The last artist

In the early 1970s NASA launched two Pioneer spacecraft, the first vessels to leave our solar system. Each carried a plaque offering an elementary rough guide to Earth and its inhabitants. Here it is:

Image © NASA

The idea came from one Eric Burgess, who mentioned to to Carl Sagan, the American Patrick Moore (not that Moore could be said to have any equivalent, anywhere, throughout history). Sagan and Frank Drake drafted a design and the final artwork was created by Linda Salzman Sagan (born 1940), who was then married to Sagan.

Pioneer 10 was launched, with a plaque attached on March 2, 1972, and Pioneer 11 followed a year later.

It's a sobering thought that when our planet is reduced to a cinder (in the increasingly foreseeable future) and all trace of civilisation erased, this artist alone will represent all humanity to any civilisation that takes an interest in this 'moist, blue-green ball' (in Vonnegut's lovely phrase)

The design came in for plenty of criticism at the time - that the woman is represented as compliant and submissive; that she has no genitals; that the couple are too caucasian, and so on. What would such a plaque look like today? The Donald and his wife Melanoma Trump, his stubby little forefinger raised, pouting petulantly, travelling forever through cold and infinite space? 

It's a  coincidence that the plaque features briefly in Paul Stanbridge's brilliant debut novel Forbidden Line. As it happens I'd drafted this blog some months before I read the novel (published yesterday), but if today's Salvete has any value it's to remind you that this is one of the books you have to read before the balloon goes up.

Forbidden Line - an Essex epic

The Only Way is Essex is a rowdy reality television show which does not, let's agree, represent my home county at its best. This begs the question: what does? 

John Betjeman's 'sweet uneventful countryside' of silted creeks and farms and drowsy villages under high East Anglian skies offers a bucolic alternative:

The deepest Essex few explore

Where steepest thatch is sunk in flowers

And out of elm and sycamore

Rise flinty fifteenth-century towers.

That Essex, home to John Fowles, Gerard Manley-Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, Ruth Pitter, Jilly Cooper, Sydney Smith, Warwick Deeping, Sabine Baring-Gould and Joseph Conrad, is a calmer, stranger and admittedly duller place than the makers and viewers of TOWIE will ever be likely to explore. Which version of Essex is echt and which ersatz will depend on your cultural priorities.. 

In the Middle Ages the county was so renowned for the quantity and quality of beef calves dispatched to London meat markets that 'Essex Calf' became the slang term for a native. The sassy types caught on camera living life the Essex way, simultaneously exploiting and exploited by the medium within which they appear to flourish are, one hopes, savvy enough to avoid becoming calves for the slaughter. They all seem to know and like and even understand what they're doing.

Essex traditionally gets a bad press and has not, as far as I'm aware, provided the setting for a major literary novel. Until now, that is.

Forbidden Line by Paul Stanbridge is published today by the Norwich independent Galley Beggar Press. The author's first book is a breathtakingly ambitious attempt to re-purpose Cervantes' Don Quixote for our times. The adventurous contemporary pair are the maniac autodidact Donald J Waswill (Don) and his doltishly engaging companion Isaiah Olm (abbreviated to Is, which never fails to look like a typo and I had no idea how this should be pronounced until it's made clear after several hundred pages). The duo set off on a shambolic adventure from Don's Colchester base in the colossal Victorian water tower known locally as Jumbo (and you should Google this extraordinary structure).

What Forbidden Line immediately brings to mind is the great short story by Borges - 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', originally published in 1939. You'll know this, I expect, and if not can read it here (and it takes about 15 minutes). This single story anticipates and demolishes the more absurd tendencies of literary post-modernism. Menard's grandchildren crop up briefly in the later stages of Forbidden Line in a seriously hilarious hospital episode featuring one Ian McEwan, who is clearly THE Ian McEwan.

Stanbridge's Don is every bit as deranged and single-minded as his Spanish prototype - obsessed with a baffling metaphysical phenomenon he calls 'the hyperfine transition of hydrogen' and in thrall to Lady Chance, a capricious secular deity who dictates his every random move. He and the shrewdly cloddish Is set off on foot together to undergo a series of downbeat, farcical encounters with the contemporary world - our world. These are beautifully rendered and as funny anything in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet or Beckett's Mercier and Camier (two abiding favourites, both of which feature incompatible male compadres navigating the wide world and beside which Forbidden Line confidently takes its place).Don and Is make their way slowly to London, running into drunks, crusties, Chelmsford dignitaries, the Essex constabulary and feuding locals. They repeatedly destroy a hefty home-made case containing Don's Encyclopedic life work, which repeatedly reappears with its contents miraculously intact. Is cannot read or write (unless the plot requires him to do so) but has the same gift of total mental recall as Funes the Memorious (another Borges link, from the Ficciones) and becomes Don's lumpen recording angel. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl are among the intellectual shades who accompany the travelling pair.

