View from the Boundary

I've just re-read Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth. In a very competitive field that includes Atonement and On Chesil Beach, it is a strong contender for his best novel and thus also for the best British novel, of the painfully small sample that I have read, published in recent decades. How much I enjoyed it, with its continual unfolding of various duplicities, is hard to express. And then you get the last few layers removed in the final chapter.
Next up on the reading list is All That Is by James Salter, the review of which in last Saturday's Times made it sound like something very important. So, it has to follow a magnificent warm-up act and will do well to live up to both its billing and the standard that has been set.
I'll read it in book form. I don't have a kindle, i-pad or any such gadget and don't expect I ever will. It's not that I'm hanging on doggedly to tradition with a Luddite view of anything new but I simply don't like the look of those things and I do like books. Even if you can hold a vast music library, the internet and hundreds of books in your hand and take them everywhere with you, I don't seem to need to.
But again, today, I joined in a conversation about how everyone in a bar was fiddling with or gazing at one of these new pieces of digital wonderment. I had been thinking along those lines only a day or two ago. But I said, yes, but these things are only the latest vehicle for the written word. We were brought up in an age when the book was the long established medium for writing to be carried by.
How far back could we take this. Did Ancient Egyptians bemoan the new trend when some of them, possibly the younger generation, were regularly seen to be gazing at hieroglyphics with rapt attention.
'Oh, look at young Rameses, staring at those funny shapes again. They are killing the art of conversation.' The same thing presumably happened the first time anyone scratched words on a tablet of stone or, at the outset of television's first predecessor, when cavemen and women were found absent from their nuclear family activity because they were enthralled by the paintings at Lascaux.
My own next forthcoming, modest contribution to the history of the printed word will only appear in hard copy form. The Perfect Murder is possibly ready to go to the printer's now but it does at present include my entry for this year's Portsmouth Poetry Society competition that I have also sent to a magazine that will appear after the competition result has been announced. It is somehow not the protocol to publish such a poem elsewhere before those events and so we are on hold for a few months and you never know what might happen in the meantime. 

A Good Point Well Made

I'm not intending to go too far out of my way in support of the actor from Stratford as the author of the plays attributed to 'Shakespeare' because it's not my job and I don't need to.
But since I reviewed Shakespeare Beyond Doubt a few weeks ago, Bill Boyle has picked up on it on one of his Oxfordian websites here, http://everreader.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/david-green-shakespeare-beyond-doubt/
and I am grateful for his admission that he is more die-hard than I and for the references he provides.
I did just look at the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration
One of the signatories I noticed signs himself,

Mr. Wayne Loman Butts III - Baconian, and Freemason and you do have to be impressed by that as an argument.

Spoiling the Broth

I'm always interested in seeing a new assessment of the current condition of poetry. The diagnosis can be very different depending on the perspective of the author, from a eulogy to a thriving Slam scene to a lament that Milton shouldst be living at this hour.
There's a new one from Clare Pollard here, http://clarepollard.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/the-health-of-poetry/ which is in depth, with detailed analysis and from the front line.
I hope I do no injustice to it in summarizing its main points as the end of Salt publishing volumes by individuals while they concentrate on anthologies and an argument in favour of awards and subsidies not only for emerging poets but established poets, too, because a hole is created for those who emerge but find it hard to go further.
I doubt if there has been a time before when there were quite so many poets aspiring to professional or semi-professional status but I read somewhere a few years ago that if a poetry title sells 500 copies then it has done very well. There wouldn't seem to be a living wage to be earned by publishing such books which would usually be the work of a few years and even getting paid for doing readings is unlikely to raise such a poet, living by poetry alone, to the minimum wage.
A few years ago I asked on a website forum how many poetry books people owned and most had several hundred but there weren't very many of them. Not as many who would be able to say they owned a few hundred pop music CD's. The health of poetry might not be best measured in economic terms. It has been noted before that the growth of the creative writing industry has created a market in which too many find themselves qualified for top honours and there are not enough consumers to buy all of their books.
Poetry doesn't need to be a full-time job in the way that novelist or musician does. It was, through history, more often an amateur occupation undertaken by individuals who had other means of getting by. I'm sure patronage and sponsorship were welcome but hardly essential and one wonders that if a great poem needed writing if its author decided against writing it through the unlikeliness of being paid enough for it. Maybe there were masterpieces lost to economic necessity but I suspect now that more poets are producing more poems only to be disappointed that there is less reward for them than they thought. A number of writing careers among contemporary poets have begun with a couple of slim volumes but they have since written novels or work for the theatre and the greater pecuniary advantage of such a stategy encouraged them to do more.
Dr. Johnson, of course, offered the opinion that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, if not for money' but, much admired though he is, Johnson was a staunch Tory and not afraid to say so and, then as now, a Tory's primary concern is always going to be hard cash.
I'd like to suggest that the state of poetry, which is probably healthy enough at present without being a Golden Age, is better judged on whether the poetry being written is any good or not rather than how it is being published and how many people are buying it. 70's disco music was a fine, and much underestimated, genre but by far its biggest selling records were those of the Bee Gees, which would be a good place to rest my case but
Poetry is not going to stop being written because we are in terminal economic decline in these islands. There is no prospect of an age of prosperity in which no other use can be found for spare money than to give it to poets. It is remarkable how much of an industry there is in poetry now and I'm not convinced all of that is a good thing.
No, Salt isn't the first poetry list to be disbanded. Oxford Poets went several years ago and poetry magazine titles come and go in a regular cycle of new inspiration and diminishing resources.
I hope that the printed word isn't disappearing and don't believe for one minute that it is.
Not all of that is a bad thing.

