Dear All,
I know I have been absent for some time…so it goes. BUT. I’ve been busy writing. And the very first thing I’ve written about is one of my favourite places in the whole wide world. If you feel so inclined you may read about it here:
Please. And. Thank You.
With Love and Squalor
Dolly
I’m in the tight dress. The one that prevents dignified sitting.
The tight dress suggests I’m prepared to be undressed.
Do my thighs flash through the seams?
I try to remember if the bed is made, or unmade.
The wind is wrapping up the sound of our kissing.
I wonder should I undress first or should you undress first.
I’m not sure I can take off the dress in a way that looks good.
I consider if I should save up sex until morning.
We are far gone and I’m better at kissing when sober.
I find that your earlobes provide the current fascination.
On my bedside table are three glasses of water and my favourite love letter.
I try to untie your shoes in a way that is appalling.
Tight Dress – Amy Key
“I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things.”
Michel Houellebecq
“There’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based.”
John Banville
“It’s so much better, you see, for me, when a writer like Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks so deeply about her concern for herself and does not offer us any altruisms.”
Maya Angelou
“Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers…to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges.”
Czeslaw Milosz
“I think Miss [Mary] McCarthy is often brilliant and sometimes even sound. But, in fiction, she is a lady writer, a lady magazine writer.”
Lillian Hellman
“Poe’s stories still inhabit my head.”
Susan Sontag
“Eudora Welty has tremendous class, not just in her work, but in the way she walks, the look in her eyes, the way she has conducted her life.”
Ken Kesey
“I suppose E. M. Forster is the best.”
Dorothy Parker
“I often feel about Fitzgerald that he couldn’t distinguish between innocence and social climbing.”
Saul Bellow
“Naipaul is a great person to read before you have to do a piece.”
Joan Didion
Source: The Paris Review
“There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest’s for a clam in a shell,
So I’m thinking of throwing the battle-
Would you kindly direct me to hell?”
Coda – Dorothy Parker
“Every crime writer has been influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even if only subconsciously.”
P. D James
“The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.”
Aldous Huxley
“I was terribly disturbed when I first read D. H Lawrence.”
Alice Munro
“After Malcolm Bradbury, my other important mentor was Angela Carter, who taught me a lot about the business of writing.”
Kazuo Ishiguro
“John Cowper Powys is really interested in sex, just as keen on it as Lawrence, but he understands and portrays it far better.”
Irish Murdoch
“Austen has always been a bit hit-or-miss with me, I must say.”
Julian Barnes
“I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted…the pretentious nonsense of Mr Pound, that total fake.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“The Quiet American by Graham Greene…is a terrific, terrific book.”
Stephen King
“Charles Dickens wrote about Bill Sikes bludgeoning Nancy to death, getting blood all over everything, but if a woman had written that, nobody would have published it.”
Margaret Atwood
“Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read.”
Toni Morrison
Sources: Google Books, The Paris Review, Brainy Quote
The cover of Matt Hill’s debut bears a quote by Stephen Fry, which tells us that the work within captures the “smell and essence of Britain”. This is a considerable claim but one that rings entirely true, despite the book’s post-apocalyptic premise. The Folded Man offers a frighteningly plausible rendition of the future, bleak and disturbing. The city is Manchester, the year is 2018. The five year leap forward sees the country in ruins, plunged into social disorder, widespread deprivation, violence, crime and vigilante rule. We learn of this desolate new world through the book’s protagonist Brian Meredith, a drug-addled “cripple” reliant on the state which he fears and despises. It is both through Brian’s internal meditations and external experiences that Hill creates a chilling picture of the outside world – a phantasmagorical panorama which constitutes the backdrop of the story. Both dynamic and very craftily constructed, it compells the reader to fully immerse in the writer’s vision of the future, bereft of the social norms and conventions that govern modern Britain.
The Folded Man crosses several genres and defies exact classification, comprising elements of Sci-Fi, surrealism, traditional storytelling and experimentation. Hill locks a range of themes into a novel literary whole, defined by intricate plot turns, seemingly freeform dialogue and a prolonged sense of suspense. It is Hill’s ability to tap into our collective consciousness that lends the book much of its realism, and his dark imagination that turns a straightforward narrative into a dystopian riddle. But it is the book’s protagonist, Brian, that’s The Folded Man’s real strength. Albeit a highly divisive character, Brian is predominantly a victim. Wheelchair bound by a rare genetic condition called Sirenomelia (Mermaid Syndrome), he spends his time in his squalid flat watching the world on CCTV and eating his own hair. There are reasons behind Brian’s psychological idiosyncrasies, which Hill weaves into the plot seamlessly. We learn in vivid snapshots of his early life and his upbringing, his fears, desires and worries and discover a very complicated and downtrodden man, who has resigned from life until his mate Noah coaxes him into an outing across the city.
