Sunday, November 29, 2009

My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville


My hero: Ben the labrador



John Banville
Saturday 29 November 2009

H
ow is one to write about a family pet without plunging feet-first into a slough of bilge and bathos? There are people who find offensive the very idea of pets, and they have a point – when Byron spoke of animals being "spoiled" by intimate proximity to us he was not thinking of pet manicures and a comfy place on the hearth-rug. The poet knew that our attitude to animals is hopelessly confused: since we are lords of the universe we feel no compunction in eating them, yet certain special ones we take into our homes to share our lives with us. What's a dog to think?

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Wilkie Collins / The Woman in White's 150 years of sensation


The Woman in White's 150 years of sensation

Wilkie Collins's novel caused unprecedented excitement when it appeared in 1859, and has not lost its capacity to thrill

Jon Michael Varese
Thu 26 Nov 2009

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Victorian readers opened Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round to find the concluding instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, and, immediately following it, the opening instalment of a new novel with no author ascribed. They joined a new protagonist, "Walter Hartright, by name," on a night-time walk over Hampstead Heath, winding on moonlit paths until they reached the intersection of the Hampstead, Finchley, West End, and London roads – somewhere in the area of where the Finchley Road tube station now stands. There they were stopped, every drop of blood in their bodies frozen still by "the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly" upon Walter's shoulder. And there, for the first time, they met the mysterious Anne Catherick –better known as The Woman in White.
Often singled out as the foundation text of "sensation fiction" – a genre distinguished by its electrifying, suspenseful, and sometimes horrific plots, as well as its unsavoury themes of intrigue, jealousy, murder, adultery, and the like – The Woman in White was an immediate sensation in its own right. (In honour of its 150th anniversary, you can currently sign up to read the story as it was originally published, in weekly parts. There are tweets, too.) Margaret Oliphant hailed it as "a new beginning in fiction", while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as "great trash". And while Henry James disliked the "ponderosity" of The Woman in White (calling it "a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe"), he acknowledged that the book had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors".



Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr Collins had invented – mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel "masterly", and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.
During its serialisation in All the Year Round (from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860), and upon its publication in book form, The Woman in White inspired not only a series of imitators (chief among them Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne [1861] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret [1862]), but also what John Sutherland has described as a "sales mania and a franchise boom." Manufacturers produced Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The poet Edward FitzGerald named his herring-lugger "Marian Halcombe"; cats were named Fosco and thought to look more sinister; and Walter became a fashionable name for babies. As Kenneth Robinson, one of Collins's earliest biographers, pointed out, "even Dickens had not known such incidental publicity".

While Collins was no stranger to the literary scene at the time of The Woman in White's appearance (by 1859 he had published four novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous other books and essays), he had not yet become an author of completely independent means. Unlike Dickens (his friend, boss, and mentor) he had not been catapulted to international fame by his early novels, and thus still retained his day job as a journalist. But The Woman in White changed all that. As a serial, the novel lifted the circulation of All the Year Round to even higher levels than had Dickens, and Sampson Low's first printing of 1,000 copies of the three-volume edition in August of 1860 sold out on publication day. When Smith and Elder made a £5,000 bid for Collins's next novel the following summer, Collins knew that he had made it. "FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS!!!!!!" he wrote to his mother in July of 1861. "Ha! ha! ha! Five thousand pounds, for nine months or, at most a year's work – nobody but Dickens has made as much."
Collins's storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers – and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the "cliff-hanger", and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it's not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us. Our flesh creeps when Anne Catherick places her hand on Walter's shoulder; our hearts ache when Marian Halcombe falls ill and Count Fosco violates her diary; our blood curdles when Walter Hartright stands next to his beloved's tombstone, only to look up and find her standing there. The apparitions that Collins conjures are the ghosts that ensured not just his success but his longevity. They are what have kept readers going back for more during the last 150 years, and they bear testament to the value of Collins's self-professed, "old-fashioned" opinion that "the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story ..."



