Not even wrong

I've been brooding on the world's most popular periodical, the Watchtower (see yesterday's blog.).

It seems that articles are for the most part submitted to the headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York, by writing committees in branch offices around the world, which are then checked by editors and translated into the languages of publication - this may in part explain the mind-numbing lack of any real content; there are no particular cultural references to engage the reader's interest, nothing specific to any one country or culture or language, nothing to link the article with anything concrete.

Only somebody who doesn't believe that what they're saying has any real value or meaning could write like this, and I want to give you an idea of what this kind of boneless prose is like. Here's a very short extract from an article on - of all things - poetry:

From nursery rhymes to advertising jingles, poetry is a part of our lives. Hence, most people are familiar with at least the basic concepts of verse. But if you want to write poetry yourself, you may first want to read a broad selection of verse. This will help you to grasp the various principles of composition, besides expanding your vocabulary. Of course, you need to be selective so as not to expose yourself to anything that is unwholesome or degrading. (Philippians 4:8, 9) Naturally, the best way to learn to write verse is to sit down with pencil and paper and write.

Those involved in writing this sort of thing are described by the publishers as volunteers (and are presumably unpaid). The names of the authors (except in certain first-person life stories) and of the other publishing staff are never included in the magazine or available elsewhere. All articles are produced under the authority and supervision of the cult's unelected and unaccountable Governing Body; and the content therefore represents the official position of the organization.

In the extract above many words simulate reason - 'hence', 'thus', 'therefore' - but don't contain reason, don't express reason, don't convey reason. They are rhetorical figures which suggest the shape of thought, of discourse, but which close down rather than open up any line of exchange or speculation. There is an occasional chilly jocularity coupled with outbursts of zealotry, a shuddering washed-in-the-blood-of-Christ fervour that soon fades into the affectless mandarin that is the standard register for this kind of writing. It's equivalent to the table-talk of the world's worst tyrants - crass, uninformed, shallow and dogmatic.

There's a tendency to pad out the lack of content with drab quotations (usually dictionary definitions or scraps of unexceptionable pop medical research); there is an endless stream of 'academic' sources but you won't have heard of the low-voltage authorities or their backwater colleges. There is a concerted evasion of almost any concrete detail that might support the material being offered for our understanding - apart from hundreds of parenthetical Bible sources which pepper every text as if to say 'don't just take our word for it - here's the proof!'

Most alarmingly the entire article about poetry cited above contains no example of poetry (apart from the Iliad and Odyssey), and I suppose this is partly a matter of copyright and partly the publishers' inability and/or unwillingness to operate within wordily publishing constraints. They wouldn't know how to acquire rights to a few lines of (say) Hart Crane, and if they did know how they wouldn't do it.

Tellingly, the piece on poetry names no poets apart from Homer, offers no technical or practical advice, no spur to action. One is reminded of a Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese as Anne Elk (in drag, lavishly bewigged) is being interviewed about his/her new theory about dinosaurs. It soon becomes clear that he/she hasn't a single idea about the subject, and is in fact so wholly ignorant not only of the subject but the protocols of discussion that the whole thing becomes a series of shrieks and coughs and postponements. Watch it here.

Some more of the Watchtower's thoughts on poetry:

POETS are a mixture of artist and songwriter. Their pens are impelled as much by their hearts as by their heads. Hence, well-written poems can inspire you. They can also make you think, laugh, or cry. The book The Need for Words says: “Poetry is often nothing more than words organised to have a high, sudden impact. That’s partly the reason why great poems . . . are unforgettable in every way.”

That recurring 'hence' is characteristic.

'Well-written poems' inspire us because the poets are ' a mixture of artist and songwriter'. That any poet I can think of, with the exception of George Herbert, would represent to the zealots of Brooklyn the very incarnation on the anti-Christ need not concern us; nor that the nearest the hacks who perpetrated this paragraph are ever likely to have gotten to a poet is Leonard Cohen (Jewish though, and therefore problematical); nor need we wonder what the difference is between 'unforgettable' and 'unforgettable in every way'. This is how language sounds when it's drained of meaning, of value, of life. This is language detached from its referends, free-floating in a dense fog of nervous conviction.

Conviction is not the same thing as belief. Belief, if it is to have any value, must always be hard-won. Conviction is the form that belief takes in dependent minds, in minds surrendered to dogma. Which brings us back to George Eliot.