The pair’s excursion leads to a series of events and characters that are at times as bizarre as they are exhilarating. Hill fuses the real with the imaginary, the factual with the fantastic to create a world characterised by an eerie introverted externality. This eeriness also extends to Hill’s literary stylings, which give the book its narrative verve. Written entirely in northern dialect, The Folded Man is full of linguistic quirks, colloquialisms and staccato sentences, sometimes as short as a single adjective. “Brian’s in his chair – the wheelchair in the middle of his world,” writes Hill of his protagonist when he returns home from the outing with Noah, “All the days are the same. All day, every hour – trapped. The fat man in his yawning city. Ageing. Smoking and sleeping between damp walls and under bare bulbs. The fat man who sat through power cuts and water shortages. Listened to new riots and masked radicals on his telly. The same chair at the arse-end of Manchester, old capital of the north. The cold city, the blinking city.” The Folded Man is both a dark tale of humanity and a tribute to Hill’s home city. Manchester is very much at the heart of the novel – a city once great now reduced to an abject quagmire by an “endless war for love between the dead and dying”.
It is difficult to imagine The Folded Man being set anywhere else, just as it is difficult to imagine the protagonist being anyone other than Brian. This is a great achievement on Hill’s part, a writer whose style and subject matter may be considered challenging. But Hill is someone who didn’t set out to write a challenging debut, merely a book that came together almost miraculously inspired by his interest in folklore, urban legends and strange phenomena, his home town and some of the people he’s met there. Brian, for example, Hill told me recently, was partly a result of his experiences with “a close relative who had terrible hip problems from a very young age” and partly a product of his own imagination, fuelled by “one of those crap, slightly exploitative documentaries about a girl born with Sirenomelia”. Brian’s congenital disorder is as integral to the plot as it is to his character. “I wanted Brian’s condition to be as ‘realistic’ a treatment of the mermaid myth as possible,” Hill explains, “So even though the book veers away from reality (far, far away in places), there’s at least a medical grounding.” There certainly is that but there is also more – much more – than that to this intriguing debut which, as Stephen Fry said, has a “direct vividness that keeps one inside its totally realised world”.
The Folded Man is an absorbing and original work that falls into a somewhat nebulous field of literary production. Hill has a keen eye for topical peculiarity similar to the writers in the prophetic tradition, distinguished by their ability to penetrate surface-reality and delve into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. In line with this tradition Hill tells the story from an outsider’s perspective, which gives The Folded Man its disturbing immediacy. It also prompts the reader to question – or at the very least ponder – the validity of the moral, cultural and socio-economic structures that frame our society and the potential consequences of their abolition. J.G Ballard once wrote that “civilised life” is based “on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly” and the trouble is that we sometimes forget “that that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us”. Hill’s book serves as a stark reminder of this, urging us to look at the uncomfortable and unsightly possibilities behind those seemingly orderly and burnished optical trickeries.
Publisher: Sandstone Press
Publication Date: May 2013
Paperback: 240 pages
ISBN: 9781908737342
There is an estimated 3,750,000 women living in London, a city under the mayoral leadership of a man who has recently been accused of flagrant sexism. Boris Johnson made the headlines again after saying that the rise in Malaysian women attending university was due to their desire to find a husband. While the comment has since been relegated as a misjudged joke Boris is yet to apologise, deeming the ensuing charges of sexism “utterly ludicrous and infuriating”. The truth is that Boris’ derisory wisecrack is indicative of more than the mayor’s poor sense of judgement and buffoonish posturing; it is a sign of Boris’ antediluvian views of women and their place in society.
A City Hall source, quoted in The Daily Telegraph, attempted to dismiss the comment as “off the cuff” and “clearly intended as a joke” which neither justifies nor pardons it. In fact it does the opposite, exposing the mayor of one of the leading cities in the world as a mumbling misogynist with a proclivity to expectorate offensive nonsense. Insidiously, the problem with Boris’ gaffe is that this sort of attitude toward women remains part of the largely accepted landscape of our everyday lives. While feminism has undoubtedly facilitated considerable gains for women’s rights over the last century, in reality the struggle against individual and institutional sexism continues.
A perfect example of the latter emerged recently when the illustrious London Review of Books (LRB) declared it was having difficulty finding women reviewers. This is both surprising and entirely implausible, namely because we live in an age when women’s writing is as ubiquitous and abundant as men’s – except apparently in the LRB. Even more surprising are the statistics, which surfaced thanks to the latest VIDA report and Kathryn Heyman’s epistolary exchange with the paper’s staff.
