Knutshell

I've started a blog of reviews in one sentence or less. The main theme will be the holy trinity of books/films/music but anything will be up for micro-reviewing.

Find it here.

Reading Casanova: Volume One.

I plan to set myself the challenge of reading all twelve volumes of Casanova’s A History of My Life within the next two years. I have copies of the modern translations by Willard Trask, which claim not to be expurgated or bowdlerised in any way. Judging by the first volume, considering what has been left in, I can’t imagine what would been cut.

The claim always made by Casanova afficienados is that there is more to Casanova than pure sex and boasting. Maybe later in the game, but this volume is pretty much wall to wall sex with a little cheating along the way.

Before we start with his story, we have the Preface, in which we meet Casanova and he tries to explain the sort of person he is and the sort of book he is writing. He hopes that the writer will see that, ‘my follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I will laugh at them and if you are kind, you will laugh along with me’. He also explains that his earliest memory will be at the age of eight because he didn’t live before then, he merely vegetated.

This earliest memory is about being taken to a witch to be healed of a constant nosebleed. It is painted in almost cinematic colours, describing a hushed boat ride across Venetian waters and the shack with the witch in. It is shortly after this he is sent to Padua to get some schooling.

In Padua he faces squalor, which he complains about until he is lodged with his teacher and their daughter Bettina. She is the first person to awake amorous feelings in him and we are then treated to a chapter of pure farce and bedroom comedy including a rival lover, demonic possession and a very handsome exorcist. Alas, Casanova does not get his leg over yet but he does acquire a love of intrigue and farce that will become as much (or even greater) pleasure to him then simple sex.

It is on his return to Venice that he loses his virginity, in a threesome with two sisters after he fails to win any attention from their cousin. Again this is something of a stage farce, involving secret keys made from an original pressed in dough, creeping around behind guardian’s backs and lots of hushed giggling. He returns to these sisters often and they teach him a lot. What is interesting about this, is that it is the girls who initiate the events. This is a pattern often repeated throughout the book.

It is somewhere about this time his patron sends him to a seminary, which he finds himself kicked out of due to a bout of bedhopping. As a result of this, he is locked in an island fortress to keep him out of mistress.(I meant to write 'mischief', but I like the typo). He spends his time in the fortresschatting, falling in love (and in bed) with the head guard’s wife and mooching around. At one point he manages to sneak out the fortress, across the water and beat the servant of his patron, who he blames for locking him up, before sneaking back and feigning a sprain. This is where we see a dark side of Casanova, he hopes to have killed the servant, even dumping the body in a canal and is certainly non-plussed about hearing the bruised man spluttering his way out if it.

He is then sent to Yugoslavia to become a secretary to a Bishop (he has, through this whole time been a sort of non-attached clergyman) he sets off, having lost most of his money at cards. We are then treated to many adventurers, most involving a disgraced Franciscan monk who prefers to beg for food instead of money, as he is more likely to get food worth more than cash handouts. The monk praises St Francis of Assisi for this shrewd advice. Casanova finds the monk a useful companion but is shocked how the monk pockets the odd valuable as well as food. There was a wonderful detail of the monk’s travelling cape being weighed down with enough food for a month.

In his travels, Casanova is locked in quarantine. He makes the most of it by chatting up a Greek slave in the floor downstairs. This culminates in her wedging herself up through a hole in the floor and giving him a blow job.

Finding the Bishop to be living a very dull life, he decides to go to Rome and make his fortune in the church. He does well, having received good letters of introduction from a Casanova he meets on his travels, he gets into the service of powerful Cardinal Aquaviva. He also ingratiates himself in a well-to-do family, where he finds ways to sleep with the man’s wife. This includes sneaking into her bed at night, finding time in solo carriage journeys and one time on a tree that has provided a ‘natural bed’. 

His career in Rome also starts to pick up. He makes the Pope laugh several times and even receives a few Papal gifts as well as flirting in verse with a powerful Duchess. This doesn’t get anywhere as he reluctantly helps a lady trying to elope with her lover and so brings too much scandal on him. This career over he sets off towards Constantinople with some promising letters of introduction and a small fortune. This is where the volume ends. He is barely nineteen years old. 

