Sylvia Plath uncovered

A while back I blogged about the great designer and typographer Berthold Wolpe and I've just found an engaging short interview with his assistant Shirley Tucker. Both of them worked for Faber and Faber and this video clip appears on the publisher's website. To date it's been viewed by fewer than twenty seekers after knowledge so perhaps this blog's readers (and there are now more than 20,000 of you) can add to that number.

Shirley Tucker

Shirley Tucker is less well-known than Wolpe, but she designed some book covers that these days are routinely described as 'iconic'. Here's one of them, from 1963:

It's good, isn't it? A whiff of Bridget Riley op-art, the suggestion of life spiralling out of control with that unsettlingly off-centre set of concentric circles, the simple bold lettering and austere colours - black and cream and green. It's a serious book by a serious writer. It's about mental illness.


When it came to the fiftieth anniversary edition, the publishers suggested in their press release that the book is a genre piece aimed at women, like television's Sex and the City:

When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control.

They also commissioned a new cover. Here it is:

Bubblegum colours, brightly lipstick'd Vogue model dabbing away with her chic compact and that spindly piss-elegant calligraphy; strawberry jam red and custard yellow (malign corporate colours shared by McDonalds and the Soviet Union) and plenty of pink skin. It looks depressingly like a piece of chick-lit. The critical reaction, not only among Plath's admirers, was ferocious.

The excellent Feminist blog Jezebel wrote: 

If Sylvia Plath hadn't already killed herself, she probably would've if she saw the new cover of her only novel The Bell Jar. For a book all about a woman's clinical depression that's exacerbated by the suffocating gender stereotypes of which she's expected to adhere and the limited life choices she has as a woman, it's pretty fucking stupid to feature a low-rent retro wannabe pinup applying makeup.

Images © Faber and Faber Limited

Nobel Prize quiz

Prompted by yesterday's jolly blog on the Nobel Prize and sexism, I've been truffling around and what I found is the basis for a quiz, following this preamble.

The eleven British literary laureates are a ramshackle bunch - Rudyard Kipling (who won at the age of 42 and remains the youngest recipient), George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy (incredibly), T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, William Golding, V. S. Naipaul, Patrick White (strictly speaking an Australian writer, but born in England), Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing. Add Yeats, Beckett and Heaney from Ireland and the total comes to fourteen.

Rudyard Kipling in 1891, aged 26

Now here's the fun part. Can you match these fourteen Nobel laureates with extracts from their citations (below, with one red herring). Scroll down for the answers. No Googling.

1."that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".  

2.  "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms" 

3. "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories"

4. "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"

5. "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today"

6. "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature"

7. "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation" 

8. "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values" 

9. "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought"

10. "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" 

11. "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga" [and there's a clue in this citation]

12. "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author"

13. "for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty" 

14. "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation" 

15. "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality".


The answers are:


1.  Doris Lessing

2.  Harold Pinter

3.  V. S. Naipaul

4.  Seamus Heaney

5.  William Golding

6.  Patrick White

7.  Samuel Beckett

8.  Winston Churchill

9.  Bertrand Russell

10. T. S. Eliot

11. John Galsworthy

12. Rudyard Kipling

13. George Bernard Shaw

14. W. B. Yeats

15. Toni Morrison

A final refelection on Nobel Prizes. Taking all categories into account, the top nation (with 338 laureates) is the United States. Britain comes second, with 119; Germany third with 103 and France fourth, with 53. After that it's mostly single figures. How these numbers relate to population size is the subject of this strangely absorbing chart. Good to see the Faroe Islands at the top for once.

The Nobel Prize and sexism

Writing in The Guardian earlier this week a journalist called Liz Bury (below) complained that '[s]ince 1901, a total of 109 individuals have won the Noble prize for literature, 12 of them women.'

Liz Bury of The Guardian

Any journalist who wants to make a point should also make an effort - it's the Nobel (not Noble) Prize in Literature, not "for", and it's supposed to be capitalised. But Liz Bury needn't worry about mere facts or professional finesse because she has right on her side. Her presentation may be slipshod but her case is just. Facts, nevertheless, still have their role to play so I did some research on her behalf for you, my thoughtful readers, and this led me to a surprising discovery.

The running total of Literature laureates since 1901, when the Prize was inaugurated, is indeed 109. The apparent shortfall in recipients reflects those years in which, for whatever reason, no Prize was awarded. Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was the first woman laureate, in 1909, and here she is in a big hat:

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940)

She has yet to make her mark in the English-reading world but appears on Swedish banknotes and is, the internet insists, "most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils)". 

