Friday Evening LitChat

The second half of the Occasional Joyce was as good if not better than the first. Being in chronological order that might be to be expected but it doesn't follow with the novels. It's not as if it should come as a surprise that he's a great essayist but you'd think he would be better known for them, as is George Orwell, and perhaps to the most thoroughgoing Joyceans he is.

His account of the poet Mangan, an early hero or role model, should really be a story in Dubliners,

He had become a mute wasted rag of a man, he ate barely enough to keep body and soul together until, one day he had a sudden bad fall.

and,

no other Irish song is as full as those of Mangan of nobly suffered misfortunes and such irreparable devastations of the soul. 

He makes Daniel Defoe the first 'English' writer on account of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the others before him being European and, whether it's 'realism' or just his tremendous intellect, I for one tend to take his word. I'm sure he's right about Dickens being good at what he does but 'hardly deserving a place among the highest' of writers and I'm glad of the account of Parnell, the political background to the novels never having been clear to me, a self-styled nationalist who brings about his own downfall.

From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer, from 1932, is fragments suddenly in the playful style of the Wake and one would gladly have more of all the things here.

I'm not sure how the shelves are going to be reorganised to bring Joyce out of the aphabetical classification of novelists to have his own section. Upstairs the likes of McEwan, Swift, Barnes, Murakami and Sebastian Faulks have theirs and downstairs the more elite group of mainly poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Edward Thomas, Auden, Gunn, Rosemary Tonks, Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare biographyhave theirs so somebody of one has biographies of their wife and daughter ought to qualify for that status.

A couple of days reading about Lucia has brought me to the brink of whatever it was that went wrong for her. It's not yet obvious why that should have happened unless it's linked to her giving up her dancing career but it's compelling stuff.

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On Wednesday night I was late for Josh Brown talking about his new book, Unjudging Love: The Enigma of Dylan Thomas'. I've only lived in Portsmouth for 40 years and so can hardly be expected to find my way around yet. Four years in the making is not bad going for something fairly comprehensive but it's possible that devotion to such a figure makes one more sympathetic than is entirely good for one.

In establishing Dylan as a committed socialist, Josh mentioned in passing that the writers of the 30's and 40's were (Auden, Eliot). Well, yes, Auden but not Eliot. South Wales has long been a Labour stronghold so there's no big surprise that Dylan would be. However, don't believe everything you're told at events like these. At the 1997 Larkin Society conference a discussion panel reflected that all the writers were right wing - Lawrence, Eliot, Pound and ultimately Larkin - and turned a blind eye to Auden, Camus, Sartre, Orwell.

I think these terms retain some meaning but as tyrannies rise and, hopefully, fall, it's not obvious it matters what their professed ideologies are or if we allocate them to a wing.

The claim that Dylan was a precursor to rap and hip-hop sounded a bit dubious. I don't dispute that rap is 'poetry' or that it has been the big thing in pop music for a long time now but with a few notable exceptions it has passed me by, 'poetry' is not necessarily a good thing and I don't know how much credit Dylan would want for it. There has been incantatory verse performance with or without Dylan Thomas or Grandmaster Flash and we should be wary of claiming things for our causes that do them not as much credit as we might think.

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Rather more on my wavelength, a few days before a trip to Soho for An Evening with Rosemary Tonks, I see that three more novels have been re-issued which must mean that The Bloater did okay at the checkout.

It's not something she'd have wanted but once you've published something, that's it, you can't unpublish it. If you think The Bloater and then The Halt During the Chase, Way Out of Berkeley Square and Businessmen as Lovers are savage and unforgiving I hope they'll get round to making Emir and Opium Fogs available too because they burn out of control.

It's not the first time I've been ahead of the wave, prompted by the first book of a revival and - I'd like to think - doing my little bit to help it along. I bought up all the Richard Yates novels well before Revolutionary Road was a film from wherever I could for whatever they cost and in due course, like Rosemary's, they were made available again. A couple of those of Rosemary's were the most I've paid for books and now they will be available for a tenner.

Not to worry. I wanted them then, not now, and there is no correlation between the price of an artefact, whether it be book, painting or recording of music and its worth. We don't concern ourselves with financial investment when it's simply the art that matters.