If Not, Not, 1975, Ronald Brooks Kitaj
Photography by Antonia Reeve
© R. B. Kitaj Estate
1. DUNE (1965), Frank Herbert
The author, Frank Herbert, clearly understood the brief when they said, ‘space-themed’ science fiction. Set on a desert planet, we are led through a story of inhospitable worlds where nothing is valued other than the sought-after drug, ‘spice.’ With its’ ability to prolong life and consciousness; Spice is something worth killing for. If you are easily obsessed with space wars and battles, we recommend this book for you.
2. THE APOLLO MURDERS (2021), Chris Hadfield
Hadfield allows his readers to view the Cold War from an alternative, out of this world lens (‘literally’). He successfully paints an image of a top-secret mission to the moon, where 3 astronauts find themselves alone and vulnerable, in a small spaceship, far from help. This book effectively captures the essence of claustrophobia, tension and the loneliness of space, where everything is at stake to stop the soviet space station from spying on America.
3. CRITICAL MASS (2004), Daniel Suarez
This book encapsulates the importance of quick thinking and determination. It tells of two crew members, left stranded and hopeless when unforeseen circumstances occur during the commercial asteroid mining mission. Scary as it is, they are forced to build a spacecraft to carry out a rescue mission before the asteroid impacts the earth. Suarez perfectly describes the utter tension and uncertainty that these characters experience allowing you to constantly question whether they will ever reach the end point of safety.
4. THE MIMICKING OF KNOWN SUCCESSES (2023), Malka Older
Set on faraway Jupiter, Older beautifully describes the struggle of a human colony who must survive in a shelter installed with gas. When a man suddenly goes missing, an investigator follows his trail recruiting an unexpected ally along the way. Together, they fight to protect their possible future and return to earth.
5. THE SCOURGE BETWEEN STARS (2023), Ness Brown
Set aboard a distant claustrophobic star-ship, Brown has written a story that blurs the boundaries of horror and sci-fi. Filled to the brim with suspense this book follows the journey of the last of humanity. Charged with the responsibility of protecting the dying species of humans, Albright’s journey through space, faces debilitating challenges. With the crew on their last legs, they realise that a horror has been living undetected within the ship walls. As they begin to hunt down this intruder, safety suddenly feels far from close.
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Student writer
Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J Robert Oppenheimer, explores ethical conflicts within an attempt to reach scientific victory. Over two centuries before the release of Oppenheimer, Mary Shelley’s character Victor Frankenstein also suffers due to his excessive ambition and negligence of his creation. However, while Frankenstein emphasises the importance of taking responsibility for your actions and the subsequent consequences, Oppenheimer focuses on the ambiguity of mankind and our ability to both achieve greatness and cause mass destruction. Still, both depictions of the dark potential of science force the audience to question the morality of their attempts to create a legacy of scientific significance.
Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein is a cautionary tale of an obsessive pursuit of usurping God and the dangers of scientific advancements. Written during a time of rapid scientific discovery, the novel follows Shelley’s eponymous protagonist during his creation of a monster using “bones from charnel houses”, the abandonment of his Creature and his struggle of attaining revenge. Frankenstein embodies the uncontrolled desire to obtain scientific knowledge while ignoring the disastrous societal consequences. His ignorance of the dangerous and murderous potential of his scientific creation leads to the death of his loved ones and the transformation of his promising and joyful life into one of turmoil and chaos. Shelley uses Frankenstein’s uncontrolled ambition to highlight the threat science poses on society, if regarded as higher than morality and if used to usurp God and nature. The sublime natural world is presented as powerful and flawless by Romantic writers, including Shelley, to emphasise the imperfections and triviality of humanity. Frankenstein is often dwarfed by the natural power of the “lightning playing on the summit of Mont Blanc” and “vivid flashes of lightning” implying that nature will continuously maintain its power over mankind. Shelley frequently emphasises the omnipotence of the sublime nature to criticise the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) and the rapid growth of scientific and technological discoveries and innovations. Throughout each chapter, it becomes clear that Victor’s fixation on defeating his Creation never disappears and even on his death bed he refuses to take responsibility and attempts to encourage Robert Walton (a scientist exploring the Arctic with hopes of achieving similar scientific greatness to Frankenstein) to continue his risky expedition despite the reluctance of his crew. Shelley could be implying that Frankenstein’s pursuit of science consumed his good sense and made him lose the ability to accept responsibility for the sufferings of his Creature and the murders of all those close to him. This makes a clear distinction between Victor Frankenstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer as in the biopic it is clear that his guilt for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunted him.
‘Oppenheimer’ showcases mankind’s ability for annihilation and explores the ethical conscience by presenting the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, his journey of creating the atomic bomb and the aftermath on his mental health and politics. Even though both scientists’ (Frankenstein and Oppenheimer) creations destroyed lives, Oppenheimer and the scientists of the Manhattan Project understood to some extent the destructive possibilities of the atomic bomb. Their final decision considered the morality of the weapon and the opportunity of ending WWII, potentially saving millions of lives and making their actions less selfish than Victor’s. Unlike Victor, the scientists had no control over their creation as the politicians decided where and when to drop the bomb. They had no foresight of the Arms Race during the Cold War and the nuclear tensions caused by the increasing possession of nuclear weapons and their destructive power. The movie was based on “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, the 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer realises his creation could end the world in his final scene with Einstein, stating that “I have become death, destroyer of worlds”, and suggesting that he knows that his atomic weapon could lead to the destruction of the world. He takes responsibility for his creation and the destructive powers it possesses and is continuously tormented by the lives his weapon took. ‘Oppenheimer’ showcases mankind’s ability for annihilation and explores the ethical dilemmas of the danger of his creation and his dedication to his country while forcing the audience to question the consequences and morality of science.
In many ways Frankenstein and Oppenheimer can be compared to Prometheus, a titan who stole fire from the Gods and was publicly punished for his actions. Frankenstein attempted to usurp God by creating a living being and Oppenheimer created a weapon that could kill thousands at once. Both were chastised for their actions: Frankenstein chased his Creature around Europe and died during the pursuit, and Oppenheimer was constantly troubled by his creations, power, and his communist ties during the Red Scare. Even though both scientists faced repercussions, they are differentiated by the fact that Frankenstein’s punishment was induced due to his refusal to accept responsibility and Oppenheimer’s was due to the political climate at the time. Despite this, Shelley’s key message about the dangers of scientific advancements is still very much relevant today.
