Seminal Lines

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

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Writers On Writers

“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 

Seminal Lines

“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

The Folded Man by Matt Hill

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

All That Is by James Salter

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 

Guardian | James Salter

Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: May 2013
Hardback:  304 pages
ISBN: 978-1447238249

Writers On Writers

“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

Seminal Lines

“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

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Writing in the Author’s Note and Acknowledgments at the end of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgeral Therese Anne Fowler says she “tried to adhere as much as possible to the established particulars” of Zelda and Scott F. Fitzgerald’s lives. And in that she has succeeded. It is apparent from the first few pages of Z that the writer has done her research which, as she explains, offered varied – and greatly conflicting – versions of their story. “I often felt as if I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott,” Fowler says at the end of the book, “For every biographer or scholar who believes Zelda derailed Scott’s life, there is one who believes Scott ruined Zelda’s.” This, no doubt, made Fowler’s undertaking a very tricky one not least because of the Fitzgeralds’ own mythmaking. Their accounts – sourced from their epistolary exchanges – are riddled with liberal embellishments, exaggerations and occasionally downright machinations, rendering the truth indeterminable. As Fowler points out, it is difficult to establish whether it was Scott who brought about Zelda’s downfall or visa versa because opinion varies, paving way for pedagogic wrangling and biographical confusion. It is, however, clear that their mutual predisposition for excess played a large part in their undoing.  This is something Fowler aims to convey in the book, distributing the culpability equally between Zelda and Scott. Yet occasionally Zelda’s voice is also that of Fowler’s who, somewhat inevitably, has far more sympathy with her protagonist than she does with her literary husband.

Z is an interesting but deeply flawed book. Fowler writes wonderfully of the background sights and sounds that constituted the couple’s lives, their time in Alabama, their stint in New York, their travels around Europe and their sultry summers on the French Rivera. The writer’s imagination roams freely across the dance floor of Montgomery Country Club’s high-ceilinged ballroom where Zelda first meets Scott, the benevolent warmth of the Mediterranean landscape where Zelda begins to yearn for independence and the resonating buzz of the casinos and cafes around Antibes where the couple’s glamorous life begins to crumble. This is something that Fowler does very well, conjuring up consummately vibrant accounts of the atmosphere, places and people with impressive lucidity and verisimilitude. But Zelda’s voice – the linchpin of the book – is somewhat less convincing. We are introduced to Zelda as a precocious and effervescent 17 year old Southern Bell, running riot in her home town much to the dismay of her stolid and disapproving father. “Boys liked me,” she tells us, “because I shot spitballs and because I told sassy jokes and because I let ‘em kiss me if they smelled nice and I felt like it.” This seemingly carefree attitude, however, quickly dissolves when Zelda meets Scott and after a brief courtship begins to contemplate her future. “I knew that if I let Scott go, I’ll most certainly end up married to some nice, proper fella from a good family whose people have deep roots in the South,” she says, thinking on the matter, “I’ll be the same girl I’ve always been only the parties I go to will take place in drawing rooms instead of the Club or the Exchange Hotel…Looking down the road in the other direction, I see the life Scott offers me…It’s more unpredictable than Alabama’s weather in springtime…It will be an adventure…”

And the pair do indeed have an adventure, which Zelda then spends most of her time bemoaning. Fowler documents the couple’s domestic disputes, financial troubles and champagne-fuelled misadventures, speaking directly through Zelda, who never really manages to ingratiate herself with the reader. Her voice, inflected with a sensationally Southern drawl, fluctuates between frivolous and fatuous, conceited, rapacious and inane. Her contemplations are sometimes interspersed with witty and amusing observations, but even in her most private and reflective moments Zelda appears to be quite uninspired and uninspiring.  And this is Z’s biggest failing because the woman behind the reputation is never quite exhilarating, complex or compelling enough in comparison to the idea we already have of her. It is somewhat unfortunate that in writing about Zelda Fowler was always going to be competing with the man who knew her best. F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalised his wife perfectly – if not altogether accurately – in his books, writing about her in various fictional guises for several decades. From The Beautiful and the Damned (1920) –  the first of Fitzgerald’s works to include a portrait of Zelda as the volatile beauty Gloria Patch –  to Tender Is the Night (1934), his last book in which Zelda appears as the captivating but unhinged Nicole Diver, wife to the equally troubled Dick. The Divers were reportedly modelled on Fitzgeralds’ friends on the French Riviera, Gerald and Sara Murphy, yet the fictional couple’s marriage and all its elements – alcoholism, mental illness, a mounting emotional chasm and eventual separation – is more closely allied to that of Zelda and Scott. Again this is something Fowler explores in the book, paying particular attention to Zelda’s looming breakdown, which was reportedly spurred by Scott. “I was fighting for my right to exist independently in the world, to realise myself, to steer my own boat if I felt like it” Zelda says toward the end, “He wanted to control everything…He wanted his adoring flapper, his Jazz Age muse.”