I have missed some of the more salacious and daft exploits out, but the book is relentless in it’s pace. It's always driving forward to the next adventure and narrated with a smiling, joyful wit by the older Casanova. Even more delicious are the older Casanova’s moral judgements on his younger self. These judgements reveal a scampishly fluid set of morals certainly. One of my favourites is, 

‘Cheating is a sin. But honest cunning is simply prudence. It is a virtue.’ There is another one about how when he stole money for his own fripperies, he is only stealing it from someone who was going to waste it on their own fripperies.

Casanova does some terrible things, from attempted murder, cheating and much jumping into bed with people’s wives, but we always like him. I think part of this is that the older Casanova is well aware of the ludicrous nature of many of his adventures. 

“For my own part, since I have always admitted that I was the chief cause of all the misfortunes which have befallen me, I have rejoiced in my ability to be my own pupil, and in my duty to love my teacher.”

It’s a duty in which he succeeds, I look forward to reading more.

Review: Writing Britain at the British Library

Throughout the Jubilee/ Olympic season, the British Library have been running an exhibition called ‘Writing Britain’, charting the relationship of British literature and its landscape. The other day I went to have a look.

On first impressions, it seemed a little flat. It is certainly a reading exhibit and showed little of the fun and visual flair of the free ‘Imaginary World’s’ exhibit a little while ago. However, when you start going around and reading and looking at the objects displayed that you really realise how many treasures are in one room. I was absorbed for nearly four hours.

The exhibition was arranged in five themed areas with cases of books and manuscripts in each one. The themes were, the countryside; industrial towns, moors and wastelands, suburbia, London and waterways. I most enjoyed the London section (which thrilled me with having John Stow’s survey of London and John Gay’s Trivia in the same case - books I have aways placed together on my shelves). 

To be honest, I found the the overall focus a little flimsy. There is little about London that is exemplified in descriptions worrying about the unnatural tastes of Hyde, but the description of London crime was used as an excuse to show a manuscript of that book. The description next to it included the very interesting snippet that it was the third manuscript of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as Stevenson’s wife had thrown the others away, worried about what the story was doing to her husband.

Indeed, the most interesting part of the exhibit was comparing all the different manuscripts to each other. Whether Ishiguro writing ‘v good’ next to some of his own writing or Oscar Wilde scoring parts out and squeezing elements in to perfect a joke in ‘Importance of Being Earnest’, the manuscripts showed such interesting differences in writing process.

Fanny Burney and Anne Bronte shared a careful hand with no mistakes, whereas JG Ballard and Blake scrawled in big messy loops. There was De Maurier’s careful notes for Rebecca and Galsworthy's’s plans of Soame Forsyte's house in the Forsyte Saga. There were the several drafts for ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ and a number Greene's attempts at ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter in ‘Wind in the Willows’. 

JK Rowling’s manuscript for ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ show her to be a product of a computer age, with a main draft with lots of crossings out and another page with paragraphs to be inserted. It also shows that she makes little heart shaped doodles as she writes, which I found to be very endearing. There were plenty more, including Dickens and lots of poets, especially romantic ones, as would be expected in an exhibition on place.

It made me think, as young writers will be more used to the computer then the pen, seeing these sorts of working drafts will be more of a rarity as the changes will be invisible or on computer files.

I for instance sometimes write ahead of myself, go back and catch up, using the momentum to get through the piece. It may be able to spot this in my writing, but each typescript looks clean, clear from the scratches it took to get there.

The exhibition also had other treasures, a 600 year old copy of the ‘Canterbury Tales’, an early chapbook about Robin Hood as well as early copies of Piers Ploughman, Gerald of Wales’ description of Ireland and Monmouth’s history of Kings. There were first edition copies of Goldsmith, Grey and Fanny Burney as well as John Lennon’s hand-scrawled lyrics for ‘in My life’. All of which had a sad git like me giddy with excitement.

As for the theme though, it seems obvious that a writer talks about place. The main theme of the novel I am working at now is how an author engages with their time and place, while the last one had strong links to parts of London (and a few scenes in Horsham, Sheffield and Coventry). The point of the exhibition either seems to be too subtle for me to have grasped or too simple to waste much though on. 

