Naomi Wakan Blog

September

The autumn winds up from the beach tell that it’s time for our island children to return to school, and for myself to settle down to fall tasks and to pick up the correspondence linking me to my nearest and dearest that I had neglected all summer.  It’s time for me to think of families… families of writers in particularly.

Melville’s Moby Dick and Thoreau’s Walden would never have been written apparently if it hadn’t been for Emerson.  This according to Susan Cheever’s account of Emerson and his friends, American Bloomsbury.  You can also add Little Women and its sequels to the two books, for Louisa May Alcott was one of the Emerson groupies, as was her father.

Susan Cheever’s conceit is to try and cram Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Melville into one heap; as if they were one big family. In the process she repeats herself a lot (she warns us that she would) and as she often doesn’t specify who the “he” or “she” or “they” are that she is referring to, it does all get a little confusing.  However one does come out the other end seeing the writers (and talkers) with all their warts.  They perhaps were not as sexually interwoven as the Bloomsbury group (in the physical sense that is) but undertones of obsession are everywhere.  If her repetitions had shed a fresh angle, say as Lawrence Durrell did in his four approaches to the same plot in Alexandria Quartet, it would have been interesting, but Ms Cheever doesn’t.  Her research shows terribly, I’m afraid, as she tosses out sentences that juxtapose without segue.

I did cull a few quotes from American Bloomsbury:

F.O.Matthiessen – “All of American literature was written between 1850-1855.”  To which Susan Cheever adds, “I hadn’t realized that most of it was written in the same cluster of three houses.” These were the three houses that Emerson owned and that the American Bloomsbury group lived in at various times.  Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father claimed that he didn’t care about property, but graciously allowed Emerson to pay for the property he and his family lived in.

Susan Cheever reports that, “Nathaniel Hawthorne moved back into his sister’s house on Herbert Street in Salem, went up to his bedroom, and lived there for 12 years.” Shades of Emily Dickinson!

Susan Cheever on Margaret Fuller, “She was a Dorothy Parker woman in a Jane Austen world.”

Thoreau, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  What a lovely quote.

Also mentioned again are Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify.” and “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Two quotes that people most frequently use from Walden, without possibly ever having read the book.  I have juts recently reread it and it’s well wroth the effort.

Back to families of writers, and who more so than the Brontes.  I tried to work out a mnemonic to help me remember who wrote what.  It was easy enough to remember that Charlotte published under the name Currer Bell, Anne was Acton and Emily was Ellis, but how to remember who wrote Wuthering Heights, who Jane Eyre and who The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?  Eventually I came up with the ‘a’ and ‘r’ of Charlotte repeated in Jane Eyre, The ‘e’ and ‘i’ of Emily repeated in Heights, which leaves Anne with the ‘an’ of ‘tenant’.  Well, I’ll probably need a mnemonic to remember the mnemonic.

If you want to do an initial exploration of the family you couldn’t do better than The World of the Brontes which is a large picture book with two pages devoted to each topic – the father, the brother, Branwell, the sisters etc.  It runs a little thin by the end when it covers topics such as domestic life at that time, sanitation, industry and landscapes. Still, by the end of the book you have enough information for delving a little deeper, if you want to.

In the reading, I come across a whole new word for my vocabulary – ‘juvenilia’  I am much struck, since I assumed it would be ‘juvenalia’ to describe the writing of juveniles.  Juvenalia were apparently youth festivals in ancient Rome initiated by Nero; not quite the same thing at all, but close.  I repeat both words and still find “juvenalia’ sounds more appropriate – like marginalia or ‘paraphenalia’.  Ah well, what do I know!

The word occurs in The World of the Brontes by Jane O’Neill and this book lays the basics out for you.  The bit that I liked best was the telling of how Charlotte sent a manuscript to the publishers Smith, Elder and Co. leaving on the package the names of all the other publishers that had rejected it (scored through).  Just the sort of thing I might do, and to think Charlotte Bronte was as careless as I am about such details!

Just as I thought Jane O’Neil’s book had cornered the market on pictures of the Brontes and their surrounds, I came across The Brontës at Haworth by Ann Dinsdale and find she exceeds Jane’s total by far, and why not, seeing that she is librarian at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and so has almost everything available at her right hand.  Her text is deeper and runs to more than two pages on each subject.  For those of you just needing to know so much about the Brontës, the above books would suffice, but I like going to extremes occasionally, and so I turn to the over 1000 pages of Juliet Barker’s 1995 book, The Brontës.

Before I do, however, I’ll quickly note a few bits from Ms Dinsdale’s wonderful photographic book.   The three sisters did not spring their accomplished novels from the void.  As children, they, and their brother, Bramwell, wrote endless gothic sagas (their juvenilia) and all of them, to a certain extent, escaped from their restricted life into their fantastic tales.  The books and journals they produced were many and tiny and would need a magnifying glass to interpret.  I am delighted to know that their punctuation and spelling was deplorable (giving me some hope for my future writing of similar ilk).  Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in their first printing were filled with mistakes.

Charlotte Brontë is quoted as saying, “My work is my best companion,” and, wonderful as my husband is, I have to admit my feelings about my writing are similar to Charlotte’s.

Last but not least may be a cliche, but in the case of my reading on the Brontës it couldn’t be more correct, for Juliet Barker’s brilliant 1,000 page biography of the family which just thudded into my book box, was the best reading of the lot.  She took five years to research and write it and this shows, for it is a meticulous, almost hour-by-hour account of the Brontë family’s lives.  I reckoned that if Ms Barker could give up five years of her life to write it, I could afford a couple of weeks, even this late in life, to read it, and, anyway, you know I’m a sucker for a big book.

The introduction caught me completely and I knew I was going to get a well-balanced picture of the family, one that would correct Mrs. Gaskell’s gossip, which was endlessly repeated in later biographies.  Patrick is no longer the controlling father, nor Charlotte the perfect daughter.  Evidence is produced with documents to balance previous misinterpretations and Ms Barker produces a clear accounting for her every statement.  She even produces excerpts from the Brontës’ early writing with all their appalling spelling and grammatical mistakes, for, to a large extent the children were home-schooled and so had areas of great erudition and subjects in which their knowledge could only be described as spotty.

Ms Barker warns that it is “always dangerous to argue autobiographical facts from fiction;” the error of so many earlier biographies of the family.  What was news to me was that the writing of Bramwell, Charlotte, Ann and Emily as children in which they created (and one could almost say lived in) imaginary kingdoms, continued into their adult life.  Emily was still engrossed in “Gondal,” the fictional land she occupied with Anne, until she was nearly thirty. 

Charlotte is drawn as an opinionated, severe depressive, and a controlling elder sister; she was incredibly condemning of Bramwell (who came to naught after a promising childhood).  Millais, the artist described her as “looking tired with her own brains.”  For much of the sisters’ lives it was them against the world.

I was amused when Ms Barker, for a brief few words in the thousand pages, steps out of character and describes her fellow Yorkshire men as “bloody-minded.”  It was the only moment in all those pages where she passed a personal opinion.  It probably had good documentation somewhere, but she didn’t include it.  As I had been brought up in Lancashire and am ever-conscious that the War of the Roses still runs on in Lancashire/Yorkshire rivalry, I was delighted at her dig.

That’s it for families, and for September. 

Naomi Beth Wakan www.naomiwakan.com

August

Too hot to work outside and the garden is looking pretty dry and barren, so it’s time to roll out the hammock and pick up a good detective story.  I actually don’t have a hammock and hate lying out in the sun, but the image is appealing.

Some time ago I ordered a book from the library which had 322 reserves on it, just to see how long it would take to get to me.  It was James Patterson’s Cross Country.  I had never heard of the book, nor of Mr. Patterson, but see it is described as “the most heart-stopping, speed-charged, electrifying Alex Cross thriller ever.”  Our library system has 42 copies, so it didn’t take them that long to deliver it into my eager little hands.

I read this much-touted volume.  It is brutal, written too glibly, and with too many easily guessed crises.  How do you write a fresh book when you have written so many?  Mr. Patterson has written over 56 detective stories; sometimes more than two a year!  The chapters are easy read three-pages long as if Patterson knew our attention spans were those of a kindergarten child.  I sometimes believe writers have only one story to tell, each book being a slight variation, but that is not formula writing.  Mr. Patterson’s book is formula writing.  I feel he has just pulled out his template for a successful detective story and has merely filled in new names and slightly different plots.  Why doesn’t someone stop him!

Disenchanted as I am with Mr Cross, I am determined to maintain my belief that brilliant crime stories have been written and, indeed, I have just now received 4 classic crime stories from the library.  What a rich country I live in that can provide this service for me!  The books are Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the biggest cheat in the whole of mystery writing), The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Reinehart (written in 1908, it was the book that established her name.  A name almost totally forgotten now), Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (considered to be her finest and Campion’s [her detective] finest hour) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (which I can bet will still be in print in the year 3000, if mankind is still around).  It is described  as the best detective story ever.  I doubt this, but all the ingredients are there.  From them I cull, as usual, a few quotes: from Hammett’s I get, “Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.”  As a voluble talker, I am delighted to hear this. The second from Margery Allingham’s is, “If only anyone could tell anybody else anything.  If only I could know by being told.”  Ah yes.

