Editing a Bookcase - continued

I thought you'd want to know how it ended.
The bottom shelf didn't take long.
Auden took up the left-hand side with MacNeice and I kept the Classical section on the right. Dylan Thomas and some WW2 come in between, Alun Lewis the best of them. So Betjeman, of which there are several, is in behind, and then Americans - Richard Wilbur, WCW, O'Hara, Emily Dickinson, Weldon Kees, Delmore Schwartz - before some Europeans are next door to the Latin - Symborska, Heine, Baudelaire, Laforgue.
Edward Thomas stayed over on the shelves with the previous centuries, where his prose books outnumber the poetry and he sits next to Chaucer for no good reason except that that's how it happened.
I feel a sense of achievement and, when I pass that bookcase, an improved level of self-worth.
 

Editing a Bookcase

It is technically a partial retirement project, not a lockdown project, but since they have arrived together, the distinction is blurred.
In other people's houses, rather than the new cushion covers or three piece suite, it's the book shelves and record collection I'm most interested in. In mine, there are four bookcases in this back room housing the poetry books. There is no point reading any further if you don't want to know about them. The pictures celebrate a sorting out of one of them but this is a guided tour of all of them.
The most important, in many ways, has a top shelf of biographies from Wyatt to Hughes, next is the Thom Gunn shelf, then one with Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien and Rosemary Tonks, then the Philip Larkin shelf and the bottom is devoted to Shakespeare biography.
The little structure behind me is mainly non-C20th, thus Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Fulke Greville, Romantics, Victorians but I can now see that further re-organisation would not have Edward Thomas and Robert Graves there, never mind Tom Leonard.
In the far corner are anthologies, essays (Clive James, Heaney, etc) and, for some reason, the complete novels of Richard Yates. Dorothy Parker is over there with Raymond Carver's stories and Dr. Johnson. To think that I ever imagined myself a librarian looks like a disaster averted so many decades later but I know where they are is the main thing.
So, it was the three shelves of the nice, glass-fronted cabinet that I have so far sorted out the top two shelves of. It was roughly in chronological order but largely 'contemporary' but with Classical in the bottom right corner. The problem with it was that they are double parked and the big names that I'm more likely to want were at the back. Eventually, one tires of taking out handfuls of the front layer to find a Heaney volume from behind.
So the process so far has matched up such things as a separated Duhig with its kin. All the Muldoons are now together and while it is no disgrace to be on the second layer - because I bought your book and read it if you're there- you need to be considered a big star to have your books visible on the top layer. Thus, the pictures show the left-hand side with the top shelf going Copus, Motion, Lumsden, Mooney, Duffy, Armitage, Burnside, Paterson and the middle shelf going Donaghy, Heaney, Longley, Harrison, Dunn. Those familiar with Anthony Thwaite's litany poem will already be thinking of it and the mind-boggling number of fine poets there have been in recent decades. The right-hand side goes Muldoon, Mahon, Harsent, Kleinzahler with MacCaig, Hughes and Plath below.
The bottom shelf will be re-ordered over the next few days with Auden and MacNeice rightfully elbowing their way to attention. The much-admired Donald Davie's position will be interesting, as will Betjeman's, and Mina Loy's, but the tidy, scholarly Loeb editions of Ovid will retain bottom right with Catullus, Daisy Dunn and such sacred texts.
One strategy involved in this process is excused by the expediency of needing to know where to look for the books behind without removing too many of the front rank. Thus, I employed an apartheid system of putting female poets together, which is not something I wanted to do but two of Lavinia Greenlaw's are waiting to be filed there. Luckily, Elizabeth Bishop is not one of them, because she wouldn't appear in women-only anthologies and I entirely take her point. It is about the words and not about the gender but if I want a recent female poet, she's likely to be somewhere behind Derek Mahon.
I am, of course, only taking part in the new, lockdown sport of the Battle of the Bookshelves as seen whenever anybody is interviewed on the telly. Well, I'm not bad at it but, beyond grandstanding, the benefits are more likely to be looking at some of them more often, possibly moving Edward Thomas into a more appropriate place and possibly a feeling that I have put my lands in better order. On the other hand, I can't see me making use of the Dewey cataloguing index any time soon.

