My life according to literature

Oh, OK, one more short post before Christmas. But only because there was such a public outcry at my going away. It’s just another blog meme, I’m afraid. The idea is to answer each question with the title of a book you’ve read this year, after the manner of Stuck in a Book and a pile of leaves. Do join in if you feel so moved. An easy task for me, what with my anal record-keeping. (Actually, I must start keeping different kinds of records. Yesterday’s tally: one evacuation, two minor disturbances.)

Describe yourself:
Banned in the USA (Herbert N. Foerstel)

How do you feel:
Eleven (Mark Watson)

Describe where you currently live:
La Ville dont le Prince est un Enfant (Henry de Montherlant)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
The Gate of Angels (Penelope Fitzgerald)

Your favorite form of transportation:
The Lark on the Wing (Elfrida Vipont)

Your best friend is:
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (Penelope Lively)

You and your friends are:
The Inheritors (William Golding)

What’s the weather like:
Old Filth (Jane Gardam)

You fear:
Going Solo (Roald Dahl)

What is the best advice you have to give:
Rabbit, Run (John Updike)

Thought for the day:
Once More, With Feeling (Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton)

How you would like to die:
Shopping and Fucking (Mark Ravenhill)

Your soul’s present condition:
First Love, Last Rites (Ian McEwan)

And that’s me done. Happy holidays!

Christmas music

When you see the phrase ‘Christmas music’ you probably automatically think of a lone boy chorister intoning the first plaintive bars of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, or the song from the Coca-Cola advert that goes ‘Holidays are coming, holidays are coming’ and makes you want to run into the street and kick someone to death.

The piano probably doesn’t get a look in. Why would it? Christmas is about choirs and bells and Noddy Holder shouting at you. But if you look hard enough, the music exists. What is there? Well, a couple of lovely wintry pieces by Debussy – ‘Des pas sur la neige’ from the first book of preludes, and ‘The snow is dancing’ from Children’s Corner. Messiaen’s monumental Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, of course. These Frenchies knew what they were doing. Mendelssohn wrote something or other. I’m almost certain he must have done. And that’s about it.

But here’s a thing: Richard Rodney Bennett’s Partridge Pie, a recent discovery of mine. A set, as you might expect, of twelve pieces, each based on one of the gifts from the song (though not the music of the song itself), all written in RRB’s idiomatically pithy harmonic language. It’s a delight from start to finish. This is one of the more serene movements, which I would like to offer in memory of Brian Jordan, the legendary Cambridge music seller, who died on 1st December. It was the last music he sold me personally.

Richard Rodney Bennett – Four calling birds

Then, of course, there exists a piano arrangement of ‘The Holy Boy’, the song Ireland adapted for every combination of musicians imaginable. It was originally a setting of words by one Herbert S. Brown:

Lowly, laid in a manger,
With oxen brooding nigh,
The Heav’nly Babe is lying
His Maiden Mother by.
Lo! The way-faring sages,
Who journey’d far through the wild,
Now worship, silent adoring,
The Boy, The Heav’nly Child -
The Heav’nly Child.

and so forth.

John Ireland – The Holy Boy

Last of all, here’s one I thought of late on, the last movement of Gabriel Grovlez’s beautiful suite L’Almanach aux Images, a set of eight pieces inspired by the poems of Tristan Klingsor, which are printed alongside the movements in the score. I reproduce the poignant poem in full here. The verse in square brackets is not printed in the score. Grovlez’s melody is not an exact metrical setting of the text, but you can sing along with it, at least for the first verse.

Ten years ago I had a practical exam for A-level Music which entailed my being given a piano piece and having 20 minutes to learn it before performing it for the visiting examiner. By sheer good fortune I was presented with the Grovlez, which I already knew, so all I had to do was fine-tune it. When the examiner asked me what I could tell him about the piece I did some creative lying so he wouldn’t know I was familiar with it already. ‘Well, it’s early twentieth century, and from the performance directions it’s clearly French, but I know Ravel and Debussy’s piano music well enough to rule them out. I’d say a minor composer of the time – Ibert, say, maybe even…Grovlez?’ I needn’t have bothered with the pretence, as he admitted afterwards he didn’t know what it was himself.

Jésus des anges et des Maries,
Petite image peinte de bois,
En robe d’étoiles fleurie,
Souriez-moi.