Fowler does well to show us Zelda’s evolution as a personality – and a woman – who outgrows her lavish lifestyle and her insular existence. “I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired,” she muses as the novel progresses, “Surrounded as I was by such ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn’t ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.” In highlighting Zelda’s personal development, Flower permits us to get a glimpse of her as someone who was deeply driven, intelligent and ambitions. Her introspection, her dreams, worries, aspirations and observations make for some interesting reading, especially in regard to other historical figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Parker, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Edmund Wilson, whom Zelda asses with incisive consideration. But again, there is little real indication of just how unstable Zelda is (aside from the reference to“blackness” in her head) or how this may have affected Scott. Fowler does, however, tap into the popular idea that Scott hindered Zelda’s literary progress as well as her rights as a woman, subjugating her to the role of his sidekick and that of a mother. “There’s no need for you to be a professional dancer, writer, anything,” he says to his muse, “Be a mother. Be a wife. I’ve made a good life for you, Zelda; stop rejecting it.” Fowler also explores the idea that those in Scott’s camp (namely Hemingway) believed the opposite was true and that Zelda, driven by professional jealously, set out to bring down her husband. This, again, is the area where Fowler sides with her protagonist.

Reading Z one senses a distinct lack of sympathy with Scott, who for all his faults – passing off Zelda’s work as his own, pilfering dialogue straight out of her diaries, controlling and neglecting her – was someone that loved her very deeply and was fiercely protective of her. “I fell in love with her courage,” he once wrote in a letter, “her sincerity and her flaming self-respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be, I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of it.” It is difficult to ascertain the true nature of their relationship or be objective in the process, as even their own records are filled with misinformation devised to contribute to their own romantic myth. The Fitzgeralds’ story, however, should be read as a cautionary one, a tale of two people who ruined themselves and each other through carelessness and excess. And in many ways, this is how Fowler sets out to project it through granting Zelda a voice of her own, allowing her to tell her story and debunk the unjust depictions of her circulating in the literary ether. But Fowler’s Zelda never quite manages to make herself heard in the way she deserves, often lacking conviction and authority. This is perhaps due to the fact that the writer aimed for objectivity but if so it begs the question why write the story from Zelda’s perspective at all? Zelda was a hurricane of a woman, disarmingly intelligent, outspoken, passionate, fearless, ambitious and unapologetic – everything that Z is not.

Publisher:  Hodder & Stoughton
Publication Date: April 2013
Hardback:  384 pages
ISBN: 9781444761405

LBMC: #2 Clerkenwell Tales Bookshop

Clerkenwell Tales is a charming little bookshop on Exmouth Market, off Rosebery Avenue.  It has a beautiful teal shop-front and vibrant window displays, thoughtfully chosen to reflect the area’s varied and eclectic character. The shop opened in July 2009 under the stewardship of former Waterstone’s bookseller Peter Ho. Peter wasn’t there during my visit – chaperoned by the incorrigible Mr Tim Wells (pictured) – but I was greeted by the lovely Anna, the other booklover who helps Peter run the shop.

We talked briefly about the selection of books on offer, which range from contemporary to classic fiction, non-fiction, design, cooking and poetry. Anna explained that the books are picked intuitively with booklovers in mind, which is something that distinguishes Clarkenwell Tales from a lot of the other shops. It also has a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and a great layout that offers perfect space for browsing, nosing around and stopping off to flick through a comic or two.

The shop also sells an interesting range of cards, wrapping papers and other literary paraphernalia. It’s small and intimate but well organised and uncluttered, which is something Peter says he was “very conscious” of when designing it. This, he explains, was done so that “every book would be given the chance to catch the eye”. And it certainly does. Clarkenwell Tales is a wonderful shop, which offers a great choice of books and an inviting atmosphere in which to peruse them.

Free Word | Peter Ho

Clarkenwell Tales
30 Exmouth Market
London
EC1R 4QE
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday: 10:00 am – 7.00pm/Saturday: 11:00 am – 6.00pm/Sunday: 12:00 am – 4.00pm

PS If you’d like to find out more about the LBMC challenge, please go here. If you’d like to recommend a bookshop please leave a comment on my blog, tweet me (@DollyDelightly) or send me an email. Thanks.

Seminal Lines

“In time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me.”

e. e. cummings