What we talk about when we talk about books is usually good books, those we have enjoyed and are implicitly recommending. What I write about here, in my devil-may-care way, are the books I've been reading recently which are nearly always books I've chosen to read and bought and so, having chosen them in the expectation of enjoying them, it is to be hoped that I did and I usually do so I mostly have good things to say about them.

But one can't be right all the time. Occasionally something's not what one thought it would be. Having set Gogol's stories aside a while ago when more important material turned up, it was in due course time to try Dead Souls. It's been on some sort of long list for decades. But it wasn't worth the wait. Not for me.

I read it. It didn't do me any harm and it didn't even drag but it didn't do much for me. It's picaresque, which is an old-fasioned thing to be, perhaps, and allegedly funny but I didn't really laugh at all. I think I saw most of the point of it and Gogol is good at capturing characters, of which he creates many but, unlike Candide which is hilarious and still highly relevant with its take on human failings and the likes of our current Prime Minister to consider in its context, it was more and more of the same, it seemed to me, except to say that if and when I don't appreciate a book it is quite possibly me that's failing.

It finished mercifully 60 pages early with the notice that,

Here Gogol's text comes to an end.

The final version was completed by another author, Zacharchenko, and the editor/translator here, Isabel F. Hapgood couldn't find a Russian edition to translate from and so used a French translation, as if translation wasn't a dubious enough business in the first place.

I have no doubt that the [French] translation is very bad, it always is when filtered through the French

 

but she provides it for those who like their stories complete. Well, with Mozart's Requiem maybe I do but I was ready to move on from this and was past caring. But that seemed to me the most interesting thing about the book, being ever sceptical about how close to the original language a translation can get and seeing this further distorted and admittedly badly distorted. 

It was thus a great pleasure to move on to John Burnside's stories in Something Like Happy ahead of a volume of his memoirs, A.N. Wilson on Dante or the next Balzac. Much more like it, that slipped down like champagne and barely lasted a day. Burnside's facility with poetry is replicated in his fiction without necessarily being identifiably by the same author. I don't think you'd guess if you didn't know. 

It's a bad thing we do when we like to categorize people as one thing as opposed to another but we do, or we seem to in England at least. We seem to think of poets, novelists or dramatists and anything they did outside of their allocated field as somehow extra-curricula, like Sylvia Plath's, Douglas Dunn's or Sean O'Brien's fiction maybe. But surely they meant it just as much. Fiction writing can be time-consuming work. Larkin thought he was a novelist before finding more success with poems but had 'writer' put on his gravestone, wisely. Poetry has always seemed like the soft option to me and so unless one wants to emphasize the poetry or that's all one did, 'writer' is what we ought to want to be and what John Burnside surely is. There's a lot more available to be had. He will be challenging my chronic shelf space crisis as time goes by.

--

It's been a happy week on the turf regaining some lost ground after a summer hiatus, most gloriously with Mishriff in the big race at York. There is no better feeling than everything that you figured being played out in front of you and restoring some lost profit. That Mishriff is quite possibly the best horse in the world, over 10 furlongs, that there wasn't much of a case for the opposition, that he was very confidently ridden and won by 6 lengths at a generous SP of 9/4 were all the ingredients one needs to be reminded that sport can still be a satisfying thing.

We look forward to the Autumn and the return of the more involving game of jumping over obstacles on the way round.

--

But just how much of our lives is formulaic, set out for us to avoid the distress of anything unexpected and provide the required comfort. Nearrly all of it, I'd suggest.

Even the ever-inventive, garrulous wit of Danny Baker was fitted into a fixed radio show that was the same every week before his one last, big mistake. Tony Blackburn's 60's and Johnnie Walker's 70's shows on R2 are both eased into pre-set templates. Most of the records they play are cosily familiar and that's how we like it.

But interviews are made up of the same habitual set pieces, too. I'm much more Times Radio than R4 or 5 these days. Interviews have the interviewee beginning the first answer with, 'So,'; some of them don't realize they fill in with 'you know' throughout, which makes me start to bet on how many 'you knows' there'll be before the interviewer speaks again.

A recent innovation, that has caught on immediately and spread like a new virus, comparable only with the 'Look' and 'Listen' introduced by Australian cricketers some years ago, is the congratulatory, 'that's a very good question'.

Suddenly they all do it, beautifully, if vacuously, combining ingratiation with the interviewer with the suggestion that even though it's a good question, they can still answer it. 

The interview comes to a premature halt when they lose the line. Technology is never quite perfected and so we may no longer have 1970's R1 deejays struggling with 7 inch singles that stick or jump we now have digital phone lines that get tired, become intermittent, possibly make the voice sound like Victoria Beckham being put through a voice coder before we are robbed of the summing up.

Orr maybe they do it deliberately once they've heard enough.

I've had it installed here....

