On Short Books

 Last week I talked about my mixed feelings towards big books. For some reason blogspot gave it a content warning. I’m not sure why this would be, I didn’t say very much shocking. I talked about big books and how I often find them too big for their own good. I used a fair amount of eating imagery I suppose, about nibbling some books and guzzling others.. but that can’t be the problem.

This is especially perplexing because I have tackled some generally taboo subjects on this blog. I’ve reviewed Fanny Hill, books about eighteenth century sexuality and any number of peculiar gothic novels and amatory tales with all sorts of odd stuff. In my review for The Manuscript Found in Saragossa I talk about a “incestuous, diabolic, necrophiliac, gay threesome” and recieved nothing. I’ve even re-uploaded the big books host and things seem fine. All very perplexing.

I thought that I’d talk about shorter books this week, if I can get away with it.

Some of my utter favourite books of the last few years have been on the short side. The Colour Purple was a particular highlight. I think it’s amazing that something so short can be so epic in scope, taking place over many years and featuring a whole community whose many characters change radically throughout. At the beginning of the story, Celie is a nobody among nobodies, her opinions are unwanted and her desires unrecognised. By the end, she is the centre of a rambunctious group of people who have been built up, knocked down and rebuilt again. If Proust’s In Search of Lost Time takes over a million words to create a society and show it change, The Colour Purple does it in sixty-six thousand - and more vividly too.

One of my utter favourite books is only eighty-thousand words. It’s Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and it’s my go-to recommendation for anyone who hasn’t read it. It doesn’t have the epic sweep of The Colour Purple, it technically takes place during the time one sentence is read out. The story itself barely leaves the confines of one hall, where people dance for hours and hours with barely a break. I read it in one huge gulp, utterly addicted. It’s not a cheerful read but the desperation and tension of it are close to unbearable.

Patrick Hamilton is one of my favourite writers, who mainly wrote mid-length to long-ish novels. My favourite is The Slaves of Solitude but coming close second is Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which is actually a trilogy of short novels. The best of those is the shortest, The Siege of Pleasure. It takes place over twenty-four hours, most of them increasingly drunken. One of the fascinating elements is how it takes the character of the first book, Ella, puts her as the central character, charts her every move and shows her to be even more empty than she seemed in the first book.

If you asked me my favourite author during university, I’d have easily answered Kurt Vonnegut. There’s an author who can slide in, lob a load of interesting stuff at a reader and get out before he wears out his welcome. I re-read those books so many times, but I don’t think I’d have appreciated a blockbuster length Vonnegut novel, it would have become tiresome.

Even my beloved eighteenth century isn’t all big bulky beasts. A lot of the Grub Street stuff was very short, some barely longer than pamphlets but even the heavyweights of the time produced pocketable works. Johnson’s Rambler essays have been packaged into three very carryable volumes - and if that’s cheating, his novel Rasselas is a tiddler. Yet, within that short novel you find a distinct summation of many of Johnson’s themes, an understanding into how he saw the world and a few pretty decent little jokes. I always recommend Rasselas to Johnson neophytes. Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield is also a fairly short work, eminently readable and rammed with charm. 

My favourite short eighteenth century work is Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a wickedly funny parody of self-improvement literature designed to help the reader become more unpleasant. And the best thing about a short book, you can read it many times over.

Dear reader, do not worry, I won’t be talking about medium sized books next week, I’ll be looking at London Street cries.

On Big Books

 Did you know, I’m into books? I like them a lot. I like collecting them, I like organising them, I like reading them, I like thinking about them after I’ve read them - I write about them, sometimes I even write them. This often leads to the assumption that I find the bigger a book is, the better. This is not necessarily true.

I have read big books and there are definitely larger books I’ve enjoyed, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne is a reading experience I found difficult but also very rewarding which grows the more I think about it and leads me to want to read it again. The same is true of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. My favourite novel, Tom Jones is rather long, but it never feels it. At least, not till Tom gets to London. 

Often I’ve found big books do not always have the full bang for their buck. I’m glad I read all of Clarissa and I can now appreciate the positive impact it had on literature and the interesting realistic and psychological things it attempted but I shall probably never return to it.

Nor do I expect to return to Ducks Newburyport, despite how fascinating it was to try and tease out an organisational and thematic principle. Les Miserables was a book that seems to be diminished by its size, the sheer onslaught of everything leading to no set-piece or character standing out. I know others would disagree, citing the chase in the sewers or the manning of the barricade, but imagine a smaller book where one of those big moments was the central moment and I think it would be a stronger book.