Saturday, November 21, 2009

My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd



My hero Alan Ross


William Boyd
Sat 21 Nov 2009


I
can visualise Alan Ross's expression – ineffably polite, but just failing to disguise his displeasure at being called anyone's hero. Perhaps "exemplar" would be a better word, given that he was the first writer I properly came to know and also the first editor to publish me, selecting one of my unsolicited short stories for his literary journal London Magazine in 1978. I was 26 – it was to be an association that lasted until his death in 2001.

Mavis Gallant / A life in books


Mavis Gallant

A life in books: Mavis Gallant



'I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write'
Mavis Gallant at Le Dôme restaurant in Paris
Mavis Gallant at Le Dôme restaurant in Paris. Photograph: Paul Cooper
A couple of months ago Mavis Gallant had a dream. A messenger came to the door carrying a cardboard box with a lid on it. On top was written "Mavis Gallant" in big letters – and underneath it "Bad Prose". "I was devastated. Devastated for days. I thought, they aren't telling me the truth."
In fact, Gallant is often cited as one of the best living short-story writers, inspiring reverence among devotees of the form, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, who credits her as the most significant influence on her own writing. At the age of 15 Gallant told a friend – who reminded her of it many years later – that when she grew up she would live in Paris and be published in the New Yorker. Next year she will have spent 6o years in her adoptive city and has had nearly as many stories in the magazine as John Updike.
"They were all in a strange land and out of context," one of the characters reflects in Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first (of only two) novels, written in 1959. A Canadian in Paris who has devoted her life to writing, she is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally. Reading too many of her stories at one time leaves the reader feeling strangely adrift, the world slightly askance. She has travelled extensively, usually alone, across Europe. "Only personal independence matters," she once wrote, quoting Boris Pasternak, and this might well be her motto.
We meet in Le Dôme, a notorious hangout for writers and artists in bohemian Montparnasse and long a favourite with Gallant, who lives what used to be for her just a nip around the corner, but is now – due to increasing frailty – a short taxi ride away. She first came to the restaurant when she arrived from Montreal in 1950. "It was a terrible winter and I used to come here because it was warm and I didn't have any electricity in my apartment. Can you imagine – the French giving anything away free!" she says, her handsome face crumpled by a chuckle. Now 87, she is a famous regular herself; the only time she is unable to secure her own spot – the cosy "Picasso booth" – is when Paloma, the artist's daughter, is in town.
"I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river," she writes in the introduction to her Selected Stories. Indeed, the life and work seem almost indistinguishable: she speaks in a succession of stories, as effortlessly as bubbles blown through a loop, smaller tales attached to larger ones. She is pin sharp: if you aren't careful, and push for direct answers, the stories burst in your face. Her osteoporosis is forgotten (sitting for long periods, and even writing, are painful) as figures from her past, or characters from her fiction – both seemingly as real to her as each other – are recollected and reanimated. She recalls how, reading one of her stories, "The End of the World", to a group of bored schoolchildren, she started to cry because she had forgotten the ending and suddenly realised one of the characters was going to die – and her eyes, just a minute before creased with laughter, fill with tears across the table. "I could only stop myself by saying: 'It's only a story, pull yourself together.'"
Gallant's life seems richer in stories than most. She made the first of her "escapes" when she was 18, turning up on the doorstep of her old nurse in her childhood city of Montreal, leaving her mother in New York. An only child, she was shunted between a bewildering number of boarding schools. When she was 10 her father, an amateur artist, died, and her mother's remarriage left her feeling abandoned. This unhappy childhood seeps like a stain throughout her fiction in the recurring neglected children and strained filial relationships – "You have to observe it and overcome it," she says now.
When she was 21, she got a job on the English-language weekly, the Standard, "dead and buried now", only, she says, because all the men were at war. One of the highlights was interviewing Sartre, and she promised herself that one day young people would come to interview her. Journalism was her "apprenticeship", and while she enjoyed thinking up features ideas, occasionally getting into trouble for her outspoken views and chafing against the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, after six years she handed in her notice. "I liked the life, but it wasn't the life I wanted." She felt she couldn't go on living in her native city, and she chose Paris because of "the black and white films, the paintings. I thought that France must be enchanted magic. I wanted to be among those people."
