What is Poetry

There might not be much new in this that hasn't been co-opted by me before but the opportunity arises again from behind-the-scenes discussions and another of my several truisms is that poets repeat themselves more after the age of 60, so I'm allowed to.

Reduced to about 1500 words, it just about fits in here. I'd like to find a better title for it and will return to amend that if and when I do. The definition might be underwhelming to those who think 'poetry' is surely more than that but not all defintions are as good as the one I once found of 'kangaroo' that said it was an antipodean marsupial that proceeded in a series of flying bounds. 

I am increasingly persuaded by the implicit suggestion that poetry might be beyond us or a figment of our imagination by the aside in Sean O'Brien's novel, 'Afterlife', in which the tragic superstar poet of her generation, Jane Jarmain, is said to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible' which I'm glad to be able to recycle again now.

So, to complete my full repertoire of poetry catchphrases, which is also lifted from elsewhere - All you have to be is any good.

--

My first meeting with the local poetry group here was in 1982. I’ve been a casual member with varying levels of attendance or excuses not to ever since. I’d seen it listed on their programme and the subject, What is Poetry?, was very much the sort of subject I’d have enjoyed at university where I’d finished the year before, the Aesthetics course with Colin Lyas having been a favourite.

The discussion was well-intentioned with dictionary definitions about ‘craft’, the idea of it being a ‘heightened form of language’, use of metaphor, alliteration and rhyme until eventually someone read some Byron and compared it with some T.S. Eliot, the implication being that Byron was poetry and Eliot wasn’t. I sat quietly and listened, not wanting to sound either too clever or say anything too opinionated among people I didn’t know, but, when the opportunity arose at the end, as a sort of summing up, I observed that much of what had been said related to the difference between good poetry and bad rather than what was poetry and what was not. 

It’s not a pejorative term that confers approval. Poetry can be bad as well as good and much of it is. Poetry can’t be assumed to be innately a good thing. 

At the time my own definition might have been that a poem was a ‘verbal construct’, which it usually is, but so is anything else made of words and so it doesn’t serve the function of delineating poetry from other writing. 

I can’t now remember how many of the pronouncements on the subject made by famous poets were quoted, if any.

Aristotle is a good place to start, whose digressions are a bit long for inclusion in a dictionary, 

Aristotle 

Certainly, poetry doesn’t have to deal with actual things but it can if it wants to. Had he known about photography, he might have compared it with painting and said that poetry is like painting in that it imbues its subject with something of the artist’s feelings about it.

In no particular order, Wordsworth’s verdict was that, 

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Shelley considered poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’; Coleridge has, ‘Poetry; the best words in the best order’, Auden offers ‘memorable speech’, Carl Sandburg says, 

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. 

Which is more like a poem than a definition of one.

I’m glad I’m checking these as I go because I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that it was Ezra Pound that said ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, which is one of the more useful contributions, but it was Robert Frost. Pound’s ‘poetry is news that stays news’ isn’t quite so good.

Most of these are manifestos, agendas or aspirations, promoting each poet’s methods or sympathies rather than a definition that could be used to decide if any given specimen was poetry or not. A definition of a house will ensure we don’t confuse that which is a house with an apartment, an office block or a kangaroo. Poetry, or ‘a poem’, needs to be defined equally accurately.

Since many of those definitions were attempted, poetry and many other things have been through Modernism and the Avant Garde which the likes of Aristotle, in all fairness to him, couldn’t have been expected to foresee. One thing we have to be able to contain is the inevitability of the ever-readiness of an endless supply of self-styled mavericks to overturn whatever definition is put in place just because they can. Concrete poetry consisted of sound sometimes rather than words, like the Konkrete Kantikle that includes ‘number poems’ that is so rare that when I google it I’m referred back to my own website and every few months I still search the archives upstairs hoping to find the late 70’s magazine that had Michael Daugherty’s concrete poems that consisted entirely of punctuation.

It’s not going to be me that says any such thing isn’t poetry. I wasn’t quite 10 when Marcel Duchamp died but I was 32 when John Cage did. The likes of them, and Yoko Ono, were significant contributors to our perceptions of what was what in my formative years and so it’s not for me to say, as I heard said in meetings many years later, that poetry should rhyme. 

Homer doesn’t; Ovid doesn’t. They concern themselves much more with scansion, that poets blinder than Homer might have subsequently abandoned at their peril.

