Graham Swift - Mothering Sunday

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday (Scribner)

If you want to spend all day reading, you'll need more than this book or you could read it twice. It is very short but would be well worth going over again.
Jane Fairchild is in domestic service with one family and having an illicit affair with the son at a nearby house. He is shortly due to be married when she assumes she will lose him and the story is set on Mothering Sunday when maids are given the day off to visit their mothers. Jane doesn't have a mother so she visits Paul for what will be their last day together before he is married.
She is also an orphan which means that her name, and birthday, was given to her like a character in a book and she eventually grows up to be a writer, which gives the novel all those literary levels of extra significance and reason for the book to reflect on its own status as literature. Some readers might have seen enough of this kind of literariness by now and object to it but I haven't. I'm happy to read and write about books that are about books that are about books. For a while longer at least.
I have not read all of Graham Swift by any means but I haven't yet read one that doesn't have bereavement as a central theme. It happens in this novel at halfway so we have a blissful lingering of Jane's last day with Paul followed by a gradual revelation of the shocking event. There is much memorable writing along the way, the book is a prose poem - for want of a better term - but none of it caught my attention as much as the way death is caused by contingent circumstances. The car has hit an oak tree on a bend in the road,
It was more of a corner in fact, indicating perhaps where surveyors and landowners had failed to agree.
Would be writers are often told to show, not tell, as if by following a litany of such sound professional advice, they will all become successful, well-known and celebrated. I don't think it quite works like that. Swift tells his story but also shows much more. At the end, by which time the book has become more of a meditation on fiction, it says that it is,
 more about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.
This might look dangerously as is Swift were being didactic and making a manifesto had he not done as much so convincingly throughout these beautifully imagined pages.
The pscychology, the lingering, the nakedness of emotion and the nakedness itself are, as it were, tellingly achieved and if Swift has written a better book, I'd like to know about it.
I have an awkward feeling that I'm dishing out too many highly commendatory reviews at the moment. I can hardly remember a time when I've enjoyed reading quite so much. This is excellent.  I'd much prefer a book to be short and as good as this than four times longer and not as good. Never mind the width, feel the quality.