She was 28 and already divorced (she had briefly married a musician called John Gallant) with one story accepted by the New Yorker. She gave herself two years, vowing that if she could not live on her writing, "I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way. Whatever happened, I would not enter my 30s as a journalist – or anything else – with stories piling up in a picnic hamper." In a fateful episode, this was very nearly prophetic. Gallant was living in Spain at this time, sending stories to her agent in New York. "I admire you very much," he wrote back. "But the New Yorker have rejected your work." She was "dead broke and desperate". Cold and hungry, she took refuge in the American library in Madrid, where she came across one of her stories in an old copy of the New Yorker. She wrote to the fiction editor, William Maxwell, to reproach him, not because she hadn't received any payment, but for not sending her proofs. He replied to say her agent had told them she lived in Capri and to write to the General Post Office there as she didn't want to be disturbed. "It was a terrible thing to do to a young writer," she says. She later heard that the rogue ("the naughty agent" as she calls him now) had been killed in a car crash.
It was, however, the beginning of a long and fertile relationship with the legendary Bill Maxwell, to whom, she writes in the introduction to theSelected Stories, she owes everything. Gallant can – and does – count on one hand the stories among her prodigious output that were not published in the New Yorker. After he retired Maxwell reread all his writers' work, including Gallant's, and he wrote to her apologising for not running in full the novella The Pegnitz Junction, which she still considers to be her finest work. "He wrote 'my mind must have been out for lunch.' What editor would do that?"
One of the most striking things about Gallant's work, including The Pegnitz Junction, is its cinematic quality, shifting perspectives and chronology, resulting in what Lahiri calls "narrative that refuses to sit still". Gallant is dismissive of analysing or explaining her work, and distrustful of academic attempts to do so. "If I thought about what I do, I think I'd stop writing. Really," she says with feeling. "I would tell you if I knew. It just happens." For her "the first flash of fiction is like a curtain going up on stage, and you wait to see what's happening. The characters aren't speaking to me, exactly, but I get lines of dialogue. I know who they are, what they do and what they are saying to each other. And I know more than they do, because I know about all of them."
The characters also come with names, like photos with captions underneath, which can cause problems: Florence in Green Water, Green Sky, is schizophrenic, and in Gallant's mind was originally called Caroline, the name of her goddaughter. "But I had to finish the novel with her name because I couldn't have written it otherwise." Brief, intense and technically dazzling, Green Water, Green Sky was conceived and is published as a novel, but Gallant wasn't satisfied. "I felt there were only four important things – so I broke the novel into four stories." (The New Yorker ran the first three, declining the last because it can't be understood in isolation.) Her only other novel, A Fairly Good Time, is out of print. Has she, like other writers committed to the short form (Alice Munro, for example), felt under pressure to write a novel? She sinks her head in her hands with a dramatic groan. "Publishers send me so many new novels – I hardly dare answer the postman. A lot of it is just stuffing between the important things. In between is nothing."
For a year in the early 80s, she was writer in residence at the University of Toronto, "a completely useless job. You are with people who have no talent whatever, and if they had they wouldn't come to me." The only good thing was that she had 20 per cent off at the campus book store. To those students who showed any promise she would give copies of Nabokov, or EM Forster, "always good for the soul". Otherwise, she would give them Raymond Carver.
Despite the inexorable popularity of the short story on creative writing courses, she thinks teaching fiction is a "dead loss. I never asked for help. I didn't even show my friends what I was doing." She has only two words of advice for aspiring short story writers: read Chekhov! "Anybody who has the English language and doesn't read the wonderful translations of Chekhov is an idiot." She also admires Eudora Welty, Marguerite Yourcenar and Elizabeth Bowen, although she was disappointed to read Bowen's letters to her lover Charles Ritchie, whom Gallant knew. "She turns out to be a snob. It is a division in the brain, between what one is as a writer and what one is as a person."