A belated crime book came in from the library.  It had been recommended as one of the best crime books ever, but it actually is more a psychological novel than a mystery.  The book, The Stain on the Snow is about a psychopath and really Simenon, the author, could almost be described that way himself.  Certainly there was a degree of cold madness about his life.  It is a horrible book and yet the description, many pages long, of the main character’s interrogation is quite a marvellous piece of writing.  I can see why this book has been selected as “one of the greatest ever” and yet….

I have just acquired one of Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie detective stories at a garage sale, and was reminded how I had loved the first of his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series.  I was also reminded that by the time I had hit the 4^th I could see formula arising and totally lost interest in the whole scene.  The series had introduced me to the novel idea, however, that Africans lead ordinary lives in ordinary homes.  Something I seem not to have considered before.  Isabel, like Precious Ramotswe, is an engaging character but I, once again, foresee a long series reaching to the horizon and so turn to P. D. James who fills her characters out better and although Dalgleish tags along throughout her writing, he is at least a poet.  From the Alexander McCall Smith I do harvest one great quote, this time from Lin Yutang, a writer popular in my childhood, “What is patriotism but the love of the good things you ate in childhood?”  A good question, indeed.

A book that is a quicky summary of detective stories by P.D.James, herself was the title that has just come my way.  It is called Talking About Detective Fiction and provides a couple of good quotes – Dorothy Sayers’ Busman’s Holiday has Lord Peter Wimsey crying when a criminal he has caught gets hanged.   P. D. James comments, “Some readers may feel that, if he couldn’t face the inevitable outcome of his detective hobby, he should have confined himself to collecting first editions.”  On Dashiell Hammett’s drinking and life-style in Hollywood, James has this to say, “He began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense ‘only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday’”. On Evelyn Waugh she reports that “when asked why he never described what his characters were thinking, Waugh replied that he didn’t know what they were thinking, he only knew what they said and did.”  She quotes a character in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, “There ain’t no clean way to make 100 million bucks…somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them… Decent people lost their jobs… Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong.  It’s the system.”  Talking about Detective Fiction is a fine overview of mysteries accentuating the golden age.

I like a detective story to provide a bonus of historical, or geographical background information.  The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, does just that, for in the process of recounting a Victorian murder, Ms Summerscale tells of the early makings of the police force, the beginnings of the detective as a specialized career and the general feeling of Victorian times on morals and crime.  Her research shows, but for some reason I, who usually hate this, don’t mind a bit.  The early recounting of this murder apparently set the course for detective fiction, the most popular form of reading for women at the moment, I am told.

As I go to return The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, I see my usual yellow tabs marking pages and realise I have not extracted the quotes, I had marked.  Here they are:

On the early journalist reports on the latest crime, Ms Summerscale quotes Henry Mansel, “There is something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated.”  Well not much has changed in this respect, I note.

And Wilkie Collins, the author of the Woman in White, is quoted as saying, “Nothing in the world is hidden forever.  Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface that body that has been drowned… hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorways of the eyes… Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.”

Ms Summerscale finishes by defining the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – “to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away.”  She finishes by quoting Raymond Chandler, “The detective story is a tragedy with a happy ending.”  These rather down days, it is not always so.

While we are dwelling on mystery and crime books, I have just read a giant tome on the art of collecting books which has a goodly chunk on a great book-stealer, Stephen Carrie Blumberg, who managed to secrete away nineteen tons of precious books.  I do so love a book that tells me almost more than I need to know, and certainly more than I want to know about a subject.  The 600 pages of A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, fulfils this requirement perfectly.  The ornate cover should have been in leather to match some of the exquisite books described inside the covers.  Being all about books (and book collectors) it has hundreds of wonderful quotes.  Here are a few:

Robert Benchley – “I am older than Hemingway, and have written more books than he has. And yet it is as much as my publisher and I can do to get people to pay even list- price for my books, to say nothing of a supplementary sum for rare copies.”

Cicero – “[Reading] gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success and offers a haven of consolation to failure.”

On when a book-buyer becomes a book-collector Mr. Basbanes reports “One theory holds that the defining moment occurs when a person buys a book with the prior certainty that he will never read it.”

This book is worth plodding through not just for news on that colossal book thief, Blumberg, but for the grand collectors, who may, in their own way have been greater thieves, though in the business sense, rather than that of books; and business theft isn’t really seen as theft, now is it?

Happy, what-is-left-of-the-summer for crime reading.

 July

And it’s time to go to the country; that is if you are not living there already, as I am. And if you can’t travel, here are four amazing writers on matters country.  The first is C.F.Tunnicliffe, the fabulous bird artist and man of wonderful integrity, then Alison Uttley, the physics graduate who wrote lovingly of her country childhood, plus David Carroll – he of the turtle fame and finally Diane Ackerman that intelligent writer of the senses.

By the way, and this really is an aside, the book dealer, Rick Gekoski, made this perceptive comment on the English countryside, for which I seem to be so nostalgic, “England is virtually the only place in the world in which it is regarded as both bracing and morally improving to go for a walk in the country.”

I found my first C.F.Tunnicliffe book, Sketches of Bird Life, in a garage sale on my little island, an ocean and a continent away from where he drew, wrote and lived on the island of Anglesey in Snowdonia country.  At that time I didn’t know that he was considered one of England’s leading bird artists and was completely bowled over by his talent.  Over the years I have collected five more of his titles as well as a biography of him by Ian Niall, for whom he had illustrated a book.  As Mr. Niall shows in Portrait of a Country Artist, Tunnicliffe was not only a fine artist but also a great craftsman perfecting the scratchboard technique with his wonderful illustrations of country life in general and birds in particular.  No detail was too small for his eye.  As Niall relates, “If he draw a collection of shore birds at roost, the dwarf gorse, the sea pinks, the rock plants in the background had to satisfy the botanist just as the plumage of the birds had to satisfy the ornithologist.”

Tunnicliffe knew that his detailed sketches of birds by male/female, season and variety would be a never ending job, even though he worked steadily year in and year out.  Tunnicliffe did commercial illustrations also, and was best known for his book illustrations of such books as Tarka the otter, and Alison Uttley’s A Year in the Country and A Country Child.

Tunnicliffe was a serious and principled man and his integrity not only shines in his art work, but also in his own writing.  He illustrated over 250 books for other people, but my favorite of his own books is Shorelands Summer Diary which is a day by day account of his simple life at his house, Shorelands, on the island of Anglesey, his encounters with birds and his problems with authors and publishers that he dealt with quietly, politely and with a stubbornness born from his own perfectionism.  His wife, Winifred, also an artist, was his constant support and their lives together seemed in so many ways idyllic and the kind we all yearn for – right priorities and the ability to express oneself through one’s creativity.  How he inspired me to go in the direction I have, even though my knowledge of birds is scant and my naming of plants as bad.  It’s his integrity and simplicity I’m after.  His books are still available on Abe books and A Libris and well worth every penny.

Might as well segue from Tunnicliffe to the author who had him illustrate several of her books, Alison Uttley.  She loved receiving his “grave and intelligent letters.” and admired his Shorelands.  Ms Uttley also inspired me although it was her writing rather than her life-style that gave me a boost.  In her books was the childlike clarity that I longed to be able to express, and, of course, for me her books were nostalgia for a country life that had never been mine.  In life, Ms Uttley was critical, demanding and her relationship with her husband and son were horrific.  I’m not saying that she drove them both to suicide, who knows what drives anyone to that, but her trying nature and her almost incestuous tie with her son (scuttling his first engagement) were surely factors that unhinged two unstable human beings.

I am not familiar with Ms Uttley’s hundreds of children’s books that flooded the market and the air-waves, for they were frequently read on BBC’s Children’s Hour.  She was accused of imitating Beatrix Potter, and it would have been hard for her not to have looked to both Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin and also Kenneth Graheme’s Wind in the Willows for some kind of guide-lines, for she too wrote about animals.

For reading from Ms Uttley I suggest you start with The Country Child, and A Year in the Country, both of which I love.  Dennis Judd’s The Life of a Country Child, tells of her life and her relationships to her illustrators and her several publishers in much more explicit terms, as Ms Uttley did tend to sepia things over in her writings, as do I.  Someone called her “Alison in Wonderland.”  Although she left her home, Castle Top farm, when she was 18, she carried it with her in her writing for the rest of her long life as if she was in exile.  She describes her life as “I live a fairy-tale, in-between life, dangling myself on the rail between the flowery fields of childhood and the arid plains of grown-ups.”  A place where A.A.Milne and I would feel comfortable, I feel, for as one reviewer said “she had not lost the ‘poetic vision of childhood.’”.

Ms Uttley was only one of many nature writers that I admire, for I have neither the patience to observe closely, nor the will to records details that is needed for such writing and lacking both, I, of course, look to others to fill my gaps.

What can you do but adore a man who chooses the John Burrough’s quote “To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.” to include in a book?  This from David M. Carroll’s, The Swampwalker’s Journal.  In this book, and also in his Year of the Turtle,  he takes the path he not only took yesterday but also the one he took for the previous ten months, for from March to December you will find him observing swamp, fen, marsh, bog… well any wetlands in the close observation of life there.  Mr Carroll has been reporting on wetlands for over fifty years, and not just reporting on them, but illustrating them, for his fine illustrations match his fine, sensitive writing.  Add Trout Reflections to the two above and you have his wetland trilogy.  Recently these have been followed by Following the Water.

