

‘Writing, at best,’ George writes on his blog, ‘is a wrought set of dimensions within which it is possible to live. The young poet moves from self to language, makes a self inside language. That language provides its dimensions, the dimensions within which a written self can live. And through those dimensions it begins to explore the world, which is out there and not the self alone, but the wind and the cold and the cry of animals and the whistling of the planets and the voices of others.’

Book Art and Maurice Gee: Going West

I was given two novels by Maurice Gee by my New Zealand publisher and was ashamed to confess that I hadn't ever read any of his work. I read 'Plumb' first and was knocked out by it. 'Blindsight' didn't impress me as much, but it is a brilliant thriller with a twist I didn't see coming. Now I'm going to read more of his work. Thanks to Sarah Salway for pointing me in the direction of this little film.

The Poetry of George Szirtes: No. 1

The Burning of the Books and other poems
Bloodaxe Books 2009

I’ve been a follower of George Szirtes’ blog for quite a while. I like his politics, his sense of humour, his take on history, but most of all his poetry, which has affinities with the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose collection, ‘A Part of Speech’, I’ve been re-reading alongside George Szirtes new collection ‘The Burning of the Books and other poems’.
These poems satisfy a thirst, not just for images or words that fit exactly in the mouth or in the mind, but for ideas - flexing the muscles of the intellect. This is poetry that is ‘more than autobiography’ or observation; poetry as dialogue, part of an ongoing debate between the writer and himself, the reader and the cosmos.

Beginning to read a book is rather like embarking on a voyage - with all the anticipation and anxiety of travel, and the expectation of an altered perspective when you arrive at your destination. In a poem called ‘Seeking North’ [from a sequence called ‘Northern Air - a Hungarian Nova Zembla’] the first stanza records the excitement of setting out on such a journey.
‘To set out with no compass but your nose
for the land of certainty and cool judgement
past moral latitudes, on the back of the wind,
with a plentiful supply of warm clothes
and every spiritual accoutrement
is the dream of the voyager whose mind

seeks resolutions.’

There are few resolutions in George Szirtes’ poetry, but many questions, and many journeys of exploration. Even the validity of language as a medium of communication is challenged in a number of poems. The narrator of ‘The Translators’ makes this observation:

‘Look hard into the eyes
of language and you see nothing. Only rhyme

and punctuation.’

George Szirtes is himself a translator of both prose and poetry from Hungarian to English. He knows the treacheries of language well. Part 2 of the title sequence ‘The Burning of the Books’, a poem called ‘In tall angular letters’, begins:

‘Where books are gathered there gathers also the dust
That sieves through the pores of the skin and the head,
The absolute dust of the language that falls apart
In your hands, that settles in your palm
Like a promise. Ideas are dust. Words dust.’

At first glance it seems a bleak viewpoint for a poet, but George explains more fully in an article in ‘Poetry' magazine entitled ‘Formal Wear’. ‘I cannot help feeling that the gap between signifier and signified is potentially enormous, and that the whole structure of grammar and syntax is a kind of illusion that hides this unpleasant fact from us.’

‘.....................Meaning vanishes
into night, into the vacant parishes
of the imagination, into a non-presence
that is positively terrifying.’
[The Translators]

That is the challenge that every writer has to face - wrestling with the inadequacies of language to express what we mean. As George said in his 2005 T.S. Eliot lecture,‘We realise the terrible truth about words: their arbitrariness, their hopelessness, their hollowness and lack of substance. Language, it seems, is no more than a thin layer of convention stretched over dark inchoate matter of which we know nothing except fear and desire’. But George regards poetry as ‘a healing act’ that can ‘bridge the gap between language and what happens.’

For me, as a reader, the poetry is in that space between signifier and signifed. The darkness where the magic and the mystery lie, where memory and imagination are called into play - not just the poet’s, but the reader’s own. The ‘reading’ of the poem is in that space - beyond language.

George Szirtes attributes his own preoccupation with this linguistic chasm to the way that he was abruptly ‘transplanted’ as a child. He was born in Hungary at a particularly troubled point in its history. The Hungarian uprising - a move for independence from Soviet control - was brutally suppressed by the Russians in 1956. George’s parents were among those who chose to leave before the Russian army arrived - abandoning all their possessions and walking across the border to Austria with their young children and two suitcases. They had originally intended to go to Australia, but got as far as England, where they settled. Once in England, George’s parents decided that only English should be spoken at home in order to ensure their complete assimilation.

What this meant, George touches on in his T.S. Eliot lecture. He learned the English words for ‘tea’ and ‘bread’, but they were not the same tea and bread that he had previously known. The lesson for the child was that the meaning of the word ‘bread’, is different in every culture, and it is ‘not just that you will get different kinds of bread in Germany and France but that these breads come with a complex baggage of history, culture and association’. From then on, Hungarian was a lost language, only re-discovered as an adult, along with the cultural identity it represented. Since then, George admits in an interview with a Romanian journalist, he ‘cannot write the songs of the tribe. I feel excluded from it.’ If he has a cultural identity it is wider than any single nationality. ‘I am, I think, above all, a European.’

George went to art college in Leeds and trained as a painter - a discipline that has influenced not only his approach to structure in poetry (more of this in the next post) but the way in which he observes and communicates the visual world. In a poem called ‘Lead White’, he inhabits the voice of Van Gogh:

‘Once I loved the poetry of words
but now it is the poetry of the intractable
that moves me: the hovering of birds
above a field, the windmill’s terrible
sails droning in the gale, the taste of white lead,
the narrowness of a room with its single bed,
the quarrel with a close friend,
the fury of the provincial alley
late at night, the mind’s dead end.’

But in those narrow, closed spaces, there is an epiphany where language blazes ‘with the fury of the sun’ towards the miraculous revelation - what Seamus Heaney called "that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens".

‘........................Mind grows chambers like
the heart and, all clumsiness
forgotten, learns to lilt, dance and strike
light into the world, to bless
the places where god sits: the emptiness.’

[to be continued]
Prose quotations from ‘Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern’, George Szirtes,
From ‘Poetry’ magazine, Volume 187, Number 5, February 2006
Copyright © The Poetry Foundation
And George Szirtes' TS Eliot Lecture 2005, courtesty of the Poetry Library

Book cover by Clarissa Upchurch

Author photograph - Caroline Forbes