Office Romance

It isn't going to be quite as prolific a year on this website as before.

The Swindon Literature Festival have stopped having big name poets that make it worth my while going there; the Portsmouth Festivities don't have anything to immediately grab my attention; it is starting to seem like more of a trek than a glimpse of glamour to go to London for a few Proms and, although I thought I might forego the Cheltenham Literature Festival this year because I'd go to the poetry conference in Manchester in the autumn, I just think, well, of course I'd love to, but do I have to.

And so Not Going Out is the new Staying In, or something like that.

What is there left to do, then.

In my booklet of 2006, Walking on Water, there was this light-hearted little tribute to two work colleagues. One of them has since moved on and bettered herself. The other one is now my new line manager. So, woe betide me.

Britten Piano Concerto/Violin Concerto

Britten, Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, Tasmin Little/ Howard Shelley/ BBC Phil/ Gardiner (Chandos)

Sometimes I'm grateful for the e-mails that Amazon send, helpfully alerting me to a new release, and at other times I'm less so. Their profiling system isn't perfect, as can be seen from some of the 'classical' items that a previous purchase has generated from their fuzzily matched recommendations, but just once or twice I have been glad to know about something among the many wild stabs they have had at guessing how they nmight sell me another unit. I have just spent a few minutes unsubscribing myself from several mailing lists that make my inbox look much more popular than I really am but, so far, Amazon have survived the cut.
I ordered this without too much scrutiny since it was advertised to me as 'Tasmin Little's new recording'. Yes, I suppose it is. But only half of it. I searched the notes in vain for where the violin part came in the Piano Concerto and, of course, there isn't one. Howard Shelley's account of it is bravura and flashy and climactic but I'm afraid the piece goes to great lengths to say not very much to me and then we are given an alternative (original) third movement and put into a less charitable mood before Tasmin comes on.
And so it was that it wasn't until the third and fourth playings of the Violin Concerto that I began to relent a little bit and gradually feel more grateful for having my attention drawn to it. The concerto still has the orchestra turned up to 9 in places but in the solo violin passages, we can hear the bleak, soulful Britten and Tasmin's sure, sensitive touch bringing it alive and one is grateful for its sotto voce ending.
The notes report some early criticism of the piece that suggested Britten was being 'too clever' and there certainly is such a thing but there is also 'too passionate' or emotiveness for its own sake. So perhaps it's a difficult balance to find to please some critics but if this concerto isn't among his best known works, it is one to return to again in future, with moments of both virtuoso and imaginative brilliance to be had regularly and throughout.
The principle to bear in mind when offered goods by mega-retailers on-line, who know they can tempt you who can buy with no more than one click of a computer device, is 'caveat emptor'. Think, think and think again. If, in olden days, you had been in a record shop and found the item in the racks, would you have immediately snatched it up and rushed to the cashier's desk. And, if you would, that's fine. But there might equally be something else that you'd like more for the same price. Luckily, I'm happy to support Tasmin in whatever she does.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press)

There are now 80 candidates for the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Edmund Campion has only one known advocate but he still counts. In the introduction to this collection of essays, Stanley Wells suggests that the introduction of each new candidate to the field mathematically reduces the chances of it being any of the others. It would have done if it were a lottery but since it is ultimately a matter of fact that has been brought into doubt and for some become a matter of conjecture, I’m not sure that it does. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s chances of being World Snooker Champion would not have been affected if I had competed for the title.

The book is motivated by a perceived recent upsurge in interest in the claims of the Earl of Oxford, Marlowe and 78 others, the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ issued by those who do not accept the Stratford-born actor as the proven author of the works and the film Anonymous. It hadn’t looked like that to me, though. I thought the absurdity of the evidence compiled by the supporters of other candidates meant that by now there was hardly a case to answer and so these assembled Stratfordians look to me a little bit paranoid in their keenness to defend a position that should be an easy win. However, they do it very well.