That’s not to say all big books are bad. Dickens is at his best when he has the space to stretch out and be truly Dickens, Hard Times being easily the weakest of his works I’ve read. Anna Karenina also has this wonderful quality of exactly as long as it needs to be, I wonder if War and Peace feels the same. Ulysses is reportedly a book that improves on reread and, having enjoyed it the first time, I can see how having a clearer expectation of the journey ahead, it would be more enjoyable. I’ve certainly found that every time I’ve reread the equally idiosyncratic Tristram Shandy. I’d like to read Middlemarch again, I wonder if I’d find it as alienating as I did the first time.

One book I can’t ever imagine reading again is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. While there were certainly moments and characters I enjoyed, and the peculiarly meditative style had a way of separating Proust time from normal time, I did find it something of a wet fart. Maybe it was the translation. I couldn’t read Don Quixote till I found a translation that slipped down easily enough. 

I tend to tackle two big beasts a year, one in the summer and one near Christmas. This summer’s book is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. While there are books I’ve split up over a year (Pamela, Montaigne and Lost Time) I tend to tackle the big book in the August holiday. This holiday I was finishing the settlement of my new house and learning/rehearsing the main part in a play and I simply didn’t get much of anything read. This means that after two months, I am yet to break halfway through Genji.

It’s one of those books which make it hard to carry around everywhere and pull out whenever. The book itself is physically large, fat and floppy, heavy if propped up on a chest or belly. It’s simply too cumbersome to sit in the park with and to throw it in a bag to grab at moments at school would be to leave no room for my raincoat or lunch. What’s more, the long chapters, detailed intricacies of courtly life and multiple characters (all without names) mean that it can’t be understood in small chunks either. Yet neither can it be read in big chunks, as too much Genji is a cosh and you find yourself asleep and dribbling before you know it. 

This is not to say Genji is unenjoyable, and it’s not boring, but it has a dreamy meditative quality, not unlike Proust, that means it’s simply not a book to be gobbled in large chunks. It’s one of those occasions where there is no solution but patience, read thirty or forty pages and night and watch it slowly be nibbled away. Now the play is over, the house settled and a nice routine has been established I am enjoying my time with Genji, entering this expansive world and life so different to mine and watch the scroll of his life gently unwind. I am looking forward to necking a few short, intense novels when I get done though.

Rest

I've been very busy with plays and school, so I'm having a rest from the blog this week.

4. Quiet; peace; cessation from disturbance.Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Mat. xi. 29. He giveth you rest from all your enemies.
Deut. xii. 10. Though the righteous be prevented with death; yet shall he be in rest.
Wisd. iv. 7. ’Scap’d from such storms of pow’r, holding it best
To be below herself to be at rest.
Daniel’s Civil War. The root cut off, from whence these tumults rose,
He should have rest, the commonwealth repose.
Daniel.Thus fenc’d, but not at rest or ease of mind.
Milton. With what a load of vengeance am I prest,
Yet never, never, can I hope for rest;
For when my heavy burden I remove,
The weight falls down, and crushes her I love.
Dryden. Like the sun, it had light and agility; it knew no rest but in motion, no quiet but in activity.
South’s Sermons. Where can a frail man hide him? in what arms
Shall a short life enjoy a little rest.
Fanshaw. Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go.
Pope. The grave, where ev’n the great find rest.
Pope. The midnight murderer
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest.
Anonym. 
5. Cessation from bodily labour.There the weary be at rest.
Job iii. 17. 

Building my 18th Century Library

 I've long wanted a lovely, permanent home for all my eighteenth century stuff and now I have my own house, I've managed to create that room of my desires. Here is how I did it and how I organised it.

"You've done this many times before"... a useful mantra from an odd place.

 “You’ve done this many times before, this is just one of those times.”

The above quote is a line spoken a number of times in Craig Warner’s theatrical adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train. It’s first said by Charles Bruno but becomes repeated by Guy Haines, a mantra between them. I’ve read the novel, but only after having read the play many times to learn the lines, I can’t find it there, it might be a play only addition.

The play version of Charles Bruno is a more pathetic person than the novel version - at the very least, his hold over Guy Haines is less strong - but the line is an example of Bruno being something of the master manipulator he thinks he is. At the point it’s introduced, he’s been sending Guy daily letters reiterating the exact steps he should take to kill Bruno’s father. The notion being that Guy has rehearsed the steps so often by reading the letters, the actual act should be no different.