]]>Student writer
Barbie Unboxed: Feminism and Mental Health in the Dollhouse
In a world where dolls and literature intersect, the Barbie movie of 2023 brings forth a reflection of contemporary society. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Barbie asks a party of friends while dancing in her rose-tinted dream-house (despite possessing the supposedly perfect life). She then embarks on a journey to come to terms with who she is and why she feels the way she does. The Barbie movie not only tackles female empowerment, it also confronts how we feel in our own skin. The script’s tussle with identity and mental health has roots in ‘confessional writing’; and Sylvia Plath, a key advocate of this style, experienced depressive and solitary feelings towards her life and motherhood, much like Barbie herself. Director Greta Gerwig claims that Barbie is “certainly a feminist film”, and this is compounded with the film’s attention to mental health, from Ken to Gloria, to Barbie. Throughout time, a myriad of feminist writers have opened doors in favour of equality for women. From Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, to Margaret Atwood, a shiny, pink feminist world has been unleashed. By examining the movie’s representation of gender dynamics and emotional struggles, a greater insight into the enduring relevance of feminism and the human experience is learned.
Margaret Atwood: Philosophy of Genders
The Barbie movie acknowledges the experiences of all women around the world, past and present. From Barbie entering the real world and being sexualised by men, to Ken starting a patriarchy where the Barbies are submissive to the Kens. Throughout various points the film, the Barbies are objectified and manipulated, this subjugation of women has been previously commented on by Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, highlighting that in a male-dominated society, the way in which men see women is in itself an act of controlling them. A common theme throughout The Handmaid’s Tale is the way Offred, the protagonist, feels she is seen by men and the violent connotations the male gaze has. In the novel Aunt Lydia states “'Modesty is invisibility, …. To be seen, to be seen, is to be … Penetrated”. Barbie’s uneasiness and need to change clothes when being leered at by men suggests that within modern day society there still are classic issues of inequality against women. In both pieces, the depiction of the male gaze is a form of oppression and social control.
The Barbie movie expresses this feminist stance and conveys a message of equality for everyone, Barbie and Ken, men and women. However conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro disagreed and went on a 43 minute tirade mocking the film for being anti-men. Admittedly the Barbie movie’s slogan is ‘She’s everything. He’s just Ken”, yet this encapsulates the essence of challenging gender norms and acknowledges the struggles of both genders. Towards the end of Barbie, Ken confesses he is nothing without Barbie and his insecurities that structured this patriarchy unfold; an expression of self which predicts a future of new masculinity. This also resonates with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as the commander feels the need to seek personal relationships with his Handmaids. The allegorical world of ‘Barbieland’ sees gender roles inverted and the Kens acting as second-class citizens, in many ways prompting the viewer to feel empathy for Ken. Ken’s journey from patriarchal norms to emotional liberation mirrors our ongoing battle against toxic masculinity. Additionally, Ken’s quest for identity is separate from Barbie’s and shows a possible world for men not as seconds or patriarchal leaders, but where they are equals to the Barbies and are valued for their emotions. Overall, the Barbie movie is neither a defamation on men nor women, but rather explores the complexities of humanity and human emotion, in a fresh land of plasticity and dolls.
Sylvia Plath: Mental Frameworks
The Barbie movie is an expression of humanity with each stomach-churning twist conveying the realities of life, plus a twinge of make-believe. Sylvia Plath wrote during ‘The Confessional Movement’ of poetry in America in the 1950s and 1960s, which addressed the taboo of mental illnesses, and featured contemporaries such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Similar to the thread running through the Barbie movie that every emotion is valid, Plath’s work explores the intricate feeling of being human, and the intense experiences and psychological states that come with it. A famously riveting poem by Plath entitled ‘Ariel’ uses both a metaphor for female empowerment and mental instability. As the speaker rides her horse Ariel, they go through a near death experience. The cyclical structure of the journey acts as a wake-up call, from the beginning “Stasis in darkness” to the juxtaposed “red// Eye, the cauldron of morning” in the final stages. Plath also explains this change in her life as being fiercely forced onto her by “Something else”. Comparably, in the Barbie movie, Barbie has been pushed headfirst into the real world and this alters her life to the point where she decides to turn human. The Barbie movie not only addresses feminism but also feelings of inadequacy in Gloria’s (played by America Ferrera) career and personal life as a mother. Plath similarly comments on the difficulties and adjustments of motherhood in her renowned poem ‘Morning song’ presenting a blossoming of instincts. In the poem the baby is initially like a “New statue”, unfamiliar and vernacular, but later described as a “cat”, suggesting animation and more maternal feelings. Though Plath comparatively is a new mother, both women experience this new affliction, which in many ways also shows life and motherhood as mystifying and ever-changing.
Barbie’s Legacy: Empowering Narratives
As literature and film converge, so does their ability to question, define and redefine the world we live in. The Barbie movie stands as testament to how storytelling can reflect societal narratives past, present and future. Through its modern-day lens, feminist approach, and focus on mental health, it bridges the gap between paper and plastic. Feminist icons like Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood have paved the progress to equality, and the Barbie movie has created an indelible pink mark. Barbieis partially a light-hearted comedy and a reason to dress in pink and buy a cowboy hat; nevertheless, it’s also a whimsical message of benevolence to yourself, your community and for the ever-evolving journey of identity.
]]>Kingsley
Born in 1922, Kingsley Amis, father of Martin, was an Oxford-educated comic novelist whose work satirised the social changes that England went through after the Second World War. His first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), won the Somerset Maugham Award, universal acclaim, and propelled him into international stardom. His protagonists are memorable anti-heroes whose bad behavior masks their struggle to find meaning in a post-war world. He is often described as the defining novelist of his generation.
Martin
Born in 1949, Martin Amis, son of Kingsley, is an Oxford-educated comic novelist whose work satirizes the social changes that England has gone through since the Second World War. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), won the Somerset Maugham Award, universal acclaim, and propelled him into international stardom. His protagonists are memorable anti-heroes whose bad behavior masks their struggle to find meaning in a post-war world. He is often described as the defining novelist of his generation.
WHAT DIVIDES THEM?
Kingsley
Kingsley’s anti-heroes are likeable. Their bad behavior is understandable; they rail against the uptight tea-and-biscuits culture of 1940s’ Little England and we cheer them on. James Dixon, in Lucky Jim, for example, is forced to spend a weekend in an upper-class English family’s country manor. Their snobbish passive aggression exasperates him and, to their horror, he escapes to the pub. Happier smoking and drinking and laughing than negotiating the rituals and customs that govern the family’s repressed and outmoded world of cucumber sandwiches and madrigals (a world familiar to readers of the English novel), Dixon is refreshingly improper. Kingsley Amis’s anti-heroes are people like us.