It is a well organized book in three parts. The first examines and puts away the imaginative but flawed testimony offered in favour of the major candidates, Bacon, Marlowe and Oxford. The second brings together a number of approaches in support of Shakespeare from Stratford, which is the more difficult part of the process. The third goes further by considering the motivations, the qualifications and the methods of the anti-Stratfordians, which is less necessary, of less significance and only really interesting in places.

It can be a difficult thing in which to maintain an even tone. Most readers of the book will come to it with an opinion more or less on one side of the argument rather than the other and so a scornful, droll or ridiculing attitude towards the opposing camp, while often entertaining, doesn’t present itself as impartial, forensic and objective and an argument isn’t won by stating that it is ‘clearly’ or ‘obviously’ the case when it needs to be demonstrably so. But it is a partisan issue and a gathering of several contributors and so there will be different levels of blasé confidence among them as well as possible minor contradictions in which, for example, some will deny it is possible to establish authorship of work by finding biographical correspondences in it and then, a few chapters later, suggest that the plays mention the references to place names not far from Stratford to show it must have been him. The Earl of Oxford might conceivably have been to Warwickshire, too, and been cognisant of some place names there. David Kathman usefully quotes T. S. Eliot,

‘having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience’.

But you can’t have it both ways and although the place names are nice anecdotal detail, they don’t stand up in court. Oxford’s more ticklish problem is having died in 1604, of course.

Being a collection of essays, the book necessarily repeats some crucial points that a single author would have needed to make fewer times. One of them is the accusation of snobbery against those who don’t believe in a provincial, non-University man who would have needed education and experience among the nobility to write such plays. It is hard to see how this central tenet of the opposition manifesto could have taken such a hold but it is as nothing compared to some of the presentations of Shakespeare in fictional accounts of his life described by Paul Franssen. By all means, there is no need to regard Shakespeare as a saint who visited this earth with a cool wit, calm temper and goodness abounding, his literary masterpieces to share with us. He was surely, above all, human, and that is how he knew. But there is no need to malign his character as a dullard, drunkard, and parsimonious wife-beater either. Genius can occur anywhere and at any time and is unlikely to be inculcated in one who doesn’t have it by sitting in classes. There was Classical education in Stratford Grammar School and nobody I know stopped reading books once they had left school (assuming that they read any in the first place). He had some business acumen, could very possibly have been a bi-sexual whose marriage was a loveless affair after the birth of his only daughter and he is likely to have taken a social drink but no amount of exaggeration of these shadowy biographical details can establish that he wasn’t a literary genius. University can do more harm than good to some people. As Carol Chillington Rutter quotes Ben Jonson, ‘A good Poet’s made as well as born’, but being born needs to come first.

Not every chapter contributes as much to the argument or the entertainment as the others. I wasn’t immediately inured of Kathleen E. McLuskie’s academic account of ‘conspiracy’ in Shakespeare’s life and one or two of the essays do look as if they were diverted to this volume and made to fit its purpose but I’m sure they are valid and worthy contributions to scholarship. At other times, though, the book provides many hugely enjoyable passages that go well beyond the requirements of nailing the argument.

Alan H. Nelson, a biographer of Oxford, treats us to a colourful summary of that life including the inadmissible evidence that Oxford returned from a trip to Italy with a choirboy, Orazio Coquo from Venice, with whom he ‘took up residence’ and that, in 1574,

Back in England, Oxford finally paid enough attention to Anne [Cecil, his wife] to get her pregnant.

 

That doesn’t prove he didn’t write Hamlet but MacDonald P. Jackson’s piece on stylometrics almost certainly does, and having once a few years ago had a sonnet attributed to Oxford in my eyeline at work for a long time for continued scrutiny, I find this forensic approach at least reasonable if not impressive. The person who wrote Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, not the author of Oxford’s sonnet, the authorship of which remains largely uncontested.

Stuart Hampton-Reeves’ crucial examination of the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ takes on reason with more reason, explaining that,

Few legal cases have been settled by recourse to radical existential doubt. The issue here is not whether there is any doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship, but whether there is any reasonable doubt.      