Carroll’s touching plea at the end of Swampwalker’s Diary is from a man in tune with what he calls wet-sneaker ecology.  He has received many awards including a MacArthur Genius Grant for his writing and illustrations in promotion of the preservation of the wetlands.  I note to read Self-portrait with Turtles, which is his semi-biography.  And what a family he has, for his wife Laurette Carroll is also an established artist as are his two children, Riana Frost and Sean Carroll.  His writing and artwork stir you to admiration, but also move you to do something, anything, to preserve the wetlands and all that they can contain.  Carroll, like Tunnicliffe, is a principled, gentle being with the greatest integrity.  I’ll finish on him with a characteristic passage illustrating his true value:

“Moments outside of the human world in the shallows of a marsh, with the red-winged blackbirds calling and then wind rustling in the cattails or reed grass, or a solitary spell at the edge of a swamp on the edge of winter – these will bring intimations of the spirit that moves with the water, the light, and the life of the marsh.”

Damn it!  The woman’s a poet, a scientist and beautiful!  Although I was driven to write a poem in protest of her over-plentiful scattering of metaphors and similes, Diane Ackerman, the woman in question, has the ability to write science as if it is poetry.  Ron Grossman describes her writing as “voluptuous prose.”  I am reading her well-known The Natural History of the Senses for the second time.  Already its slightly raised illustration by John Waterhouse on the cover jacket has me running my fingers over it as if it were some kind of Braille.  Touch being an important sense for a fabric worker.

I love the way Ms Ackerman defines what she is going to tell us about: “Our senses define the edge of consciousness, and because we are born explorers and questors after the unknown, we spend a lot of our lives pacing that windswept perimeter.”  Well I do anyway and so am anxious to follow her through The Natural History of the Senses.  I think the best way I can explain to you her wide canvas is to take a passage from each of the senses as she covers them.  I’ll start with her liberating statement of what the mind’s function in all this is:

“Most people think of the mind as being in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain, but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision.”

Here’s a small quote from the section on smell, “There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.”

For touch: “Despite we’re territorial creatures who move through the world like small principalities, contact warms us even without our knowing it.  It probably reminds us of that time, long before deadlines and banks, when our mothers cradled us and we were enthralled and felt perfectly lovable.”

In the section on taste she covers such topics as cravings, chocolate, truffles, vanilla, ginger, the social sense, food and sex, the omnivores picnic, cannibalism and Roman meals, among others.  Here’s a little bit from Ms Ackerman on mouths:

“We use our mouths for other things—language, if we’re human; drilling tree bark if we’re a woodpecker; sucking blood if we’re a mosquito—but the mouth holds the tongue, a thick mucous slab of muscle wearing minute cleats as if it were an athlete.”

On hearing (the ear):

“It may not seem like a particularly complicated route, but in practice it follows an elaborate pathway that looks something like a maniacal miniature golf course, with curlicues, branches, roundabouts, relays, levers, hydraulics, and feedback loops.”

And on vision:

“Lovers want to do serious touching, and not be disturbed.  So they close their eyes as if asking two cherished relatives to leave the room.”

Delicious, sensuous writing on the senses.  I’ll finish, as Diane Ackerman finishes The Natural History of the Senses – “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”  Indeed it is and the journey with Ms Ackerman is rich with her poetic prose.  This book is so worth buying.  As a writer I want to be her and I wouldn’t have minded having her looks either.

Have a sensuous July.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

June

Summertime and the poets sing joyfully, so to be in tune, I pick up a couple of collections of poetry.  These are from Roger Housden’s four collections of poems – Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Ten Poems to Open your Heart, Ten Poems to Set You Free and Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime.  I have here the “Heart” and the “Lifetime” volumes and have actually been moved by half of the poems Mr. Housden has chosen, though whether they will open my heart, or last my lifetime may well take a while to judge.  His commentaries on each poem are personal and very feely- touchy, but, as with spiritual matters, I don’t like anyone to stand between me and my source, I prefer to let the poems stand on their own merits.  I think of the ten possible favorites I would choose, and know I would probably select most of them from the works of Billy Collins and Wisława Szymborska, both of whose poetry speaks straight to my heart.

Mr. Housden uses the following quote from Robert Frost to justify his selection, “It’s absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts.  The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound – that he will never get over it.  That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly.  It hasn’t to await the test of time.”  Well that is Mr. Housden’s excuse for choosing one volume.  I suspect that his publisher pressed him to do sequels for other less than aesthetic reasons.

Poems are usually short, shorter than novels that is, but not so often read.  Nor are short stories as popular.  I have decided to take another look at some to see if I can make up my mind why.  Oddly enough, the other day Ali Smith’s short stories were given a warm push in an incoming e-mail.  So, obediently, I got The First Person and other stories from the library and was actually startled by her fresh approach and imaginative take on the short story.  Her quirky juxtapositions caught my attention with their wittiness such as during her retelling of the story of Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio, she suddenly introduces Porgy and Bess!  Much taken with her originality, I find an anthology she has put together, The Book Lover.  It is of mainly 20^th century writers, although the odd one pops in from another century.  Half of the writer’s Ms Smith has chosen I haven’t heard of, and at least half of the stories are way outside my comfort zone for me to enjoy.  Still maybe I needed a shaking up, for by the time I had finished the anthology, I had a certain determination to at least finish one short fiction story of the eighty or so that I have started writing at one time or another in my life.  One of the stories Ms Smith chose I have listed with my all-time favorites.  It is Unseen Translations by Kate Atkinson, a wonderful tale of a bright young boy and his eccentric governess.  Tom Leonard’s brief version of baa, baa, black sheep has me adding him to my list of writers that I should check out.  Not in Ms Smith’s anthology, The Tumblers by Nathan Englander is still the most moving of recent short stories I have read.  You can find it in his book, For Relief of Unbearable Urges.

Unseen Translations determined me to search out more books by Kate Atkinson.  The first one I come across is a collection of her short stories, Not the End of the World.  They are strange stories combining Greek myths with modern family distresses, but there is my favorite little story again, Unseen Translation, and I read it wishing I had silver sandals too.

I took the opportunity, because my ink-roll on the printer ran dry and so I couldn’t photo-copy and print some of Tolstoy’s stories that I really loved, to do something I often recommend my students do, and that is to copy out in their own hand a work that they admire.  The theory was that in so doing you could follow the writer’s creative mind by writing out his/her every word, every comma, letter by letter.

The story I chose was The Three Hermits.  It is odd that this is one of my favorite short stories, since it is ostensibly about faith in God, a concept strange to me, and yet, every time I read the story I cannot finish it without copious tears flowing – a sign of unresolved something or other.  It is the pure faith of these simple men that hits me every time.  They say even a dog’s bone will shine if venerated enough and so, I suppose, I long for that simple faith that will give a bone a halo.  The other Tolstoy story I often quote is How Much Land Does a Man Need?  I’m sure you know the answer.  I would add Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, a great story to stir one to action before it is too late..

Just met Lydia Davis, literally that is, in her book of short stories Variety of Disturbances.  Where has this woman been hiding?  Her short stories range from two lines to ordinary short story length.  This encourages me to try, yet once more the short story form, for if I can allow myself such freedom I might pull one off.  But can I match this two-liner entitled “Collaboration with Fly.” 

“I put that word on the page,

but he added the apostrophe”

Also the perceptive comment of one of her characters, “there are such beautiful passages in the book that I have become beautiful myself.”

Yes, many books make me feel this way.  I mark down to read everything of hers that I can lay hands on.

More on Lydia Davis, who has apparently been around for a long while and it is my fault that I haven’t read her sooner.  This time Break it Down is the name of her book of short stories.  The stories are full of thoughts rather than actions – recordings of second by second thoughts sometimes – and are remarkable.  We all think this way, but I’ve never read such detailed accounts of our mental lives.  Her protagonists have no names and their actions are subtle.  She is so fresh, so entirely original in her approach that any slight adoption of her style and it would be an obvious pastiche.  And yet, and yet I need something of what she does in my own writing.  I will have to be patient and see how my psyche has absorbed her innovative writing.  My very favorite story, “The French Lesson” has the sub-title “Le Meurtre.”  It is sooooooooo clever.  Lydia Davis is also a noted translator of French texts and I imagine she lives curled up inside her own brain she is so brilliant.

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After looking at collections of short stories, I suppose it is a reasonable segue for my mind to move from those anthologies to anthologies of poetry, although my mind never seems to need a reasonable reason for its leaps.  Anyway, The Anthologist has just hit my book bag, so I’ll talk about here.  The book, by Nicholson Baker starts off by wanting to impress the reader.  I hate this come-on, but luckily I overcome my distaste and carry on to find that The Anthologist is really a paean to rhymed verse in the thin disguise of being a novel.  Mr. Baker loves his rhymes and particularly those fitting in the four beat line, which he expounds is “the soul of English poetry.”  In some cases he almost pulls me over to his side.  The book is full of good advice to poets such as copying out poems you love, which, he promises, will change the writing in your own next poem.  I have just done this with the Tolstoy short story and can confirm Mr. Baker;s promise.  He also advises one to tell the truth immediately and not leave it until the end of the poem, “if you have something to say, say it.”  He tells that Auden recommended “writing drunk and revising sober.”  I know what Auden is getting at – write with abandon and edit with critical faculties well in control, luckily there are ways to do this without the aid of alcohol or drugs.