Desert Island Armitage

Prof. Simon Armitage was shipwrecked on another island in R4's teeming archipelago yesterday and made a tremendous job of it. It began promisingly with not quite the track one might expect from Hunky Dory but one gradually becomes aware, over the years, that the choice of records isn't the main point - it's the interview. Simon is very good at an interview and has disarmingly self-deprecated his way to poetry eminence. He still tends to present himself as Mr. and Mrs. Armitage's lad from Marsden.
As well as music by John Tavener, a poem read by Ted Hughes and some homely Yorkshire , he took the whole shebang of the OED with him,
Armitage Desert Island Discs
He has enough good stories in his repertoire that he didn't repeat any of those I've heard before. Most notably, though, it's when a poet says things that you'd say yourself that one feels some kinship.
While making the usual claims for something special about 'poetry' and its unique power, I was more with him when he gladly declared himself 'mainstream' rather than claiming some ground-breaking poetics for himself, which seems to me a mature thing to do.
While I would prefer to direct anybody to an interview with Norman MacCaig that is on You Tube, rather than be interviewed myself, Simon presented something like a list of things I would say, too.
His influential example was Hughes, as opposed to my Gunn, but the point is you probably have to have one even if you don't write much like them in the end. He also feels comfortable with poetry's minority status and says if it wasn't thus, he would most likely not be doing it. And whereas he kept his first cheque as a 'professional writer' as evidence, I photocopied mine as a momento and still cashed it.
It's worth hearing and I think the link will last forever in the BBC archive there.

Proust Diary - Nearly Halfway

It wasn't specifically a Lockdown Project but it's ideal as such and seems like it. For over 35 years I've intended to have another go at it and now, with no new books due here, I'm in Week 6. I didn't note exactly which day I started. I'm on page 500 of the 1186 of vol. 2 out of 3 of the Penguin Remembrance in the translation by Terence Kilmartin. Nearly halfway and enjoying it massively.
I always nominate Bach as the Greatest Composer, either comfortably or by a long way, and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is at least as convincingly the Greatest Novel. The Novel seems to have been at its highest point in the early C20th, with Joyce and Virginia Woolf  following at a respectful distance. I never thought I'd say that about James Joyce but Dubliners isn't a novel so it wins a different heat.
I am now beyond the point I reached on my abandoned effort in the 1980's. What I remembered of it was the long sentences, the infatuations and the Dreyfuss Affair. It's all of that but I hadn't thought it quite so brilliantly funny. And I'm better acquainted with Dreyfuss since Michael Rosen's book on Zola's part in it than I was previously, with only a largely forgotten notion of having heard of it at school. It also seems that Kilmartin's translation is almost as great an achievement as the novel itself.
While there must be some ironic distance between Proust and his character, Marcel, it is from Marcel's observations of the strata of the social life in Paris and elsewhere that so many of my memorable citations have been noted.
(Of course, I realize that anybody erudite enough to be reading this website will have read Proust as a toddler but I'm catching up.)
Not only Swann in the first section but Marcel echoing after, are readily infatuated, causing the torrential outpouring of rapture and rhapsody but it subsides as soon as their affections move elsewhere. Many of my notes are memnorable lines or passages for their use of extended metaphor but it can also be simply droll but, for thev most part, one recognizes quite how well he's noted something you knew already,
I don't know quite what went wrong, stammered the barrister who, like most liars, imagined that other people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail 
I've been there a hundred times, listening to the most unlikely stories but my list covers two old envelopes and now both sides of a folded piece of A4. Few books, when I make such notes for reviewing purposes, need more than the one envelope.
The novel doesn't have a plot as such but follows Marcel through a panoramic survey of aristocratic society and I gather that he is to become a writer and the novel is the book he writes in that meta-fictional way that we may have heard before in novels that have been written since but the well-read will be ahead of me and know that. If you haven't got round to it yet, I'm obviously recommending it as highly as any book I've ever read. I'm sure you won't regret it.
With a combination of semi-retirement and lockdown, I'm on course to read it in three months. Then I have three commentaries on it to look at to find out what I hadn't realized for myself.