Satanic feminists

George Eliot, in Silas Marner:

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that  the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

There is no shortage of dull minds behind the world's most astonishingly prolific and successful publishing enterprise. A billion copies sold every year of their flagship publication. It's the most widely distributed magazine in the world, appearing in 240 languages and with a monthly print run of 60 million copies. The Watchtower (less well known by its full title The Watchtower - Announcing Jehovah's Kingdom) is an evangelical publication produced in Brooklyn, New York, headquarters of The Watchtower, Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania - better known to the world as the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Now read this:

Throughout the developed world, an increasing number of people, inspired by feminist movements and disenchanted with mainstream religions, seek spiritual fulfilment in various forms of witchcraft.

It comes from The Watchtower, and is the only reference to feminism I can find in their online archives. To test a theory I went online to confirm a hunch by comparing citations. This rough list of lexical frequency in the Society's publications (including their version of the Bible) only covers the period 2000-2012, but is nevertheless suggestive in its bizarre priorities, its unequal weightings. Here's what I found:

Subject            Mentions

Jehovah           8,392

Jesus                5,464

Faith                2,912

Truth               2.549

Power              2,433

Fear                 1,666

Jews                1,479

Blood              1,409

Satan               1,357

Followers        1,169

Salvation            818

The Devil           766

Mercy                 652

Obedience          603

Sex                     586

Afraid                 557

Illness                 498

Crime                 490

Discipline           465

Demons              438

AIDS                  431

Alcohol              389

Eternal life          318

Adultery             302

Caesar                285

Evolution           253

Armageddon      244

Homosexuality   122

Hitler                  114

Masturbation        34

This blog is prompted by the recent appearance of members of this cult on the streets where I live. No longer diligently knocking on every door they now operate mobile bookstands, displaying their publications (which appear these days to be free) at busy traffic junctions.

I don't like to see religious hucksters of any denomination promoting their dim bigotry in public spaces, unchallenged. So I wrote a letter to the local Council and received a phone call the other day saying that there was nothing they could do about it and in any case when they sent an inspector he couldn't see any evidence of the bookstand or its attendants so there was clearly no problem.

But why on earth should we have to tolerate religious pedlars on our street corners promoting homophobic, misogynist, creationist, anti-intellectual, bug-eye'd nonsense? If you doubt their toxic priorities look again at the archive lexicon above.

More on this tomorrow.

Soap box

I've just read Sheena Joughin's online Telegraph review of Greg Baxter's forthcoming novel Munich Airport. You can too, here. She doesn't like it at all, giving it one star. (One of the less attractive aspects to broadsheet reviews these days is a tendency to allocate stars. The Times Literary Supplement doesn't do that, yet.)

As it happens I'm reviewing this same novel for the TLS and, bound as I am by the Critics' Samurai Code, can say nothing here in advance of my piece appearing later this year. The reason for this blog is to share with you Sheena Joaquin's extraordinary opening statement. She writes:

      "Any novel that starts when its story is over is in a sticky predicament; the plot is all in the past."

Really? Any novel? A sticky predicament, then, for Proust and Joyce and Woolf and Dickens and Flaubert and Tolstoy and Stendahl all the other writers who, in their innocence, recounted (with the reliable omniscience we used to expect from authors) stories with a beginning, middle and end, usually from the perspective of a 'now' shared with the reader and all set in the past. "It was the best of times it was the worst of times . . "

I don't much like novels written entirely in the present tense - a wearisome and limiting trope, but all-too-common these days and largely the result of creative writing tutors advocating the approach, presumably because it's immediate and compelling and artless and (for the hapless reader) more like watching the telly. It's as if the novel amounts to an extended pitch for a movie, or the basis for a stand-up routine. What Dickens used sparingly in Bleak House as a signifier for social stagnation and anomie (the Dedlock chapters are all written in the stultifying present) has become the one and only method for too many novelists, not all of them negligible, but most of them indistinguishable.

I tend as a reader mentally to correct such stuff, but since it's hard work and annoying to edit modishly present narratives into professionally acceptable pasts I tend after a dozen pages to give up. I can think of no novel written in the long-established past tense that would be improved by rewriting into the now ubiquitous present.

'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan stands . . .' Nah.

Some recent novels would be hugely improved if rewritten using the past tense in its many forms (and Tom McCarthy's 'C' comes to mind).

But don't take my word for it - read this engaging piece from 2010 by Philip Hensher in (as it happens) the Telegraph. 

Incidentally - why give stars for novels rather than more useful rating information (much as we do with films). Munich Airport strikes me as a book that's less likely to appeal if you're much under forty (the age of its author as it happens). But (and I expect we're heading this way) the time will surely come when novels carry prissy little warnings as CD packaging does: 'Contains mild peril', Contains cartoon violence' and (best of all) 'Contains language'.