When he calms down, Mr. Baker has a wonderful way with words e.g., on describing Swinburne’s enormous output, each poem being far too lengthy, he says, “Swinburne was like the application of too much fertiliser to a very green lawn.”  In The Anthologist, the protagonist is a poet who has been asked to collect and write an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry.  He procrastinates until almost the last page of the pseudo-novel, but what he doesn’t procrastinate about is his love of rhyme and rhythm and his deploring of its absence since the Futurists rebellion at the beginning of the twentieth century tolled its knell.  Mr. Baker, via the protagonist, knows his poets and his poetry inside out (at least his rhymed poetry) and this book is as good an introduction to the subject as any non-fiction coverage that I know of purely because of his enthusiasm and dedication.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

May

May and I’m tearing back and forward from the seedlings to the garden rows like some mad silent comedian.  From the dining room window I must seem quite amusing.  As I laugh regularly at my inane behavior, here’s one more scene to add to the cache.  Still laughter keeps me alive and the wolf from the door, so I’m not putting it down.  I’m even promoting it as a way to, if not solve, at least soften my worries.

Bartholomew D. Queen pronounced that comedy began a half-century later than tragedy.  I’m not sure how he knows this, but can only assume that folks found tragedy a useless mire and so, Darwinian-like, turned to comedy as a better survival technique.

I am very much absorbed these days in how comedy helps humanity survive far better than tragedy.  Somerset Maugham, as a young doctor and in his wide-flung travels saw much suffering, and of it he says, “I have never found that suffering improves the character. Its influence to refine and ennoble is a myth.  The first effect of suffering is to make people narrow.  They grow self-centred. Their bodies, their immediate surroundings, acquire an importance that is unreasonable.”  He found this in himself and could therefore extol the healthy man as one who “exercises all his faculties, he is happy in himself and the cause of happiness in others.” And he adds, “suffering depresses the vitality.”  I couldn’t agree more.  Just because you are sick, or having a difficult time, doesn’t mean you have to be caught in the circumstances.

There must have been a time when I laughed when flipping the pages of the New Yorker magazine.  It was either a long time ago, or I have forgotten how to laugh, which happens from time to time when I venture out of my shell to glimpse the passing world.  All this because my daughter arrived on our little island, flushed with the New York staccato vibe and clutching a handful of New Yorker magazines for me to peruse in my little island sanctuary.  Later I get an anthology of New Yorker humor from the library.  It is called Disquiet, Please, and is edited by David Remmick and Henry Finder.  I seem to have become totally provincial, and island provincial at that, for not only does the title not resonate with me, none of the pieces bring forth more than a tiny twitch of my lips.  It is not until I end up with a couple of David Sedaris’ efforts that I even give an audible chuckle.  I fear the fault is mine and flagellate myself a bit for my dour personality that cannot find wit among the 525 pages of great New Yorker contributors.  I vaguely remember that at one time I adored Thurber and Benchley and Parker and longed to be with them at the Algonquin Round Table, but, alas, no more.  Even more au courant guys like Frank Doyle, John Kenney and Frank Gannon leave me sighing as if I was world-weary and not just weed-picking weary.  What have I laughed at recently?

Our bookshops are overflowing with books on happiness – how to be in a state of, how to sustain, how to attain with/or without a partner etc.  Even His Holiness, The Dalai Lama in his book, The Art of Happiness expounds that “Happiness is our birthright as human beings.”

When you reach the late 70’s and have just a few years of life left under your belt, you are entitled to be able to say, “What Rubbish!”  Has His holiness any suggestions how one might have stayed happy in Auschwitz, in Rwanda, in Somalia, in the Belgian Congo as it became the Belgian Congo… oh the list is endless, but might also include a Tibetan peasant’s life in the feudal times not so long ago.  That’s why when the book Against Happiness by Professor Eric G. Wilson came over my threshold, I gave it more than a cursory glance.  His thesis is simple, he is not talking about clinical depression, but about ordinary folk, as he extols melancholy – to accept that the world is incomplete, that nothing can ever be known fully, to ignore the seduction of our blissed-out culture and somehow to hold to sadness (these are fragmented bits from Professor Wilson that I am quoting here).  He speaks of Blake’s “experienced innocence” as a desirable state – innocence without ignorance, plus experience without bitterness.  Wilson quotes Marsilio Ficino on melancholy philosophers (a brand that Wilson promotes) as “knowing that truth is likely to thrive in the middle ground between oppositions – between inside and outside, contemplation and action, unseen and seen – sorrowful thinkers delve into the crepuscular continuum clarity and clarity (sic).  They think that edges, circumferences and fringes are the most interesting places, for there on the terminals the world things reveal their deepest mysteries: their blurred identities, their relationship to opposites, their tortured duplicities. Choosing to hover in this limbo between traditional oppositions, sorrowful thinkers feel themselves pulled asunder.” This quote seems to be part Ficino’s and part Wilson’s, anyway it celebrates Wilson’s feelings that by adopting the golden mean between opposites (and this can be done by embracing melancholia), a  ground of “both/and,” we would “enjoy a profoundly tense peace” which he strangely calls “a sinister shining.”

Well I don’t know about “sinister shining”, but I do know that by keeping that smiling face turned towards the world, you are sacrificing a whole lot of rich feelings that, on condition you don’t get lost in melancholia, can dynamite you into creative action.  I live in that limbo and even my wittiest poetry is tinged with the bittersweet of knowing that everything passes, that death is inevitable and that life is a “maybe.”

Back to Somerset Maugham, an author who still rings true for me.  He has a lot to say on the subject, so I’ve extracted a few pithy quotes:

*“A sense of humour leads you to take pleasure in the discrepancies of human nature; it leads you to mistrust great professions and look for the unworthy motive that they conceal; the disparity between appearance and reality diverts you and you are apt when you cannot find it to create it. You tend to close you eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.”

*“The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognise the saint.”

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance…”

I wrote of some aspects of Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival in Book Ends – a year between the covers but would like to speak of other aspect here for Meeker joins Maugham in extolling a comedic approach to life.  “Comedy and ecology are,” he states, “systems designed to accommodate necessity and to encourage acceptance of it, while tragedy is concerned with avoiding or transcending the necessary in order to accomplish the impossible.”  Mr Meeker feels that since all choices will end in error, comedy is more accommodating since it doesn’t demand choice as tragedy does.  Since he states that tragedy demands that the universe cares about the lives of humans and since he finds no evidence of this, he opts for comedy as a survival technique every time.

Elsewhere, Mr. Meeker points out that “comedy is rarely found in places where power is concentrated, but it is a daily staple of the powerless.”  Comedy is the tool that enables the powerless to survive the inequalities that bullying, whether by big business, or big government, presents.

Meeker sums up the comic versus tragic approach to life in this way, “Although comedy fails to cure the world or to make gigantic demands of it, it is not shallow.  The humor of comedy is most often an attempt to deflate the over-inflated, not to trivialize what is truly important.  Comedy is serious about life even in its lightest moments.”

His book, The Comedy of Survival, tries to answer the question, “from the unforgiving perspective of evolution and natural selection, does literature contribute more to our survival than it does to our extinction?”  Meeker specifically supports literary comedy in this respect, “Productive and stable ecosystems are those which minimize destructive aggression, encourage maximum diversity, and seek to establish equilibrium among their participants – which is essentially what happens in literary comedy.”  He knows that survival depends on all parties surviving.  He therefore supports the accommodations that comedy allows, for he knows that comedy accepts the world as it is much more than tragedy.

Dante felt that misery is the result of mistaking or distorting one’s vision so that only a fragment of reality can be seen, and then that fragment is taken for the whole.  Only by seeing the whole can one stop being miserable, he expounds.  It is true that comedy is far more accepting of the way things are.

Comedy, it seems to me, shows our weaknesses, but also presents a way of overcoming them, or at least coming to terms with them, whereas tragedy only presents a succumbing.  As Mr. Meeker says, “The comic spirit strives for normality, not transcendence.”  Tragedy, with all it’s pomposity and searching for perfection is bound to fall on its face every time.  Tragedy is such a black and white thing and speaks in terms of warfare – confronting evil, attacking those who would dishonor us, whereas comedy just thumbs its nose and chooses not to choose.”

The funniest writers?  Doing a poll on Google, the following is probably a reasonable list of the top 10: Douglas Adams (well at least my husband thinks so), Bill Bryson (particularly A Walk in the Woods), Joseph Heller (Catch 22 being an all-time favorite), Christopher Moore (His Lamb was mentioned a lot), Terry Pratchett (particularly with his book he wrote with Neil Gaiman – Good Omens), David Sedaris (I have my reservations here), Zadie Smith (her book, White Teeth was a real tour de force), John Kennedy Toole (his book A Confederacy of Dunces got most votes) and the two obvious writers from the past – Mark Twain and P.G.Wodehouse (although I find the latter so fixed in a certain social strata as to be almost undecipherable today).

There, reading a few of those should cheer you up a bit.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

April

Well the seeds are going into the propagation box and peas into the moist soil and contrary as ever, my mind is onto reading and the joy of words when it should be onto compost and the joy of worms.