The structural mastery of her stories, coupled with their fluid morality – you are not entirely sure, which, if any, of the characters, deserve sympathy (well-intentioned "liberals" come in for a particularly hard time) – has led to accusations of emotional coldness. In the New York Review of Books in 1980 – in which Gallant was reviewed alongside the "arresting new talent" in English fiction, Ian McEwan – VS Pritchett found her "brittle". While Pritchett concluded that, despite her "sharp", "clever" comedy, "Miss Gallant has compassion", John McGahern, writing in the New York Times more than a decade later, complained that her "witty, controlled prose is functioning at the expense of her characters". "I don't sit weeping as I write," she retorts impatiently.
On a more positive note, she recalls a review by John Updike, in which he wrote that she doesn't "belittle men, that she seems to really like men". Indeed, her chat is scattered with recollections of flirtatious exchanges, as light and colourful as confetti: giving bothersome Italians the slip by vanishing into art galleries; going gambling in Monte Carlo; even being asked out to dinner over the coffin at a funeral by the brother of a Jewish poet who had killed himself. But a committed reader of Gallant's fiction might be forgiven for asking if she believes in love. "Oh yes! Oh of course. I don't say that it will last 50 years. I never intended to marry. I fell in love!" Was she ever tempted to remarry? "No."
But that doesn't mean she was always alone. Just as in her 20s she gave herself two years to prove she could be a writer, so in her 30s she promised that she would give herself two years to see if she could live with someone else. She left almost on the day. "I went to stay on a farm outside Salzburg and every morning I woke up and thought 'I'm free.'" She hardly wrote at all during the two years. "You have to stop and think – 'Oh I must get the bread for supper' – I didn't even eat bread because I didn't want to get fat! I didn't like being half a person with half of another person attached. It wasn't his fault, he didn't do anything wrong, anything mean or nasty. As a couple you only ever see other couples. It was so boring, I was so bored," she says with feeling. "I was going out like a light. But if everyone was like me the human race would run out."
Although she writes about children with beguiling empathy, she knew she never wanted to have any of her own. To illustrate the point, she tells another story. After lunch with a lawyer friend on a trip to Montreal in 1955, he drove her back and stopped in front of "a very charming looking house with vines growing up it. 'I'd love a house like that,' he said. And I said, 'It's not for me.' Saying, 'How was your school day?' every evening . . . I'd run away. I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write."
Which for the next few decades was all she did. But it wasn't until the 60s that she feels she fully developed her own style. Gallant has been rereading her work from this period for a new collection of her early and uncollected stories, published by Bloomsbury in the UK this month asThe Cost of Living. It opens with "Madeline's Birthday", the very first story accepted by the New Yorker. Ironically, today when being Canadian seems almost to be a criterion for the job description of short story writer, Gallant was only the second Canadian to be published in America's most prestigious magazine and feels her nationality was a "handicap." "To them I was like an Eskimo with talent. A hick. They were surprised when they got 'Madeline's Birthday', which takes place outside New York."
Three of these early stories were turned down by the New Yorker because they were considered "inauthentic". This early rejection has continued to haunt her, feeding her fear that she might have "inherited a flawed legacy", like her artistic father, afflicted with "a vocation without the competence to sustain it". When the collection was published last year by the book imprint of the New York Review of Books, she "nearly fainted for joy", when the editor told her that one of the rejected stories is "authentic even for New York even now". "I had put those stories out of my mind. I took their word for it that they were no good. But I did know what I was doing. I did know what I was talking about. And the stories work."
She is very proud that her fiction is firmly rooted in the time in which it was written, and it was at her insistence that the Selected Stories are chronologically ordered and dated. It wasn't, she says, until the Selected Stories were published, and received such positive reviews, that she really felt able to relax. "I felt like Queen Alexandra – when she said 'They do like me'."
But then there's that dream, she remembers sorrowfully – even in a year when she's had seven books published (reissues in different languages). The Spanish edition of the Selected Stories is particularly pleasing to her. It took the translator two years, and because Spanish sentences are longer, it is even fatter than the English edition squatting unignorably on the table between us. In a strange echo of her nightmare, of which Gallant herself seems unaware, she recalls its arrival: "I had forgotten even signing the contract. The messenger delivered it. It had Mavis Gallant on it" – and not, of course, a word about bad prose. "It is divine", she says. Perhaps she can finally lay those doubts to rest.