My Life in Sport - Cycling, part 1

The recent upturn of interest in cycling and coverage of it makes it suddenly seem unthinkable that in the 1970's and before, and as recently as the 1990's, it felt like an undercover activity, some weird ritual and cyclists were some kind of strange breed apart that nobody else understood.
In the same way that Lester Piggott's family tree went back a few generations with horse racing people, I was born into cycling to a slightly lesser extent, my dad having been a rider in Nottingham in the 1950's, also riding a tandem with my Uncle Don, and still to this day, Ron Hallam (my uncle's wife's brother) is setting new age-related records in time trials at the age of 85. I think that most things we do, or have a go at, are a result of 'monkey see, monkey do', or 'copy cat' traits in the way we are made so, when my dad returned to time trialling some time in the late 60's, or maybe very early 70's, and the family went with him early on Sunday mornings, it was not going to be long before I wanted to have a go. It might have been George Best I wanted to be at football but our man from Gloucester was called Ted Tedaldi and I more or less wanted to be him.
I had been piling up miles on my green Carlton Corsa bike, with 5 derailleur gears, to the extent that my dad thought the milometer attached to the front wheel must have been calibrated in kilometers, not miles and I had a number of different courses mapped out that began and ended in Hucclecote. So pretty soon it was time to make my debut in an evening Club 10 on the Newent Road and, aged 12, with Puppy Love by Donny Osmond at number one in the charts on 2/8/1972, I turned up and did a 31.37 compared to Ted's winning time of 24.02. And that was that for the 1972 season.
But the record shows I rode four more such events in my juvenile career, improving steadily through 1973, recording 29.12 on 5th July, which I remember very well. Eighteen years later I was going to realize what a good performance that was for a 13 year old when I came back at the age of 32 and couldn't match it. But that ride in '73 had been artificially enhanced by having a target for the last half mile or more as I caught sight of the lad who had started two minutes ahead of me and I made it very much a thing that mattered to catch him, and did. That target must have been worth 15 or 20 seconds off my time compared to what I might have done without it so, thanks for being there, Kevin. Two weeks later, perhaps too full of this new found panache, I perhaps went off too quickly and was so devastated by my 30.04, not quite 20 mph, that I didn't ride another race for 18 years. I did get a medal for Best Schoolboy in the Gloucester City Cycliong Club 10 competition and I could still find it if I had to but after that setback I did some fairly mediocre running (which is a chapter to come), football (which we've done already) but then entered a sporting wilderness that consisted of not much more than darts and pool until 1991.
I'm not quite sure now how or why I got back on a bike. I certainly wasn't in a fit state for it as much of the agonies I went through going up hills or any sort of distance provided ample evidence for. It was possibly because I'd started playing cricket again in 1987, thought I could get fitter and bowl faster if I spent a winter going swimming and, having gone from complete exhaustion having done two lengths to an hour and a half of non-stop doggypaddle   front crawl, I imagined I only had to do a bit of cycling and I could become a triathlete. The triathlons never happened but I did get myself in good enough condition, with the necessary obsession and nostalgia for bike riding as a corollary, to enter a few races at te back end of the 1991 season. I was glad just to be there. It would be now be called a 'journey' that I'd been on, promising myself that all I had to do was get to the top of this bloody hill and then I'd throw the bike into the undergrowth and walk home but, once you get to the top, it feels better and once you get home and lie in the bath, that's good as well. In 1991, all this hideous new nonsense about 'journeys' hadn't been thought of and so I'm glad it wasn't one. All I wanted to do was 'be a cyclist' and I was, although, aged 32 in a Corinium Road Club 10, I was 20 seconds short of being as good as I had been when I was 13. There I am in the picture before the start, thinking I might do something great, looking as gormless and clueless as I was then alongside my dad who at least knew what it was all about.
That could have been a bit depressing but two weeks later, on the course at Devizes, the record showing that I was among such big local names as the soon-to-be greatly admired Andy Cook, Rob Pears and John French, the last of who started a minute behind me, soon went by me as if the wind was somehow behind him but against me, seemed to hang about 50 yards ahead of me for a bit and then I never saw him again. But, having started at the top of a hill that you didn't have to go back up to finish and, I remember, having the legendary Gary Woodward doing the job of taking the times from the timekeeper at the finish to the result board, even something as insignificant as a 27.59 by me, there it was, Look, you lot, You proper bike riders, I'm one as well now and that was nearly as much as I wanted it to be.
Very much the same thing has been said about David Cameron being Prime Minister, that is that 90% of his ambition was achieved when he went into 10 Downing Street. All he wanted to do was Be Prime Minister and there wasn't much he wanted to do with it. But I found, and I hope he did, too, that once you've arrived you may as well see what else there is. After all, 27.59 isn't very good  and on that result sheet, only four of the forty-five finishers went slower than me but at least in these days of gender equality it is not relevant that three of them were women and I dare say the bloke was much older than I was.    
I only rode 30 time trials in my life which is not to say I didn't cover endless miles, or as endless as 6200 in 1995 seemed, in pursuit of something worthwhile. In 1992, I rode more than half of those, ransacking the RTTC handbook in search of events I could get to in my Ford Escort with the bike in the back. There are a few stories to tell as personal bests were achieved at 10 and 25 miles and three attempts at 50 miles finally resulting in a 2.24.07 and better than 20 mph. I might have finished next to last in one of them but there is no record of me ever finishing last.
But there were bigger and better things to do. One of the most astonishing things I'd ever seen in those early days was the 12 Hour event in which it might have been a trick of the light but apparently riders were sent off at daybreak on a Sunday in late summer. You could go home having seen them in the morning, see them again after dinner and then see them finish in the evening and, yes, they had been riding their bikes all that time in between.
Not all people who didn't know about cycling really thought that anybody rode 10 miles on a bike, still less thought that 25 miles was even humanly possible and so 12 Hours and just see how far you can go seemed even less likely to them in 1968 than a man could land on the moon. But I believed I'd seen it because I'd seen most of it. I'd seen Ted Tedaldi do it and I'd been there in about 1971 on a day of horrendous torrential rain when only four riders stuck it out. They were my heroes, they were from another realm- not the sad machismo of school rugby union which was only an institutionalized playground scrap- but that was real. By the early 1990's, I'd gone back and found out that the same kind of completely pointless heroism was still allowed to go on and riders like Gwen Shillaker could do it in pink on a pink bike, the sensational Keith Wright would grind out 240 miles making it look just as hard as it was, and probably the greatest bike rider I've ever seen in my life (and that includes Miguel Indurain, lots of those Tour de France riders, Phil Griffiths, Chris Boardman, Mark Cavendish and anybody else you might care to mention), it 's not Vicky Pendleton or Laura Trott, it's Janet Tebbutt, who set new standards for Lands End to John O'Groats and I saw her doing it, through Gloucester, late one night circa 1972, but she still had the nerve to be there more than 20 years later in 12 Hour events, still as modest and unassuming as she ever was.
And in Part 2 of My life in Sport - Cycling, I will try to explain how cycling was the best thing I ever did, why bike riding was about ten times more important to me than all the other sports I did put together and thus why Janet is my Sports Personality of All Time. 
 