Needing a fresh idea, Jane Farrow of This Morning on CBC, thought of a small program in which listeners would send in moments, or things, which didn’t yet have appropriate words for them, and then they would also send in their suggestions for newly formed words.  An economical program that proved wildly successful for out there in audience land, there are a whole slew of inventive, imaginative people who are clever with words, and parts of words and how to put those parts together to form new words – new words that turn out to be just what the word-missing moments and things need.  Here are a few examples:

Bagmata – the word for those red lines that appear on your hands from carrying heavy super-market bags.

Chillbrain – ice-cream headaches

Forevuary – that long dark spell between New Year’s Day and Easter

Gournot – a person whom would like to cook well, but just can’t get it right.

Well, you get the idea.  And all these words and many more are in a small book entitled, Wanted Words, that will spark your imagination, and, if you are a poet, as I am, will get you flagellating yourself for not being more creative with the language.  The book is enchanting and useful.

Well Lynne Truss’ best seller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves was good for several belly laughs, but could have been summarized in one page.  But Ben Yagoda’s  When you Catch an Adjective, Kill It, while its title seems of a somewhat similar promise, actually contains so many interesting aspects of parts of speech that, because there was no way I could retain them all, I actually thought about purchasing the book.  The book uses au courant examples and is just as witty as Ms Truss’ book, but contains loads more informative and even, one might say, more gripping basic facts.  Some of the things I learned are:

*that Google objects to you using Google as a verb,

*Alexander Pope thought that, “whatever is, is right” when it comes to English usage,

*that there is a data base of 50 English language newspapers – LexisNexis,

*that Gabriel García Márques used only one adverb in his book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I think I’ll take him at his word as I intend to read no more of his books after I had devoured One Hundred Years of Solitude in rather ungourmet-like fashion),

*that the origin of the word “ampersand” is because children used to finish the recitation of the alphabet with the words “and per se and” (“and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and”.) which soon became abbreviated to ampersand.

All these facts, apart from the adverbs in Marquez’ books, are of a certain interest, I feel.  I decide to write to Mr. Yagoda (since he rates nouns lowly) about haiku, where nouns are the thing and all other parts of speech might as well not exist.  Authors like to get my cheery messages I like to think, for some of them reply and tell me I have made their day.

As my readers know by now, I am not able to read a text in an academic way.  I have never learned the language, nor the skills.  It is my fault and reflects a personality more able to deal with a general gloss than delve into details – that applies not just to writing, but also to recipes!  However, from time to time I pick up a book of academic writing on the literary world and totally love it and get a lot out of the erudite analysis that I can usually only admire from a distance.  My latest book of this kind is Kristjana Gunnar’s Stranger at the Door.  It is full of well-targeted quotes on writing and the writer’s world.  I marked some for you:

Theodor Adorno – “The only education that has any sense at all is an education towards critical self-reflection.”

Paul Auster – “The poet puts everything away, even his clothes, and addresses the world in nakedness.

Ben Okri – But finding the subject and theme that is in perfect harmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hidden dreams and the full unresonated essence of your life – now that cannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled upon through ambition.”

Kristjana Gunners – “It is not what you know that matters, but how you think.  It is not quantity of information you need in order to write, it is quality of mind.”

Christa Wolf – “It is a simple fact that if you write, even if it is only one book every ten years, yet see yourself the whole time as a writer, then you live differently from how you would if you just lived normally… Your powers of observation are heightened, you feel a continual pressure of responsibility, a constant commitment.”

Laura Riding – “If what you write is true, it will not be because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being.”

André Brink – “The writer turns to his own paper and draws himself the map of The Land of Truth he knows exists in himself.”

John Gardner – “Telling the truth in fiction can mean one of three things: saying that which is factually correct, a trivial kind of truth, though a kind central to works of verisimilitude; saying that, which by virtue of tone and coherence, does not feel like lying, a more important kind of truth; and discovering and affirming moral truth about human existence – the highest truth of all.”

Salmon Rushdie – “One reason for the uncertainty of individual memory is that “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated.”

There Jabès – “No art ever came out of not risking your neck.”

Virginia Woolf – “a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy.  He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity.  He wants to see the same faces, read the same books, do the same things, day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living – so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”

James Tate – “The poem  we read says it is doing one thing, is about such and such, when really the important work, the real work, is being done off stage, as it were.”  [Of course the same is true with reading – we read certain things, absorb what we apparently need, but the real reading, the real thing that the psyche is searching for (and maybe finding in part), that goes on at an unconscious level].

Paul Auster – “Sometimes writing is a necessity, not a choice.”

Ben Okri – Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being.”

And that’s just a selection from this wonderful academic, but accessible book on writing!  Please read this one.

I love small non-books that fill a couple of odd hours and yet stimulate days of writing.  One that came into my book box recently was Now all We Need is a Title, by André Bernard.  It is just a listing of famous books and how their titles came about, but it raises questions and ideas that will feed me for weeks.

Examples of the difference between the before and after, that is the author’s working title and the final book jacket title, that Mr Bernard quotes are often startling e.g., “The House of Faith” became Brideshead Revisited, “The Kingdom by the Sea” would it ever have become the major triumph of Lolita?  And would Pride and Prejudice have become a world favorite under its original title, “First Impressions”?  Mr. Bernard has numerous side-bars of titles with numbers in them, titles with colors in them, titles with planets and the moon etc. as well as trivia such as the shortest and longest book titles.  Mr Bernard gives examples of how important titles are to book-sellers, and gave the example that Raymond Chandler’s editor refused the title The Brasher Doubloon, for he said that booksellers would pronounce “brasher” as “brassieres.”  Every word counts, particularly in titles.  My favorite title and, indeed Wendy Cope loved it too, is Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which came to her in a dream and she made it into a great little poem.  This engaging little book is not just about titles, it is about the importance of giving names, a problem which has been with us since the days of Adam.

Some titles were strong enough to enter the language, titles such as Heller’s Catch 22 (working manuscript was titled Catch 14!  And some were as enigmatic as the manuscripts contents e.g., Waiting for Godot.  Beckett said of this title, “If Godot were God, I would have called him that.”

Mr Bernard has also gathered a delicious number of quotations on book titles and book titling so he is really my man:

“A writer who does cherish his title would probably do well to hold it in reserve and not present it until two or three others, all duds, have been duly rejected, leaving the editor with his editorial honor intact.”  Charles Portis

“The only advantage to titles with internal punctuation [Camels are easy, Comedy’s Hard] is that when you list them together, they look like twice as many books.”  Roy Blount, Jr.

The book, Now all we Need is a Title reminded me of an editor once telling me that he and his fellow editors would gather in a pub after hours and invent titles to put as “upcoming books” on the book flap of a new book coming out that season.  The titles rarely developed into manuscripts, although they probably impressed the reader as he read the firm’s future title list.

While we are on the topic of book titles, here’s Martin Amis’ take on the matter, “… there are two kinds of title – two grades, two orders.  The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there.  The second kind of title is present all along; it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page.”

Happy planting when you’re not reading!

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

March

March finds me still sorting seed packages while I anxiously await for the soil to warm up.  My intellect is buzzing around unfocused, so it’s time to give it a little science to wrestle with.  Perhaps this year I’ll grasp a little more of the seemingly ungraspable.

The reason that reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2004 and The Best American Science Writing 2005 make me feel like a polymath is because each chapter is written by a different science writer on a different topic – transplants, dark matter, asteroids, false memory, slow food… Well they are both delicious books with appetizers on so many subjects that following up on each would absorb a life-time, so the illusion that I know a little of each topic by the time I have finished the books, is one I relish and cling to, for I don’t have much of even this lifetime left and I do love illusions.

By the way, Malcolm Gladwell’s writing in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005 makes me want to break my pencil in half and close my computer forever!  “Hey! That’s not a good feeling,” you will say.  But I will respond that hubris overtakes every writer from time to time and precise, concise, intelligent writing, such as Mr. Gladwell’s, is a good benchmark by which to judge oneself occasionally, in order to regain a little humility.  His article on personality tests, Personality Plus is worth the price of the two books together.  Add Timothy Ferris’ brilliant analysis of NASA in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2005 is the best bargain for any budding writer, let alone science writer.  

My book box has just filled with a rush of books on codes. The history of codes, scattered with tales of betrayal and revenge, fascinates me, and stories from Bletchley Park, the English code centre during the Second World War, and of the Navaho codes that shielded American secrets from the Axis, still make compelling reading.  I have already got a copy of the classic, Codes, by Simon Singh, in my collection and decide to spend a day decoding one of the examples he gives – the most simplest form – letter transference – “A” is represented by say a “D” and “C” by an “X” etc.  It’s quite easy, although first you have the ponderous task of counting how many of each letter occurs on a page of writing.  Once this is done it’s a matter of applying the letter frequency – etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkqj xz .  This gives you a rough guide, “e” being the most frequently used letter in English text, followed by “t” and “a”.  I should mention that each language has its own letter-frequency, and that the spoken language has a different letter frequency to the written.  Those of you lucky enough to have seen that wonderful film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will have heard the letter frequency in French repeated many times, as the assistant helps the “locked-in” patient write his book, with his left eye-lid indicating by blinking “Yes” or “No”, one letter at a time. The frequency usage will give you the cipher usage of at least half a dozen letters for sure. Next, by checking out the single letters, you’ll get the “a’ and “I” (and rarely “o”).  After that go for the doubles such as “ee”, “oo”, “ss”  “tt”.  Real cipher makers would use a different method so that double-letters would not show so obviously in this way.  However I am doing the first of Simon Singh’s code problems and it is the very simplest.  Three letter words are often “and” or “the”.  After you have substituted as many letters as you can, the rest is pretty well guesswork to fill in the gaps and correct the mistakes.