Of course, if Guy had a backbone, he’d send the letters to the police and use it as proof of Bruno’s murderous intentions but he doesn’t, so he obsessively reads them instead. There is something psychologically powerful in repeating and reiterating the instructions again and again, something which makes it inevitable that Guy will follow them. It reminds me of the Roman stoics who would rehearse the worst outcomes of an event so they would be ready for them if they occurred.

It’s also an interesting line to have in a play. As someone playing Guy, I’ve read those lines multiple times, said them aloud in rehearsals and will say them over again during the play’s run. In a very real sense, when I ‘kill’ Bruno’s father on the fifth night of the run, I’ll have done it ‘for real’, (at least for an audience invested in the action) four times before. Poor Bruno’s father, he never appears on stage but is killed over and over again.

Weirdly, it’s a line that has been playing in my head a lot this week, both in reference to the play and in reference to going back to work at a school. This is my 17th new year and I find going back after the summer holidays as much as I ever did. There’s something comforting in remembering that I’ve done it many times before and that this is just one of those times. It also helps with the play, although I’ve learned the lines, I don’t feel like I have. They are all in there and come out when the scenes play, but if I were to sit down and try to cold remember them, it’s like they’re not there - but I’ve successfully got through the scenes many times before, tonight will be just one of those times. 

It also applies to my writing and this blog. A little hour snatched after school and before rehearsal is the only time I have to write this and it wasn’t till this morning that I had any idea of what I wanted to write about. I always think of something though. I’ve written a blog post many times before, this is just one of those times - I should trust myself.

And it might not be the finest entry on this blog, but it’s something, and something relevant to the art of writing and my life at this moment. It’ll do anyway.

Next week I perform the play and then after that, I won’t be doing it any more. I’ll probably miss it then.

On the Morality of Authors

 There was something people used to say at the Dr Johnson House that I found myself saying sometimes, that we were lucky as a museum to not have to apologise for Samuel Johnson. This phrase usually came up when talking about the relationship of Samuel Johnson and Francis Barber, unlike many museums we didn’t have to apologise for being involved with the slave trade, on the contrary, Johnson was one of the earlier protestors against and left much of his money to someone born a slave.

It’s not the whole story though. The relationship between Johnson and Barber wasn’t always the smoothest, he was overbearing in general, especially to those he cared for and he steered Barber into life paths against his will. What’s more, the house itself is literally built with a consequence of slavery. The floorboards are American red woods which were used as ship’s lumber to weigh it down on the return leg of the triangular trade, probably stacked in the same hold that held the slaves.

Another way we felt we were lucky to have Johnson was his attitude to women’s education. It’s an  odd thing, one of his most famous quotes is denigrating a woman preacher, but many of his other actions show a keen support for intelligent women. He helped market women’s writing, regarded Elizabeth Carter as something of a role model, came up with a plan of education for Hester Thrale’s daughter, Queeney. Even his jabs at Scotland fall more into the category of jokey banter than actual invective.

But why do we need our writers and historical figures to be good?

Writers are a famously anti-social bunch of people and many lived incredibly messy lives and held incredibly messy views. Goldsmith was an early abolitionist who wrote under the patronage of the very slave-positive Lord Mayor of Bristol. Smart’s Jubilate Agno is full of misogyny (much of which is being worked through as the text progresses.) Some of the best writers, like the Scriblerans, are essentially writing on ‘the wrong side of history’, upholding the traditional practices of patronage over commercial literature. Essentially, they gate-keep public expression as something for the wealthy and educated.

Boswell does some terrible things, dressing up as a commoner so he can rape a prostitute in front of an audience on Westminster Bridge. Casanova is a seducer, conman and attempted murderer, Smollett used the funds of his wife’s sugar plantation to set himself up a gentleman, Fielding may have groomed his housekeeper, Thomas Day specifically educated a young girl to become the perfect wife… the list goes on.

Just before I fell into my eighteenth century hole, I very nearly fell into a seventeenth century one (a time period I still find very interesting). This was because of another Samuel, Samuel Pepys. I have, and have read, the complete unabridged diary which I read with great pleasure and occasional alarm. He was so open to life, to new ideas and experiences - and he was a complete shit. A creepy, pervy little man who used his position of power to grope as many poor women as possible. The more I’ve become aware of this side of him, the harder he is to read.