The other eleven female laureates are a very mixed bunch, as follows:

1926 - Grazia Deledda

1928 - Sigrid Undset

1938 - Pearl S. Buck

1945 - Gabriela Mistral

1966 - Nelly Sachs

1991 - Nadine Gordimer

1993 - Toni Morrison

1996 - Wisława Szymborska

2004 - Elfriede Jelinek

2007 - Doris Lessing

2009 - Herta Müller

Apart from our own Doris, it's not a particularly awe-inspiring list, is it? Pearl S. Buck is largely unread today although The Good Earth was and remains a very fine account of Chinese life with no more than a whiff of middlebrow Orientalism. Sigrid Undset wrote an interminable trilogy called Kristin Lavransdatter which for some reason I read as a schoolboy, perhaps mistaking it for Lord of the Rings. I'm afraid to have to admit I've never heard of Deledda, Mistral, Sachs or Symborska (a Polish poet). Elfriede Jelinek? After seeing the film version I read The Piano Teacher, which I thought good, though not as good as the film. Gordimer I've never read, but then I've never read Alan Paton either and have no particular interest in South African writing. (One must have blind spots, like Ezra Pound who once told Hemingway "To tell the truth, Hem, ah've never read the Rooshians"). Herta Müller is Romanian and (I learn) "noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceaușescu regime which she has experienced herself." Toni Morrison? Please.

Liz Bury attributes too much weight to the Nobel Prize apparatus and its role in cultural endorsement. It clearly doesn't reflect literary merit because although Toni Morrison got it, James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Ibsen and Henry James didn't. How on earth can it be taken seriously as anything more than a posthumous PR exercise on behalf of the man who invented dynamite? Each one of these male authors is, by any objective measure, more important and influential than the whole cohort of female literary laureates put together, but the Swedish panel of judges didn't think so, which tells you more about them than about the great writers they neglected to honour. 

But - and this is was my discovery - Liz Bury should have looked beyond literature to the other Nobel categories - Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Peace (all inaugurated in 1901) and the related Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (introduced in 1968). Between 1901 and 2012, Prizes in all six categories were awarded 555 times to 863 people and institutions.

Marie Curie (Nobel Prizes in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911)

Four of the recipients (including Marie Curie) won twice, so this makes a total of 835 individuals and 21 organizations. But of the 835 individuals just 44 are female, around 5 per cent. Female authors, although dispiritingly few in number, are closer to 10 per cent of the total and therefore double the average. Liz Bury is straining at gnats and ignoring the camels.

It's as if women were somehow regarded - and not only by the Nobel committees - as second class, second rate and subject, if you like, to a prevailing male hegemony. Speaking as a gynocrat I happen to believe that women outclass men in almost every worthwhile field of human endeavour (sport doesn't interest me) so clearly we need to shake up the system. Perhaps a fair-minded solution would be to create (as in the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress) two Nobel Prizes each year in each category - male and female? Why not a Nobel Prize in Female Physics? 

Henry James - had no strong views on physics

The poetry of Mary Wilson

Say what you like about Samantha Cameron or Justine Miliband as political arm-candy - at least they don't write poetry. Or if they do, they keep it to themselves.

Younger readers of this blog may never have heard of Mary Wilson, wife of the former British Prime Minister Harold. Younger readers may never, come to that, have heard of Harold Wilson either or, as he was never known, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC. Older readers who remember them both may be surprised to learn that Mary is still with us, aged 97 and living close to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Harold died in 1995.

She wrote poetry, and some of it was published. A cynical view is that it's the kind of stuff only a statesman's consort would get into print. The blurb on the back of my copy of her Selected Poems, published in 1970 by Hutchinson, says:

This selection from the poems of Mary Wilson, wife of Harold Wilson, has been made by herself from those she has written over many years. They reflect the compassion of a serious, kindly and sensitive woman who derives great joy and consolation from the poetry of others and is moved, by all sorts of varying experiences, to express her own views in the same medium. Very many people, to whom poetry and its writing may be something of an intimidating mystery, will gain an understanding and appreciation of it from Mary Wilson's reflective writing.

The hardback sold an astonishing 75,000 copies to readers who might otherwise have found poetry 'an intimidating mystery' (and there's nothing wrong with mysteries, and we all benefit from intimidation when it comes as a beneficial shock). There's an underlying assumption in the blurb  about the relative roles of Harold and Mary in the political and cultural life of the nation that is very much of its time.

Here's a sample of her work:

After the Bomb


After the Bomb had fallen,
After the last sad cry
When the Earth was a burnt-out cinder
Drifting across the sky,

Came Lucifer, Son of the Morning,
With his fallen-angel band,
Silent and swift as a vulture
On a mountain-top to stand.

And he looked, as he stood on the mountain
With his scarlet wings unfurled,
At the charnel-house of London
And the cities of the world.

And he laughed..........

And as that mocking laughter
Across the heavens ran,
He cried 'Look!' to the fallen angels -
'This is the work of Man
Who was made in the image of God!'

© Mary Wilson / Hutchinson

I grew up during the Cold War. Or rather I didn't, because the concept of utter extinction following a four-minute warning and nuclear holocaust wasn't conducive to maturation. So it's closer to the truth that I lived through the Cold War, through a period that instilled in me, in all of us, a disabling existential terror. The cynical 'No Future' nihilism of the 1970s punk movement and its attendant cult of arrested development was largely attributable to the fear induced in a post-war generation by the threat of imminent annihilation. What was the point of anything? 