Martin
Martin’s anti-heroes are repulsive. They indulge in every excess available to them: they are never not taking drugs; never not sleeping with strippers and prostitutes; never not exploiting someone. In Money, for example, the Thatcherite badboy John Self reels off a litany of sordid excesses with wicked pride as he boasts to the reader about just how much money he has and just how irresponsible is his spending of it. His vertiginous debauchery is nauseating – the (sensible) reader wants nothing to do with him or his lifestyle – yet the immoderation is mesmerizing. As the writer Carl Hiaasen has said, “he pushes you right to the edge of unease and discomfort and it’s beyond cringe-worthy. It makes you shudder. And yet you keep reading.”
WHAT DID THEY THINK OF EACH OTHER?
Kinsley
According to Martin, his father does not have a very high regard of his work: “I can point out the exact place,” he once said, “where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in. ‘Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself,’ Kingsley complained.” Certainly, Kingsley has publicly denounced aspects of his son’s writing – he hated his postmodern games and described his politics as “a lot of dangerous howling nonsense”. And it is true that in a letter to the poet Philip Larkin, he once described Martin as “a fucking fool”. But harsh words are always followed by expressions of love: “I admire him very much as a man,’ he once said, “I regard him as one of my best and closest friends.”
Martin
Martin is less publicly outspoken about his father, but his writing presents a fierce challenge to everything he stood for. Kingsley was a staunch realist, who hated the kind of Modernist novelists operating before the war (Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, etc.). Their work was obtuse, rarefied, elitist; Kingsley simply wanted to tell funny stories about ordinary people. Martin took his lead from Modernism rather than from his father, preferring ornate, virtuosic language to Kingsley’s plain style, and post-modern tricksiness and self-referentiality to his immersive realism. When questioned about Kingsley’s dismissal of this kind of writing as “Fucking Around with the Reader” in Rolling Stone, Martin described it as an “evolutionary development” of the novel and said that his father was “in the position of someone in fifteenth-century Venice or Florence saying: ‘You know, I don’t like this perspective stuff. Get back to when we didn’t know about perspective.’ Despite their differences, however, as the novelist Julian Barnes has said, ‘They do love each other.”
FAMOUS SAYINGS
Kinsley
“Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”
“If you can’t annoy somebody there is little point in writing.”
“It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.”
Martin
“Laughter always forgives.”
“Sexism is like racism: we all feel such impulses.”
“Good sex is impossible to write about… It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.”
WHAT DID THEY BELIEVE?
Kingsley
Kingsley belonged to a generation of young, English, male writers who were popularly known – much to their dismay – as Angry Young Men. They were mainly working and middle class, disillusioned men who saw English life as stifling and boring. They questioned all orthodoxies and, in the words of the writer Christopher Hitchens, waged a “protracted war against hypocrisy and phoniness of all kinds”. Like most Angry Young Men, Kingsley Amis began his political life on the Left – in the 1950s he claimed he would always vote Labour, and was even a member of the Communist Party at university – but moved to the Right as he grew older.
Kingsley was also a member of a group of writers known as ‘The Movement’, who saw England as increasingly irrelevant in world affairs – World War Two was over; Empire was a thing of the past – and mourned the loss of a traditional English lifestyle. England, for writers like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, was a lost Eden concreted over by a banal and exploitative urban lifestyle.
Martin
For Martin, the most important thing for a writer to do is to avoid cliché. In an essay on James Joyce, he wrote: “To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” Writing, for him, is a chance to think freshly about things, to see the world in a new light, and reconsider one’s assumptions. The late 20th century, for Martin, was full of people not thinking freshly, not questioning their assumptions, but following a new, capitalist orthodoxy, a worldview which conflated money with democracy and held that the richer you are the freer you are. This worldview, in Martin’s writing, is signaled by “the brash ascendancy of tabloid England, the downmarket world of Page Three pinups, Bingo greed and soap stars' abortions,” to quote Mira Stout in the New York Times. In his own words: “Money is a more democratic medium than blood, but money as a cultural banner - you can feel the whole of society deteriorating around you because of that. Civility, civilisation is falling apart.”
WHO WOULD BE MOST FUN AT DINNER?
Kinsley
“Now and then I become conscious,” Kingsley wrote in his memoir, “of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.” His sharp wit, erudition and drunken bonhomie would, no doubt, make him an excellent dinner companion. But you’d better watch out: he might try to sleep with you. He was a serial adulterer who made no attempt to hide it from his wife. The writer Al Alvarez tells an anecdote about a drunken dinner the Amis’s once hosted during which Kingsley disappeared, one by one, with every woman present. "What got to me most about the whole performance,” Alvarez said, “was that everyone was miserable — the women who went outside with Kingsley, as much as those who were left behind, even Kingsley himself — but nobody said a word.”
Martin
Martin drank less, adulterated less – but you could be sure he’d say something memorably outrageous. He once, for example, called for the installation of “suicide booths” on street corners so that the elderly could quietly end their lives in comfort. He is perhaps most outspoken when talking about writers of enormous stature. In his memoir Experience, he relates a dinner party at which the Indian novelist Salmon Rushdie asked him to step outside for a fight after he insulted Samuel Beckett’s prose. The novelist Will Self remembers another dinner party at which Amis rolled around on the floor, frothing at the mouth, in anger the Nobel-Prize-and-Twice-Booker-Prize-winning South African Novelist J.M. Coetzee’s use of cliché.
WHAT DO THE CRITICS THINK?
Kingsley
No-one would question Christopher Hitchens’s assertion that Lucky Jim is “the funniest book of the last half century”. The Guardian called it “preposterously funny”, Helene Dunmore, ‘a flawless comic novel’. Or as John Mortimer had it, ‘He was a genuine comic writer, probably the best after P. G. Wodehouse”. Those who criticise him tend to focus on his latent misogyny. They may have a point: he once wrote in a letter to the poet Philip Larkin: “Women appear to me as basically dull but as basically pathetic too.”
Martin
The Sunday Independent has called him “the finest English fiction writer of his generation”, A.O. Scott has called him ‘the best American writer England has ever produced’ and John Sutherland has called him “the most daring novelist of his generation”. However, Martin has received his fair share of memorably bad reviews. Tibor Fischer, for example, said of his novel Yellow Dog: “Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder… It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.”
HOW SUCCESSFUL WERE THEY
Kinsley
According to a list published in the Times in 2008, Kingsley Amis is the 9th greatest British writer since 1945. Lucky Jim was listed in TIME’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923. By the 1970s it had sold over 1,250,000 copies in America alone. Though he never quite matched this early success, he went on to write 27 further novels, none of which were flops – not to mention countless books of essays, poems, etc.
Martin
Martin ranked lower than his father in the Times’s list: he is apparently the 19th greatest British writer since 1945. But his novel, Money was also listed in TIME’s list of the 100 greatest novels. He has not outsold his father, but has done better than him in one respect: for his 1995 novel The Information he received an advance of £500,000 – an unprecedented sum for a literary novel.
