A few months ago, reading had become chaotic and was less the rewarding pleasure it is supposed to be and more a forced march. It's not self-improving, there's no progrramme or worthiness to it, it's just something to enjoy so once one has to abandon one thing in favour of a higher priority, sidelining things that might never be returned to (sorry, George Gissing) orr having three on the go at once, it starts to defeat the object, even if the priority is often to report back on something new and important here.
So, back to some level of orderliness, I can returrned to the 645 pages of Elizabeth Bishoip's selected letters in between items of a more pressing nature while Hereward the Wake hangs on in there, hoping to come back into favour.
It was on page 176, November 1948, when she is 37 years old that the first reference to her heavy drinking is made. I don't want to become too voyeuristic because the value of the letters is in the insights offered into her own writing, and self-deprecation about it, and her relationships with other poets. But by 1951 it is remarkable how she is able to hold herself together and report to friends of three week binges and her five day hospitalization when clearly the literary among us are far more interested in the opportunity she had to read alongside E. E. Cummings.
But she's a doughty old bird and whether one should really be reading letters or not, they make a fine biography and only add to one's admiring of her.
Another American lady of the same generation is Carson McCullers, whose The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was a title on the C20th American reading list at University that I shouldn't have missed out in my strategy of achieving a 2:1 by reading as few books as possible. Beginning with The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, immediately impressed and I'm now wondering if there has always been a copy of the Lonely Hunter somewhere upstairs and didn't need to order another. But, something to relish and a writer who conveys most persuasively some profound humanity,
His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
While Charlotte Mew failed to impress at first, whose Collected Poems and Selected Prose I was looking at well in advance of the Julia Copus biography. One can see a kinship with Hardy's poetry and why ne would have admired hers but things have moved on a bit since then. She was on the verge of being consigned to a verdict of quaint eccentric before the story Elinor made the whole book worthwhile, a steady, mannered account of love denied and inevitable, but very convincing, sadness.
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Be that as it may, it can't be good news all the time and perhaps I was due to pay for the good time we had in Wales. It's been a bad week here in Lake Wobegon.
The TLS tells us we are all Janeite now, on her anniversary and being put on the ten pound note.Well;, we're not. I'm not anyway. I'm sure it's my fault and that with a prose style so eminently imitable, Eng Lit's answer to Tommy Cooper, she must be classic, iconic and canonical and I've missed out. I read Mansfield Park nearly forty yearrs ago, perhaps too young to appreciate its satire and ironies. On a visit to Cambridge, my friend introduced me to his best mate there who eventually struck up conversation by asking who was my favourite novelist.
- James Joyce.
He pulled a face intended to express disgust. So, out of politeness, I enquired after his and it was Jane. And that just about put paid to that. We eyed each other distrust, suspicion and possibly even contempt and I realized I might not be his favourite poet anymore.
Then I re-read 100 pages of Mansfield Park after the whole of George Eliot by way of comparison and for me there was no comparison.
So this week's TLS got filed before bedtime on the day of its arrival, couldn't even do the crossword, when it usually lastrs the weekend.
Then, having struggled heroically with my feet all week, probably something to do with new boots, I thought the least I deserved last night was a good Prom but it was John Williams' film music. While I've no objection to a certain openness to diversity in the Proms progrramme, and one of the most memorable ever was a late night Indian performance by Rajan and Sajan Misra, it would be nice if film scores, Dr. Who and other such lowbrow items could be shuffled off to Radio 2 and Alan Titchmarsh put in charge.
And I only escaped as far as the racing channel where Deauville was going to start the fightback to the position of affluence I was in this time last week except it got turned over by the shortest of short heads.
And, with the chess rating at Chess24 suddenly ordinary again having been stratospheric quite recently, things can only get better. And there's every chance they might with the arrival of a rare (for me) DVD order. Not a film but something I stumbled on that I thought I must have.
Tune in next week to hear all about it
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