Hardy Fights Back

Last year I spent a lot of time reading George Eliot and sharing a few highlights here. She wasn't exactly a new discovery but it's not often I systematically read an author quite as diligently as I did her because I'm not often impressed enough by any of them to go to quite those lengths.
I felt a little bit guilty at the way I allowed her to sweep so majestically to such a position in my estimation because although I've never been a big fan of Dickens, Thomas Hardy has been a big favourite ever since we were given The Woodlanders to read for O level Eng Lit.
But, waiting for new books to arrive, I went in search of interim reading matter in the upstairs room and came back down with The Return of the Native. I began it donkey's years ago but left it aside at an early stage, unable to get beyond the grim foreboding of Egdon Heath. But, what a wonderful thing it is and, if George Eliot seems somehow more metropolitan and sophisticated then Hardy, re-stating his case for fate, determinism and some rustic comedy in no uncertain terms, is possibly doing something on a larger, more Classical scale.
I daresay Tess is Hardy's best known novel, in a career that abandoned fiction for poetry at roughly the turn of that century but included architecture as well, but among those major Wessex novels I retained a preference for my first love, as a Hardy character might, and admired the way that he multiplies the capacity for loss and missed opportunites by expanding the customary eternal triangle into a concatenation of five caught in romantic hopes and ambitions that, I'm sure, in The Return of the Native will prove as heartbreaking as it did in The Woodlanders.
Whereas there, on a rising scale of social status, we had Marty South, Giles Winterbourne, Grace Melbury, Dr. Edred Fitzpiers and Felice Charmond, in The Return it is Diggory Venn, Thomasin Yeobright, Damon Wildeve, Eustacia Vye and the native returning from his excursions among Parisian elegance, Clym Yeobright. In The Woodlanders, Hardy achieved a brilliant point by making the linear relationship circular when Felice attracts the ambitious doctor in a wig made of hair sold by Marty, who needed to sacrifice it for the money. But please don't tell me if anything similar happens in The Return. 
I'm well aware that Eustacia is not intended to be admired. I'm not entirely sure what she's doing stuck in the outback of Egdon Heath when she longs for the glamour even of Budmouth but, whatever devious devices she employs in pursuit of her vain ambitions, she was immediately a candidate for my shortlist of favourite fictional characters (and I realize that Maggie Tulliver is much more worthy) when she first appears,
To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow;

and I reckon winters in rural Dorset in 1878 were considerably darker than our urban winters now.
In lines like those, Hardy came convincingly back to make it clear that George Eliot can't just swan in and deprive him of his long-held position among the Greatest Novelists in My Opinion.
There's plenty more to come. Real life can be hilarious, hugely entertaining and possibly even gorgeous if you can perceive it to be but, seen through a book like this with it all done for you, fiction is almost preferable.
I'm looking forward to the new Graham Swift but it can arrive whenever it feels like it. If it had arrived earlier, I might not have gone back to The Return of the Native and that would have been a tragedy in itself.    