What I would really love the British Library to do is to create an exhibition about writing process, comparing manuscripts, pictures, draft notes and interviews to create a good hard look at how writers write. Maybe I should drop a line and ask them.

Olympic Ceremony, Some Thoughts

It’s not often I see a presentation of the United Kingdom actually represents the country I live in, but last night’s Opening Ceremony was close. True, there was a little too much texting and scones but I still recognised the place being portrayed.

The beginning, which incorporated the Thames, the tube, some clash and a pan out to London so we could get the Eastenders ‘doofers’ set the tone perfectly. A bit silly, but at it’s heart the certainties of geography with Father Thames flowing through a city that has changed so much and so little over the last 2,000 years.

The first bit didn’t speak to me particularly. I am quite comfortably a city dweller and all bucolic, pretty countrysidey stuff makes me think that someone will shortly be ritually murdered and morris-danced on. I also find that the whole Betjeman/Major ‘shady girls bicycling through sleepy lanes’ type of nostalgia is cloying and a bit vacant. That said, filling a stadium with shire horses and geese and that is a beautifully daft thing to do. 

Our countrysidey bit didn’t last long though, soon a smug Kenneth Brannagh in sculptured sideboards signalled the industrial revolution. Grey workers skulked out from under the big oak tree like freddies under a rock and belching factory towers thrust forth from the ground and there are lots of drums. The drums are lead by a deaf drummer with wild hair and they make lots of noise, people bustle and hammer and such. Eventually the chaos erupts with a Thames on fire and the smelting of a last ring that is hoisted up to make the Olympic symbol. This is the first part where I am confronted by more than just spectacle. Although we are presented with the traditional ‘dark satanic mills’ image, the pandemonium is not just smoke and smell and chaos, it’s creativity. It argues that the industrial revolution was a creative act and that art comes from chaos and individuality. We also had a march of Jarrow Workers, Suffragettes and others, implying that the chaos also created moves in individual freedoms and that something like the industrial revolution was necessary. Of course a huge ceremony is not the place to discuss the repercussions of the upheavals of the nineteenth century, but I found it at least a little more nuanced than the usual fairy tale, taking in the practical benefits as well as the downside.

Is it at this point that James Bond and the Queen parachuted into the stadium? I can’t remember. I liked that bit, it was a silly bit of grandstanding which gave the Queen a decent entrance without pomp and a big cheeky wink. That’s almost like the public face of Britain, the act of suave urbanity and daredevil lack of deference.

Then there was the whole NHS/clean your whites whiter than white/Mary Poppins vs Voldemort bit.   As a premature child with very little chance of survival and not rich parents, I do not find myself being very cynical when it comes to the NHS. I thought it very apt to celebrate the NHS as representative of modern England and the social experiments and advances that have happened post war. It is a way of celebrating Britain’s more modern successes, a success that doesn’t rely on   war or jingoism. I also liked the link to children’s literature via Great Ormond Street. I particularly liked the choice of children’s literature, as that allowed us to ignore the issues of cannon or rely on our cliched greats and pick literature that is accessible, well known, produced by both sexes and still going strong today. Like the NHS element, it allowed celebration of modern Britain, not harking back to old glories but also not imagining some non-existent yoof renaissance. It also allowed for some fun as flocks of Mary Poppi repelled Voldemort, Captain Hook and Cruella DeVille. It managed to celebrate our social successes and culture without being at all pompous or cliched.

And if it approached pompous, there was always the LSO/Rowan Atkinson sketch to debunk it.

Next was the bit with the music. This did veer a little towards a Channel 4 ‘Yoof Season’ ident but was saved by three things. The first was that the music was a full 30 odd years of pop-picking Gold, we didn’t get the old story of today’s youth, we got the music to provide a throughline to youth of the past years. The story was cute, the kiss was lovely and the couple were nice together - it seemed quite lovely to have a little romance scene in the middle of it all. Finally, the link between music and technology with the reveal of Berners-Lee sitting at his white boxes. If the last section was about the past, than this was about the future. A future that managed to be optimistic without being utopian, namely that we’ve had good music in the past and will probably get more to come and that things will get increasingly digitally connected. 

Then was the parade of peoples, apparently Fiji came out to the Beejees, but I didn’t pick up on that.