It is hard to believe that 74 per cent of the LRB’s reviews are dedicated to books by men, even harder to understand why 78 per cent of them are written by men too. There is no viable excuse for this. NONE. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the publication is keeping schtum, failing to coherently address either the problem or the critics. Deborah Friedell’s attempt to placate the online outrage – published in full on the Salon web site – evades the issue in its entirety, emphasising instead the LRB’s “painstaking editing” processes and her own academic credentials. Baffling.
This is unquestionably the time for the paper’s long-time editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, to step in and initiate change. Or at least to try to explain her consummately biased editorial policy; and the reported “efforts” that have been undertaken to rectify this mind-cripplingly disproportionate gender ratio inherent in the LRB’s practices. Sadly, however, the “presiding genius” at the helm of one of the most influential literary publications remains resolutely taciturn.
Wilmers’ ostensible lack of concern about the gender inequality under her famously vigilante editorship is something of a puzzle; her recent remarks stating that women have “a tendency to be either a bit jargony, or a bit breathless” in their wiring even more so. It is difficult to understand why as a woman of considerable intelligence, standing and power she would propagate such spumous mullock. Because not only does it betray a certain sense of ignorance of the talent pool that’s out there, it also undermines and vitiates the feminist legacy.
Both Boris’ putatively innocent outburst and the LRB’s inherently discriminatory editorial policy highlight the fact that sexism and gender inequality remain firmly in place and largely in the open. Worse still is the fact that we live in a more liberal and conscientiously broad-minded society than any of our predecessors AND yet continue to face the same old social prejudices and gender biases…
James Salter is one of few modern writers able to create equally compelling male and female characters. He says it’s because he has made a conscious “effort to nurture the feminine” in himself and in his responses to the world around him which “pure masculinity” often discounts. This very shrewdly cultivated skill is something one can clearly see in All That Is, rippling with atmospheric vitality and meticulously developed men and women vying for the reader’s attention. The story of Salter’s first novel in over 30 years revolves around former naval officer, now book editor, Philip Bowman and the people who drift in and out of his life. The book itself is primarily concerned with the nature of love, the hardship of relationships and the way in which people deal with both. After returning home from Okinawa and a stint at Harvard, Bowman meets and falls for a young woman by the name of Vivian Amussen. “He saw himself tumbled with her among the bedclothes and fragrance of married life,” Salter writes of Bowman’s daydreams, “the meals and holidays of it, the shared rooms, the glimpses of her half-dressed, her blondness, the pale hair where her legs met, the sexual riches that would be there forever.” Shortly after the couple tie the knot, however, Bowman learns that nothing lasts forever, especially marriage. Theirs sours rapidly as Vivian loses interested in her husband’s bookish whimsies, in his talk of high culture and his quixotic reveries.
With his marriage over, Bowman travels to London on business where he meets Enid Armour – a sultry South African English blonde with a chronic philanderer for a husband. The pair embark on an affair and following Bowman’s divorce travel to Spain to consummate their romance, to consolidate their fledgling love. It is here in his descriptions of cities and their poetry through the eyes of the lovers that Salter reveals himself to be a master of etymology and lyrical precision. His rolling sentences flow mellifluously from one page to the next, creating iridescent snapshots of García Lorca’s homeland, effortlessly integrating his story and the country’s history into the narrative. “He was…an angel of the re-awakening of Spain in the 1920s and ‘30s,” Slater writes, “[his] books and plays filled with a pure, fatal music, and poems rich in colors with fierce emotion and despairing love.” Numerous historical elements and literary references are interwoven into the plot, adding to the wonderfully rich tapestry of Salter’s prose. Salter captures the glamorous milieu of Europe – Greece, France, Spain – in all its glory, through opulent literary ruminations over its present and its past. He goes from describing places to describing people in them with graceful fluency, connecting the two to create a larger, more vivid picture. “They went to Toledo for a day and then on to Seville, where summer lingered and the voice of the city, as the poet said, brought tears,” he writes of the two lovers in Spain, “They walked through walled alleyways, she in high heels, bare-shouldered, and sat in the silent darkness as deep chords of a guitar slowly began and the air itself stilled.”