And so, the book progresses from a very fair assessment of the work of Delia Bacon, the American credited with beginning the debate in the mid-C19th, through Stanley Wells’ survey of direct references to William Shakespeare to 1642 to an analysis of Anonymous, the box office disaster, that the film perhaps doesn’t quite warrant. But the chapter on Shakespeare as collaborator by John Jowett seems to me as important as any because, in the unlikely event of any consensus being arrived at between these two (mostly) firmly entrenched points of view, it might be here. The idea that Shakespeare was the figurehead, the name, the stooge or the editor of a committee of writers that produced this body of work, in the same way that American television programmes like The Simpsons are made, is only a big stretch of generous effort from the widely accepted idea that Shakespeare collaborated with other writers on some plays. Thomas Middleton on Timon of Athens, George Wilkins, the brothel-keeper, on Pericles, and I can’t help but suspect that the shift from a downward-spiral of darker and gloomier themes through Hamlet and Lear to Timon could really have been halted and reversed to the magical reconciliation of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale without the intervention, or at least powerful influence of another writer, like John Fletcher. But this is a matter of degree and although research into such an area is still ongoing, I can’t see it becoming enough of a committee to satisfy those that have declared their doubt. It would, however, be somewhere to start in attempting a reconciliation in a debate that has surely got out of hand except that I’m not sure there is a will ( ! ) to do so and the industry would perhaps prefer to grind on forever.

The Declaration has apparently stalled with no significant upturn in signatories inspired by the film or any book published since its inception. But since it was an allegedly awful film and all those that wanted to sign it would have done so early on, it’s difficult to see how it could have been expected to become a juggernaut campaign and, even if it did, it doesn’t matter how many people doubt something, it still doesn’t make it untrue.

Paul Edmondson puts the finishing touches to the show with an account of recent developments in the debate, beginning with the proposition that,

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

and ending with a denial that there is a ‘Shakespeare establishment'.  

I don’t know how much better the job could have been done but I remain a little bit surprised that it was required given the lack of a candidate to replace the Stratford man’s name on those books of plays and poems. But, then again, it did cost me 18 pounds and so it served at least the purpose of relieving me of that. But it is not the Shakesperians who are keeping this authorship industry going, they are ‘left gasping in incredulity’ at some of it. One would like to think it was a comprehensive enough statement but one somehow doubts if it will be the last word.

Would that it were, Mr. Wells, would that it were.      

Michael Symmons Roberts - Drysalter

Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape)

It is so hard not to hear 'psalter' in the title of Michael Symmons Roberts' new book that I'm having great difficulty thinking of the real meaning of it as 'a dealer in drugs, dyestuffs, gums, oils, etc.' and the heavy associations are made more redolent when you notice the dedicatee is James MacMillan.
It is more than a modern day prayer book, though, if it is one at all. 150 poems of variously arranged 15 lines each make it longer than Shakespeare's Sonnets (2250 lines comapred to 154 x 14 = 2156) and it is not only noticeably thicker than most 'full- length' collections, which I might have seen defined as 60 poems somewhere, but it also offers a more comprehensive consideration of, what, the human condition or the poet's view of it than many of its peers.
Poetry at its best defies reduction to summary or a perceived set of premises and exegesis and, in many of these poems 'meaning' as such is elusive, although we can trace themes of what is pralleled with what may be, a world here and now which is also one to be transcended, a sense of times in some sort of crisis but dark times that in other contemporary poets are just that in these poems often offer the possibility of redemption and if they are quieter for the most part and less dramatic than much of MacMillan's music, one can think one is appreciating some thread of kinship between them. It will have been said of other work, I'm sure, that the 'meaning' is the poetry itself but we don't want to get too immersed in theory when it is a remarkable and hugely enjoyable book to take pleasure in for its own sake.
There are a number of groups of poems that spread throughout the book. There are Hymns to a number of cubicles, like secular confessionals, that include a photo booth, a karaoke booth, cars, a roller coaster and a ghost train. There are Portraits of the Psalmist in various guises- the old man, in mid-life, as a man in tears, in utter darkness, and, although not explicitly identified as a psalmist, a dove, that,
   does not 
sing for shattered cities, but her own
nut-hard and ever tightening heart.
And that might represent a way in to the theme of the book, a set of songs still to be sung in limited times when reasons to do so appear to be diminishing.
In Babylon echoes the sentiment in more apocalyptic circumstances but Roberts has possibly been tuned into a Gold FM radio station because,
      the songs are so old no one
will forget their tunes. Besides,
they play them all day on the radio.

String Theory describes a forlorn 'scrap of balloon' hanging from the ceiling of a closed-down office, from a past works party, that represents a barometer of the economy, the culture or zeitgest. He is a commentator on and observer of detail like that before he is meditational.
In For Want of a Leap Second, time isn't quite a good enough measure of itself and there are fractional, microscopic stallings such as 'the kiss that stopped at pout'.
The book balances on its dualism of irony and mysticism, the one needing the other, the psalter heard in its title playing off against the dubious peddlar of potions, the poet selling an intoxicant or remedy in his songs, its import fugitive but there somewhere time and again..