Mary Wilson's poetry makes me unhappy because it was written by the wife of a nondescript man who, for much of my childhood, wielded power of a kind that is barely imaginable today - power to end life on large parts of our bit of the planet. She may well be a 'serious, kindly and sensitive woman' but that counted for little at the time. The psychic damage of growing up under the threat of atomic holocaust is hard to calculate - but it made me feel bad all the time, and still does. "On a mountain top to stand". Christ almighty.

Anna Karina dances!

In Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (1964) Anna Karina dances the Madison with Danielle Girard and Sami Frey (see the still below). I may be biased (she was my First Great Crush), but I reckon this is unquestionably the best dance scene in cinema. Was there ever a cooler, sexier film star than Anna Karina? Take a look before you read this blog and ask yourself - wouldn't you rather be there, in that smoky bar with an intermittent jukebox, than wherever you are right now?

She will, improbably, be 73 later this month. She was Godard's muse, in the days when directors had muses and films were made by and for grown-ups. She was also his wife for five tumultuous years. Think of their collaborations - Le petit soldat and Une femme est une femme (both 1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Alphaville and Pierrot le fou (both 1965) and Made in U.S.A. (1966) - that's quite a haul. 

Yet in 1962 and at the height of her fame she also appeared alongside Bob Monkhouse and Hattie Jacques in She'll Have to Go, a witless British farce that I've never seen and hope I never will. She survived the indignity and, following her divorce from Godard, went on to work with some heavyweight directors - Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, George Cukor and Tony Richardson and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's (Chinese Roulette, 1976). But the Godard films are her most coherent and cherishable legacy, proof of how good things can be when the right people work together.

I don't intend to brood on the lamentable decline in film since the glory days of the nouvelle vague and the pitifully homogenised quality of today's actresses. Gwyneth Paltrow? You must be joking.

Some Like It Hot

Here's my unpublished review of Peter Vacher's Mixed Messages : American Jazz Stories. I wrote it on spec, but the same problem applies to publishing reviews of such books as it does to the original interviews it assembles. Let the author explain:

'It is now virtually impossible to find outlets (or editors) who will print lengthy pieces like those devoted to Ruby Braff, John Stubblefield or Lanny Morgan,' laments Peter Vacher, who has been writing up such encounters for over half a century. This, a second collection of extended articles culled from long-defunct jazz periodicals, is consistently informative and entertaining - interviews with the movement's lesser lights conducted between 1964 (Flip Ricard, briefly bassist with the Count Basie Orchestra) and 2008 (Byron Stripling, a fine trumpeter). There are no big names - no Miles or Chet or Ella, no Thelonius or Dizzy or Dexter - but if the prospect of two dozen working jazz musicians talking at length about their vocation puts a spring in your step and a song in your heart then you're in for a treat.

Beginning with veteran trombonist Louis Nelson (1902-1990) these performers are eloquent practitioners of a musical form that continues to develop without much mainstream media support. There's a score of other interviewees, all of them American and (to borrow George Melly's phrase describing the Belgian surrealist E.L.T. Mesens) figures of 'major minorness' - Norman 'Dewey' Keenan, Gerald Wilson, George 'Buster' Cooper, Bill Berry, Benny Powell, Plas Johnson Jr., Carl 'Ace' Carter, Herman Riley, Lanny Morgan, John Eckert, Houston Person Jr., Tom Artin, Rufus Reid, Judy Carmichael (the only female performer) and Tardo Hammer.

They are, the author says, 'all players of genuine worth' and he's quite right. It's an eclectic list of journeymen (and the one woman) - hard-working pianists, trombonists, cornet players, saxophonists and bass players, all of them with long, successful and often illustrious careers. Their lives are largely free of the professional pitfalls and personal afflictions that beset the Charlie Parkers of this world. What they talk about - and talk about well - is their music, but there are many fruitful digressions. Vacher's subjects speak eloquently about life in a pre-Civil Rights world of segregation, back-breaking tours (doing consecutive thirty one-nighters), run-ins with the law, clashes with temperamental bandleaders and gangster club proprietors. These are the bit-players and session men, the seasoned pros who reliably deliver the goods night after night, gig after gig, like the tenor saxophonist Paul Johnson Jr: 'I could get HOT in four bars. If you had a really bot blues singer I could carry it a notch higher.' They could fill a hall, play up a storm, have a few drinks and be sure to turn up on time at the studio the following day.

Mixed Messages is published by Five Leaves Press, the enterprising Nottingham-based independents run by the admirable Ross Bradshaw.

While a love of jazz transcends political boundaries, and while Minister without Portfolio Ken Clarke  is clearly a hep cat from head to toe, he is unlikely to read the Morning Star, the Communist daily newspaper featuring Chris Searle's excellent jazz reviews. These are now available from the same publishers in a lively anthology entitled Red Groove. How come 'the only English-language socialist daily in the world' still runs regular articles on jazz? Ken might like to take a closer look.

On Seamus Heaney

Here's Heaney at length and in depth, interviewed for the Paris Review in 1997.