WHO HAS THE BEST WAY WITH WORDS?
Kinsley
Kingsley’s prose is simple, uncomplicated. As the critic Rubin Rabinowitz has said of his novels, “their styles are plain, their time-sequences are chronological, and they make no use of myth, symbol or stream-of-consciousness inner narratives”. But his writing is marked by impeccable comic timing and joyfully unexpected phrasing, as in this memorable description of a hangover in Lucky Jim: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.”
Martin
If Kinglsey’s prose is notable for its plainness, his son’s is notable for its elaborateness. As the novelist Sebastian Faulks has said: “When the father was happy to write “Dixon paid the garage-man and the taxi moved off,” as though challenging the reader to see how his meaning could have been more clearly conveyed, the son seemed reluctant to pass any sentence in which words were not pressed hard against one another to produce unsettling effects.” Here, for example, is a description of arriving in America in Money: “So now I stand here with my case, in smiting light and island rain. Behind me massed water looms, and the industrial corsetry of FDR Drive... It must be pushing eight o’clock by now but the weepy breath of the day still shields its glow, a guttering glow, very wretched – rained on, leaked on.”
]]>other books, too). As young teenagers in the summer of Love, we found our perception transformed by Lawrence’s rainbow prose. His multi-coloured, emotional language, and his intoxicating passion for expressing the unexpressed and inexpressible was like a drug. My generation ingested Lawrence – his novels, poems, and stories – like junkies. Here, at last, was a writer who was unequivocally all about the human soul, and who loved nothing better than to explore the fathomless complexity of family and marital relations.
Our hunger for Lawrence was stoked by cinema: films like The Virgin and the
Gypsy and (of course) Ken Russell’sWomen in Love. Loose white cotton shirts and bra-less women? Yes! Uninhibited conversations about sex? Yes! Frolicking naked, at dawn, in deep summer meadows? Yes, please! Tumultuous orgams? Yes, we said, yes, yes, yes! Young men wrestling – naked again – in front of log fires ? Why not!
For a society that had grown up with J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbitt and all the repressed masters of post-Victorian childrens’ literature, Lawrence seemed to offer the most exhilarating liberation. To hell with discipline. Stuff the self-sacrifice. Our parents, having come through world war two, were committed to such stoic ideas. We, by contrast, we 4 would feel the blood thunder in our veins, become spontaneous and vital and instinctual. We would, as Lawrence put it, “break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to form our utterance.” We would celebrate Dionysus, and we would be free at once, and – thank God Almighty – free at last. Adolescents had worn khaki in the 40s, and flannel in the 50s, but we would dress like clowns. How wonderfully young and stupid we were.
It’s an undifferentiated blur now – like the memory of a terrible hangover – but
if I stop to focus on my D.H. Lawrence, the Lawrence of the Sixties, I can begin to discern the fuzzy but recognisable outline of a literary aesthetic that was both persuasive and, for Lawrence at least, coherent. Anyway, don’t we expect our greatest writers to be a little bit mad? As compelling as the fantasy of the creative crucible, we had the puritanical cold steel of F.R. Leavis to remind us, in The Great Tradition, about Lawrence’s artistic integrity and moral grandeur, his profound artistic seriousness. This Sixties Lawrence was also the magnificent standard-bearer for English Modernism. We didn’t need to box him into a pigeon-hole. As the novelist and critic Howard Jacobson has written, “Women In Love is the nearest any English novel has so far approximated to the fearful grandeur of Medea or the Oresteia.”
In addition to the attractions of his literary genius, there was the thrill of Lawrence’s personal philosophy. This had begun in heterodox meditations on
Christianity, and had then swerved towards mysticism, Buddhism and – most
arousing of all – earthy, pagan theologies. Seductively, for English boys and
girls in, say, 1967, Lawrence seemed to celebrate the liberation of the individual in the mass, through the celebration of primal instincts, while also finding, in physical intimacy, an elite and private communion with the Self and (with a bit of luck) the Other.
The D.H. Lawence with whom we fell in love was a Protean figure, for sure.
The barest sketch of his biography – the humble origins in mining Notts.; the escape to metropolitan London; his elopement with Frieda, a married woman;
the long exile; his “savage pilgrimage” to selfknowledge; and finally his early
death from tuberculosis in 1930, aged just 44 – put him effortlessly in the company of the great Romantics, Byron and Keats.
But he was more than a Romantic, we sensed that he was in a deep colloquy
with some darker forces. And then, shadowy and tantalising, beyond the
confines of The Great Tradition, there was that novel with those forbidden
words, and those ectstatic descriptions of sexual intercourse. Looking
back, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was both the making of D.H. Lawrence in the
post-war English imagination, and ultimately, the ruining of his reputation.
Here’s what happened.
A censored version of Lady Chatterley had been published in America as long
ago as 1928. In the 6 late 50s, the publisher Allen Lane, who had done well
with Penguin editions of Lawrence’s finest books, The Rainbow, Sons &
Lovers and Women in Love, decided that a new generation of readers should
be allowed to enjoy an unexpurgated version of a great English writer’s
transgressive last novel.
But there was a problem: the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Lane, who liked
a fight, decided to test the new legislation by publishing Lady Chatterley. The
inevitable trial had high stakes. If convicted, Lane would have gone to prison.
In fact, the case became both a legal challenge to the new law and an
entertaining literary circus. A procession of writers and critics, led by E.M.
Forster, filed into the witness box to declare that not only was D.H. Lawrence
a great artist but that his novel was a) a masterpiece and b) certainly not
obscene. Penguin won the case, in part thanks to the prosecution, which
never recovered from suggesting to the jury that Lady Chatterley was not the
kind of book, “you would wish your wife or servants to read.”
After that, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became a massive bestseller, and Allen
Lane a millionaire. Most damaging of all – from one book that’s a long way
below his best – D.H. Lawrence became fatally attached to the zeitgeist, and
fatally identified with just one novel. In time, inevitably, there was a reaction
against the bells and the beards, the drugs, the pan pipes and the liberation.
So Lawrence got thrown out with the flared trousers, the Beatles and, in
America, with the Vietnam War. By the dawn of the 80s there was no place for
clowns, and – WTF – four-letter words were two a penny.
So, when we come to Lady Chatterley now, what do we find ? One publisher’s
blurb boldly declares that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is all about sex”. But that’s
wrong. What you discover on a grown-up reading is that it’s all about class.
And after that, it’s all about the wasteland of the years after the Great War.
