On Lauren Bacall

The death of the great Lauren Bacall aged 89 prompts two stories.

When she first met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not (she was 19, he 45), Bogie strolled over and decided to have some fun, telling her to take off her glasses (she was very short-sighted). "Without your glasses you;re a swell-looki' kid" he said.

"Without my glasses you're not so bad." she sliced back. BANG!

The other story concerns an acquaintance of mine who found himself at a charity lunch in the 1980s, seated next to an American woman wearing a veil (perhaps to conceal some recent 'work'). He had no idea who she was and made the usual small talk. Struggling slightly, he asked her whether she was interested in the theatre at all, and whether she'd seen any shows in London. "My husband was an actor', s he said, but not giving anything away. They then chatted inconsequentially about this and that and only after lunch broke up did the penny belatedly drop. He told me he was glad he had no idea he was sitting next to an actress he admired above any other - he would have been completely tongue-tied. 'You don't wake up in the morning expecting to meet Lauren Bacall', he added, still starstruck, and who can blame him?

The Big Sleep is not only my favourite American film but possibly my favourite film tout court. We should all watch it today, savouring the first encounter between Bogart (as Marlowe) and Bacall) as General Sternwood's elder daughter). Just watch them - they both seem to be on heat.

Zang Tumb Tumb

Here's a really great thing. The Italian Futurist poet Marinetti delivers a sensational reading of his Zang Tumb Tumb. You'll love this.

It's an onomatopoeic rendering of The Battle of Adrianople during the First Balkan War, beginning in mid-November 1912 and ending on 26 March 1913. Zang Tumb Tumb is the origin of all sound poetry - Hugo Ball's dadaist 'verses without words' came three or four years later, at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire. I'm about to record a podcast about Hugo Ball, and am daunted at the challenge of performing his Karawane. Marinetti is a tough act to follow.

Nairn's London by Routemaster - latest

I'm pleased to say there is huge interest  in my idea for a bus tour to mark the re-issue of Nairn's London by Penguin Books. It's been great fun working out a route and approximate timings with the aid of Ian Nairn's masterpiece, my tatty London A-Z and (of course) Google Streetview. The tour will begin in the East End and head westwards to the City, travelling in the selfsame bus that appears (with Nairn at the wheel) on the cover of the 1966 paperback. 

The tour will take place on a Sunday in November. (Sundays are best with less traffic, easier parking and fewer crowds). The tour will include perambulations, private visits to some sites (admission is included in the ticket price), photo opportunities and much more. The specific Sunday will be announced very soon.

Half the available seats have already been provisionally booked so places will be limited.  Here's the draft flier:

 Nairn's London 
  by    Routemaster     

A guided bus tour marking the reissue of Nairn's London and celebrating the life and work of Ian Nairn (1930-1983), Britain's greatest topographical writer.

Nairn's London by Routemaster will feature:

   'the best visual joke in London'

         the capital's oldest industrial site

             a beautiful synagogue built by a Quaker

                 a magnificent Victorian covered market

                     a vinegar warehouse (the stuff of nightmare)    

                          a heartbreaking shelter in an atmospheric park 
                             a 'cantankerous' house pre-dating the Great Fire

                                the former home of Sir John Betjeman
                                    a gorgeous City pub 
                                        a wall scarred by a Great War zeppelin raid

                                            the ascent of Ludgate Hill to St Paul's 

                                                a church that looks like a typist     

                                                     a mighty Hawksmoor masterpiece

                                        

We then head to a central London venue for a talk by the distinguished architectural historian Gavin Stamp, who has written a new introduction to the Penguin re-issue of Nairn's London. He will be joined by Gillian Darley and David McKie, co-authors of Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves Press). 

Travis Elborough, author of The Bus We Loved (Granta Books) will talk about the Routemaster's enduring significance. 

Simon Okotie will read from his acclaimed debut Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? (Salt Publishing) - an existential whodunnit set entirely on a bus.