That's not what I call progress

 

John Burnside - Learning to Sleep

 John Burnside, Learning to Sleep (Cape)

John Burnside's new collection begins with the observation that,

Wooing is out of fashion,

like silence,

or manna 

 

no fervour any more, no

Tir na Nog.

 

and before the Postscript, it ends reflecting on David Hume and how, perhaps,

everything we know is what it seems.

In between those two empirical attitudes, though, that 'what we know' appears to suggest or contain a bit more. Postscript refers to the 'edge' and a 'brink',

as if a better world was still to come.

 

and elsewhere he has a 'cusp' and a 'horizon', or lack of one. Without wanting to sound too much like a poetry reviewer, it is that intersection between the actual and some potential beyond it that runs through the book. I don't imagine John Burnside to be a religious man or he would surely say so more explicitly but he needs quasi-religious ideas sometimes to express the idea. There must be more to it than meets the eye, he is trying to convince us, or convince himself, especially when, in A Brief Memo, for Valentine's Day, he senses,

            how sweet it is

to be alive.

 

That is the theme of the poetry and the poetry provides its own answer by being what it is. It is gorgeously done and entirely convincing despite the apparent ease with which such writing seems to come. There is no shortage of Burnside poetry and then there's the fiction and other prose but such facility doesn't seem to diminish the accomplishment. He hasn't wandered off into mythologies of his own making like some might say Ted Hughes did and he hasn't taken his method to the outer limits of arch-cleverness like Paul Muldoon, who continued from his pre-eminent position of sophistication twenty years ago into realms of his own making as if he were James Joyce.

Having posted the programme for the forthcoming year with Portsmouth Poetry Society only yesterday, I see I am down to introduce the subject of 'free verse' in February. I don't intend to either attack or defend the idea but to 'tell it how it is', for me at least, which may or may not gravitate towards a manifesto statement that there's no such thing. However, if one ever needed an example of a poet that writes 'free verse' than is undeniably 'poetry', I'm quite prepared to abandon Thom Gunn's Touch as my paragon example and replace it with almost anything from this book or elsewhere in John Burnside. Rhyme and metre, assumed by so many to be essential to 'poetry', would ruin the rhythms and progress of his language. It has an orderliness of its own. One couldn't call it verse but it isn't 'chopped-up prose'. As ever, all you have to be is any good.

 

Abundance, or at least the illusion of it, pours out of such regular experiences as loss, absence and isolation. From those first lines, from In Memoriam, in which 'there is a Meadow / - afterward', the world is charged with the likes of,

the murmur of stars in my blood

 

and the knowledge that,

so, now, there is no end

to what we know,

though what we know

is never quite enough

to set things right:        

and we recognize our unsafe place in the universe or at least have a good friend in John Burnside, or the words he threads together, to help soothe those agonies. And that is what he quotes from Thomas Carlyle ahead of Preparations for the True Apocalypse as,

 which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.

It can happen in the rare beauty of such lines as those from An Angel Passes, 

                                   the light

re-spinstering your face

by slow degrees, your fingers

tangled in a myth of needlecraft 

 

but it happens more properly not in selected quotes but in the cumulative effect of the book as a whole.

 

Poetry isn't actually up to much these days when the real threat of climate apocalypse has been obscured by a couple of years of pandemic difficulty. John Burnside's poems are unlikely to save us because hardly anybody outside the small, closed poetry world has heard of him but that doesn't mean a few of us aren't glad of knowing we are not alone. It's very unlikely I'll see a better book of new poems than this this year and, alongside the music and, let's hope, some great Autumn concerts, it's a highlight of 2021.

 

Sainthood

It said here, I think, years ago now that there were only two titles I'd like, professor and saint. Not any more, though. Professor's only a job and not one I'd like. Adorning one's name with epithets like titles before or letters after weighs one down like a royal wearing lots of medals at a ceremony. My name is a common enough one but it's all I need. The B.A. (Hons) need only appear on a CV if ever I had to provide one, which I won't.

Sainthood's odd, though. Plenty of people still think it's a good thing, like righteousness, but the language continues to move on and shift its meanings further. Sainthood is conferred by the Catholic church as a reward for work in its service like a Conservative party donor given a place in the House of Lords. While saints are usually credited with miracles, it is similarly a miracle that anybody would want to sponsor that ramshackle racket of self-interest except, of course, self-interest is why they do it.

I finished A.N. Wilson's weighty and impressive life of Tolstoy today. Wilson himself would possibly be deserving of some sort of honour were it not for his woeful dismissals of Seamus Heaney. It is a blind spot that makes him human and thus flawed. There are no saints, we are all who we are and we all think what we want to think. But Tolstoy was regarded as a saint in his lifetime, mostly for good reasons but, as ever, he couldn't provide the necessary unblemished record.