Lawrence, the inveterate fingerwagger, is unequivocal about that. “Ours is
essentially a tragic age,” he begins. “The catastrophe has happened, we are
among the ruins.” For nearly 100 pages, Lawrence gives the reader a portrait
of a dead marriage between a mismatched couple adrift in “the void” of
interwar Britain. It’s not until chapter seven that Connie goes up to her
bedroom and does “what she had not done for a long time: took off all her
clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge mirror”. Several more pages
pass before Connie finally submits to the gamekeeper’s embrace and we
plunge into those breathless passages, teeming with “fucks”, “loins”, and
“cunts”, that our grandparents thought were pornographic.
Meanwhile, everyday life at Wragby Hall and the desiccated literary career of
Sir Clifford Chatterley rattle along like subplots torn from the pages of a
latterday Mrs Gaskell. Lawrence, from some angles, is simply an enfant
terrible of the mid-Victorian literary imagination. Connie is certainly having
some sexual epiphanies in the gamekeeper’s hut, but she remains a metropolitan snob, despite her passion. To Connie, her lover “seemed so unlike a gamekeeper, so unlike a working man anyhow; although he had something in common with the local people”. Lawrence emphasises this point by Mellors’ use of dialect.
In between the cockeyed social commentary and the phallocentric meeting of
Connie and Mellors, there is, as always with Lawrence, some lovely landscape writing. No one does Spring better than Lawrence, words that remain timeless and true, especially today: “The bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the splatter of green rain.”
And so, from the occasionally ridiculous to the sublime. Lawrence first
attracted the attention of literary London with a short story entitled “Odour of
Chrysanthemums”, and it’s as the master of the short story that I began to
read him. Where to start? There are many options, including “The Rocking-
Horse Winner”, but one of his finest collections is “The Prussian Officer and
Other Stories”, published in 1914. This places it after his acclaimed third
novel, Sons and Lovers(1913), but before The Rainbow (1915), the novel that,
with Women In Love (1920), secures his claim on posterity.
Actually, it makes better sense to treat these two mature novels as one.
That’s how they began in Lawrence’s first draft. The Brangwen sisters, Ursula
and Gudrun, for instance, feature in both books. The other character who
plays a vital role in all Lawrence’s best work, is Nature. Thomas Hardy had
written about rural Dorset with a poet’s eye, but Hardy was a Victorian who
treated the landscape as an attractive backdrop to the human drama.
Lawrence is a twentieth century writer and his vision is fresh, dynamic and
modern – as if Nature is there to galvinise the human soul, not merely to
decorate his or her environment. For instance, listen to Lawrence describe the
scene beyond the grime of the colliery in Women In Love: “Still the faint
glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and
seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of
sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms… currant
bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the
grey alyssum that hung over stone walls.”
But there is much more than Nature to recommend Lawrence to the contemporary reader. For instance, the frank – I was going to write “obsessive” – fascination with sex. In Lady Chatterley, sexuality is erotically contrasted with the terribly grey dullness of the post-war world. Throughout Women In Love, the sexuality of Ursula, Gudrun, Rupert and Gerald throbs through the narrative like a feverish pulse. No one writes better about the complexity of desire, especially homosexual desire, than Lawrence. “I should like to know,” he wrote in one letter, “why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not.”
The more we look at D.H. Lawrence, the harder it is to know why – apart from
shift in the cultural mood – he should have become so neglected. Yes, he
held some odd, even perverse, and often baffling, views on sexual politics,
especially feminism; also on democracy and organised labour; and on modernity. And yes, like all radicals, he made some ridiculous utterances from time to time. He is a writer that adolescents devour omnivorously, but then cannot return to. Perhaps if we read him in a less compulsive way, we could learn to benefit from the nurture of the diet he offers, and stay with him – at all ages, young and old. He’s so worth it.
Image credits
Cover image: Netflix.
Image 1: Karen Robinson for the Observer New Review.
]]>By Elsie Hayward
Student Writer
T.S Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Wasteland was written in the aftermath of a devastating world war. The very fabric of it seems traumatised, being as it is ‘a heap of broken images’, or a series of disconnected, disembodied voices. In the fragmentary feel of the poem, we experience the fragmentary state of the traumatised mind, where snatches of thoughts refuse to make sense together. Yet this is more than just a reference to literal shell-shock - we are being painted a picture of a traumatised society. As Derek Traversi writes in his book on Eliot, The Wasteland is a comment on ‘the state of a civilisation’, although its vehicle is individual scenes and voices. There is nothing else like The Wasteland. It is an announcement in itself that things are not as they were, that the old rules do not apply, the old conventions cannot adequately express the way things are now. We cannot see the world in the same way. Does any of that sound a little like where we are now, in the centenary year of its publication?
If we can think our way back to the start of the first lockdown, it was Spring; around April- time, in fact. It was also one of the most beautiful Springs I’ve known and I remember this making me somehow uncomfortable. It does, after all, feel inappropriate to be ‘breeding lilacs out of the dead land’, or watching nature brazenly come into bloom while we are surrounded by death. How many of us literally did this - tended plants in our gardens while the world was in upheaval, focusing on one little piece of renewal while knowing so much of the rest of the world is ‘dead land’? Perhaps this is the key to one of Eliot’s most puzzled-over lines; the answer to why ‘April is the cruellest month’. ‘Memory and desire’ seems like a formula for hope, where we carry the happiness and comfort we knew and long to know it again. This could be cruel in a world of uncertainty, where we do not know how or if we get out of this, or even if the people in charge do.
Although The Wasteland is a desolate landscape, we feel a connection to it and its rhythms. After all, it is still governed by nature; there is still Spring after Winter, and haven’t we all felt more aware of these changes, and taken a little comfort in their unchanging cycle? Even, that is, if our perceptions and receptions of them are jumbled - if we are ‘warmed’ by Winter like hibernating creatures, and ‘surprised’ to see Summer again, which is so often the most anticipated season. I know I have wondered something along the lines of ‘what branches grow out of this stony rubbish’, and, aside from more literally speaking a lot of people’s vegetable patches, there have been so many different answers; so many different visions of a society rebuilt. We’ve been promised countless lessons, silver-linings, ways that we will do things better: get our priorities straight, be more mindful, chuck out less pollution, work less, love each other more, listen to the birds. I don’t know where Eliot leaves us on this, but I suppose there is an inherent hopefulness in fishing, even if ‘London Bridge is falling down’ just behind, like in a particularly destructive bombing raid.