   

Crossword Crimewave

Police warned crossword solvers to be vigilant today after a weekend outbreak of clues to which the answer was CAT BURGLAR. Seen in yesterday's Times, the thief struck again in today's Observer. 

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The plastic sleeve that contains my finished Uncollected Poems since the last booklet now contains 9 poems currently considered fit for the next book, 2 borderline items -and the correct decision on any 'borderline' item is to leave it out - and 7 already thought unworthy. However, those 9 poems are longer than usual and might be close to filling the standard size booklet I generally produce so it would be almost thinkable to take The Perfect Book to the printers soon.
I don't think I'll be doing that, though. The plan is to wait until I'm 60 and, hopefully, publish something more substantial, having left a 6 year gap since The Perfect Murder. It's not a commercial enterprise, it matters not at all that my audience is kept supplied with a product to buy as if I was Dick Francis, One Direction, James Bond or Downton Abbey. I only give them away to anybody kind enough to take an interest and I'm very grateful if they read them.
At Portsmouth Poetry Society on Wedneesday night, I read Martin Mooney's poem, The Self-Published, which asks a similar question to that I was asked at an interview at Exeter University in 1977 when Exeter were in the process of deciding if they wanted me on their B.A. English Lit course. Of course, they were quick to decide they bloody well didn't.
I was asked, after I had told them I was a poet, who I wrote for. Was it for myself or for other people. Although it's a very obvious question, I'd never heard it before or, up to the age of 17, ever thought about it. I didn't know. Exeter, where I think I might have quite liked to have gone, decided against having me but they can look at the University league tables now, some of which is based on the success of alumni, and see where Lancaster is.
But I know the answer now, nearly 40 years later. I write for myself. If anybody else finds anything worthwhile in anything I ever write, that's great, that's fine and it's a wonderful thing but if I don't like it enough, it goes no further. Writing is best, like so many other things, when it is amateur, not professional.  The idea of being a professional writer, as espoused by Dr. Johnson, is a nightmare I wouldn't want to live through and I much prefer going to the office to produce the mundane work that I do there than the ghastly alternative of having a deadline to produce, say, another Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on Friday night.

The other reason why The Perfect Book will wait a while yet is that I only have two ISBN's left from the allocation of ten I was given in 1990. I need to use them sparingly because once they are used up, David Green (Books) has used up its quota and I'm not going looking for any other publisher.
Do you know the sort of things they ask? Like, how are you going to promote the book - by readings, a launch, appearances, gladhanding.
No, I'm not. I feel bad enough doing a poetry reading at the best of times, wondering why I'm taking up the time of these good people, without expecting them to buy a book at the end of it.
But another thing I've noticed is how, for the first half dozen titles I published, I filled in a form for the ISBN people and posted it off and that was that. Now, doing a title every four years or even less often than that, the agency dealing with it is different to what it was the last time and you have to register with some new people.
And all of that just so that my poems, those combinations of all available words that were already there but I decided to make my own, can be left in copyright libraries with my name on them. You might think I wouldn't care about that but actually I do. It's less about posterity or 'asserting my right as the author' but about how I first saw lists of titles by poets, or anybody else, whether it was Prufrock, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, or The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, High Windows or Fighting Terms, The Sense of Movement, My Sad Captains, Touch and all. I thought it would be a tremendous thing to have my own list to put alongside Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station. And eventually I have.
--
It's also nice to see Daisy Dunn re-tweeting (is it?) my mention of her book on Catullus, below, and seeing which line it is grabs her attention the most, which is the unlikely bringing together on one issue of Boris Johnson and me.
We didn't have a Bullingdon Club at Lancaster from 1978-81 but any inward-looking community will inevitably generate its own self-appointed bunch of oiks. And that must be the last I say on the European referendum because civil servants are duly warned of the period of purdah during which we are not to be seen to try to influence the outcome of a democratic process. So, I'm sure that all the traditional values of British democracy will be upheld by all those involved and still allowed to state their case and let that be a debate that is honest, considered, polite and reasonable.
--
But I don't think we've aligned ourselves with the USA thus far that I'm not allowed to mention their election.
One should never rest easy and it wasn't long ago that I was saying, Don't worry about a thing because every little thing is gonna be alright. But now Donald Trump is 3/1 with Paddy to be the next president, which realistically means he has more than a 25% chance. The fact that Hilary is odds on at 1/2 brings with it less comfort than it ought to because I've seen more odds on chances turned over in horse races than I'd ever have the time to tell you about.
Complacency is probably our own worst enemy in all such situations.
--
But, to end on a good note. Hurray for Vicky Pendleton, who rode Pacha De Polder to win at Wincanton this week, not getting knocked off, or falling off, whichever it was, like last time and she will go to Cheltenham.
I love her. She is tremendous but I'm with John Francome, who knows 100% more than I do about riding horses, that it's not been a good idea. I wish her well.
Come back safely, Vicky, with the horse, because there's some of us care about you and all that stuff about the next big challenge can sometimes be a bad idea in disguise.