On avuncularity

I'm an only child, and therefore incapable of being an uncle, not having any nephews and nieces. This is no great loss as if there's one thing I don't do it's avuncularity. 

Uncles generally get short shrift in fiction - they tend to trail a whiff of Soho or Brighton or Epsom Downs. Usually hard up (or flush from a recent win) they wear camel-hair coats and trilbies, drive rented cars, wear after-shave and cash cheques in pubs. They are bachelors, of course, and sometimes 'not the marrying kind'.

Uncles in the past were, or claimed to be, ex-army officers (ideally played by Cecil Parker). There was often a woman in the background, possibly married or a widow and clearly unsuitable. There was also, often, a hint of perversity. They came, necessarily, from outside the immediate family yet were also privileged insiders. Uncles were sanctioned alternatives to the grim, unyielding and authoritarian figure of father.

Think of Uncle Giles (aka 'Captain Jenkins') in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. He's reliably unreliable, occasionally missing without trace , surely related to Waugh's Captain Grimes, the opportunist one-legged pederast in Decline and Fall ('I'm in the soup again, old boy!'). I suppose they both trace their literary origin back to Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, another military relic, deeply eccentric and childlike and unemployable, pursued by the widow Wadman .

Uncles - you wouldn't let them babysit your little chicks.

Rolf Harris, the very popular Australian entertainer, was sentenced yesterday, following a lengthy trial, for sex offences against young, sometimes very young, girls. His prosecution and imprisonment shocked (as they say) the nation. Not Rolf! Star of all our childhoods (though not mine, not really), beloved clown singer, performer, didgeridoo player, inventor of the wobble board and the immortal Jake the Peg ('with his eggsttra leg diddle diddle diddle dum') and so on and on. He was also some people's idea of a good painter. (Non-British readers who have never heard of Rolf Harris and readers with a taste for unlikely cultural pairings and showbiz kitsch should watch  Liberace and Rolf together.)

Rolf is, or was until his 'dark side' became manifest, invariably described as avuncular. He was certainly not a sinister weirdo like Jimmy Saville, but, perhaps on account of his Australian brand of warm informality (now of course revealed as a chilly form of deviant manipulation), earned a place for over half a century as the nation's antipodean uncle - trusted and admired, loved even. His downfall really is spectacular and it's likely that he will die in prison. 

A phrase much used in the cases of Savile and Harris is they they were 'hiding in plain sight'. They were very visible, instantly recognisable public figures and Harris even fronted a campaign to promote awareness of child abuse. The phrase (new to me) sets off an alarming tendency (in myself) to think of the many much-loved public figures who are self-evidently doing just that even as I blog. Of course they are protected by the law (and rightly) from being named by the likes of me, but the time cannot be far off when I write an 'I told you so' piece about a high profile entertainer or politician, now 'outed' as a predator. Watch this space.

What, by the way, is the female equivalent of avuncular? Is there a word meaning 'aunt-like'? A facetiously pedantic option offered by the OED is 'materteral' from the Latin “matertera,” which refers to a mother’s sister. But the OED can only muster one published reference, from 1823, and it's fair to say that it hasn't caught on. What does this tell you about our cultural values? Am I right to suppose that we don't need 'materteral' because the faintly disparaging term 'spinsterish' covers it, especially since the apparent demise of 'maiden aunt'?  But just as there are apparently very few female paedophiles we may as a society have come to the conclusion that we don't need a word corresponding to the now-tainted 'avuncular'.

On not being a Faber poet

I visited the new Foyles bookshop in the Charing Cross Road when the new store opened in the former St. Martin's School of Art, a few yards away from the old Foyles. All very bright and spiffy, and encouragingly bustling. But something important was missing.

In the old store one entered through the usual clutter of new fiction and celebrity cookbooks and postcards and magazines and Moleskine notebooks and then almost immediately, on the left, arrived in the poetry section, which was quite large and prominent yet tucked away, a quiet backwater, that always seemed remote from the bustling crowds of the ground floor. There were chairs, and they were comfortable.

In the new store the much-reduced poetry section (perhaps a quarter of the size it was) is in an easily-overlooked upstairs corner on the first floor, and hemmed in by graphic novels, and populated by the sort of browsers who prefer graphic novels to poetry. (As it happens I admire many graphic novels, but found the juxtaposition unsettling.) There are no chairs.