Jésus, ma pauvre âme s’effraie
Comme un agneau divin qui broute au bois
Les épines des roseraies:
Souriez-moi.

Jésus qui avez eu le doux malheur
De la couronne de ronces des bois
Après la couronne adorable de fleurs,
Souriez-moi.

[Jésus, mon cœur est misérable
Comme un meurtrier qui rôde au bois
Avec le couteau ou le bâton d'érable:
Souriez-moi.]

Jésus des carrefours et des chemins,
Pendu comme un oiseau mort aux croix de bois,
Avec les roses des clous aux mains,
Jésus des gueux et des rois,
Souriez-moi.

Gabriel Grovlez – Petites Litanies de Jésus

I’m probably going quiet now until the New Year, so excuse the radio silence and please have a lovely and restful Christmas if that’s the kind of thing you observe and a lovely end of December and beginning of January if it’s not.

Christmas cards

As usual, I’m in a nostalgic mood. This time it’s partly to do with interview week. The library has been swarming with youths to an unprecedented degree. This week the dreams of thousands of adolescent children crystallise and solidify into something palpable. In a month’s time they may be shattered, but over Christmas at least they will subsist. Fantasies of wearing coats and scarves, muffled against the Anglian cold. Lecturers who swear. Evensong. Toast. Punting. Girls. Confusing learning with the smell of cold stone (History Boys) can be an education too.

It’s not with shock but with a kind of contentment about its neatness that I realise it was ten years ago this month that I came up for interview at Christ’s. An inauspicious start. I was accommodated in the unprepossessing Typewriter, my interview was dismal, though perhaps slightly redeemed by a Bach dictation exercise, and after a month I received not a letter to say I hadn’t got in but a phone call from another college to tell me they were giving me a second chance. I remember that night in Christ’s, not vividly but with a probably false recollection of the excitement, the anxiety and the loneliness vying for supremacy within me. I know that before I went to bed I wrote a few paragraphs on a sheet of A4 lined paper, though now I can’t remember what. Probably a simple statement of my emotions. I have always found writing cathartic. I still have the paper in a folder somewhere, and will seek it out at Christmas. I wonder how much I have changed in the intervening decade, and whether I will find what I wrote then remotely enlightened or enlightening.

But I meant to write about my first proper job, which I found myself thinking about while writing Christmas cards this week. From October to December 2001 I worked in the Charity Christmas Card Shop at St Michael’s Church, Broad Street, Bath. I believe my job had a rather grand name, which may have been Assistant Floor Manager, though I don’t recall anyone ever using it. My being given this title may have been a token gesture to differentiate me from the kindly old ladies who volunteered at the tills. I have a vague memory that the shop in Bath was supposed to be the biggest in the country; it was certainly in the top ten.

Cards for Good Causes. So much better than Card Aid.

I had two bosses, Jackie and Jacky. One was the nicest, most approachable lady in the world (a world she has now departed, I find; may God have mercy on her soul). The other was stern and formidable. You knew she wouldn’t take any shit, but sensed she had a heart of gold.

What I remember of the job is that it consisted largely of my manoeuvring boxes up and down the spiral staircase leading to the belfry so that they were arranged according to charity. I recall constructing and deconstructing cardboard boxes with cartoon Father Christmases on the side until my hands were sore, and using more parcel tape than I had been aware was in existence. Once I opened a box with a knife and found I had sliced one of the packets of cards down the front. I acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of which card belonged to which company, and knew exactly where to find each one. I remember titles like ‘The Flight into Egypt’, ‘The Virgin in Prayer’, ‘Peace/Light’, ‘Prospect Park’ and ‘Magpie in the Snow’ (this last a Monet card of which I was particularly fond). When family members came in to do their shopping I was able to direct them automatically to the pick of the cards.

Monet, La Pie

A man working at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter downstairs used to bring up soup at lunchtimes for the staff of the shop. The tomato soup remains the best I have ever tasted, and I regret enormously not pressing him for the recipe. He said the secret ingredient was wine, and I have tried unsuccessfully to obliterate from memory my own hideous experiments to replicate it at home.