Gorecki Symphony no.4

Gorecki, Symphony no.4, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Boreyko (Nonesuch)

So long-awaited was this disc that I had forgotten a number of times that I was waiting for it. Finished as a piano score by 2006, it was left with notes on its orchestration when Henryk Gorecki died in 2010 and completed from those notes by his son, Mikolaj.
How was Gorecki going to follow his mournful masterpiece, no.3, that was such a critical and commercial success, one of the great pieces of the late C20th. Beethoven followed his seminal third with a less ambitious fourth. Stevie Wonder followed Songs in the Key of Life with the reduced resources employed on Talking Book. But from the start, Gorecki is clearly not taking cover in understatement. The fff fortissimo of his five blasted chords make a bolder opening than anything else in the repertoire and we arrive at the 4-minute mark before there's any sign of abatement. This is not a disc that lends itself to a proper appreciation if you live in a terraced house; one must consider the neighbours. Loud and soft passages alternate most inconveniently. It's a tendency that began perhaps with Haydn's Surprise Symphony so I blame him but whereas he was having one of his jokes with the audience, C20th music has taken his example to heart as a staple effect compared to the more even temper of earlier music. The last chords of Sibelius 5, previously regarded as hammer blows, are sweet and gentle compared to Gorecki 4.
During this onslaught it appears that another piece, for piano, has begun underneath the main theme but it is assimilated into the main composition, the sets of five notes encoding the name Aleksander Tansman, another Polish composer, by means of a much more contrived system than that with which Bach signed such compositions as The Art of Fugue, his B-A-C-H, where H is German for B flat. And the work continues to reference composers from Poland and Russia, more or less noticeably depending on one's knowledge.
In the quiet parts, the cello, violin and woodwind combine to make spectral reference back to the theme before, later it is brought back in a rush of Russian folk dance that charges along merrily to an energetic string accompaniment. It shifts, as one becomes accustomed to post-Stravinsky modernism doing, but returns to its memorable, grand first theme, discharging its rough energy before falling back on almost inaudible murmurs until, well, I won't tell you the ending but it's either very loud or very quiet. Afterwards, although the disc had officially ended, I was left wondering if the vaguest hum I thought I could hear was still a part of the piece, as in the end of A Day in the Life's continuous loop at the end of the LPor if it was what the sound the Sony machine makes when it's resting. So I switched it off and it stopped so I expect it was the machine.
It isn't going to be the phenomenon that no.3 was. It would be out of the question to expect it to be but Gorecki can be applauded for not ducking the issue of the fourth and providing a bold 35 minutes that will be well worthy of a place of its own. Those reviewers who were disappointed were ever likely to be and there was no point delivering something similar that would suffer in comparison. Artists can sometimes justifiably be accused of repeating themselves or reproducing the same work as they get older- even Seamus Heaney was- so bravo to Henryk Gorecki. I didn't know what to expect but now I know, I'm not disappointed.