Shouldn't bookstores follow the example of department stores. which invariably welcome the customer with the fragrant delights of the cosmetics counters? I'm not saying poetry is the same thing as perfume, or even soap, or moisturisers, but it's undeniable that one's first impression on entering (say) John Lewis or Selfridges or Harrods is of glamour, prestige, allure and elegance. Also pleasant smells and youthful vitality and freshness. You wouldn't expect pots and pans or lawnmowers and dustbins. High value luxury items have an inherent attraction: if books are cosmetics then poetry is perfume, and I mean Guerlain's Vol de Nuit (see blogs passim)

Which reminds me of a daydream since adolescence, prompted by the gift of Ted Hughes's Wodwo when I was fifteen. The dream was not merely to become a poet (we all dream of that at some point), but to become a Faber poet. My never-to-be-written debut volume (entitled Fungoids as a tribute to Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames) would appear in bright yellow cloth binding, with a dust jacket designed by Berthold Wolpe, the title in his noble Albertus typeface, and on the back my name would appear between John Berryman and e. e. cummings. Fungoids would cost 12s 6d net (three weeks' pocket money), the same price as Auden's Homage to Clio, which I hadn't read but liked the sound of. It's a dream still, though Faber sans Wolpe is salad without the dressing.

On Jack Kerouac

Some thoughts on the recent publication of an early novel by Jack Kerouac called The Haunted Life.

There's an exchange in Douglas Copeland's fifth novel Miss Wyoming, published in 2000, when one character tells another (who has elected to live like a hobo, with predictable results) that ‘the Road is over. It never even was. You’re thinking like a kid at a Starbucks counter, sneaking peeks at his Kerouac paperback and writing That’s so true! in the margins.’ 

That's so true. We no longer live in a world of cheap gasoline, American automobiles on open highways, unfranchised coffee shops and healthy nicotine. Now it's  . . . well, not like that.

Jack Kerouac's estate was valued at less than a hundred dollars when the author died in 1969 from cirrhosis-related internal haemorrhage. 'Good career move', as Gore said of Truman, because by 2004 it had swollen to $20 million.. The impressive posthumous earnings are partly down to book sales - On the Road, still sells around 100,000 copies annually, mostly in the States - as well as numberless volumes of letters, memoirs, biography and critical studies. 

There are also film rights, and some well-heeled fans who are happy to pay big money for the cool aura of the relics: the actor Johnny Depp bought Jack's old raincoat for $15,000; the forty-yard-long Teletype scroll on which the author hammered out a draft of On the Road was sold at auction in 2001 for $2.43 million (£1.7m) and is now the property of a billionaire businessman. It was on show last year in the British Library - an unlovely object that can never be separated from Capote's put down: 'It isn’t writing at all - it’s typing'. There's an established tourist trail in the author's home town of Lowell, Massachusetts (birthplace of Bette Davies and James Abbott McNeill Whistler), a clothing range and for all I know a smartphone app.. The estate, bogged down in acrimonious litigation for years, is now run by the youngest son of Kerouac's third wife Stella. In 1993 he licensed Kerouac's image to the clothing retailer Gap ('Kerouac wore khakis' was the strapline next to a photoshopped snapshot of the author in Greenwich Village in 1958). The campaign to promote cheap cotton pants to a new generation of urban hipsters included this oddly-punctuated full-page ad:

Legendary 

New York in the 40s. 

Hollywood in the 50s. 

Legendary writers, critics, intellectuals with courage. 

All in their cotton khakis. 

Casual. Defiant. 

Khakis just like those we make for you. Gap khakis. 

Traditional. Plain-front. 

Easy fit. Classic fit.

Other legendary writers featured in the campaign were Spillane, Hemingway and Arthur Miller - but there was no sign of any legendary critics. Did Edmund Wilson wear khakis? 

Ginsberg also appeared in a Gap ad, donating the proceeds to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, 'the first fully accredited Buddhist-inspired university in the United States'. Burroughs high-mindedly held out until Nike came knocking. Both Beats were still alive at the time so I guess they made there own choice when it came to selling out to the man. And if all this bilious preamble seems a way to put off writing about The Haunted Life, the novel under advisement, I can only say that it's practically beyond criticism.

It was written in 1944 when the author was 22. The manuscript came up for auction in 2002 and was sold to an anonymous buyer for a sum equivalent to three-and-a-half raincoats. Now published by Scribners and conscientiously edited and annotated by Todd Tietchen, it's likely to appeal only to diehard Kerouac fans and obsessive Beat completists. There's no shortage of these, but is it a good career move?