Yet, how terrible many of these people are (or more accurately, how terrible some aspects of them are) I still read them. Casanova is a pretty awful person but he is a very entertaining one. In general, I’d prefer to read something about, or by, someone deeply flawed and interesting than someone boring. Not that immorality makes someone interesting, a person who will predictably do the most selfish thing is deeply boring also. 

An aspect of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that taught me a lesson for writing and life is the way his character’s greatest flaws have the same source as their greatest virtues. Anna’s strong emotional life powers her best and worst moments, as does Karenin’s logical detachment. Similarly, both Pepys and Casanova are powered by their hunger for experience - it leads them to create joyful, expansive visions of life at the same time it leads them to use other people (particularly women) as means to experience new things. (Incidentally, I’m with Kant, people should always be ends in themselves and never means).

One of my favourite books is Arieh Sachs’s Passionate Intelligence. It argues that one of the key themes of Johnson’s writing, and a key drive in his life was the urge to blend the power of imagination (which Johnson saw as inherently selfish) with the steering power of reason (which is universal but a little inert). This blend Sachs calls ‘Passionate Intelligence’. Like most of Johnson’s ideas, it’s not a new one. Plato talked about the driver steering the white and black horses on the same path - the idea of reason being the reins for passion is a common one.  Of course, he failed to enact this ideal but he tried, and I think that’s why Dr Johnson’s house is lucky to have him. 

Ultimately, worrying about the morality of other people, especially long-dead people is a fruitless endeavour. The only morality we have control over is our own. We need to be aware of who influences us and how. we also need to be open about the flaws of the people we study just as we need to be aware of our own. I’d like the joy and openness of Pepys, the hope of Smart, an awareness of my own absurdity and contradiction like Goldsmith and the passionate intelligence of Johnson - but I have to accept that I am me, with all the benefits and constraints that entails. 

Trying out Youtube's 'Inspiration' feature.

 I've had a little poke about on AI now and again. I know it's awful but I can't help being nosy. This time I discovered a feature on Youtube that gives you ideas for a video, structures it and provides thumbnails. I gave it a little go.

Review: The Ladies by Doris Grumbach

 The Ladies of Llangollen were a pair of Irish heiresses, with a twenty year age-gap, who set up house together in a Welsh valley. There, they lived a quiet and domestic life, slowly improving their home and gardens, keeping to themselves, whilst wearing a masculine coded uniform of riding habits, white powdered hair and top hats. They became famous, ending up having lots of famous visitors who often left little gifts. 

The Ladies is a novel that retells these events and, while it teases out some of the tensions within The Ladies’ lives, it never fully goes beyond being a retelling to a fully alive, flesh-and-blood novel.  Events are rejigged, the point of view does delves into Eleanor and Sarah’s heads, but it never seems to grow from someone telling the reader their version of the events into a shaped and compelling work of literature. Their story is fascinating, and that made the book an enjoyable read, but it was (presumably) more accurately, and more engagingly told in Elizabeth Maven’s The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship.

Part of my ambivalence about the book is the use of tense. It swaps between past and present tense, seemingly at random. There are no chapters in the book but it’s split into four sections, yet the tense isn’t consistent within these sections. Going back to the book and skipping through to when the tense changes, I think any part about the two Ladies on their own or together are in present tense, and the parts when they are with someone else are in the past. If this is true, I think the idea is that when they are together, things are more intense and immediate but washed out when their essential togetherness is watered down by the presence of someone else. If so, it’s an interesting idea, but it comes across as muddled.

The Ladies have represented a lot to people. To the age they lived in, they were either ‘damned sapphists’, as Hester Thrale called them, or a symbol of a pure romantic friendship to be celebrated. Certainly, they saw themselves in a tradition of Rousseau and sought to bring a cosy, homely quality to their lives, especially expressed by their garden. To many queer people today they represent an ideal, a happy and fulfilled domestic life. Anne Lister even went to meet them to see how a same sex ‘marriage’ could work. The Ladies themselves were indignant about any sexual aspersions being cast on them, but Grumbach’s novel centres their sexual life as the anchor of the relationship, with their shared bed being a separate and better world. (That said, it’s never an explicit book).

The most interesting thing the book does, is poke some criticisms into the life the Ladies built together. Their cosy life of reading, sewing and walking in the gardens is one that has been celebrated as ideal. Personally, it seems like a very heaven to me. However, the book pulls at a divide between the home they built in Wales and a sense of exile from their families in Ireland. There’s a sense that the very routine and domestic life they lived also served as something of a prison.