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘poetry is the music of being human’ sounded a bit like what those dreamy Romantic giants of two hundred years previous had said and can’t be made to mean very much at all. Poetry would be something of a luxury for millions and being human doesn’t sound like that to them in the same way that it does to Poet Laureates and Professors of Creative Writing.

We have to allow poetry to be all and everything it wants to be or thinks it is and then dismiss it as bad poetry if need be. 

In one Philosophy seminar at university, 40 years ago now, Colin Lyas asked on what grounds we could believe what he was telling us and I suggested that he was a lecturer and we were students and so we should be able to believe him. This ‘argument from authority’, or argumentum ad verecundiam, was readily accepted, possibly because it was in the Philosophy Dept of a lowly-rated university (then) as part of a liberal humanities education that meant well but the argumentum ad verecundiam is clearly a fallacy post-Trump, during Boris Johnson and long after even worse travesties. But, at my own risk, I will use as a potentially treacherous stepping stone, a definition of poetry given by Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Literary Theory, who rose from the backstreets of Salford to become Professor at both Oxford and Cambridge before taking an Emeritus job at Lancaster.

In his book, How to Read a Poem, Prof. Eagleton, who has had a long time to arrive at his preferred form of words, delivers,

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

It’s at the start of Chapter 2, here,

Eagleton, How to Read a Poem 

But in the same way that Aristotle didn’t need to make the point that poetry doesn’t have to be true, neither should Prof. Eagleton assert that it is ‘fictional’. It doesn’t seem right for me to be telling them they’re both wrong but it is ostensibly the fact that some poems are entirely true. And so we need to delete ‘fictional’ from the quotation above.

While it is surely desirable for a poem to be ‘verbally inventive’, not all of them are. Many are cliché-ridden and steadfastly refuse to do anything original. I wouldn’t want to name any names but I could find any number of poems, or even poets, in magazines that have never done anything verbally inventive even if they thought they had. They are bad poems but that doesn’t mean they’re not poems. So we can’t allow that. 

And why would a poem need to be ‘moral’ to qualify as a poem. It must be possible for a poem to be immoral. I have the Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, within arm’s reach here. It might be a matter of opinion but many ethical traditions would struggle to accept them as ‘moral’. 

I’m going to have to accept that a poem is a ‘statement’ in order to retain any sense in the sentence but, yes, it is stated and so it’s a statement. Donald Davie distinguished between poems as ‘considered utterance’ or ‘unconsidered utterance’ and only now does it occur to me to ask whether he meant it was the poet or the reader that did the considering but surely it is ‘considered’ by the author who has considered various options - one might hope - before deciding on their form of words and it is considered by any reader in the act of reading. It can become disarmingly straightforward to break down some of these questions. 

What we are left with, having removed the extraneous bits is,

A poem is a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

And, thus, poetry is the language used in writing such a thing.   

There is still the ‘prose poem’, which is a thing whether it’s a tautology or not. The idea of what was ‘poetry’ or ‘a poem’ had taken off in all sorts of directions long before the prose poem came about which might have been in France in the C19th. All the ‘prose poem’ does is abnegate its claim to being a poem by admitting that it’s prose. It’s a very French, or possibly Belgian, idea like René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. That is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. A prose poem is not a poem because it’s prose. But it’s also a poem because it says it is.