It took him some time to emerge from a ruinous gambling habit, a huge appetite for debauchery and a rich young man's lack of purpose. But Wilson quotes a number in the many millions of pages of writing he went on to produce that is industrial on a vast scale, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina being such achievements and only counting less than a thousand pages each. Put alongside his thirteen children and political and religious concerns, it is evidence of enormous energy. His mass popularity and the crowds he gathered were something far beyond literary significance and Wilson points out that his two big masterpiece novels weren't the cause of it. Like Saint Albert Camus later, it's hard to think that such a great novelist wasn't necessarily most importantly a novelist.

I took some satisfaction from the handful of times Wilson made comparisons with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I spent some teenage years reading in the mid-1970's and now sometimes wonder if I should have been reading something else. Dickens, for instance, who was so admired by Tolstoy. But I was also pleased to see a few references to Larkin edging their way in, showing that Larkin is a part of the Wilson firmament even if one hardly thinks of him as Tolstoyan.

Tolstoyan comes to mean a Christian faith and devotion, despite the doubts anybody would have, that went beyond any church into the pursuit of a simple, rustic life, as he saw it, anti-war, valuing some impossible idyll of life, and revolutionary at a time in Tsarist Russia when revolution would have seemed to us the very least objective. But he was ex-communicated by the Orthodox Church and Lenin's 1917 revolution, being industrial and genocidal, was anything but Tolstoyan.

But as self-styled genius with all too much regard for itself can often be, Tolstoy's practice didn't follow all that it preached. As with many such men, his marriage was a catastrophe, he seems severly unhappy struggling with his malevolent demons and he is cruel to those close to him. In the closing chapters, anybody and everybody, knowing that they are living in such important times, is keeping diaries in order that their side of the story will be on record. It is madness and maybe it did drive Sofia mad.

In one telling vignette, Tolstoy asks a guest if he would empty his own chamber pot as he regards it as beneath the dignity of a servant to have to do so. Sofia has no such qualms and doesn't understand what they pay servants for if it's not to do that and informs the guest otherwise. But the guest is English and does what an Englishman, one might hope, would do at least in those days in those circumstances and makes no use of the chamber pot but uses the extensive garden instead.

But sainthood is beyond us, just another ludicrous invention of the imagination. The more one knows about a saint, the less they prove to be one.

--

So, tempted by the new, highly recommended (by A.N. Wilson in The Times) biography of Dante, I find I can wait until later for that because there's more Balzac and Gogol on the shelves, waiting. And, moving a few books about to accommodate Tolstoy upstairs, I found John Steinbeck. I must have had that for 40-odd years and not read it yet. But Dead Souls is up next.

Summertime

 I was surprised, somewhere below, to be reminded how many summer poems I had available to contribute from the back catalogue to the recent poetry club theme. Two of that very name, which briefly confused the compilation of the Collected, plus others. I think I see it as a passing aberration, or did. All bets are off as to how future generations will understand poems about the seasons written when Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter were known quantities. But as we lean back away from the Sun and make our way to more temperate weather we can look forward to something less jarring.

Not the least of which will be not having to try to understand the cricket season as the main strategy is by now how to monetize, and thereby reduce, the game. Today Trent Rockets are away in Cardiff and Notts are away in York while Trent Bridge hosts the test match. Well, that answers my question, then. I can hardly be expected to support a new-fangled Nottingham-based team if they take a handful of players from Notts, of who I am a lifelong 'follower' (at a distance) and diminish the real thing. It makes precious little difference to me what happens to Notts but following a sport seems to involve taking sides and so they are my side but the sport devalues itself if it expects me to be devoted to Trent Rockets, too, because I'm not going to be and it further undermines what interest I have in Notts when they have to field half a reserve team. I am just about a good enough supporter to know that I've never heard of half the side playing in Cardiff at the moment.

Whether it's the way of the world or just incipient old age, so much seems like Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

 

But at least here we might revive an old practice and review a new book of poems which is something that's not happened for some time. That's partly because there have been fewer, maybe, but also because I'm not finding, or even trying to find, new names to read. As happened with pop music a few decades ago, new poetry by generations that came after one's own seems to be about, or doing, something else. 

One lives in one's own moment as the Rolling Stones have always done and when David Bowie tried to move with the times he wasn't as good. Not even Shakespeare managed to do that.

And so the lights go out, one by one - Heaney, Lumsden, Mahon. All men, of course, but I was a great admirer of Anne Stevenson and Eavan Boland was significant to many. But John Burnside is still at it and never lets us down at the risk of being prolific. I'm promised delivery on Tuesday. That can often mean Monday. It should be just like the old days, reading new poems and wondering what I can possibly say about them to make it look like I 'got it'. 

 

Also, looking forward to the glory days of September and Autumn, although we still await the programme of Tuesday lunchtime concerts from Chichester Cathedral, we do have Portsmouth's list for Thursdays. Thank heaven, as it were, for cathedrals.