And at the end the extremely beautiful olympic flame thing, the use of young athletes to light the flame and the wheeling on of some old codgers to hang around, and in one case, sing.

Not the perfect ceremony, some of it was muddled and much of it was odd, but as a presentation of this country as it is now, with very little sentiment and a nice bundle of funny stuff, I don’t think it could have been any more appropriate.

For a completely different but very interesting reading of the ceremony click here.

All yours

Review: The Notable Man by John Ginger

And now as an end to this mini-iceage of an unseasonable Goldsmith Season, I’m going to look at John Ginger’s biography ‘A Notable Man’, especially in comparison to Ralph Wardle’s earlier biography.

The first difference is that there is a 20 odd year difference between the earlier Wardle and the later Ginger. The second is that The Ginger is almost twice the thickness of the Wardle. That would imply that there has been more things discovered about Goldsmith in that time. Unfortunately not.

Ginger has padded out his biography with two elements, life -n- times stuff, and psychology. Although some of the life -n-times stuff was interesting, was it really necessary to have long, involved descriptions of the political shufflings of the Bute administrations to understand the life of writings of Oliver Goldsmith? I would suggest not. Goldsmith is such an apolitical writer, even his reforming of manners type of writing has much more to do with fashions and fads than politics. Nor did I find all the drawn out lives of every incidental character or object Goldsmith interacted with to be very useful. These Interjections also cause Ginger to lose the thread of the narrative, meaning there are frequently times when we cannot fully follow where Goldsmith is and what he is doing. 

The second padding, psychology, is more of a problem. He has obviously read and enjoyed Walter Jackson Bale’s Samuel Johnson biography (and to be honest, what sane person hasn’t?) which makes him want to create a psychological portrait of Goldsmith. The trouble is that the portrait he creates is neither clear nor consistent. At the end of the book he declares that Goldsmith didn’t have any real feelings for people, and it was the construction of a fake, genial Goldsmith, a rational being and the dark, emotional black hole that was his real personality that creates the inconsistencies in his character and presentation. However, this interpretation comes out of nowhere, as beforehand the only talk he has given to Goldsmith’s psychological profile is his pull between escapist fantasy and the practical and dull details of life. Wardle mostly leaves the psychology of Goldsmith to the reader, discussing his intellect and the broad and eclectic nature of it, rather than any description of his personality.

Is it an unfair portrait?

Ginger’s reluctance to tell any of the classic Goldsmith anecdotes, or merely to allude to them takes away a lot of the pleasure of the text. I can see why he doesn’t just want to repeat the stories and create the quaint Goldsmith of popular imagination but a few of those anecdotes may have lightened up a story which inexplicably becomes doom and gloom by the end. Apparently Goldsmith hates himself, feels he has wasted his talent, is embarrassed about not getting a medical degree and generally fed up with a dog-like existence. While he also writes ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ and chatting with friends. (Incidentally, Ginger takes great pains to say that all of that play are stolen from Isaac Bickerstaff’s ‘Love in a Village’. He does this by picking out details of plot the two plays share, details that seem pretty characteristic of much eighteenth century comedy - frustrated lovers &c.)

The astute reader may have picked up on the fact that I did not particularly enjoy this biography. I found the more John Ginger was trying to convince me not to like Oliver Goldsmith, the more I didn’t like John Ginger. I found Ralph Wardle to be far kinda to dear Goldy.

There is, however an odd similarity in the way both biographers conclude that Goldsmith rather neglected to develop or properly utilise his talent as if his talent didn’t in some way rely on Goldsmith being Goldsmith. If Goldsmith was an underachiever, he’s the kind of underachiever I want to be (though I’ll pass on the early ‘death by vomiting’)

Review: Oliver Goldsmith's 'A History of the Natural World'.

After reading The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith, I had a fancy for a little more of the man and his writings. The God of Books must have been smiling down on me as I found a Goldsmith book at the fair run by the school I work at. The book cost 5 pence and it is a copy of Goldsmith’s History of the Natural World, much abridged but put together with some absolutely gorgeous water colours of the animals.

I haven’t sat and read it through, I did try but there wasn’t enough space between the seats on a bus to open it and it is very heavy. However, I have had many long picks through it and I find the book utterly charming and lovely.