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Prizes

Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the title of course echoing Raymond Carver, is a companionable memoir, mainly about his marathon exploits. In an age when some take more of an interest in the writer than the writing, it is gentle, open and accessible compared to some of his more opaque and mystifying novels. But apart from his obsessional nature as writer, extreme athlete and record collector (all of which are laudible enterprises), he comes across as a very sensible bloke.
And sensible, too, in the view that he doesn't want a Nobel Prize although the link sent by my Japanese correspondent is in Japanese so I'm going to take her word for what it says. Neither would I, although I am a bit further down the list of likely recipients, although the cheque that comes with it is admittedly generous. But apparently, you can't turn it down, you can just not turn up.
Bob Dylan, at the time of writing, doesn't seem all that excited about it either. Why would you be. It's nice to be listed alongside James Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Heaney and suchlike but I'd prefer to have just written The Changing of the Guards, the Street Legal album, in among everything else, and enjoy having done so than get a prize for it. No amount of celebrity, gongs and acclamation can be as good as having such a thing. It's the words. There isn't anything else.
So I simply don't have a view on whether Dylan worked in a genre that qualified him for the Nobel Prize. It doesn't make his word sound any better. And questions such as 'what is literature?' can be left to the likes of Terry Eagleton to publish books on which will no doubt be diverting but risk leaving you none the wiser. Or, perhaps wiser but still not sure of the answer.
But perhaps this derision of prize-giving is a bit rich coming from me. Not because I've been happy enough to accept some very minor ones but because this week I did look at the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize to widen the coverage of my own Best Collection and Best Poem of the Year meditations.
It's getting late and my list of poems only has three on it and while Judy Brown and Ian Duhig's collections are admirable, it is not the most competitive shortlist I've ever had.
I haven't read much new poetry this year. I've read a few reviews but not been tempted by many of them and perhaps, as one gets older, the activities of those a few decades younger don't seem quite so relevant. Some of the elderly are either fearful or uncomprehending of their successors.
And so I've ordered Bernard O'Donoghue's new book, picked from the Eliot Prize list, and hope for great things. I met him in the street in Oxford once. I was with an-ex student of his and he was on his bike, and I'd say you'd hardly wish to meet a more congenial man.
But if prizes just provide reading lists, we could just call them reading lists. 

Terry Eagleton - Across the Pond

Terry Eagleton, Across the Pond (Norton)

Americans are open, honest and friendly in this 'Englishman's view of America' but stereotyping is to be avoided as a general rule because although stereotypes must have some foundation in fact or else they wouldn't have come about, they are by no means laws of nature and cannot be applied universally.
Prof. Eagleton starts with language in his consideration of how he finds the USA. He makes a long list of Americanisms that 'not all Americans know..are fairly distinctive to their own brand of English' but I'm afraid I hear weird, awesome, feel comfortable with, have a hard time and many others of his collection regularly. They have fed back into English English through young people and a similar vocabulary has arrived through consultants who dress up the bleakest common sense as if it were science to sell it to gullible organisations who think it will improve them. I'm afraid we are not as divided by the same language as we might like to be although pants, fags and bums are three things that we do need to be clear about.
America, for Eagleton, is up-front, confident, unironic and loud- to summarize him very crudely- whereas the British are self-effacing, understated and apologetic. He brings in the Irish to make it a three-cornered comparison sometimes. They are unsentimental. Guinness is no longer Irish and no Irishman ever said Begorrah unless it was for the benefit of a tourist.
But the defining quality of America from which all else follows is the pursuit of money. They don't have much history, tradition or class and they don't care about that but they do care about money. Eagleton regularly refers back to previous accounts of America, by de Tocqueville and Dickens, and finds them very sympathetic to his view or possibly only quotes them when they are. But in books like these he is not the sort of philosopher that Kant or Hegel are, constructing closely argued chapters to establish general epistemolgical or phenomenolgical truths. He does a bit of refuting, applies a bit of logic and then arrives at a conclusion or generalization that we aren't necessarily inclined to take too seriously in the way that observational stand-up comedians do. Eagleton's entertainments qualify him for a high place among the Sean Lock, Dara O'Brian, Shappi Khorsandi, Alexei Sayle contingent of humourists.
Miserable people rarely get murdered.
is one of his Quod Erat Demonstrandums that might not stand up to much statistical investigation and would have been unlikely to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason.
On the way to arriving at such wisdom, though, he is good at identifying the shortcomings, absurdities and moral vacuousness of the aristocracy, the royal family, capitalism and the inordinately wealthy as well as Americans but Michael Jackson seems to be particularly getting on his nerves at the moment.
It is a book that made me laugh every few pages which I thought it would and which is why I bought it. Eagleton is well-practiced at this line of reductio ad absurdam by now and he works like a gadget that can be pointed at a subject and he will deconstruct it for you in this playful, half-earnest, half-derisory manner. A life spent perfecting this common sense, slighly contrarian method has not gone to waste. He finishes with several pieces of advice for America and Americans, which do seem to be sincerely and not ironically meant, for example,
There should be compulsory courses for all college freshmen in how not to mean what you say.
Most of it almost goes without saying but was never so well expressed. The problem with any of it is that if they took him at his word, it wouldn't be America anymore.