I think we’ve all had to think more about death over the last couple of years than we have before. It was certainly on Eliot’s mind too, and as we’re watching the ‘crowd’ of dead that ‘flowed’ over London Bridge, like blood from an unstaunchable wound, it’s hard not to be reminded of a constantly increasing Covid death toll. To make matters worse, we overhear someone ask, ‘the corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?’, which is an uncomfortably literal reminder of the circle of life, as well as a kind of shaming for continuing in the face of the death around us. We can’t ignore the part death plays in the workings of everything anymore. We aren’t sure, but the ‘third who walks always beside you’ may well be the grim reaper, ‘gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded’, a quiet but constant presence. In The Wasteland, nature is against us, just as it is when it throws a virus our way. In the poem, there is attack from the elements, in the form of ‘burning burning burning burning’, and ‘Death by Water’. Both of these are levelling, humbling - we are reminded that the drowned Phlebas ‘was once as handsome and tall as you’. When it comes to suffering, to vulnerability to nature’s nasty tricks, perhaps we are all in it together.
Part of TS Eliot, 1938, Wyndham Lewis. Photograph: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images
The Wasteland is not a place characterised by human connection. I’m not sure how well we know how to handle it any more either, as out of practice as we’ve generally been. There is Lil and her husband Albert, separated like many couples have been while he’s away with the army, but their reunion will be an uneasy one. According to their nosy friend at least, their relationship has been reduced to something shallow and superficial, where Albert tells his wife ‘I can’t bear to look at you’ because of the state of her teeth. We haven’t been doing so much looking at each other in recent times perhaps, but we’ve been doing a lot more looking at glossy TV ads and pictures on the internet. Of course, there’s also the awful encounter between the typist and the clerk, which we can now see quite clearly as a depiction of rape, with ‘caresses…undesired’. However, it’s more likely that Eliot was commenting on the way he saw sex being emptied of true meaning, or even love, setting it unromantically in the moment where ‘the meal is ended, she is bored and tired’. Once the transaction is complete, he has no business to stay, so ‘gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit’. Especially now, after several lockdowns, it seems much easier to look for a partner online, and, digital- age love stories aside, this can often lead to something more throw-away, or mechanical. For couples, keeping intimacy following either far too much time together or nowhere near enough must also be a challenge.
Eliot also understands our claustrophobia. You can feel the suffocating restriction of the ‘room enclosed ‘ around the woman at the start The Game of Chess, with the ‘smoke’ and the ‘strange synthetic perfumes’, and the relief of ‘the air that freshened from the window’. Trapped and as good as alone, we also feel her anxiety conveyed in the fragmentary speech that follows, and probably relate to her confession ‘my nerves are bad tonight’. Most moving is her desperate reaching for connection, companionship, comfort; things of which many of us have been starved. She demands ‘speak to me…what are you thinking of’, aching to know that someone is there beside her, living this with her, but her reply, ‘I think we are in the rat’s alley’, is no comfort at all. Then, at the very end of the poem, there is the image of us ‘each in his prison, thinking of the key’, and few of us are now unfamiliar to the sensation of our surroundings becoming a prison to us. Eerily, this is then followed by ‘your heart would have responded gaily, when invited, beating obedient to controlling hands’. Even if we all know lockdowns were necessary, and for the best, there was surprisingly little protest against such a major curtailment of our freedoms. Never have we felt so keenly those ‘controlling hands’, and, I’d like to think mainly because of our care for others, we were indeed ‘obedient’. But maybe this is nothing to how clearly Eliot foresees a city emptied of signs of human life, where ‘the river bears no empty bottles, sandwich wrappers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends or other testimony of summer nights’. And just to confirm that this isn’t merely a great city clean-up, and a blessing for the environment, there is ‘the rattle of bones’. Death is still hanging around.
If Not, Not, 1975, Ronald Brooks Kitaj
Photography by Antonia Reeve
© R. B. Kitaj Estate
All good wishes,
Jon Connell
Editor-in-chief
Why does Orwell matter?
He’s the independent radical who saw through communist lies during the Spanish Civil War and opened our eyes to how totalitarian regimes tick. He also racked up some serious sales: Nineteen Eighty-Four has shifted more than 30 million copies and shoots up Amazon’s bestseller list whenever the US does anything mildly undemocratic. Orwell was “a libertarian before the word had gained currency”, wrote Christopher Hitchens, who also credited him with coining the phrase “Cold War”. “The three great subjects of the 20th century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism,” said Hitchens – and Orwell got all three right.
What was he most right about?
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell bashed out his “wretched book” – 4,000 words a day, seven days a week – on the barren Scottish island of Jura in 1948, smoking his tuberculosis-scarred lungs into oblivion. “It’s a ghastly mess now,” he moaned to a friend, “a good idea ruined.” He died in 1950, aged 46, yet that ruined idea became his most influential work thanks to its omnipresent totalitarian, Big Brother; children who spy on their parents; telescreens in every home; three “superstates” locked in perpetual war; and the total destruction of culture. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” Orwell wrote – but he thought it could.
Are we living in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The pandemic has certainly put the author’s name on everyone’s lips. “In Orwellian Britain, lockdown is perpetual and sickness is health,” said Tim Stanley in the Telegraph back in June. If that was stretching it a bit, there’s undoubtedly something Orwellian about China. President Xi Jinping wants to construct an all-seeing digital system of social control, policed by algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time. Eight of the 10 most surveilled cities in the world are in China. But third on the list is London.
Was Orwell worried about China?
No. Big Brother, “black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm”, was a stand-in for Stalin. Orwell was no Americanophile, either. Convinced that capitalism was doomed, he could only imagine the US becoming some sort of totalitarian regime. In the Partisan Review in 1947, Orwell said he’d rather be bombed back to the Bronze Age than live in a stalemate between the two atrophying atomic states. But it was the horrors of communism that really kept him up at night. “Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences,” he wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Wasn’t Orwell a bit of a leftie himself?
Orwell hated class – he was born Eric Blair in British India in 1903, then won scholarships to two English boarding schools, St Cyprian’s and Eton. But little Eric hated being posh, slacked off at Eton and joined the imperial police in Burma rather than applying for university. He used his pen name largely to graft a new identity, wore the same beaten-up tweed jacket and vaguely French moustache, and kept a goat in his backyard. He even spent four years living as a tramp to churn out his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London – then went to war. He spent the first half of 1937 fighting with the loyalists in Spain, was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper, then witnessed the brutal communist purges of the other revolutionary parties in the Republican alliance.
What would he have made of today’s discourse?
He would not have been impressed, says the American commentator Andrew Sullivan. One of Orwell’s mantras was: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful.” He’d have hated phrases such as “systemic racism”, “racial inequity”, “lived experience” and “heteronormativity”. He argued for originality, simplicity, brevity, active verbs, everyday language and “decency” – as opposed to repetition, complexity, length and endless jargon. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details”.
So was Orwell a regular Nostradamus?