What grips at once is Stanbridge's beautiful, stately, eccentric and richly rewarding prose. He never lets up, never falters. The lyrical descriptions of backwater Essex are consistently lovely, providing a backdrop for mesmerisingly erudite riffs by Don on every subject under the sun, while the hapless Is offers a stalwart comic foil subject to no end of painful indignities. There's a deeply satisfying and sophisticated philosophical undertow, lots of very good jokes, lavish digressions, pointless repetitions, countless literary references,stretches of dialogue in Greek and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, sudden violent reversals, dazzling rhetorical flights and, throughout, a sense of unalloyed authorial joy in the whole project. His sole concern is all for our delight and, while he is unafraid to court tedium when the fancy takes him (generously inviting the reader to skip such passages), he has the rare gift - vanishingly rare - of making one laugh out loud, and regularly. Chapter 27 reduced me to a giggling puddle of contentedness: at one point therein Don and Is discuss what they respectively pronounce as 'déjà vu' and 'deja-vu', leading to a wonderfully mad mis en abyme in which simultaneous hypothetical déjà vus (or deja-vus) are embedded within one another. leading inevitably to 'an eternal stasis of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen'.

                     - What you are saying is so far over my head, said Is, that it has ice on it.

Forbidden Line is very, very silly and as wholly and profoundly serious as Cervantes' original. It's a rich plum pudding of a novel, but a plum pudding with antlers.

For the first time in my ramshackle career as a literary hack I sent the publishers an unsolicited encomium (in case they needed an early blurb). In it I said that Forbidden Line was "breathtaking, magisterial, uniquely demented and hilarious - a lavish comic masterpiece". It really is. You can, and certainly should, buy a copy from the publishers here. Read it in the dog days between Christmas and the New Year.

If my enthusiasm isn't recommendation enough you might like to know that the novel has been long listed for the first Republic of Consciousness Prize the founder of which, Neil Griffiths, has this to say:

A modern day Don Quixote channeling early Wittgenstein and late Heidegger, and the events of the Peasant’s Revolt, Forbidden Line take us on a picaresque journey through Essex and London in what must be the most exuberant and maximalist novel of ideas ever written in English. It really shouldn’t work, but it does so with a kind joy and comic panache that few writers possess. It’s an achievement to be admired, relished, and loved. Not only will there be PhDs written about this novel, there will be fan-fiction and meta-fiction, and I won’t be surprised if very soon there are clubs and secret societies dedicated to unravelling how the ‘hyperfine transition of hydrogen’ permits a chest of papers continually to appear after many determined destructions. This isn’t magical realism – it’s so much more mysterious and profound than that. 

November index

• Here's the long-awaited November index.

• Click on the title. And . . .. relax.
• 
  
• 01 Another girl, another planet - American author Carola Dibbell's remarkable first novel
• 02 On mispronouncing authors' names  -  a confession, kinda
• 03 On the telly - why I don't have a TV licence, or a telly
• 04 The Good Old Days - remembering Leonard Sachs
• 05 Auden and auto-erotic asphyxiation - not for the faint-hearted
• 06 The Small Publishers Fair 2016 - one of the good things to happen this year
• 
  
• 07 Over-rated writers; under-rated writers - Anthony Doerr and Agota Kristof
• 08 Trump - so thats' that then - and we're all fucked
• 09 Last Trump - day 2, still all fucked
• 10 On literary prizes - on the 2016 Goldsmiths and the Republic of Consciousness
• 11 William Blake at Peckham Rye - a modest proposal
• 12 Momentary Stars - new poems by Edward Vanderpump
• 13 On the Cenotaph - Lutyen's masterpiece
• 
  
• 14 Jack Clemo revisited -- an unpublished short story by the visionary Cornish poet
• 15 Sapir-Whorf in Hollywood - on Linguistic Relativity in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival
• 16 Anakana Schofield's Martin John - a new neuronovel
• 17 The Hatred of Poetry - on Ben Lerner's essay on poetry
• 18 Tempest fugit - on performance poetry
• 19 You say 'ceramics' - on The Big Sleep, dactyls and amphibrachs
• 20 Writers on film - Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and Raymond Chandler in front of the camera