Terry Eagleton - The Event of Literature

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (Yale)

Having progressed from seats at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and through Manchester, Terry Eagleton now updates his thoughts on literary theory from the summit of the academic world, the English department at Lancaster.

Who would have thought that theory would ever become 'unfashionable' but the opening paragraphs here suggest that it has finally gone the way of so many ephemeral academic subjects for discussion that have come and gone in an ever accelerating need for novelty, edge and topicality, an unseemly hastening that necessarily makes each successive burning issue the more rapidly outdated.

It seems undue to regard such passing fancies as post-colonial studies, sexuality, ethnicity and cultural studies more 'radical', or, for that matter, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism or psychoanalysis, compared to the 'conservative opponents of theory' but if they have had their day then I'm sure their obsolescence was in-built.

While for the most part maintaining an acute awareness of the flaws in any given practice or thinking, Eagleton equally brings with him vestigial remnants of his soi-disant radical past. There is a lameness in his insistence of using the pronoun 'she', rather than the presumably discredited 'he', to denote such non-gender specific figures as 'the author' or 'the reader' when the usage of the singular 'they/their' is perfectly serviceable. And for one so forensically accurate in dismantling the terminology of others, it is surprising to find him refer to 'literary types' as if they were a species, as identifiable perhaps as a term used by John McCririck in the past, the 'each-way shrewdy'.

In the opening chapter that differentiates between Realists and Nominalists, I find that I am probably among the latter, along with Derrida and Foucault and other 'literary types', who are more commonly liberals than conservatives. Although only 35 pages earlier it had seemed I might be irredeemibly conservative if I wasn't a fully-paid up adherent of theory.

But, as a fairly literary type of philosopher himself, Eagleton makes his way through some labyrinthine arguments, clarifying with well-chosen illustrations and his trademark 'sardonic travesties',

without some measure of implicit meaning, no piece of writing could function at all. The sign 'Exit' tacitly requests us to take it as a description rather than an imperative otherwise theatres and department stores would be permanently empty.

Philosophy at its best is the highest form of humour and Eagleton is rarely more than a paragraph away from his next droll observation. The problem with the question, 'What is Literature', though, is that although it appears to be the same sort of question as 'what is a giraffe', it can't be answered in the same way. A giraffe has giraffe DNA, and can be identified with some confidence at a glance in any case, but literature is a man-made thing, has meant different things at different times and can still mean somewhat different things to different people. But if it weren't so then the finest minds in the country wouldn't be able to exercise themselves on such arcane questions and instead might have to address more pressing concerns like economic crises, wars and social problems that are generally left to the spivs and charlatans elected to do so.

Calling something 'literature' has often conferred approbation on it, something that Eagleton is well aware of but has difficulty getting away from. Having not accepted his definition of 'poem' in How to Read a Poem, I'm not keen to take his word on literature either. I know that there are such things as bad poems. I know that poetry is a part of literature. And so I believe that there can be bad literature. So many of our assumptions are only 200 years old, taken from the vast influence of Romanticism, and we haven't recovered from them yet.

But Eagleton does a great job in setting out the complex relationship between fiction and the real world, between what a literary work is and how it might be apprehended. We have the concept of sacraments that are things that 'fulfil their ends simply by virtue of the actions they involve', and praxis, a practice whose ends are internal to it, both of which seem useful in arriving at an idea of what a literary work is.

The work of art ...is an example of human praxis, and therefore of how to live well.

And so might this book be, which is, in itself, a literary work of a sort. In places it demonstrates how philosophy, with its sense of its own absurdity temporarily absent, can be little more than a chore, but it is the process involved as much as the answer, if any, arrived at that provide its meaning and justification. Philosophy investigates itself as much as it investigates anything else. We may not be much the wiser at the end of it but, if not, we feel as if we understand a little better why not.    

Terry Eagleton - The Meaning of Life

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (Oxford)

I've been re-reading this in the absence of more recent matter as I await the outcome of the more pressing conundrums of the Cheltenham Festival of horse racing. It was published in 2007 and I was quick to snap it up as the follow-up to Prof. Eagleton's masterpiece, the fall-about hilarious The Gatekeeper, which I am still tempted to nominate as the best book I ever read.