Another great book on codes is by Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide.  Leo Marks’ father was co-owner of 84 Charing Cross Rd, the store that Helen Hanff made famous in her book of that name (how I love her semi-fictionalized version of her relationship with this once famous bookstore).

By the way the Leo Mark’s book was prevented from being published for several years because of “official secrets” regulations.  Between Silk and Cyanide shows just what a mess politics and power-seeking can be to the extent that they can cause loss of lives in the field, it makes me wonder whether any cause is worth risking one’s neck for seeing as those pushing you forward often have other, and more personally-ambitious, aims than general peace and welfare. If I hadn’t already lost most hope in mankind, this book would finish it off. 

I just came across a prize given to books that should be reconsidered.  What a great idea!  The prize is the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award and is given to forgotten Science Fiction classics.  I decided to read the first winner, Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon that I just happened to have on my bookshelf.  My twin and I had read Stapledon’s books, Sirius and Odd John in our early teens, but I never got my teeth into Star Maker.  Now I see why, because it is far too dry and didactic and as one is warned so often not to, it “tells, rather than shows.”  Still Olaf Stapledon, in true science-fiction tradition, speaks of possibilities and universes that are only just coming under discussion today.  He was basically a philosopher and was really concerned with the moral state of the world (we are looking at 1937 here) and so begs and pleads and presents in earnest terms an evolution of the spirit as well as an evolution of technological skills.  He had a big influence on Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C.S.Lewis and John Maynard Smith as well as many other science fiction writers. His “supermind” composed of many individual consciousnesses foretells of Gaia and other such ideas.

As all works, Star Maker reflects the times of the writer and the occasional phrases such as “persuaded the aborigines to cease breeding” “peopled the planet with its own superior type” ring rather badly these days.

Ever since seeing Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, I have yet to meet anyone, besides my husband and I, who viewed it at all critically.  Now I have just read a book, Physics for Future Presidents, by Professor Richard A. Muller, that presents a wide variety of scientific facts on nuclear power, energy and terrorism and indeed, does question some of Mr. Gore’s facts and the perhaps slanted way that they were presented.  Starting every time with the physics of the subject, Professor Muller looks at topics an incoming president has to face from as many angles as possible in order to present all sides of the argument. It seems to me a reasonable, non-panic, non headline-science book that all folks (never mind presidents) should read before they get hysterical about the running out of our energy-supplies, a terrorist attack, or the end of the world.

Outside Science Fiction, not much fiction has a science theme running through.  Two examples that do, jumped into my book box recently.  They are the play, Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard and Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World.

The first, a play, and I rarely read plays, is engrossing as it presents how literary research is often done and, at the same time, holds forth on chaos theory, Mandelbrot sets, entropy and other fascinating scientific topics.  Arcadia is brilliantly clever as two plots intertwine – the first concerns a precocious girl who has mathematical ideas way ahead of her time, the second plot, set 190 years later involves a writer and a professor of literature.  The two periods are not just linked by the topics that the writer and academician are researching, but by a large table which carries shared props.  Of course the thing that struck me most is that the play is all about truth and how the past is interpreted by the academic world.  But this is only one theme among seemingly a million other concerns.  This is such a rich play.  Among the mathematical concepts explored is the chaos theory and as the plots from the two periods intertwine, representing perhaps chaos, order is sought through theories that are presented.

Heir to the Glimmering World, the second writing that has scientific content, is a large and rich story.  It intrigues me for two reasons.  The first is that one of the protagonists is a Christopher Robin type character whose father exploited his childhood image in a series of very profitable children’s books.  I have read all Christopher Robin Milne’s books and admire his integrity and a certain kind of purity.  Unlike Christopher Robin Milne, who had the strength to throw off the Christopher Robin image and lead a quiet and thoughtful later life, the character in Heir to the Glimmering World is self-destruct bent.  The other thing that caught me in this book was the retelling of the winter escapade to the Alps by Shroedinger and one of his many mistresses.  During this winter holiday, in between sex, Schroedinger completed his work on his famous wave-theory.  I have always wondered who the unnamed woman was who accompanied him, and here she is fleshed out imaginatively by Ms Ozick and given the role of more than sexual Muse, for she too was a physicist; a clever and believable ploy by Ms Ozick.  Apart from these two aspects that drew me to the book, there is also Ms Ozick’s preoccupation with Jewish religious history in that the father-figure in the book is completely occupied with exploring the 1,200 year old Jewish heresy called Karaism, in this way totally ignoring the woes of his large household by withdrawing into Jewish studies.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

February

Even in our balmy neck of Canada it’s hard not to feel a little blue this month.  Doing a laundry or picking up a promising 800 page book never fails to cheer me, however.  For this month, I’ll be looking at books on libraries, for libraries have kept me stable and productive now for over 70 years… I owe them.

The first book that I happen on is totally satisfactory.  Unfortunately it is also a little inhibiting.  Inhibiting in that Alberto Manguel is not only a magnificent writer, but also a most erudite scholar, with languages, a classical education and an enormous range of topics on which he can write eloquently.  An unnamed UK critic of Manguel’s book, Reading Pictures, describes Manguel’s style as “wide and eclectic reading [that] is put at the service of a large thesis, one which is not so rigorous as to exclude the entertaining anecdote or the curious fact.”  The Library at Night, has everything a bibliophile would ever want in a book – whilst designing, constructing and organizing his own library in the Poitou-Charentes region in France, Alberto Manguel wanders out to muse on the history of libraries, the great private libraries, public libraries, book trivia, freedom of thought, the burning of libraries and even imaginary libraries.  And the book considers larger than life characters – Pepys (who built little heels for his shorter books so that all the books in his library were the same height), Panizi, Carnegie, Huttington and the blind Borges (for whom Manguel was lucky enough to be a reader for some time).. It is delicious writing and captivating book talk – it is everything I, as an avid reader, want to know, plus it has a large number of wonderful quotes, which, as you may know by now, are an absolute essential to any book that gets my seal of approval. As Mr. Manguel says, “To quote is to continue a conversation from the past in order to give context to the present.”  Here are a few (unless I indicate otherwise, they are all Mr. Manguel’s wise words:

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality.  Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

Mr. Manguel tells that in Lyons, at the end of the first century, a strict law demanded that, after every literary competition, the losers be forced to erase their poetic efforts with their tongues, so that no second-rate literature would survive. I uneasily move my tongue around my mouth, tasting the ink!

“the accumulation of knowledge isn’t knowledge.” And, Mr. Manguel adds, “knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, in the words reflected both in the outside world and in the reader’s own being.”

“the world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself.”

Of Manguel’s own reading tastes, he comments, “A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the miniscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves.  Every library is biographical.”  My library?  Books on haiku and tanka, 20^th and 21^st century novels, books on books and writers and a goodly section on nature writers such as David Carroll and Charles Tunnicliffe.  What does your library reveal about you, I wonder?

I learn from Library at Night that when Johnson left some pages uncut in books he speed-read when assembling his Dictionary, he commented, “I do not suppose that what is in the pages that are closed is any worse than what is in the open pages.”

A thought of Mr. Manguel’s that has often struck me also is, “Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read. Don Quixote read after Kim and Don Quixote read after Huckleberry Finn are two different books, both coloured by the reader’s experience of journeys, friendships and adventures.”

I can recommend another couple of books while we are on the subject of libraries.  The first is a large anthology, Reading Rooms edited by Susan Allen Toth and John Coughlan.  These pieces are a mixture of fictional and autobiographical accounts of libraries and their reading rooms, librarians and other aspects of the library.  For me it was worth reading for the bits by Elizabeth Hardwick alone, and also for notes on the many detective stories that took place in libraries, though I must say my interest flagged by the time I had reached the end, page 486; but then who aims at reading an anthology in one sitting?

I was a little surprised to see Ms Toth had included one of her own pieces and I felt this wasn’t quite the thing for an anthologist to do.  I wonder whether I would ever be so tempted if I had to collect an anthology.  I just might.

The second title is Library – an unquiet history by Matthew Battles.  This book tells of the makings of libraries and of their destruction, and lest you think this is ancient history, as recently as 1992, a library was destroyed – the library in the town hall of Vijećnica, in Sarajevo.  Also, Mr Battles’ book tells about how libraries control human knowledge and how they preserve the best literature.  The many colorful characters in the world of libraries are shown in all aspects here, particularly wonderful is the coverage of the brilliant Panizzi (the Italian revolutionary who became Sir Anthony Panizzi, Principal Librarian at the British Museum) and, of course, Melvil Louis Kossuth Dewey – that classifier of books whose number-system of cataloguing still perplexes us today. 