Pluperfect, Collected Poems

Setting this up as a kindle available on Amazon proved beyond me. Never mind. I had gone far enough with compiling the Word doument by the time I found that out that I wasn't going to abandon it at that late stage.

The next best alternative was to make a pdf out of it. That was easy in the end but not until I'd explored all the difficult options. Good Lord, I thought, if I'd wanted to battle with the computer all morning, making an easy job too hard, I need not have retired.

But now we have it, at least in version 1.0. One can't go on looking for errata and gremlins forever and so let's go with this.

In the end I decided to go without a foreword. The poems can manage without any more than the barest commentary, context and footnotes.

But the foreword I removed, if you really want to know, was thus,

 -- 

I had thought the Collected  might be pared down to only 20 or 30 poems but that would have been a new Selected. Thus the 123 poems here represent the career retrospective from, I think, 1979, to 2021. They are pluperfect by having looked back once, they are looked back on again.

Some poems were luckier than others on either side of the fine line between being kept in and being left out. In the unlikely event of a Complete Poems, there would be no such arbitrary line.

The process of writing was, for me, one of unlearning or of learning what not to do and, preferably, not consciously dwelling on such thoughts about what one was doing. The more successful pieces seemed to be those that came without trying too hard, that arrived almost fully-formed, and the three original manuscripts in the appendix show very little amendment.

123 poems is a slight Collected but it was never a full-time job. Four poems a year was the rate I maintained fairly steadily, much of that time not knowing where the next poem was coming from or if it would come at all.

While it is customary to thank people who helped or read such work along the way it became increasingly the case that if I was happy with a poem, that was all that mattered. Any reaction they generated by appearing in print or being read was of interest but a bonus. It was very soon not a commercial venture but something with which to please oneself. However, of course, by presenting those that might be more worth preserving, I’m glad of anyone who wants to share them and I hope they find something worthwhile among them.  

--

You are welcome to the pdf and can have it for the asking by e-mailing dg217.888@ntlworld.com.

Shakespeare and Tolstoy

 The film All is True will not be news to most people but, not being a film-watcher, it was to me when shown on TV the other night. I may not watch many films but I am a Shakespeare biography addict. One can put this film straight in at the top of Ben Elton's finest work with Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellan enacting an insightful if ultimately far-fetched account of Shakespeare's retirement back in Stratford, 1613-16.

There are all the usual biographical motifs to include, like beds mentioned in wills, Shakespeare's concern for his social status and the death of the boy, Hamnet. I also realized that surely Shakespeare is by now surely a character in more works of historical fiction than he wrote himself.

Central to the film is Shakespeare's 'realization' that Hamnet didn't die of plague as he does in Maggie O'Farrell and as he is assumed to have in nearly every biography. Shakespeare notices that there were only five infant deaths in Stratford in 1596, three of which were newborn. In a line worthy of the man himself, Elton gives him, 'the plague is a scythe, not a dagger' that takes out swathes of lives and doesn't pick them out one by one. I wonder how verifiable that figure is because it shifts our understanding a little bit if it's true.

What is much less likely is the alternative explanation that Judith pushed him into the pond out of jealousy and he drowned. That Shakespeare had favoured Hamnet on account of his attempts at poetry but that they had really been written by Judith who, being a girl, helped in the kitchen is not going to be given much credence as a biographical possibility but it made for yet more fine fiction from the fertile material of the shadowy life.

It gives us the very outside possibility that it produced the lines,

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream

but I'm not buying that any more than I think Hamnet's death resulted in the lines from King John,

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

 

That ain't necessarily so.

---

We're dealing with big guns at present.

Moving from Anna Karenina to A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy one is struck by how much of one is in the other. One can read the one without knowing about the other. It is, in fact, more of a distraction from either to open up a whole new area by comparing the two.

Wilson is scholarly and entertaining and sends one diligently to his back catalogue to see what else there is among his novels, Dickens and Victorian work having been so hugely impressed with his Jesus and his Betjeman.

I couldn't help but notice his passage on the C19th biographers of Jesus, including,

The most notorious and radical of their theologians, David Fiedrich Strauss, had brought to the study of the New Testament a whole package of scientific and philosophical presuppositions which enabled him to examine the Gospel stories in the same sceptical spirit which would have governed a scholar's reading of, say, Plutarch's 'Lives'. 

which is very much what Wilson himself does so he wasn't the first to do so but the latest in an honourable line.

Having also read Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy- The Time-Torn Man recently, the litany of great writers in difficult marriages insists on compiling itself before one's very eyes. Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Shakespeare...it begins to look like a pattern. Do great writers become great writers as a result of unhappy marriages or are the unhappy marriages due to them being great writers.

That looks like an easy one to me.