Even though it is very short, I don't think I finished it in 2007. Either I tired of it or other things came along and overtook it in priority. I am similarly still halfway through a biography of Walter Sickert that is forever being outstripped by more crucial reading, but I'll find my way through the detail eventually.

I don't know why this was abandoned, though. It might not have the knockabout, music hall entertainment value of The Gatekeeper but it approaches its very ultimate question with all necessary methodology intact and provides a sort of beginner's guide to philosophy, taking apart every angle of the question, bringing in the biggest names, like Wittgenstein, Berkeley, Marx, Schopenhauer, Hegel et al, and shows that there might not have been any more profound answer to the question than what one had thought already. But it provides the comfort of knowing that even the cleverset people in the history of thought didn't know either and that football, fundamentalism, religious sects, and perhaps even God himself haven't provided satisfactory answers either.

Prof. Eagleton is exceptionally good at showing how language, which is the vehicle of philosophy, sets up so many of the traps that thought falls into. It is as if you chose a mode of transport, like a car or a horse, but it refuses to take you anywhere because it insists on being the subject of the journey rather than its conveyance. But he also cajoles the mulish conveyance by subtle circumvention.

Philosophy is either thrilling or pointless, and so, much like football, horse racing or poetry. In Terry Eagleton, it has an admirably accessible and entertaining apologist. I don't think I know the outcome of the book because I don't remember finishing it five years ago but I suspect I will finish it this time, be none the wiser as to the answer, but feel fulfilled in as far as I think I knew all of it but never had it quite so well explained to me before.

My Life in Books

Not being quite famous enough to be invited to talk to Ann Robinson about 'My Life in Books' in the BBC series, you thank heavens for small mercies and then immediately want to have a go.

The format begins with the guests divulging their favourite reading from childhood. There is only really one candidate for me, and Richmal Crompton's Just William is the obvious answer. William's misunderstood good intentions, ill-conceived plans for enterprise and adventure and their inevitably disastrous denouements provided 30-odd book full of stories that boil down to half a dozen basic plots at most. But, in the meantime, there is the succession of his sister's hopelessly besotted boyfriends, the distant father, a series of do-gooding or intellectual eccentrics in the village and the delusions of grandeur and leadership in William himself and not quite as much of Violet Elizabeth Bott as television might lead you to think.

Declaring an adolescent interest, I now realize I need my teenage years back to read all the classic titles that I've missed because I spent that time reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not just One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which doesn't take long, but long evenings went by with three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, August 1914, Lenin in Zurich and the most accessible, perhaps, the Short Stories and Prose Poems, which is the one I'll nominate here because it's the one I remember best. It gave me some insight into C20th Russian history reading Solzhenitsyn but it was a mis-spent youth.

I haven't seen enough of the BBC shows to know if poetry's allowed. If it is, I will have to have Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, the volume in which he moves from metrical to syllabic verse and opens out towards a more humane view because his poems have been my main literary interest since discovering him aged about 16 or 17. If poetry isn't allowable in this game, I'll take James Joyce The Dubliners, the greatest prose fiction writer, in his masterpiece of understatement, inertia and linguistic style.

Whereas my favourite book, which made me laugh out loud on a train, in bed and anywhere else I opened it, is Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, a memoir of childhood Catholicism, adult Marxism, literary academics and class. It is the old renegade in top stand-up comic form with some marvellously told set piece stories, not the least of which is about a trip he makes to Scotland to attend the funeral of one of his undergraduate students. He is picked up from the station by a Lady Dotty and driven to the ancestral home where,

A policeman at the gates drew himself to attention and saluted as we passed. Either he had recognized Lady Dotty or he was a fan of literary theory.

The programme ends with the guest admitting to a 'guilty pleasure', which I find quite difficult to think of. I'm not sure if Banana Yoshimoto's novels of Japanese poignant loss and deep friendship are chick-lit or proper literature and even when asking at dinner at an academic conference from someone who presumably knew, my query wasn't even deemed worthy of an answer.

So, not knowing if that's guilty or not, I'll have to go with Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters. It was a different age when an ingenious child, called Fatty, could undertake his investigations in a quiet village in a range of masterly disguises. The five find-outers obviously outwit the fall guy constable, Mr. Goon, every time and although there are a number of very tempting titles in the series, like The Mystery of...The Invisible Thief, Banshee Towers or The Disappearing Cat, as soon as you've read Spiteful Letters, you know it's the best.