Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly

 Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly (Penguin)

Sebastian Faulks makes a tremendous job of the memoir that he,

never wanted to write ... because I didn't think my life remarkable. 

 

Compared to whose, I wonder. It's surely well above average in terms of stories, achievement and his capacity to understand it. But, perhaps more than those things, he can write it himself rather than have it written for him like sports people and others usually have to. Always highly readable in his fiction, he is at least as much so in his life.

While it is approximately chronological, at the suggestion of his publisher, it is more thematic with the ten chapters reflecting on school, thirteen years in journalism, booze, France, war, America and family in a variety of combinations. He is aware of the privilege he came into and, in some detail about his education, that it provides no insurance against the misery of private schooling. He 'borrowed' a friend's bike and escaped on one occasion.

He was clearly one of those whose talent was such that he succeeded in school and university without having to work very hard. Without going on any ideological excursions, it is apparent that his sympathies are properly placed, understanding where the world has gone so wrong and with an appreciation of wine, books, music and cricket. In his case it was Procul Harum that were in the right place at an impressionable age for him. It is to the eternal credit of the teenage Sebastian that it mattered to him whether the greatest pop record of all time was Be My Baby by The Ronettes or Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. The passing references to an enthusiasm for golf are less excusable.

Insights into the writer's life are provided in the depth of research involved in producing the novels, not only about the wars that shaped the world in the twentieth century but also the development of psychiatry that may or may not have been related to them in understanding how humanity functions, or fails to. And also, a promotional tour of America that sounds genuinely horrific. If one thinks that producing full-length novels looks like hard work then selling them afterwards sounds worse.

Faulks is naturally funny. when suitable opportunities arise, and the count of 'laugh out loud' moments was impressive. Several, by no means on every page, but thus similar to Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, similarly thematically organized and possibly done more in the spirit of a stand-up comedian but, as a writer's account of their own life, I can't compare it with anything that I enjoyed more. 

His interests extend well into poetry as I realized some years ago when he attended a session on Thom Gunn, who is mentioned in passing, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival almost inevitably being made aware on his way in how much a reader admired his work. What must it be like being Paul McCartney if a novelist can't go out in public without being harrassed in the same way that I'd bothered Clive Wilmer outside half an hour earlier.

Things come easily to a class act. None of his books are my biggest favourites but I have plenty of them. His memoir is as good as any of them, for some reason still not threatening any all-time list but tremendously enjoyable. It is almost comparable to the music of, say, Fleetwood Mac which is often hard to fault but somehow 'middlebrow' and thus not quite eligible for top honours. But they and he did well out of what they chose to do and are unlikely to worry that they are not quite James Joyce or the Velvet Underground in my book.

What's in a Name?

 Susan Dwyer Amussen, What's in a Name? (Manchester University Press)

No historian thinks that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. The main reason, in Susan Dwyer Amussen's account is that several of his contemporaries thought he did and none doubted it and it took 150 years for anybody to think otherwise. In a book subtitled How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare one might expect a bit more than an argument that is set out in one or two pages but the rest of the text is socio-economic, theatrical and local history that is at best only very loosely required to establish that the Stratford man wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Or most of them. Not many by now dispute that there was collaboration with other writers involved.

It is interesting material and most books on Shakespeare's life necessarily include some context and background. It's not clear that knowledge of the apprentices rioting in London, for example, help us to establish that Shakespeare rather than Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe was the author of the oeuvre that bears his name. What the accumulated detail does do, more thoroughly than might be required, is show that Shakespeare, with his grammar school education, would have been perfectly capable of producing the work he did without going to university. There were others like him who, had they possessed the requisite talent, might have become similarly memorable. What is so often left out of the debate is the possibility of innate genius.

Susan writes carefully at times, like when only noting that the twins were born to Anne, but can be reduced to banality when reporting such things about London as,

Courtship, sex and marriage were critical parts of the life of the city. 

Not being a biography, the book isn't expected to cover the life in a coherent sweep but its progress surveys its trajectory, understandably concentrating more on the theatre than personal relationships. The recent claims about Anne living in London, based on a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakespaire' are treated without prejudice as being possible without proving anything for certain but she brings the possible date for that forward to as early as 1598-9 and she imagines Shakespeare travelling between London and Stratford more regularly than I do. The purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse so close upon his retirement from the theatre suggests he intended to retain business interests in London even if he did spend more time in Stratford. While all such possibilities can be considered, it's easy to get lost under a welter of such speculation when we simply don't know and probably never will.