• 
  
• 21 Word Aversion - an irrational loathing of particular words
• 22 Cellar door and other euphonies  - words that make you go 'mmmmm'
• 23 Objectophilia  -  it takes all sorts
• 24 The 2016 Saltire Prize - rooting for J O Morgan
• 25 On vocal fry  - replacing steak with sizzle
• 26 On Coventry Patmore - a forgotten Victorian bestseller
• 27 Seen here sharing a joke - Mike McCormack and Solar Bones
• 28 On literary tattoos - written on the body

• 29 ''Apolitical ponce' - W. H. Auden in the OED - with acknowledgements to Toby Litt

• 30  November index - mis en abyme

      

'Apolitical ponce' - W. H. Auden in the OED

Another TLS blog dusted off and presented for your reading pleasure. This one comes from September 2014, those balmy blue-remembered days.


W. H. A. in the O. E. D.

The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter has appeared more or less annually since its inaugural issue in April 1988. Plainly designed, wonderfully rich in content, scholarly but not academic, it's an indispensable omnium gatherum of all things Auden – eccentric, eclectic, unpredictable and endlessly fascinating.

My favourite Newsletter item dates back to the fourth issue (October 1989) when a young Toby Litt, long before he achieved fame as a fine novelist, contributed a dazzling little essay entitled “From ‘Acedia’ to ‘Zeitgeist’: Auden in the 2nd Edition of the OED”. (Before I go any further I have to gratefully acknowledge my debt to his essay as a source for this blog.)

Litt begins his piece with a quotation from Auden, taken from an interview in 1971:

One of my great ambitions is to get into the OED as the first person to have used in print a new word. I have two candidates at the moment, which I used in my review of J. R. Ackerley’s autobiography. They are ‘Plain-sewing’ and ‘Princeton-First-Year’. They refer to two types of homosexual behaviour.

Auden’s ambition was realized posthumously with the appearance in 1989 of the twenty-volume 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, now available online as "OED3", from which the following definitions are taken.

An admirably explicit definition of “Princeton-First-Year” cites Auden’s piece on the Ackerley autobiography (My Father and Myself) in the New York Review of Books:

"Designating a form of male homosexual activity in which the penis is rubbed against the thighs or stomach of a partner.

1969 W. H. AUDEN in N.Y. Rev. Bks. 27 Mar. 3/4 My guess is that at the back of his mind, lay a daydream of an innocent Eden where children play ‘Doctor’, so that the acts he really preferred were the most ‘brotherly’, Plain-Sewing and Princeton-First-Year.”

A later citation comes from the TLS, with a discreetly explicit Latin tag:

“1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 21 Mar. 324/5 ‘Princeton-First-Year’ is a more condescending version of the term ‘Princeton Rub’; that is, coitus contra ventrem.”

When it comes to “plain sewing” as a euphemism for both buggery and masturbation, the OED has it both ways:

“plain sewing n. (a) Needlework which is functional or practical rather than decorative; (b) slang [popularized by W. H. Auden (compare quot.1980)] , a sexual activity of homosexuals involving mutual masturbation.”

Auden enriched the language of the tribe far beyond this subversive promotion of mid-century gay slang. He appears 766 times in the second, four-volume OED Supplement published from 1972 to 1986, including quotations from works co-written with Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Chester Kallman. Most of these citations are not for being the first person to have used a new word in print, but are included to show a change or extension of meaning. (While this is an impressive total, Shakespeare – by far the most frequently quoted single author – is the source of 33,300 quotations, of which 1,600 come from Hamlet alone.) 

That Auden came to feature so prominently in the OED is partly down to the time he spent as Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1956 and 1961. He became an acquaintance of R. W. Burchfield, a lecturer at Christ Church (Auden’s college) and, from 1957, the editor of the second supplement to the OED. Burchfield, though he had a low opinion of the poet's linguistic scholarship, decided that Auden should be among the major writers whose work merited special attention from the compilers.