This kind of tender evocation also extends to Salter’s images of the lovers in their most intimate moments. “The glory of her,” Bowman marvells looking at Enid, “England stood before him, naked in the darkness…He pulled her over him by her wrists, like a torn sheet.” But for all their passion, Bowman’s relationship with Enid eventually fizzles out and the two part. Shortly after, he meets Christine Vassilaros and her young daughter. The pair fall in love and set up house, living in blissful domesticity or so Bowman thinks until one day Christine decides it’s over. Inexperienced, uncertain and self-doubting Bowman appears to be the very antithesis of a romantic lead and in many ways remains so until the end. He laments his incompetence with women from the start, blaming it on his absent father. There are nebulous questions over Bowman’s masculinity and there is but one moment in the book when he exercises its full force, revealing the truly chilling side of man. Wounded by Christine’s betrayal and humiliated by having to forgo the house they shared Bowman waits patiently to take his revenge, which comes as an unexpected twist in the otherwise linear plot. Salter brings the story to an equally unexpected close, which in many ways reflects the precariousness of life. “He had been married, once, wholeheartedly and been mistaken,” Salter writes of Bowman toward the end of the book‚ “He had fallen wildly in love with a woman in London, and it had somehow faded away. As if by fate one night in the most romantic encounter of his life he had met a woman and been betrayed. He believed in love – all his life he had – but now it was likely to be too late”. This rather reductive view is relegated by Bowman himself just pages later as he realises that it is, in fact, never too.
All That Is is a lyrical meditation on the human condition, replete with languorously poetic turns cut with fastidious precision. The book’s key themes evoke universal interconnections, between love and death, loneliness and companionship drawing the conclusion that one’s fate depends almost entirely upon oneself. Yet the book is much more than a romantic allegory, All That Is also deals with a number of other topics such as identity, social exclusion and inclusive alienation. The latter are diligently rooted in the plot. Bowman feels an outsider, an interloper at Harvard and a stranger in his American-Jewish social circles despite being inexorably linked to his friends and acquaintances by a shared cultural heritage. Bowman is the vessel through which Slater channels the search for one’s identity, in and out of relationships. And in this Bowman is uncompromising, refusing to settle into a cosy existence by way marriage, electing to teeter on the peripheries of the in-crowd. “He might have married one [a Jewish woman] and become part of that world, slowly being accepted into it like a convert,” Salter writes of Bowman’s decision, “He might have lived among them in that practical family density that had been formed by the ages, been a familiar presence at seder tables, birthday gathering, funerals, wearing a hat and throwing a handful of earth into the grave. He felt some regret at not having done it, of not having had the chance. On the other hand, he could not really imagine it. He would never have belonged.”
This sense of otherness is a motif throughout the book. Bowman’s search for a place in the world is defined by his romantic failures, which continuously distort and destabilise his sense of self until he finds love once again. All That Is is characterised by Salter’s trademarks, his geometric prose, his tacit force, decisive authority and erotic realism. Sex lends the book much of its thematic unity both individually and in relation to Salter’s other works. On occasion, the amorous liaisons lack the poetry of the more commonplace scenes but Salter redeems himself through those. Speaking in a recent interview, the writer said that he “will never again write a book in which there’s a single sexual act”. This might prove to be an interesting exercise if, indeed, Salter decides to write another book. Certainly, his “energy and desire” seem to be intact as is his lifelong passion for flying. Like his protagonist, Salter was a military man, a US air force pilot, who gave it up to pursue a career in the literary world. This inevitably invites one to draw comparisons between the two men, but while Bowman often appears finite and fallible Salter does not. He commands attention with the inimitable certainty of a master storyteller, a literary frotteur, a man who likes to “rub words in his hand” but one who never minces them.
The Paris Review | James Salter
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: May 2013
Hardback: 304 pages
ISBN: 978-1447238249
“Important novelists often say that writing a novel is hard. I think Anthony Powell said it was like conducting foreign policy—that you have to be prepared to go and do it every day no matter how you feel.”
James Salter
“Beryl Bainbridge understood the absurdity of life and how humour lurks in even the most tragic situation.”
Deborah Moggach
“Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer . . . in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”
Hunter S. Thompson
“There was a period in my early career that was determined by the images of women writers I was exposed to—women writers as genius suicides like Virginia Woolf.”
Margaret Atwood
“Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry.”
T. S Eliot
“In writing She Came to Stay, I was certainly influenced by Hemingway insofar as it was he who taught us a certain simplicity of dialogue and the importance of the little things in life.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“I find Faulkner intolerably bad.”
Evelyn Waugh
“Rebecca West’s novel The Fountain Overflows taught me a lot.”
Andrea Barrett
“Every year or so I read Shakespeare straight through.”
P.G. Wodehouse
“Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic.”
Ian McEwan
Sources: Bartleby, The Independent, The Paris Review, Wikiquote
“My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much.”
The Truth the Dead Know – Anne Sexton
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