No such biography, though, affects the authorship question. The reasons for thinking that Shakespeare wrote a vast portion of the work that is credited to him are simply stated. It is the far-fetched cases for other candidates put forward by those who think he didn't that are much more convincing that he did. Somebody wrote it all and there isn't a credible case to be made for anybody else. It is a much more unlikely story that such ideas ever gained the credence that they have- with such eminent adherents as Mark Rylance among them- but, as is credited to H.L. Mencken, the idea that one never went broke by underestimating the public is relevant once again.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has provided a well-researched, readable and possibly useful book on Early Modern England but its contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship question, while welcome, could have been presented in an essay. I'm not even sure how much of a question is left. I bought and read the book because it seemed to promise what might be some closure on the subject. Who is the gullible one now?  

 

PHAS Art Exhibition

 I'm glad I remembered to check up in time when the annual exhibition by the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society was. It was today, taking up the nave of Portsmouth Cathedral, and for the rest of the week.

Of course, as in a poetry magazine, there is plenty of work that is 'not one's kind of thing'. Most things aren't. But one reads, or attends, because there is likely to be something worth knowing about that one wouldn't have otherwise.

My first walk round made the work of Ric Robinson appear the stand outs. Three similar compositions to The Earth Dies Screaming , featured here.

That's a bit dramatic whereas another taking its title from another old pop record, Cruel Summer, might have been more muted until one realizes one doesn't want to be reminded of our 'new normal', parched summers. My favourite of what may or may not have been intended as a triptych was the other one, mostly in a blue that was nearly black and shades of black, something about not knowing about entering into the abyss. Not, as far as I know, taking its title from a piece of music but it might.

These were on sale for £600 and change. I take some convincing, especially when there was a much smaller item, something about eternal light disappearing, that was more affordable. I will have to go back and have another look.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was obvious who was Louise Griffiths-Kimber whose Preseli Hills was easily the most engaging canvas two years ago. She was kind enough to show me around her exhibits which included the Lord Mayor's Prize winner. Proper art people know their stuff. One of her pictures was of Whitby Abbey. I somehow had a feeling her favourite band would be The Cure.

 

You might go in search of art but, time and again, you return with pop music.
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Do I want this painting, for the price I think was being asked- title not properly remembered, the name of the artist so easily forgotten- I think I probably do. Partly for the colours but also for the way it's not quite abstract but only vaguely figurative. And it is gorgeously small and intelligent like the wonderful dog that was on the no. 21 bus on the way home. I'm not in a position to look after a dog but I can just about find space for one more painting.

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's been some discussion about abandoning books on the wireless in the last few days. As usual, I'd like to contribute.

The Ambassadors by Henry James was a recent abandonment for me after he had flattered with his shorter novels only to deceive as I ploughed on through some longer ones. Before that, The Letters of Basil Bunting were overtaken by more pressing concerns.

My first attempt at Proust, forty years ago, got as far as finishing vol. 1 of 3 but I returned to it in lockdown and rated it very highly indeed. Also, I went back to Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks with some success. The first book I gave up on, I think, was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky at school. I didn't pursue Bleak House at university but struggled through it thirty-odd years later. I have Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and Captain Corelli's Mandolin in common with many others as being unfinished. There is no virtue in reading things dutifully and without pleasure or understanding if you don't have to.

I don't know if I've wondered it here but I've often wondered what percentage of words ever printed are ever read. I buy The Times on Saturday and I'm sure I don't read anything like 5% of it although I read some of the crossword clues any number of times.

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The Upside-Down World is still a great book as I re-read The Best Books in the House but I suspect it's not as good as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer and so that short list might be due some amendment. Benjamin Moser features a bit more in his own book than one ideally wants and his ordering of chapters front loads his account of C17th Dutch Art with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch so that it loses some impetus, certainly with Frans Hals for who he makes a strong case but his group portraits of society men aren't anything I'd want on a wall of mine. There are, nonetheless, some very worthwhile observations on both the painters in question and art in general.

Even Vermeer might have to wait, though, because an order is due at the weekend- What's in a Name? putting together the reasons for allowing Shakespeare his own plays, the latest McEwan and the Sebastian Faulks memoir rather than the new novel. First up, I will be back on the Shakespeare trail. Dismissing the claims of Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford and the increasingly absurd list of challengers to the authorship- which is none of their faults- isn't difficult work. The hard part is ridiculing those making claims on their behalf enough to shame them into shutting up about it.

The reason for spending more than £35 on new books was to save a couple of quid postage on a battery.