DRAGON

RIMBAUD

DE OTROS MUNDOS

CUENTOS



Saturday, November 14, 2009

My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self


JG Ballard
Illustration by T.A.

My hero: 

JG Ballard 

by Will Self


Saturday 14 November 2009

T
omorrow, on what would have been his 79th birthday, family and friends of JG Ballard will gather in London to celebrate his extraordinary life and still more extraordinary literary achievement. I don't really do "heroes", and Jim Ballard's whole outlook was antithetical to the notion of the "great man" (though less so, I suspect, to that of the "great woman"), but if I were in search of an antiheroic hero it would have to be him. When I was stranded in the doldrums of my early 20s, desperate to write fiction but uncertain that there was any way to yoke my perverse vision to any recognised form, Ballard's luminous short stories and minatory novels showed me a way forward.

Then there's the man himself. I was just one of the scores of journalists who went out to sleepy Shepperton to beard its seer, and no matter how many times we'd already been told not to expect some drug-crazed weirdo, we were all surprised to find the genial, rather bluff Jim Ballard, happy to discuss anything from the wilder shores of futurity to the pinched parochialism of England's greening.
Over 15 years I got to know this intensely private man – a little. It was difficult for me not to look to him for advice – and he showed me the respect of never providing any, save by omission, the real advice being: think for yourself. Early in life, during the Japanese occupation of his natal city, Shanghai, Ballard had learnt the vital lesson that anyone can descend effortlessly into barbarism, and so he eschewed all state-sanctioned morality and the mock heroics that bolster it up.
Ballard's contribution to literature, to the visual arts, to architectural theory and even philosophy will, I feel certain, be increasingly acknowledged in the decades to come. His writing life straddled the period from when censorship meant that commonplace thoughts could not be set down to the current era when anything can be said – but hardly anyone bothers to listen. He thus stands as the last great English avatar of the avant garde – heroism enough for anyone.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



Sunday, November 8, 2009

Classics corner 036 / The Tin Drum by Günter Grass / Review



CLASSICS CORNER 
No 036


The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Phil Mongredien
Sunday 8 November 2009 00.05 GMT

"Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution…" So begins Oskar Matzerath, narrator of Günter Grass's 1959 debut. With the help of one of his titular drums, Oskar recounts – not always reliably – the extraordinary events of his first 30 years: arresting his own physical development on his third birthday by throwing himself downs the stairs; "singshattering" glass with his otherworldly voice; impregnating his father's second wife; his key role in the deaths of his parents; finding independence as a stonemason, then later an artist's model and recording artist in the German postwar economic miracle.
Set primarily in Grass's native Danzig, the shadow of Nazism hangs heavy over the first two-thirds of the book, with Kristallnacht, the fall of Poland and ultimately the Soviet capture of the city all refracted through Oskar's eyes, as is the plight of German refugees struggling westwards ahead of the Red Army.

But it's Grass's dazzling use of language that sets The Tin Drum apart, as he spins a dense verbal web alive with wordplay and innovation. It's no coincidence that Oskar enjoys a stint with a jazz band, as there is an uninhibited, free-flowing musicality to the telling of his life story.
To mark The Tin Drum's 50th anniversary, its publishers around the world have commissioned a series of new translations, overseen by Grass himself. Breon Mitchell has reinstated much of the rhythm of the German original, as well as restoring some overtly sexual references thought too shocking for British audiences half a century ago. Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the postwar era.



Saturday, November 7, 2009

My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes


My hero Ernest Shephard 

by Richard Holmes


Richard Holmes
Saturday 7 November 2009

I
am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major.