Battles comments, rather pessimistically, that “there is no library that does not ultimately disappear, leaving a lacuna for future generations to puzzle over.”  Is that really how it’s going to be?  I must slip in a tiny note here (you’ll be saying, when is this woman going to stop talking about libraries, but I’m into it right now, so please be patient)  for those of you who are interested in what libraries are destroying these days, please read anything by Nicholson Baker.  Mr. Baker is the man who wrote brilliant essays in the New Yorker on the elimination of the card catalogue, how San Francisco Public Library sent thousands of books to destruction and how microfilm caused newspaper files to be cast out for destruction or for sale on the lucrative antiquarian market.  Folks call him a Luddite, but he is doing all he can to protect original copies of famous newspapers, many of whom no longer publish.  He says that he has become a newspaper librarian as he runs around collecting old newspapers that libraries are discarding. Mr. Baker has a six thousand square feet storage space ready for them.

By the way, his four recommendations to libraries re the discard situation are:

*        Libraries should publish what they are discarding so that the public can see whether they are behaving responsibly

*        The Library of Congress should rent extra space to store material from publishers that they don’t want to store on site

*        Libraries should be encouraged to store current newspapers in bound form

*        Microfilming and digital storage of material should be non-destructive and the originals saved.

You can read all about his efforts in Double Fold

While on the topic of libraries and books, a great book came my way that is concerned with reading.  It is called How to Read Literature Like a Professor and “brilliant” is the one word I came up with after I had read it with barely an interval for food and sleep.  According to Professor Thomas C. Foster, it’s really quite simple to read like a professor.  Apparently, all you need to do is make connections with your memory while reading, linking settings with those you’ve known in reality, or in other literature, likewise linking characters and plot to similar ones read elsewhere.  In this way you will be enmeshing the book in the setting of comparative literature.  Then, if you are reading as a professor, there is the ability to recognize symbols – do we have a Grail Quest here (think of all those “on-the-road’ books), a casting out of the Garden of Eden (loss of innocence), an Odyssey, an Iliad, an Oedipal situation. As Thomas C. Foster says, “everything is a symbol of something, it seems, unless proven otherwise.”  Along with memory and symbolism, professors look at form pattern e.g., this is a pattern of behaviour I recognize, where else was it used?

Professor Foster’s dictums are delicious:

*Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.” Also “it’s never just rain.”

*irony doesn’t work for everyone

*irony trumps everything

*don’t read with your eyes (here he means don’t read from a fixed intellectual, or cultural position).

*if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it before you need it

*pure originality is impossible; “a wholly original work…would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to the reader.”  He adds “we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity too.”

*when writers send characters south, it is so that they can run amok.

*flight is freedom

*we have to bring our imagination to a story otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something. Foster warns, “That doesn’t indicate the story can mean anything we want it to….That’s not reading, that’s writing.”

*ask ”what does the text feel like it’s doing?”

*myth is a body of story that matters

*there’s only one story

Well if that doesn’t get you leaping to the nearest bookstore, on to Abe books, or at least rushing to the local library to order that book, then I am lost for words.  It is a wonderful, wonderful book – in no way condescendingly academic, Foster knows you can read like he does, it just takes a little awareness and a lot of practice.

And grey February has suitably been brought to a close by my intense dwelling of thoughts on libraries, books and yet more books, for what else is there to do in February but read?

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

Whether it’s a leap year or not, moving from December 31^st to January 1^st always seems like a leap to me. Leaping, whether it be from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, to middle and then old-age is scary whichever way you look at it.

I was not surprised then when I found myself with the book, Leap on the top of the pile of books in my book box.  It starts badly with the author, a woman of some talent (and not without funds) whining because she is ageing, finding herself unwanted in her field of endeavour, and has just lost a young lover.

Not another book by a person afraid to move on to the next phase in life!  But yes it is.  This time it is Sarah Davidson. I can certainly remember my body shaking when I knew I was taking a step that would mean a major life-change for me, yet I am unsympathetic to all Ms Davidson’s whinings.  She has talent and money, why are things so hard for her?  It is not until half-way through the book that I get over my distaste for her moping around her luxury condo in Boulder, and see that an acceptance of ageing is no easier for a rich person than for one with no assets.  The fact she has had her 15 minutes on the stage doesn’t make it any easier either, I can see.  As one who has experienced ageism in the publishing business, I fully appreciate her despondency at the rejections of her submitted manuscripts that start arriving.  How is it one day we are listened to carefully, and the next day nothing we have to say is relevant? 

I cull one delicious quote from Leap, and that is Whoopie Goldberg’s “It’s tough. Anyone who is not you… who is living with you… is a problem.”

If you’re having trouble moving on to the next phase, particularly if that phase is old age, then this book might be worth perusing.  Ms Davidson doesn’t have slick answers, but she does explore, by excellent interviews, a large number of people and the ways they have approached the inevitable sickness, old-age and death.  In the end, I came to appreciate her writing and wish her well with her dealing with the latter years (and the publishing business).

My next reading of the year is, by coincidence, also about making changes.  The author expounds on the interesting fact that most people are reluctant to change, even when confronted with the alternative of death.  In the book, Change or Die, Alan Deutschman goes on to show how changes can be made and how important it is that we make them when we need to.  ‘Relate,’ ‘repeat’ and ‘reframe’ are his buzz words and he makes it all sound possible.  “Relate” implies that you “form a new, emotional relationship with a person or a community that inspires and sustains hope.  “Repeat” means repeating the lessons, habits and skills you have learned – “training,” that is, in new and hopeful ways.  “Reframe” reframe indicates how the community and new skills support you “while you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life.”  Well that all sounds very nicely laid-out and I’ll add it to my list of “to-do’s” for the up-coming year.

What is controlling those two apparent needs – to be an individual and, at the same time to be part of a larger reality is explored in Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, a book which delves deeper into the matter and is a book that everyone should read.  I have watched Ms Taylor lecture and am not attracted to her, and yet I am intelligent enough to know that what she has done is truly remarkable.  She had a stroke that wiped out the use of the left half of her brain so that she could not read, or write, or recall any of her life.  But more interesting yet, she stayed aware and watched these faculties slowly fade away for four hours before she realised what had happened and, by that time, she was barely able to dial for help.  Her fascination with the process as a neuroscientist overcame her need for self-preservation!

Then, still awarely, she fought for 8 years to win her left-brain skills back. Ms Taylor’s clarity of purpose and enormous will-power made this possible.  Her account of the thousands of small steps she had to take is remarkable.  Her main insight, which she knew in an intellectual kind of way before the stroke, but with enormous power she was informed of it after the stroke, was that depending on which side of the brain was in use two different personalities presented themselves.  This has nothing to do with split personalities.  The Jill Taylor in the right side of the brain floated in an amorphous cloud of universal well-being.  She didn’t exist as a separate individual, but as part of some kind of universal process. Everything is cool and in its right place and one floats in a bliss state of well-being and peace.  The Jill Taylor in the left-side of the brain is linear, logical and is very much aware of being an individual with drives and ambitions. The left side delineates things and links perceptions weaving them into stories.  Neither side of the brain is the total reality; we are neither separate, nor dissolved beings.

The book raises the enormous question “Is reality only what we perceive then?  Or is there an external reality beyond the limits of our senses?”  This is such an important book, a case of a neuroscientist observing within her body what she had only observed with test equipment in others. I would make it required reading.

I am having my head and torso sculpted by the stone worker, Nancy Crozier.  She is a lively lady and keeps me up to date with island gossip and what she is up to.  Of course, anytime anyone drops a book title near my ears, they prick up.  This month she is reading No! I don’t want to join a book club by Virginia Ironside.  Nancy is coming towards her late 50’s and the book is a light-hearted rant about becoming 60.  I dutifully got the book.  The jokes in it are old and the writing a bit forced, but Ms Ironside does have a load of interesting things to say about reaching 60, which she views as kind of “old age”.  I am 79 and still view myself as somewhat towards the end of my middle years, but I suppose middle-age moves along as you do.  I recently read that in Japan there are 40,000 people 100 years or older, so the 70’s are definitely still middle-age there.

Ms Ironside embraces “old-age,” and all the many freebies that go with it.  As a spoiler the book ends with a possible romance on the horizon, so her “end to sex” rant should be taken cum granis salis. I read her because I thought the book would contain some thoughts on book-clubs, but it didn’t.  Her complaints about book clubs fell on my deaf ears as she protests that book clubs would force her to read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The God of Small Things and The Book Seller of Kabul.  Since these books all rate highly with me, I can’t see what she is complaining about except that she may be being forced to read them in someone else’s time-frame. It’s a quick read, and, if you’re approaching 60 it might be a helpful one.

It’s true the bulk of my reading is non-fiction, but a slight novel; almost novella just crossed my path and it is so.  It dwells on sex in general and loss of virginity in particular.  Ian McEwan’s Saturday kept its action to one day. Here with his On Chesil Beach, he confines the action to a couple of hours.  A couple of hours that changed two lives markedly.  Some reviewers felt this was a lot of fuss over nothing much, but I, having been part of the sexually inhibited generation as well as part of the sexually “liberated” generation of the 50’s and 60’s thought the male mind and the female mind remarkably well expressed in this brief book by McEwen.  Cuddles versus penetration is how one might express the dilemma of female/male needs.  Whatever the women’s movement might say, evolutionary-wise the male wants to penetrate and get off-spring, whilst the female wants a steady support for the off-spring which would be rather nice to have had without all that male messy bouncing around and invasion of her body.