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Equally absurd episodes in my recent day-to-day life have included referring to the manual to put this replacement computer together, not making much sense of it and eventually realizing it was the manual for the boiler. I'm increasingly beset by such problems when only trying to function at a basic level and get by. Perhaps I just need to concentrate harder on practicalities and not spend my time wondering if the Archduke Trio quite brings time to a standstill in the same way that the Shostakovich Viola Sonata the Schubert Quintet do.

 

But perhaps it's not all over yet. Tesco Mobile took not much interest in advising how I should download photos from the new, very basic, mobile phone to the computer. So I came home and found out for myself, following their advice to 'keep trying'. And thus now I can show you the action from the Copnor Road last Friday when I witnessed a car on fire in the morning and saw the burnt out remains in the afternoon. 

And I've been able to send a poet a picture of her poem featured on a no. 2 bus. 

679 Songs

 Playing DGBooks Radio on Spotify, as I sometimes do, it says it is now 679 songs and thus, as it has been for a long time 'over 24 hours'.

It's no rubbish. All carefully considered. I never seem to find it necessary to delete a title. Radio stations can be fairly 'niche' these days, making sure you will hear, say, Dire Straits at least three times a day and two of them will be Sultans of Swing. That failed attempt at 'cool' isn't on DGBooks Radio.

So, 679 x 3 and a half minutes, according to the calculator on the computer, makes 2376 and a half minutes. Divide that by 60 and  it makes 39.6 hours of the best possible, choice pop music. No Queen guaranteed. Tune in.

It will be sometime before it becomes my official Top 1000 but 679 tracks, none of which I see fit to delete means I'm two-thirds of the way there. I'll give it some thought. At first, thinking of it as a radio playlist, I tried not to overload it with favourite artists but if it's shifting towards a Top 1000, it will be necessary to look further into Bowie, T. Rex, Motown, the Magnetic Fields, Al Green, reggae and Northern Soul. Once one has had a thousand guesses there will not be room to say, oh, that one should have been in. There will be no prize for being no. 1001.

Is the fifteenth best track by Bowie better than the best thing Queen ever did without his help.

Yes, it is.   

Shadowy Lives

 It says at the top here, and has done for some time that,

The website is now what it has become, ... It will be about whatever suggests itself. 

I quite the way that from time to time a theme develops, rather than the mere repetition of old opinions and prejudices that have been set out several times before.

Coming to the end of Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, it is every bit as impressive as Jesus by A.N. Wilson and is doing a similar thing. Both are shedding highly informed and rational light on lives that have got out of hand in traditional re-tellings and idolatry. Germaine Greer was one who, in her life of Anne Hathaway, scorned the 'bardolaters' for who Shakespeare could do no wrong but even their devotion is paltry and half-hearted compared to that of Christians and their versions of Jesus. Wilson knows the scriptures and reads them with an alert scepticism and Duncan-Jones brings the same intelligence to her interpretation of Shakespeare. Implicit in both of their approaches is an understanding that their subjects are human. If they weren't then their work would have been less likely to be relevant. Wilson is Church of England and maybe his ex-wife was, too, but the C. of E. in recent decades has been quite liberal on belief in God and perhaps they have an inkling that gods are the product of man's imagination.

Where the tradition Sunday School Jesus was meek and mild and suffered little children to come unto him, we come away from Wilson with the impression of a firebrand preacher who wanted Jews to be better Jews, not establish his own church. He was a troublesome political figure crucified by the Roman rulers. Similarly, Shakespeare, on account of his sublime writing, was elevated to the sweet Swan of Avon who charmed everyone who met him and understood the human situation sympathetically. Such an account overlooks the litigious businessman building a portfolio of investments, a misogynist with an ongoing disgust towards women and an obsession with establishing his gentlemanly status. Both built up sizeable followings in their lifetimes while both would surely be astonished not only at their influence over 2000 and over 400 years later but also the myths and legends put about by their subsequent followers that have become so widely accepted.

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One last aspect of the KDJ book is her setting out of the last part of Shakespeare's career before retirement circa 1613. Throughout her book she has very sceptical about the success of the marriage to Anne and she is consistent in explaining that the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse with three trustees was a move to prevent the property being left to her. 

She was writing before the discovery of the letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' which has been dated to the 1600's. With William living as a 'lodger' in Silver Street from circa 1604, any credence given to that letter might need to be put nearer to 1610. The purchase of the gatehouse is not until March 1613. The incumbent there on Shakespeare's death, John Robinson, could plausibly have been in his service.