Of Auden's 700-plus citations 110 are original coinages, of which around half are hyphenated compounds such as “angel-vampire”, “swan-delighting” and suchlike poetic figures that have never entered the mainstream; a further twenty-two appear under sub-headings as additional definitions of words already in existence. In all, there are twenty-eight citations (including the entry for “Princeton-First-Year”) for which Auden is credited as the first writer to use the word in print, a lexical horde that in part reflects the poet's camp and ramshackle character. Toby Litt writes:

“Among Auden's more notable citations are: the first pejorative use of ‘queer’, the first printed use of ‘ponce’ to designate an effeminate homosexual, of ‘toilet-humour’, of ‘agent’ in the sense of a secret agent or spy, of ‘dedicated’ to mean a person ‘single-minded in loyalty to his beliefs or in his artistic or personal integrity’, of ‘shagged’ meaning ‘weary, exhausted’, and of ‘stud’ for a person ‘displaying masculine sexual characteristics’. Further curiosities are the first printed appearance in English of the surrealist term ‘objet trouve’ and the first printed use of ‘What’s yours?’ as an invitation given by the person buying the next round of drinks.”

Not included in the Litt list but noted by Mendelson in his introduction to the reprint of Auden's The Prolific and the Devourer (1939) is the poet's use of the term 'apolitical', its first appearance in print. Other Auden-sourced coinages include "Mosleyite", "Disneyesque" and (from 1941) "butch", in the sense of aggressively masculine. 

Where would we be without him?

On literary tattoos

Another of m recycleded blogs from the Times Literary Supplement. It's about tattoos in general, and literary tattoos in particular:

Written on the skin

“The Skin Project”, launched in 2003 by the American artist Shelley Jackson, is a 2,095-word short story “published exclusively in tattoo form, one word at a time, on the skin of volunteers”. The first word – which is “skin” – adorns Jackson’s wrist in Baskerville font, and she stipulates that each volunteer, once issued with their word, should likewise employ a “classic book font such as Caslon, Garamond, Bodoni, and Times Roman”, adding that the tattoo “should look like something intended to be read, not admired for its decorative qualities”.

Prompted by my belated discovery of this I’ve been looking (and often flinching) at online images of other “literary” tattoos, of which there are thousands. The same “decorative qualities” proscribed by Jackson are very much on display as, wrenched from their printed context, lines of prose and poetry are elaborated with baroque fonts, fancy scrolls and curlicues and much use of faux-Gothic script, more Motörhead than Montherlant.

Literary tattoos fall into two broad categories: photorealist portraits of authors and quotations from their work. Most common is a quotation, drawn for the most part from a small cohort of hip writers. Kurt Vonnegut is very popular, with numberless Slaughterhouse-Five fans sporting the author’s laconic coda “So it goes”. So too is Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac and J. R. R. Tolkien. People also seem to favour lines from childhood classics (The Little Prince, Harry Potter) and high school staples (Maya Angelou, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Edgar Allan Poe), but there are some surprises, such as the nine lines from Little Gidding covering the back of an English teacher from Hawaii, who writes: “I chose to tattoo the first four and last five lines together (I didn’t have the guts at the time to go whole hog and tattoo the entire section. I wish I had.)”

There is a perhaps inevitable trend for literary tattoos among celebrities. Johnny Depp, the epitome of Hollywood cool, has Joyce’s “Silence Exile Cunning” (sic) in big faux Gothic script on his forearm. Lady Gaga is inked with lines from Rilke; Angelina Jolie with Tennessee Williams.

Leafing through Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor's The Word Made Flesh: Literary tattoos from bookworms worldwide (2010) and looking at the associated online archive I couldn’t find a single literary tattoo I liked. I’m deeply sceptical about the self-commodification involved when asserting non-conformism and individuality by shelling out on an epidermal doodle, but I wanted to get an opposing view so I asked a good friend about it. He’s a writer in his fifties and has “Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone” emblazoned on his chest because (he says) it’s his favourite line in English poetry and because he “thought it was funny to have Wordsworth tattooed on oneself”. When I asked him why he didn’t quote the full line from The Prelude (“A mind voyaging . . .  etc”), he replied, reasonably enough, that it wouldn’t fit. Then I asked him about tattoos in general, and literary ones in particular, and he said: “People I know see it as a continuous point of reference and don’t give two hoots about being thoughtful or cultured. It’s often because they want a tattoo but want to show they have a certain degree of awareness of the process”.