Pictures aside, there is the joy of Goldsmith’s writing. Although much of what he wrote in this book was cribbed off other people, he still managed to make the prose his. It is easy to read, quick, active and he has a brilliant way of anthropomorphising animals. Even more entertaining for the modern reader is when he uses some less than kosher information, such as the fact that Gorillas like to steal human women for their own pleasure and when angered ‘make use of clubs for defence’.

Superstition is not beyond Goldsmith either, he talks about the ‘hideous note’ of the owl and talks about the beliefs that they signal death. I particularly enjoyed the rant he goes into about dolphins, a creature that in this book are found in the section labelled ‘fish’. In this, he moans about how many fables and stories there are about dolphins saving people. ‘Scarce an accident could happen at sea but the dolphin offered himself to convey the unfortunate to shore’. He doesn’t understand why they are given this character as they are ugly and completely unloveable, thus revealing that he has probably not ever met a dolphin.

Goldsmith then goes onto talking about sharks and their power and voracious appetite. He talks about how sharks would ‘unpeople the oceans’ were it not for the fact that the shark’s ‘upper jaw projects so far above the lower’. This made me laugh, as in the case of jaws, Goldsmith could well be describing his own preposterous fizzog.

I like how Goldsmith’s own prejudices litter the book. A cat is ‘a faithless friend’ and the ‘only animal of it’s tribe whose services can more than recompense the trouble of his education’. A dog however is, ‘the most intelligent of known quadrupeds’ and is ‘more faithful than the most boasted among men’. Goldsmith does not seem to be merely writing for money, he reveals some genuine love of animals, celebrating the decline of cock-fighting in his age and suggesting a reason why they are such fierce fighters, he reckons it is because a cock is ‘salacious’ and must defend his harem against other cocks. I can picture him skimming his source books and becoming very interested in what he read.

(I remember reading some Goldsmith somewhere, where he is hiding from creditors and so has to spend all daytime in his room, where he does amateur natural history on the spiders that share it with him).

A reflection of my own animal prejudices is that I have read less of the fish and insect part of the book, but all of the birds and mammals. The scorpion is apparently ‘infinitely more hideous’ than the lobster and he finds flea bites to be worse in England than the continent, and blames the weather for it.

It’s hard to know who this repackaging of the book is intended for. I assume that Goldsmith’s words are mainly being used to be a way of carrying the pictures. When it was produced, it was a readable and fascinating description of the private lives of known animals and an insight into others which were far more exotic seeming than a modern person with access to David Attenborough can ever really imagine.

But now the text is less informative, and it where Goldsmith veers into his own ideas that brings the book to life. As always, Goldsmith can be informative, funny and even a bit touching, as his description of a dodo testifies. 

“This silly simple bird makes great weight of it’s slowness, appearance of stupidity it can be easily caught and is good and wholesome eating. Three or four dodos are enough to dine a hundred men”. 

Goodbye dodo.

Yours

Clarissa, Big Read for June

I have been going on a journey recently. In January I started Clarissa with a group of other foolish readers. Many have fallen out of the race. Many are hobbling along. I was behind but have grit my teeth and ploughed through to mid-June and I have to say, my opinions of the book are not so very different from the first.

Clarissa tells its story with utter commitment to the daily psychological reality of the story. It forces you into people’s heads, into their hearts and souls and makes you feel rather dirty doing it. Especially now we are spending more time with Lovelace than we have before. His letters feel clammy and uncomfortable as a reader and I can never believe that he is being totally honest, even in his letters.

There have been many times in this read that I have yearned that Samuel RIchardson had an editor (I even wanted to tell him the other week) but then I remember that he did have an editor, he had many. Richardson actively sought people who would make his work shorter but they all said that he should write longer.

His publisher told him that in his style, ‘ where verbosity becomes a virtue’, because it conveys the patterns and repetitions of real life. He gathered huge salons of women with whom he tried to edit the work, but everyone kept telling him to keep it long and make it full of redundant letters, so he did and the book was a huge success.

Sometimes I feel I should just give it up and read Shades of Grey but then a little line will pop up and keep me going.

The other #Clarissa readers are here, go cheer them on.

Yours