The most novelistic parts of the book happen at the beginning, where the Ladies formed their relationship, prepared an escape, made it and then were captured before making an arrangement to be allowed to go off together. The characterisation of Eleanor’s parents and Sarah’s gropey guardian are often stronger than the characterisation of the Ladies themselves. It’s quite a gripping beginning.

The flattest section is at the end, entitled ‘visitors’, which is largely a description of all the people that visited their houses and the Ladies’ slow decline. The book starts to come to a conclusion about their relationship at this part, and it’s an interesting an nuanced one. Their relationship was intense and fulfilling but in being so central to them it trapped them together and denied them access to the rest of the world. It seems their relationship was enough for them, which is brilliant, but if it hadn’t been, it would have been a slow suffocation.

Personally, this book has reenforced me an important lesson as I am writing a book featuring real historical people. That the book needs to be a novel as well as a retelling.

Overconsumption and my Book Habit

 I'm currently unpacking and organising my books in order to create my dream house-library, so I've turned it into a little video about my book consumption habits.

Review: Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

 

Having read The Interesting Adventures of Olaudah Equiano and A Portable Paradise, I seemed to have something of a slavery theme in my reading (as unintentional as it was) so I decided to continue it with Blood and Sugar, a murder mystery set around the slave traders of Deptford.

At first, I found the book a little pulpy, the sort of book where shadows are described as passing over someone’s soul. This feeling was further increased when the main character walked into a room, the narrator described a several paragraph itinerary of what was in it than told the reader, “I noted all these facts peripherally”. As the book went on, the pulpy elements seemed less glaring as I got into the voice of the book, then they became a feature I enjoyed about it.

Captain Harry Corsham is essentially a noir-ish gumshoe detective and this is a noir-ish gumshoe book, complete with a fun, slightly cheesy, first-person voice. It’s paced brilliantly, with a shocking act or piece of information coming along regularly and a small cliffhanger at the end of all of the short chapters. I can see why C.J Tudor said she read it in a day.

There’s a shocking murder at the beginning, a body is found which has been branded, tortured with thumbscrews, whipped and then had their throat slit. The visceral nature of the murder grabs the attention, like the more twisted murders in Seven or that Messiah series. However, these are all revealed to be typical slave punishments and the sadistic aspects of the killing are everyday actions to the slavers, and a perpetual fear for the slaves. 

The casualness of cruelty that the slavers adopt and the impact of that cruelty on their own souls is one of the themes of the book. Corsham wanders about Deptford and finds an ironmonger shop which sells thumbscrews, scold’s bridles and chains “every size, from four years old”. People off-handedly talk about how they had to crucify someone to pacify others, and the central mystery which surrounds a Zong-like ship.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the depiction of Deptford, as somewhere that is specifically distinct from London. They have their own accents, their own rules and their own systems of control. The ownership of slaves within England itself was a very muddy one, and the people of Deptford own outright slaves where that wouldn’t be possible within London itself.

There’s also a lot about the precariousness of being a freed slave. Equiano found himself constantly cheated and was several times almost kidnapped back into slavery, but this was always when he was in the West Indies. It could be that he was writing for a London audience that meant he didn’t talk about similar problems in England itself, but the freed slaves in this novel are almost as imprisoned as the slaves themselves. Two work as painters and abolitionists but are easy prey for anyone who wishes to attack them, another runs a criminal gang which protects freed slaves, and another works for a slave-trader he despises. 

There’s also a lot about how slavery was considered one of the nation’s backbones and that the urge to protect the institution went into the upper classes and the government. Captain Corsham has to do a lot of sneaking around his ‘own people’ so he won’t be caught undermining their interests.

While this book does paint a graphic picture of slavery, the harm it did to all participants of it and how entrenched it was within the country, it still manages to be a decent noir-ish thriller, keeping the pace up throughout. I found the solution of the murderer to be quite dissatisfying, and I can see why the killer was who they were from a story structure sense, I felt it detracted from the book in a thematic one.

I’m not sure I’ll read Daughters of the Night, which appears to be Corsham’s wife delving into the underbelly of prostitution to solve her own murder, but only because I feel like it’d be more of the same. I can’t decide whether using the backdrop of slavery for a mystery novel feels appropriate or not, the reality of the slave trade seems like one of those dark events, like the holocaust, that doesn’t easily fit with a very constructed genre piece. The carefully constructed, and pulpy elements of the book did sometimes clash with the genuine horror of history.