A casual census suggests that the practice of literary tattooing is largely confined to youngish American fans of cultish American authors, though it’s becoming more popular in Britain. It’s made me wonder which author’s portrait and which quotations I would, if so minded, have inscribed on myself. Do I really like anything I’ve readthat much? Then I thought of the fine opening lines of the poem “Liverpool” by Michael Donaghy, who died the year after “The Skin Project” (a quarter of the way through, according to the last report) began and didn’t live long enough to see the rise of the literary tattoo:

“Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron,

takes sweating in the antiseptic-stinking parlour,

nothing to read but motorcycle magazines   

before the blood-sopped cotton, and, of course, the needle,     

all for — at best — some Chinese dragon.

But mostly they do hearts”

“It takes a whim of iron” might be my own choice for a discreet inking – in Times New Roman, of course, or even Gill Sans, and in legible 12-point.

Quotation © Michael Donaghy from Collected Poems courtesy of Pan Macmillan

Seen here sharing a joke

Here's author Mike McCormack (left) with your blogger (right) moments after he was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize for his superb novel Solar Bones.

    Picture courtesy Maeve Curtis

There was a time, not so long ago, when newspapers would routinely employ the caption 'Seen here sharing a joke' beneath any picture of two chaps (always chaps) clearly not sharing a joke. 

We weren't sharing a joke, but were both buoyed by the unexpected and richly deserved recognition for a remarkable literary achievement. There were two other very strong contenders on this year's Goldmsiths shortlist, both from writers with Irish backgrounds: Anakana Schofield's superb Martin John and Eimear McBride's The Lesser Bohemians (which is even better than her magnificent 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing). Both of these have found their place in the world, and offer further proof (not that it's needed) of an extraordinary revival of Irish writing, and of experimental writing generally. 

The trophy Mike is holding is based on the meandering line left by Uncle Toby's walking stick in Tristram Shandy, which has become the Goldsmiths' Prize logo.

 

 

This years' trophy (each year being a one-off design)  also resembles the children's toy in which one has to navigate the tight curves of a metal tube with a metal hoop, setting off a buzzer whenever the hoop touches the tube. You know the kind of thing I mean. I have no idea what it's called. Does anyone?

The Goldsmiths was the first big prize for Solar Bones. It recently scooped (why do we say 'scooped'?) the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards as Novel of the Year. There are bound to be many others, and rightly. It's a wonderful, original, pitch-perfect evocation of a life, profoundly moving, serenely beautiful. I wrote about the novel for the Literary Review, describing it, perhaps glibly, as 'Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien'. It really is that good. The final sentence of my draft review was cut, but here it is:

This is about all of us, now and forever after, and unquestionably one of the big books of 2016.

But it's not just a book of the year. This one will last.

Buy a copy direct from the excellent publishers, Dublin-based Tramp Press here.

  

 

On Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore died on this day in 1896. The house he lived in is a few minutes' walk from here: Highwood Lodge, 85 Fortis Green, Muswell Hill. 

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896)

Besides having an excellent name - one to rank alongside Somerset Maugham and Tennessee Williams - Coventry Patmore was an enormously popular poet who wrote The Angel in the House, a domestic epic providing the recipe for a happy and lasting marriage. It makes today's feminists spit feathers but we should make allowances - things were different then and only a simpleton will judge the past by present standards with what E. P. Thompson called 'the massive condescension of posterity'. Time passes, things change.

Having said which, feminists at the time were not among his admirers. Virginia Woolf loathed Patmore's verses. Having said which again - isn't is at useful, necessary even, to have evidence of such long-abandoned patrician attitudes? Long-abandoned by most of us. I mean, although looking around I begin to wonder.  In many parts of the world patriarchy is in rude good health and many a religious head honcho would denounce Coventry Patmore as a dangerous radical.

In the preface to his Collected Poems of 1886 he wrote, half-pleadingly:

I have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.

Are we living in an age that cares for letters? I'm afraid Dame Posterity, a notoriously fickle mistress, has not been kind, and Coventry Patmore doesn't enjoy much of a poetic afterlife. You can look him up on the internet but don't expect to be blown away. By way of small consolation he's remembered by the great Ogden Nash in this Clerihew:

Walter Savage Landor
Stood before the fire of life with candor.
Coventry Patmore
Sat more.

Even better, there's the following which is (I think, but apologies if I'm wrong) is by John Julius Norwich:

A pat on the head

Sends me happy to bed;

I wish, how I wish you'd do that more.

Cold words and neglect

Leave me wretched and wrecked;
Don't send me to Coventry, pat more.