Most of the people I encountered working in Bath were lovely, but there was one lady of whom my memories are unpleasant. She was a nervous old bat whose responsibility it was to polish the brass in the church. One morning I arrived with a horrible cold and dripping nose to find her polishing the handles of the door into the church. She held it open for me to go through and I mumbled ‘thank you’ (alas, not loud enough for her to hear). I was halfway through the door when she shouted ‘THANK YOU!’ – as a reproach, I presume, for my having failed to thank her – and slammed the door forcefully on my back with me not yet fully through it. I maintain that my rucksack saved me from what would almost certainly have been a nasty spinal injury, and confess that the injustice led to numerous and inexcusable fantasies of my jumping out at her from behind a pillar and provoking a fatal heart attack.

Did I learn anything useful from my first genuine experience of work? The power of persuasion, perhaps. I managed one day, I’m not sure how, to convince one of the Jackies that it would be acceptable for me to play Christmassy music on the church’s electric piano as part of my work, in order to create a festive atmosphere. I also learned it is useful to have a secret place where it is possible to slack off but make it appear that you are working if another person catches you. This was the top of the spiral staircase next to the top boxes of cards, where from time to time I would look out of the high window at the Podium and watch people doing their Christmas shopping.

Of course, wasting time at work is a habit I have now entirely dispensed with.

50 novels – part 2

Well, here is the conclusion of my traversal of the novel. Cruel of me to make you wait so long, really. Glancing down the list, I’m not sure exactly why The Remains of the Day should be there. I think when I compiled the list it wasn’t so long since I had read the book, and it was fairly fresh in my mind, but the impression it made has not lasted. I think it would be first off if I wanted to make room for something else. But why should I trust my memory of it now better than my memory of it then? It’s perverse, quite frankly. Better to say nothing of the matter.

***

26. Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners (1956)
A bittersweet snapshot of a group of West Indian immigrants living in 1950s London on the lookout for a better life, finding strength but also isolation in their community.

27. Saul Bellow – Seize the Day (1956)
Tommy Wilhelm is a failed actor and furniture salesman who has unwisely invested his money in lard. This novella – not a comedy, despite the premise – shows Wilhelm approaching crisis point and eventually making a reassessment of his life. Tragic and inspiring in equal measure, this is a ‘small grey masterpiece’ (V.S. Pritchett) in the mould of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

28. Rebecca West – The Fountain Overflows (1957)
The engrossing tale of a bohemian family headed by a brilliant but unstable father struggling to make ends meet in turn-of-the-century London, this novel is magically exuberant. Not much in the way of plot, but a book I imagine I could read over and over without getting bored, and the best advert for Virago I can think of.

29. Catherine Storr – Marianne Dreams (1958)
Young Marianne, suffering from a debilitating illness, finds that whatever she draws she dreams about the following night and enters into an eerie dream-world through which she finds she is able to communicate with another invalid from reality. A haunting story that I first read when I was nine and have continued to revisit. The kind of book that I suspect is wasted on children.

30. Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
The story of the trial of a black man falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama seen through the eyes of two children, this is book that radiates warmth and humanity, a deeply moral statement that nevertheless avoids the trap of descending into polemicism.

31. Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Among Muriel Spark’s many fine novels, this one stands out for the character of Jean Brodie, an amalgam of the sort of inspirational teacher who is the stuff of dreams and a self-absorbed monster whose individuality ultimately proves her downfall. Spark’s dry humour is abundant and she tells the story with great wit and verve. A book that seems to get funnier with every reading.

32. Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire (1962)
Even more dazzling, if possible, than Lolita, this novel takes the form of a commentary on a posthumously published poem whose author is all but obliterated by the commentator’s self-importance. The character of Kinbote is monstrous, the book fiendishly clever and at times deeply sad.

33. John Fowles – The Collector (1963)
Macabre, nasty and utterly addictive, Fowles’ debut is a psychological thriller telling the story of a young misfit who stalks and kidnaps an art student. The dual narrative is very stylishly executed, and the conclusion chilling.

34. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood (1966)
The archetype of the non-fiction novel, a compelling reconstruction of a crime and the path to justice. Capote takes liberties with the truth, but if one can overlook this aspect the book stands on its own as a remarkable work.