Other guests subject to confirmation

Nairn in Routemaster (1966)

  The same bus 48 years later

The bus we'll be using is a remarkable survivor - it's the very same one featured (with the author in the cab) on the cover of the original 1966 Penguin edition of  Nairn's London.

CUV 217C, now nearly fifty years old, was the last Routemaster to run in regular public service before withdrawal in 2005, and is  now operated as part of the Arriva Heritage Fleet.

Date, ticket prices and more details will follow soon . . . 
Profits will be donated to The Twentieth Century Society

More on Gaza

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Auden's lines (from 'September 1, 1939') come to mind unbidden as I reflect on today's centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, and on what's happening today, unspeakably, in Gaza. This, from yesterday's Guardian website:

A third deadly attack on a United Nations school sheltering people fleeing bombardment in Gaza was strongly condemned by both the UN and the US on Sunday, with UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, calling it a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and pleading for an end to "this madness".

What's happening now, and what's been happening over the past several weeks in Gaza, is utterly barbaric and the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu will certainly, in time, face prosecution for crimes against humanity. 

Is it too fanciful to speculate that the breathtaking cruelty of the IDF can in some way be attributed to a form of mass psychosis, the expression of a delayed and collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder originating in the death camps of Eastern Europe? A belated response to the unspeakable and degrading horrors of the Holocaust?

What the Israeli government and military are visiting on the people of Palestine (average age 17) has an Old Testament ferocity and primitivism - something dark and vengeful is happening. While I can make no defence of Hamas as a terrorist organisation (who dish out evil of their own) I recall, vividly, the IRA mainland bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 80s. These caused disruption, fear, mayhem and loss of life but at no point did the British government order the army to pulverise Dublin schools and hospitals with rockets. 

What the State of Israel is doing to the people of the Gaza Strip is wrong, shameful, disgusting, morbid and self-loathing.  It is, if you like, evil. It is evil in itself and the result of evil in the past. I am no historian or academic or scholar of the region and I'm certainly no politician. Or, to use another few Auden lines from later in the same poem:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad . . .

So we go back to Cain and Abel - is that 'the whole offence'? The schism between the nomad and the agrarian? Is this the profound and bloody dispute that has driven a culture mad? Is there any legal precedent for sectioning an entire country?


Auden lines © The Estate of W. H. Auden

"Most influential books by women" my aunt fanny

This recently-published selection of 20 titles (below) was voted for by members of the public following a campaign, launched after this year's Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (awarded to Eimear McBride), to determine those books by women, "that have most impacted, shaped or changed readers' lives". This involved a public consultation and here are the results, arranged numerically in order of popularity. Ready?

1)  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

2)  The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood

3)  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4)  Harry Potter – J. K Rowling (I suppose this means the complete series rather than one book)

5)  Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

6)  Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

7)  Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

8)  Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

9)  The Secret History – Donna Tartt

10)  I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

11)  The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

12)  Beloved – Toni Morrison

13)  Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

14)  We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

15)  The Time Traveller's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

16)  Middlemarch – George Eliot

17)  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

18)  The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

19)  The Colour Purple – Alice Walker

20)  The Women's Room – Marilyn French

Of course any list of female authors that finds room for J. K. Rowling and not Virginia Woolf is, let's agree, partial (in both senses), and any list of influential novels that omits Mrs Dalloway is suspect. The compilers of this list will have their own agenda, of course, and their own definition of what constitutes the 'influential' which appears, on the evidence above, to revolve around sales (while omitting the really big names such as Agatha Christie, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Barbara Cartland), and current visibility (hence Atwood and Shriver and Tartt). Harper Lee is there not least because her single book has been on the National Curriculum forever and may therefore be one of the only books respondents have read.

The list was, let's remind ourselves. restricted to those books 'that have most impacted, shaped or changed readers' lives.'  (Let's respond to the barbarous 'impacted' with no more than a fastidious shudder. And let's not quibble over the life-changing potency of Gone with the Wind and Little Women.)