An unsigned reviewer said that it was a very bad book that only a great writer can write and gave it the bad-sex writing award… yet the inner dialogues ring true.  The last pages unfortunately do the usual “let’s polish the plot off fast” following denouement of the wedding night and so the rest of the hero and heroine’s lives are brushed off in a few hasty pages.  I do so hate it when the pace of a book changes that fast – 156 pages of exposition about one evening (plus a few flashbacks to fill in) followed by 10 pages of the rest of their lives.  Philip Larkin, in a poem, defined sexual intercourse as starting in 1963 between the banning of Lady Chatterley and the first Beatles album and this book is very much concerned with the time just before that seeming quantum leap into sexual awareness, or at least expression of.

This book is a reminder of all the words we said, or didn’t say that could have altered our lives drastically.  As background noise the fact that Britain was losing its Empire and Kennedy was bringing Camelot to Washington did rather contrast the pettiness of two people trying to make it.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com  For permission to use all, or part of this blog please contact naomi@naomiwakan.com

December

The year is ending and on looking back on it’s events, its history, I find myself turning to books of other histories, both of countries and of peoples’ and also the history of a book.

As a poet who dwells on clothes lines, strawberry patches and such subjects, what could I feel after looking at 300 pages of Howard Zinn’s graphic presentation of A People’s History of the American Empire?  The book consists of page after page of political lying, of old rich men sending young men to war, wars that furthered the interests of the Rockefellers, Goulds and Morgan’s; pages of union battles to establish the rights of the working man, and greed, deception and bigotry on every page.  Guilt, guilt, guilt, is what I felt: guilt that I was not doing more, or indeed anything, to further the goodness in the world; to outbalance the cruelty and greed; guilt that I was staying close to home in my concerns, and NIMBY in my generosities. 

As a child, when I moved my farm animals around my model farm, all was in order – the ducks swam on their mirror-lake, the pigs stayed in their pen, the sheep nibbled the green-cloth grass and the cows waited to be milked in their model barn.  Life was simple – problems could be solved by my wise half-sisters, and ills cured by a kiss.  Have I moved much from that 8 years-old position at 79, I wonder?  How can one person kill another?  Or wish to push them down and have them servile?  Or want for anything but the creative growth of all humans that each may give of their best?  Historian, Howard Zinn offers 2 pages of hope at the end of A People’s History of the American Empire when he points out that “human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness.”  As he does not offer any examples of these, I am left feeling bitter, angry and impotent; not good feelings to have, so I do a laundry and hang the clothes on the line admiring the bare bones of the grape vine, and thinking I will write a very nice little poem about them soon.

I have just picked up a copy of Toni Morrison’s What Moves at the Margin, (edited by Carolyn C. Denard).  It contains her selected non-fiction and it is grim reading.  But then the terrible history of blacks in America is grim reading and continues to this day, despite a colored President.  Can an Afro-American ever be “ordinary” I ask myself.  Even as a person with Jewish parents, who knows all about living at the margin, I know a little of the history of the Jews with their sporadic pograms, and genocide-attempts, terrible as they were, whereas having a black skin in American can only offer you not sporadic, but constant haranguing and stereotyping, though brutality as far as lynching is rarely an option these days, you can still count police-prejudice and subsequent in-cell treatment. 

Toni Morison not only cannot forget, or forgive, she cannot let up on reminding her readers.  It is a tragic history and she should continue to do that, just as the Jews make sure Auschwitz is never forgotten.  However when she speaks of black women, she loses me.  How can such a large group be painted with one brush, no matter how wide the bristles?  Black women range from Michelle Obama to domestics still kept as almost slaves.  Is there any writer out there, I ask myself, who doesn’t write of black and white, or male and female, or maybe even not humans and animals, but writes only of the living condition… the fact of lungs and gills and levels of consciousness and what it all might mean in a multidimensional universe?  That’s my man (or woman).

I just read a news item of a child who was buried without its brain.  Apparently the pathologist hung on to it for some reason and didn’t bother telling the parents.  The item caught my eye because I am reading a wonderful biography.  It is the biography of a book, Gray’s Anatomy, by Ruth Richardson.  It is a remarkable biography in that a lot of needed information is no longer available and so Ms Richardson fills it in with speculation.  The speculation is considered and well-reasoned and fills the blanks so effortlessly that one seems to have a complete picture.  It is an amazing effort.  Ms Richardson makes clear when she is doing this and you just marvel at her background knowledge that allows her to paint a picture when the subject is absent.  For example on page 103, not knowing how exactly the first contact was made between Mr. Gray and the publisher, she presents various possible scenarios.  Later on the page she considers the previous anatomy books that might have been brought forward as examples of how the publisher and author might proceed.  It is all done so seamlessly that you don’t realise that perhaps 10% of the book’s history has been laid out as “this is what possibly happened,”  “this is a probable explanation.”

Ms Richardson has a firm background as a writer of medical history and has done a book on UK dissection-room corpses, Death, Dissection and the Destitute.  This background of knowledge of Victorian workhouses and grave-snatchers stands her in good stead as she provides facts about the difficulties of finding corpses for the medical schools to dissect.

Dr. Richardson is the perfect person to write the history of Gray’s Anatomy, which is now in its 40th edition, (150 years in print) for her medical and historical knowledge is matched by a perfectly engrossing literary style.  Mr Gray, the writer of the text, of Gray’s Anatomy and Dr. Carter, the illustrator, are filled out as very real human beings, even though the actual documentation of their lives is scant.

The whole of Ruth Richardson’s book, is a good lesson as to how biography can be written honestly, when the paperwork is scant.

Can you believe it? I’ve just read a thoroughly satisfactory book.  It said it would tell me How to do Biography and that is just what it did do.  It is by the biographer Nigel Hamilton who wrote a three volume biography of Field Marshall Montgomery, a biography of Thomas Mann and his brother and two biographies of recent presidents, Clinton and JFK.  The latter two books were declared sleazy, which I suppose increased their sales enormously, but Mr. Hamilton presents his case for presenting the whole truth very well and I, for one, am won over… though not enough to order them from the library.  A Chicago reviewer of the Clinton book asked rhetorically, “Does he know the national sport is baseball, not adultery?”  I must check on this assertion.

Mr. Hamilton makes some interesting points:

“In a postmodern relativistic world, the roles of fiction and nonfiction have reversed: we can no longer trust the truth which a nonfiction work purports to provide (since it is always debatable), whereas we have to accept the truth of what a fiction artist writes.”

“Go into any public library, take down almost any modern biography, and the quality of the narrative, the intelligence of the author, and the architecture of the account are likely to expose the mediocrity of most novels, detective yarns, thrillers, sci-fi tales, romances, and “chick lit: that pass today for Fiction.”

Quoting Anais Nin, apparently a very untruthful autobiographer, “If I had not created my world, I would certainly have died in other people’s…”

“Love, not sex per se, is thus far more important as a theme for biographers than for novelists, who must pander to man’s need for escapism (sex, violence, and horror) to satisfy modern readers.”  Ah! Maybe that’s why I can’t write fiction.

Mr. Hamilton declares that “total immersion, dogged research, hard work, skilful narrative, deep respect for the task, illumination of the themes tackled, compassion for the human dimension of history and achievement: these are qualities you need.” (in order to become a biographer).  Such people who put five years of their lives into one work need at least a tip of the hat, no matter how sleazy the final product might be.

I love it when speaking of the co-authors of a biography of Oppenheim, Mr. Hamilton states “they never raise their voices or overstate their case.”

Whether you want to write a biography, or not, read this book, it’s clear and unassuming and does what it states it will do.  By the way Nigel Hamilton has also written Biography: a brief history, and that I will immediately order in.

When  it comes to biography, Untold Stories by Alan Bennett should be compulsory reading for aspiring memoir writers.  At least the first half of it should be read.  This is the portion where he tells the ’untold stories’ of his grandfather’s suicide and his mother’s mental illness.  It is poignant, funny, has moments of anger and of distaste… it has integrity, real integrity, with no holds barred.  Mr. Bennett is, of course, a well-known playwright and fondly remembered as a member of the “Beyond the Fringe” bunch.  But here, he speaks, as he has never spoken before of the pains, and pleasures in his life.  His homosexuality tints everything, not in that ‘in your face’ way of say David Sedaris, but actually in a way that could allow me to see the world from a point of view which I had never carefully considered before.  This is always a good thing that reading a good book can effect.

Mr. Bennett’s gentle wisdom pervades the pages, which are not devoid of the occasional stab at what he sees as injustice manifesting.  It is the every day that he records in a way that catches you to him forever.  For example, after taking his car in to have a new tire put on, he remarks, “This is put on and it is all over and done with in ten minutes.  I feel I want to ask them home so that they can take charge of my life.”  How he captures a job well done with these simple sentences.  As to the trials of being a humorist he states, “It’s much harder if you have a sense of humour not to be indiscreet; the temptation to hang discretion and make jokes or be witty is too great.  Secrets are best kept by those with no sense of humour.”

If you haven’t read Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, which I wrote about in Book Ends a year between the covers, please do so.  It is about how the queen gets hooked on books and is very witty.  I know book-covers are slathered with comments “This is the funniest…”  “this will have you roaring with laughter..” etc., but, believe me this will at least have you smiling delightedly throughout the reading.  A good idea for an Xmas gift too.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an essayist and poet.  She has written over thirty books including her popular Late Bloomers –on writing later in life, and her recently published, Book Ends – a year between the covers. www.naomiwakan.com