Catullus' Bedspread

Daisy Dunn, Catullus' Bedspread (William Collins)

What a tremendous book. Daisy Dunn is a young classical scholar who it would be no surprise to see on telly reporting back from the ancient world as soon as a production company can scribble out the contract for her to sign. This life of Catullus appears alongside a volume of her new translations of the poems, which are quoted generously here, too.
It's not as if Latin poetry is short of compelling personalities with Horace, Ovid and Juvenal but Catullus is the most provocative, forthright and, in many ways, 'colourful'. Daisy's account of him is confident, hugely informed by a wide range of sources, and joins the poet to the history of his times through the poems vividly and with panache. Her detailed description of his appearance is taken from a portrait found painted on plaster on the site of his family home in Sirmio (pictured) but she doesn't entertain any doubt that this is him even though there is no title by which to identify him.
Catullus hasn't long been in Rome, from Verona, using family connections to invite himself to some select gatherings, when he sees and immediately becomes obsessed by Coldia, the wife of Metellus Celer, he

watched her- and watched her husband watching her- and almost passed out

and there begins a story in poetry to put alongside Petrarch's Laura, Shakespeare's Dark Lady or any such journal of love's trials and tribulations. I don't think poets feel these things any more deeply than anybody else but, by definition, the best of them make them the most memorable in poems. However, I do think that the cause is in the capacity of the admirer to feel such admiration and not necessarily always in the suitability of the beloved. But there's not much we can do about that. This particular lady, who it seems wasn't all that particular, wasn't the only object of desire for Catullus but she was well ahead of any other in his preferences. However, the senator, Celer, is found dead at his house which one might think - or Catullus certainly did- gave them the opportunity to make their unofficial relationship more official but Clodia was not quite so enamoured of such an arrangement or, solely with Catullus.
A further bombshell - and I don't want to ruin the whole book for any potential reader- comes with the death of his brother on foreign shores, across the Aegean Sea in Rhoeteum and the poet is compelled to travel there full of complex feelings of bereavment, family, his insufficiently requited love and correspondances with history.
Catullus' bedspread itself is the subject of poem, no. 64, that Daisy Dunn makes the book's central motif. A long poem, featured in her translation in an appendix, makes a similar tapestry of historic events (beginning with the Argo and including Prometheus and the loss of the Golden Age) and personal themes. The book might not need such a device to hold it together unless it is in parallel to her own sewing together of history and Catullus' life and work but her literary criticism is as impressive as her biographical research. Included in it are such telling insights as how the Latin for 'business', negotium, which I see can also mean pain, trouble, annoyance or distress, is simply the direct antonym of otium, for 'leisure'. And we also learn how fashionable Romans would adopt accents from other regions to give themselves a more plebian image, if need be, for effect.
Part of the political background is the rise of Julius Caesar, the machinations of the triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, the end of the Republic and the establishment of the dictatorship but Catullus' father was a friend of Caesar's and it is suggested here that somehow that is why Catullus could even include Caesar in his targets for derogatory remarks in his poems with impunity. It is hard to imagine any literary author now having quite the licence to produce work like that but none of it would be available to us now had copies not been made by admirers that by various very unlikely circumstances allowed them to be rediscovered and that part of the Epilogue is the most astonishing part of the story.
Dead by the age of 30, Catullus could hardly have wished for quite such longevity for his poems. Daisy Dunn makes a good case for how great his poetry reads in the Latin and he was clearly admired by subsequent generations but, with a poem being a literary event not necessarily the sincere words of the author, there is no telling if Catullus was quite as bad and dangerous to know as his finely crafted verses make him out to be. If he was one of the first poets to be a different person in his poems to what he was in real life, he wasn't going to be the last.
Slightly discouragingly, the first piece of blurb on the back cover of this book is by that well-known classical scholar and statesman, Boris Johnson. It is recognizably Johnsonian in its composite verve and grandiose overstatement but, for once, I can see what he means. Any book that can make me agree with him must be a good one. On a scale of 1 to 10 on which 1 represents a book you have to abandon because it's not worth the effort and 10 means you can't put it down, Catullus' Bedspread is close to a 9. I hope Daisy's getting down to work on Ovid or Horace.