He didn’t get everything right, says novelist Robert Harris. He was wrong, for example, about religion. “What makes your version [of the future] spurious to me is the disappearance of the church,” Evelyn Waugh wrote to him after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in July 1948. Waugh considered religion “inextinguishable”. Certainly, the idea that oil supplies might be threatened by fundamentalist Islam “lies far outside the materialist logic” of the novel, says Harris.
Did he miss anything else?
More than governments, it’s the overreach of big companies that has changed the 21st century. Facebook and Google weren’t on Orwell’s radar (although he was way ahead of his time with the telescreen). Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, says: “Rather than an intimate Big Brother that uses murder and terror to possess each soul from the inside out, these digital networks are a Big Other: impersonal systems trained to monitor and shape our actions remotely, unimpeded by law.”
What was the year 1984 actually like?
Not so bad. Instead of Ingsoc Party members’ uniform blue overalls, we had leggings, jean jackets and parachute pants. Rather than the telescreen, we had the Apple Macintosh personal computer. The year’s biggest event was the Los Angeles Olympics (not, fortunately, the Party’s Hate Week). If pulpy novels were produced by machines in the Ministry of Truth, they lost out to The Hunt for Red October and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But Orwell urged us to practise “constant criticism”, warning that any “immunity” to totalitarianism must not be taken for granted. And now, more than 70 years later, his prophetic vision chills us to our jegging-clad, iPhone-toting bones.
The legacy of 9/11
The 9/11 attacks ushered in a new era of surveillance, says Jacob Siegel in UnHerd. Before 2001 the US government had tried to regulate the internet and protect users’ privacy. That came to an “abrupt end” when it began amassing vast amounts of data “to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists”. An age of “total information” had begun.
The “true heirs” to the government’s efforts are companies such as Google and Facebook, which lure people in with free services in order to extract their user data. As Shoshana Zuboff says in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity” – surveillance everywhere, all of the time.
]]>Macbeth may well be the most terrifying play in the English language, though it hasn’t always been seen that way. Traditional critics, while accepting that it is a thorough-going a study of evil, believe that in the end good prevails and that there is a providential restoration of “Order” – the order Macbeth has destroyed by killing Duncan, the ‘Holy King’. Modern critics take a darker view, seeing the end as more equivocal and the play as more
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What no one disagrees about is that our attention is fixed on Macbeth himself throughout. No Shakespearean tragedy gives so much attention to its hero. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, there is much less emphasis on the figures round the hero than there is in Hamlet or Othello. There is no sub-plot.
The story Shakespeare draws on comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Most of his recently preceding plays, including Hamlet, are set in highly evolved, sophisticated societies. Macbeth (like King Lear, written just before it) returns us to a historically primitive 11th century world. Take the famous 15 line opening scene where we meet the three Weird Sisters, witches who, in A.D. Nuttall’s phrase, “belong to a northern, Breugelesque world of cooking pots and greasy kitchen scraps”.
Their sinister line – “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” – is seen by many modern critics as summing up what they see as the play’s ‘view’: that there is no absolute difference between fair and foul, indeed that this is a world where there are no absolute values at all.
The witches predict Macbeth will become king. Macbeth, to ensure this comes about, then murders his predecessor, King Duncan, setting in motion a train of events which ends with his death and Malcolm accepting the throne.
Some argue that Shakespeare distorted Holinshed by depicting Duncan as old and holy and not as the weak, crafty figure who emerges from the Chronicles. The evidence points the other way. Shakespeare saw Duncan as just as crafty and weak as Holinshed did. Significantly, as we see at the start, he is the only monarch in Shakespeare not to lead his army into battle – he watches from the sidelines. And he moves very quickly after the battle to ensure that his son Malcolm is named as his successor – hardly the action of a saintly old king.
Macbeth raises disturbing questions about the nature of good and evil – suggesting that evil is the more powerful force of the two. It raises equally disturbing questions about free will. The witches predict Macbeth will become king. But is this a guide to what he should do or will it happen anyway? Macbeth seems to become, in one critic’s words, “a slave to the prophecy”, while the predictions made in the play seem to be both powerless to alter the course of events and yet to reflect faithfully a course of events which is unalterable. Macbeth, then, behaves both as if he has free will and as if he hasn’t. He draws the unnecessary conclusion from the witches’ prophecy that chance will not crown him king unless he takes action.
Crucially, we see everything through his own eyes. We witness his terrible degeneration. At the same time we see that he is the most sensitive and sympathetic character in the play (much more so than Duncan. Paradoxically, he is the only character in the play who speaks fondly of Duncan or seems to understand his virtues.)
We see through him as we see through a confidence trickster. But we also “see through” him in a different sense, seeing his world through his eyes, through his asides and soliloquies (in this play which is full of lonely talking) and through his tortured sense that “nothing is, but what is not”.
As Macbeth sinks deeper into sin, his wife goes the other way. The play shows them through two sharply contrasted arcs. When we first see Macbeth he is the saviour of Scotland but a nervous wreck. Yet after the murder he becomes steadily more ruthless. Lady Macbeth moves in the opposite direction. In one of Shakespeare’s very few portraits of marriage, she first fears that her husband is “too full of the milk of human kindness”, then becomes weaker, and more human, until finally dies (we assume by her own hand). And what really destroys her is not guilt or remorse over the murder but the sense of increasing estrangement within her marriage.
What’s often forgotten about Macbeth, but crucial to understanding the tragedy, is that the central figure is a Christian. It is this which makes his downfall so poignant. The world of Macbeth is a world of Christian beliefs even it if it is not, in a broader sense, a Christian world. It does not matter whether Shakespeare was a ‘believer’ in the conventional sense, as the critic Wilbur Sanders has noted. What matters is that the play is “fed at its sources by the ethics of Jesus”. Macbeth’s words in his final soliloquy are the words of a bitter, disappointed man who has been driven mad by his actions and who has killed the best part of himself. As a Christian, he cannot, in other words, both grasp the true nature of what he has done and go on living amicably with himself. His despairing words, many feel, reflect the mood of the play:
Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
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From the moment it premiered on American TV earlier this year, people have been drawing a parallel between the events depicted in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and Donald Trump’s presidency. In Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel, America has been taken over by an autocratic, Christian fundamentalist regime, called Gilead, which hides its violent, repressive violations behind soft rhetoric about ‘a return to traditional values’. For a number of commentators, it has an eerie resonance. As Sam Wollaston wrote in his review of the first episode for the Guardian on Monday, ‘[t]here has been a lot of talk about new resonance for The Handmaid’s Tale since the election of You Know Who; fear of freedoms, rights and long-established orders disappearing overnight.’