Anne being in London circa 1610 fits with the idea of some reconciliation that is reflected in the themes of the 'late plays' that were written from then onwards. But it doesn't look like such a complete reconciliation that such an asset was to be left to her. And the famous difficulties of interpreting what the bequest of the 'second best bed' in the will is meant to mean. None of which makes it impossible to form an idea of what was happening. There is no need to explain away every detail in a convoluted way and come up with a story that fits it all in for the sake of it. We don't know for sure and it's best to say as much.

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But a third title of the seven shortlisted for Best Book in the House is on a comparable theme. KDJ is quick to correct the often-heard truism that 'not much is known about Shakespeare's life'. Not enough, certainly, but quite a bit. Not all of it reliable, as in the case of Jesus Christ. But much more guesswork and assuming are needed if one wants to imagine the life of Vermeer, another raised to quasi-saintly status on the back of the tremendous legacy left in his work. Due, possibly next up, as I re-read the best books I've ever read, is Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World, which isn't a life of Vermeer but alongside Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch, he is one of the foremost in the greatest Golden Age anywhere in any genre, Dutch C17th Painting. Not everybody will agree. There is a time around 1720 when European music was doing especially well. There was 1971 when pop music was very wonderful for the most part.

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On a slightly less elevated level, I'm most gratified that my mate, Kev, has chosen my poem, Romanticism, to read at an ongoing local event where readers recite poems from memory. I said I could thus attend in support and if one was required to perform I could do Rainyday Woman which I do know. Gladly, in what is a wise guideline, one isn't supposed to do one's own poems and one hardly wants to instigate a celebration of oneself.

What I do like, though, is how people choose poems of mine, when required, that are among the best of them. Over the years that has also included The Cathedrals of Liverpool, Windy Miller and Situation. There is something reassuring about others liking the one's I like best. It would be awful if none of my favourites ever got a mention and people chose titles that, in retrospect, might have been lucky to get into print. There are a few of those.

One thing KDJ says about Shakespeare's late plays is how they are 'backward-looking', partly at his own career, like The Tempest. He was only 52 when he died but he seemed to know he had done enough. Again, not imagining myself quite in the same league, I have been spending some time reviewing the oeuvre, aged 66. Poems rarely came in battalions but single spies and they come less often than ever. But I'd rather have one worth having per year- when it used to be four- than none at all. It isn't over til it's over.    

Ungentle

 Ungentle is what one needs to be in literary studies, or anywhere else. As well as less deceived. It's exactly what Katherine Duncan-Jones is in her Ungentle Shakespeare and the book is not only well worth its place on the shortlist of Best Books in the House, it is putting up a serious challenge to her ex-husband, A.N. Wilson's Jesus to be the best book in the house.

What she brings to Shakespeare biography is 'disinterest', in the way Thom Gunn was once at pains to stress, does not mean 'not interested'. She comes with no motive or need to make Shakespeare hers or in her own image. Behind much such work is an impulse to make him like oneself - like 'happily married', 'virtuous', in line with one's own ideology- anything like that as long as one feels some kinship with the perceived greatness.

Katherine has no ulterior motive in noticing what little part women take in Shakespeare's life. She goes into great detail on many things but where many pass over the pursuit of 'armigerous status', the acquisition of a coat of arms, the issue of achieving 'gentle' status is central here. But that is almost eclipsed by how she describes his cult hero, pop star, standing among the young when at the height of his powers in the early 1600's and maybe feels that the customary tributes paid by other poets to the deceased queen and incoming king are beneath him. She is not only deeply immersed in the culture and lesser known work of the time but good enough to bring insight to bear on it.

Who knew- I didn't even though I've read this book before- that Hamlet has a companion piece in John Marston's Antonio's Revenge as well as Twelfth Night having too much in common with Marston's What You Will. There is a depth to KDJ's scholarship that is not to be found in other generally available Shakespeare biography.

She wouldn't have been aware of the discovery of a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' in London in the 1600's that has been used to claim that Anne moved to London and William lived with her there, thus establishing the happy marriage. It's not for me to dispute the provenance of the letter but it's not only Katherine that has Shakespeare lodging in Silver Street from 1604 onwards, Charles Nicholl has a whole book about the period in The Lodger. I wouldn't have thought the biggest theatrical name of the day would live with his wife in lodgings. Katherine's version of him sees him as almost itinerant in London, like a rock star on tour, while piling up assets in Stratford. 

One doesn't have to answer every question that might arise about the life but one can take the most persuasive bits of likeliness, one of which is that conjugal relations between William and Anne came to an end in the 1580's. 

If you are only going to read one book on Shakespeare's life, it ought to be this one but it might be necessary to read another one before it in order to appreciate how good it is.