No and yes. No because its dull, flat, unaccomplished prose has nothing at all to offer the casual reader or the faithful. Yes, because it adds nothing to Kerouac's literary reputation and that's no bad thing because his reputation isn't that kind of reputation. He's not a great writer, seldom even a good writer, but for his many admirers he's the right writer and even, God help us, a role model. Those admirers are almost exclusively male adolescents (or their adult counterparts): angst-ridden, romantic, disaffected and (ironically enough) anti-materialist. They buy into the simulacrum of freedom offered by a lost world of Hudson Hornets, cheap gasoline, amphetamines and coffee and (in Ginsberg's approving phrase) 'spontaneous bop prosody'. The myth of genius in the grip of passionate creativity has a lasting appeal to some. The one example of the technique in Kerouac's oeuvre is The Subterraneans, written in three days and nights in 1958. It's like being cornered by a garrulous drunk and proof that in fiction, as in life, loquacity isn't the same as eloquence. If On the Road continues to exert an attract this may be down to the fact that its less of a novel and more of a script, best heard and not read, when the rhythmic syncopations outstrip the meaning.

On the Road is the one book Salinger's Holden Caulfield might just have dug because, whatever else it is it's not phony, although I suspect today's Caulfields get their kicks and consolations elsewhere. That the book's integrity seems undamaged by all the posthumous boondoggle says something for its hold on successive generations of readers, its claim on their affection and forbearance. It still seems to stand for something unsullied, authentic and true. It has nothing to do with khaki pants. 

Set in Lowell in a year unspecified but with the Depression a recent memory and America about to enter the war in Europe, the story unfolds through the summer before Peter Martin begins his sophomore year at Boston College. Peter is torn between the world views embodied by four thinly-realised emblematic characters: Garabed Tourian (a Byronic poet), Dick Sheffield (a footloose romantic and progressive Democrat), Joe Martin (a right wing racist bigot based on the author's father) and a Catholic radio celebrity, Father Coughlin. 

It really is that bad. When it comes to publishing Kerouac's early writings the sad truth is that each book, however unprepossessing, turns out to be better than the next. Just over two years ago Penguin issued The Sea is My Brother, an early novel nearly as flat and sophomoric as A Haunted Life. Before that we had Orpheus Emerged (written in 1945, published in 2002) and before that 1999's Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings. The bottom of the barrel has been scraped away and we're now digging into the soil beneath. Still inexplicably unpublished are two early Kerouac manuscripts written in Québécois French: La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin. Their appearance in print really would be the last of it.

Overwhelming question

Something that's been nagging me: what does the 'J' stand for in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'?

Eliot's poem, written in 1910-11 and first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine, attracted mixed reviews. According to the TLS: 'The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.' Its original title was 'Prufrock among the Women' - in later years Eliot claimed to have no memory of how he came upon the name of his diffident and ageing mouthpiece.

The form of the name may reflect Eliot's habit at the time of writing his name as 'T. Stearns Eliot' (and this was a not unusual practice in Edwardian Britain - one thinks of the flour miller and film mogul J. Arthur Rank). Prufrock-Litton was the name of a furniture store in St. Louis, Missouri, the town where Eliot grew up, although this appears not to have any particular significance.

But here's my whimsical theory: perhaps that upper case J was merely hanging around waiting to be used - belatedly - in a notorious line from Eliot's 'Gerontion' (Poems, 1920), a line in which Eliot was criticised for using a disparagingly lower case initial 'j' for 'Jew' in the lines:

          And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner

          Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

He eventually amended this to capitalise the Jew (although it hardly renders the lines any less offensive, with their dehumanising 'squats' and 'spawned'.) I suppose we're expected to bear in mind that the old man who narrates the poem is a mouthpiece and no more Eliot's representative than (say) Browning's Bishop Bloughram or Larkin's landlady at the Bodies. It's an expression of anti-Semitism rather than an endorsement of the view. 

I recall reading with great interest and some irritation Anthony Julius's book about Eliot's anti-Semitism, because although Julius is a very able barrister he's not much of a literary critic. (To be fair few literary critics could hack it at the Bar.) Julius rightly sees more troubling evidence of anti-Semitism in Eliot's 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar' and, while he builds a strong case and ultimately sees Eliot's anti-Semitism as a troubling quality rather than a disabling flaw, the case for the prosecution rests upon a couple of lines taken from a very large body of work. Troubling lines to be sure, and offensive - but art should always make us uncomfortable and the fact that they continue to shock is a sign of their continuing value.

As a novelist friend pointed out to me the other day, Joyce never capitalises Jew or Jewish in Ulysses - the main character of which is a Dublin Jew. Or jew, in Joyce's philosemitic formulation.  Nobody could accuse Joyce of anti-Semitism.

Quotation © The Estate of T. S. Eliot