35. Daniel Keyes – Flowers for Algernon (1966)
A tearjerker of a novel, this is the story of Charlie Gordon, a man of low intelligence who undergoes a pioneering operation to make him smart – but his heightened self-awareness brings tragedy as well as joy. Its genius lies in the development of Charlie’s narrative voice, which mirrors his changing intelligence.

36. B.S. Johnson – Trawl (1966)
Johnson is best known for his stylistic gimmickry – the book in a box, the holes in pages, the typographical innovations – but this is a comparatively straight work, an extended monologue by a man on a fishing trawler. His reflections on events from his past are deeply affecting, his return home exhilarating.

37. Michael Campbell – Lord Dismiss Us (1967)
A marvellously witty and poignant schoolboy novel about the joy and pain of first love, the kind of book I would like to read every year but feel bound to ration for fear of dulling its power. It’s not in print at the moment and might be dismissed by some as genre fiction, but as Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess and Christopher Isherwood have all at some point recorded their love of the book I feel in exalted company.

38. Henry de Montherlant – Les Garçons (1969)
Another intoxicating novel of love in adolescence, remarkable for Montherlant’s uncanny observation of human relationships. His wisdom, his understanding, and his forgiveness of his characters’ faults shine like beacons.

39. Philip Roth – Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Fabulously filthy and laugh-out-loud funny, an excursion into the mind of a neurotic as he catalogues his sexual hangups, forever in the shadow of his equally monstrous mother…

40. Ian McEwan – The Cement Garden (1978)
McEwan’s first novel, a macabre story of the way four children deal with the death of their mother. His novels may have grown in complexity and verbal polish, but I find none of them as gripping, dangerous or headily atmospheric as this one.

41. Philip Roth – The Ghost Writer (1979)
Arguably as different a book from Portnoy’s Complaint as Roth has written, this is the novel that introduces his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, a young writer who journeys to stay with a celebrated novelist and encounters his mysterious lodger. Principally memorable for the brilliant extended section revealing the lodger’s secret identity, this intriguing novel has much to say about the process of writing and the discovery of one’s own voice.

42. J.L. Carr – A Month in the Country (1980)
Set in the years following the First World War, this is the story of two veterans now employed in rural England, one restoring a mural in a church, the other searching for a grave in the churchyard outside. A small book, but it carries a great emotional impact.

43. William Maxwell – So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)
An elegiac account of a burgeoning friendship brutally cut short, and a beautifully sad depiction of the tangential nature of tragedy, how the conjunction of a number of superficially minor things can cause irreparable damage, and how the smallest act of selflessness can make the most enormous difference.

44. Gabriel García Márquez – Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) (1981)
A delicate, meticulously crafted novella documenting the events leading up to a murder, this is both concise and compelling.

45. Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy (1987)
Metafiction par excellence. An endlessly fascinating trilogy of complex and self-referential detective stories, and a deeply impressive achievement.

46. Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day (1989)
A warmly funny and yet bittersweet story of a dignified but emotionally repressed butler on the verge of old age, who takes a journey that causes him to take stock of his life. I found the ending, which hints at Stevens’ awareness of his delusion but also suggests that his optimistic perseverance will prevail, curiously moving.

47. Hanif Kureishi – The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
A favourite book during my teens that I ought to revisit, this tells the story of Karim Amir, a second-generation immigrant growing up in 1970s London, discovering the forbidden. I think I was as much if not more interested in the secondary character of Changez, who arrives from India a few chapters in and finds difficulty in adapting to his new life. Funny and touching.

48. Haruki Murakami – Sputnik Sweetheart (1999)
The needlessness of loneliness and the power of companionship are the themes that are shot through this melancholy but hopeful novel. The idea of people as satellites whose orbits coincide only occasionally continues to resonate with me years after reading it.

49. Vikram Seth – An Equal Music (1999)
One of the most moving and emotionally involving love stories I have had the joy(/despair) to read, also remarkable for Seth’s gift for writing about the process of making music, which is more accurate and insightful than that of any other writer I can think of.

50. Howard Jacobson – Kalooki Nights (2006)
Jacobson’s magnum opus [N.B. this description may now be out of date] is the story of a middle-aged cartoonist ruminating on the events that led to the imprisonment of a childhood friend for murder. A moving and witty novel, showing the ways we deal and fail to deal with tragedy in our lives. Jacobson’s meditations on the shadow cast by the Holocaust have great substance.