Notice anything? It's this: all these authors are, without exception, women who wrote, or write in the English language. Not a foreign writer among them, not one. So there's no Simone de Beauvoir, no Colette, no Nathalie Sarraute, no Marguerite Yourcenar, (and that's just the tip of a French iceberg). There's not a single author from outside the English-speaking world. This is, I think, regrettable. If we are a multi-cultural society,  and we are, shouldn't this be expressed through a less parochial view of literature? 

And another thing. Although the compilers of the list claim they are ranking the most influential books by women writers, they have restricted their choices entirely to novels. So there's no work of feminism, philosophy, science, history, economics, biography, theology, biology, geology, ethnology, linguistics, political theory, literary criticism or anything else by any woman writer over the past millennium who isn't a novelist.

There's not even any poetry. No memoirs or diaries either, so no Anne Frank, whose single book can surely claim to have at least as great an influence as, say, Toni Morrison's Beloved? This focus on fiction to the exclusion of all other writing is, I think, not so much regrettable as inexcusable. The hard-to-avoid implication is that novels are what woman do best, bless 'em - the cultural equivalent of needlework and flower arranging. Making up stories.

Of course what is revealed here is both the participating public's narrow range and the intellectual impoverishment and condescension of the whole project. Exercises of this kind show how, and always with the best intentions, cultures become inward-looking and finally fail. 

But then you look at the "nineteen inspirational women" who launched the campaign that led to the compilation of this list. Here they are, with their choices:

Baroness Valerie Amos: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Zawe Ashton: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Mary Beard:  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Edith Bowman: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Saffron Burrows: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Shami Chakrabarti: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Gwendoline Christie:  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Grace Dent: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Katherine Grainger: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Martha Lane Fox: Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Caitlin Moran: Two Pence to Cross the Mersey by Helen Forrester

Kate Mosse: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Dawn O’Porter: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Susanna Reid: We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Jennifer Saunders: Dust by Patricia Cornwell

Sharleen Spiteri: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Tanni Grey-Thompson: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Sandi Toksvig: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Joanna Trollope: The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

It's not really much of a list, is it? The choice of books, that is. It's not much of a list if one is looking for seriously influential books by major female writers because, with a couple of exceptions, the chosen titles are all popular, middlebrow, crowd-pleasing choices, established favourites alongside a few modish latecomers that the nineteen inspirational women happen to have read at some point in their lives and liked. There's not much here that one could regard as serious, and very little that even their admirers could defend as 'life-shaping'. I agree with Sandi Toksvig that Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm is a marvellous comic novel, but still . . . 

Enough already. Here (since nobody is likely to canvas my opinion, even as a token bloke with an interest in such matters) are my top ten 'influential' books by female writers, arranged alphabetically (and not as a numerical pissing contest):

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Infidel

Elizabeth Anscombe (the pre-eminent female philosopher of the 20th century. Her omission from the Baileys list is inexcusable). No single book comes to mind so perhaps her editing of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations? Or Intention.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Barbara Cartland. who wrote - or dictated - over 700 novels with total sales estimated at a billion. There's influence for you. Has any man ever read one of her books, I wonder?

Agatha Christie And Then There Were None (over 100 million copies sold of this one novel)

Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch 

Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway 

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Marguerite Yourcenar Mémoires d'Hadrien

My list concurs with the Baileys roster in omitting (though perhaps for different reasons) Camille Paglia, Ayn Rand, Zadie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, and Naomi Wolf (whom Joan Smith described memorably as 'the show pony of American feminism'). All of them have written, or wrote, 'influential' books. But then so did Mrs Beeton.

Poetry Book Fair 2014

The 2014 Poetry Book Fair will be the best thing of its kind since the 2013 Poetry Book Fair.

It's at the Conway Hall in central London on Saturday 6th September. Do go, and take a reasonably thick bundle of banknotes. Details are here

On Gaza

I don't have a television, so have only just seen this short broadcast by Channel 4's Jon Snow last week. His is a quiet voice that seems to me to have the moral authority and compassion that political leaders in the region lack. As I write a fragile cease fire is in place. What next?