Women are Gilead’s chief victims: as a result of plummeting fertility rates, they are valued (or not) only for their child-bearing capabilities. Those lucky few who remain fertile – whom Gilead calls ‘Handmaids’, a Biblical reference – are kept in isolation, forced to wear veils around their faces so that they have no peripheral vision, are no longer allowed to read or write, and are victims of ritualistic state-sanctioned rape.
June 5th 2017
From the moment it premiered on American TV earlier this year, people have been drawing a parallel between the events depicted in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and Donald Trump’s presidency. In Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel, America has been taken over by an autocratic, Christian fundamentalist regime, called Gilead, which hides its violent, repressive violations behind soft rhetoric about ‘a return to traditional values’. For a number of commentators, it has an eerie resonance. As Sam Wollaston wrote in his review of the first episode for the Guardian on Monday, ‘[t]here has been a lot of talk about new resonance for The Handmaid’s Tale since the election of You Know Who; fear of freedoms, rights and long-established orders disappearing overnight.’
Women are Gilead’s chief victims: as a result of plummeting fertility rates, they are valued (or not) only for their child-bearing capabilities. Those lucky few who remain fertile – whom Gilead calls ‘Handmaids’, a Biblical reference – are kept in isolation, forced to wear veils around their faces so that they have no peripheral vision, are no longer allowed to read or write, and are victims of ritualistic state-sanctioned rape. Those who are infertile are either stuck in joyless, enforced marriages – or killed. It may sound a million miles away from the present day reality of American life, but even Trump’s presidential opponent has delicately suggested that, with his election, we might have got a step closer. In a speech she gave earlier this month at a fundraising event for the sexual health charity Planned Parenthood (which fights for women’s sexual rights), Hilary Clinton said,
We come tonight to celebrate the last 100 years, the progress that so many generations have fought so hard for – and what a time it is to be holding this centennial. Just ask those who’ve been watching The Handmaid’s Tale, a book I read and was captivated by years ago. No I am not suggesting this dystopian future is around the corner, but this show has prompted important conversations about women’s rights and autonomy. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s rights are actually slowly stripped away. As one character says, ‘We didn’t look up from our phones until it was too late.’ It is not too late for us. But we have to encourage the millions of women and men who support Planned Parenthood’s mission to keep fighting. And to paraphrase Margaret Atwood, ‘We can never let them run us down.’
But how relevant is this story – written over 30 years ago – to the present day? The TV adaptation, which premiered on Channel Four earlier this week, certainly wants to make it feel contemporary. Most of it takes place in an implied future (though its antique décor, old-fashioned costumes and lack of electronic devices make it feel more like a distant past), but there are a number of flashbacks that take place unambiguously in the present day. There are references to things Margaret Atwood could not have imagined when she wrote the book: Tinder and Uber are both discussed; the morning after pill is presented as a contributing factor to infertility. The characters listen to contemporary pop music (SBTRKT’s ‘Wildfire’ can be heard prominently in the first episode). There are even lines of dialogue that wouldn’t have made any sense in 1985: one female character, recalling her past, tells the novel’s protagonist, Offred, ‘My wife and I had a son’. But same sex marriage has in fact only been legal across all states since 2015.
This is not a period drama, then: the film-makers have made the decision to update the material. But, aside from the occasional reordering of events and the odd extra-gruesome moment (an eye is gouged out in one scene in the first episode; I don’t remember that from the novel), they haven’t altered any of the details of Gilead itself; the series’ present is our present, but its future is 1985’s future.
You could argue that this is a misstep. One of the things that make the novel so remarkable is how deeply embedded in its historical moment the details of Gilead are. Absurd and far-fetched as it may seem, there is nothing about Gilead that doesn’t come from real life. As Keith A. Spencer noted in Salon, also on Monday, the novel was written partly as a response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, ‘in which a formerly secular, Westernized society was suddenly transformed into a patriarchal theocracy. Under the Ayatollah, women were legally obliged to wear the veil and were banned from many college majors…’ Likewise, Atwood got the idea for Gilead’s religious extremism from currents in American politics. The ‘New Right’ was on the rise – a political movement, preaching ‘a return to traditional values’, which sought to reverse the developments of gender equality: as God had decreed it, the New Right believed, the woman’s place was in the home. More than that – Atwood, as Spencer writes, ‘noted the presence of an American Catholic sect that called women “handmaids” and “threatened the handmaids according to the biblical verse I use in the book – sit down and shut up.”’ Or, as Wollaston reports, ‘[Atwood] wrote her dystopian novel in Berlin, in 1985. The wall was still up; on the other side was the eastern bloc and the Soviet Union, a powerful influence.’ Accordingly, a geographical feature of Gilead is a huge wall, from which the regime can hang the bodies of political prisoners it has executed, and beyond which the Handmaids are unable to pass. Other contemporary phenomena that very obviously influenced the novel include a societal anxiety about the decline of birth rates (which has since given way to an anxiety about over-population), and the battles of ‘second generation feminism’.
Do Gilead’s injustices and atrocities, so specific to 1985, really resonate in Trump’s America? After all, many of the criticisms of Trump’s domestic policy are centred around anxieties about race relations and nationalism, immigration policies, threats to LBGQT rights, healthcare, policing and financial inequality. Which isn’t, of course, to say that women’s rights aren’t an ever-present, pressing concern – particularly on the subjects of consent and reproduction. Nor is it to say that those other concerns were irrelevant in 1985 (race relations have never been irrelevant in America). But the matrix of political anxieties is a different one. So is this really the right way to tell a story about Trump’s America? If the film-makers saw fit to update the novel’s ‘normality’ – the time before Gilead – to encourage us to identify with it, shouldn’t they have updated the horror of Gilead, too? (The lack of electronic devices is a case in point: wouldn’t a surveillance state like Gilead in fact use such devices to spy on people?)
Well, maybe there’s another way of looking at it, apparent in the first episode’s striking opening minutes.
It’s the present day. A woman runs, panicked, through a forest with her daughter. She’s dressed in everyday clothes and wearing a backpack. The style of film-making is gritty: hand-held cameras right in close with the characters; fast editing; shifting perspectives. It’s disorienting. We’re running with her; we’re in the throes of the actions and can find no objective perspective. There’s a vivid sense of the materiality of the backpack, the clothes, but we don’t know what’s happening. It feels immediate, present: it’s here, now. The woman hides beneath a ridge with her daughter, we think she’s safe. Then a number of men with guns appear and take hold of her as she struggles and screams.
There’s an abrupt cut to a long, held shot whose stillness and clarity of composition are startling after all that frenzied, confusing movement. An old-fashioned room: the same woman, dressed in strange clothes, sits by a window in an eerie light. It looks like a painting. The camera closes in, slowly, and in a voice over Offred introduces herself. The recognisable, normal world in which we began has given away to this strange new world. But it’s this new world that appears solid, unchanging. The one we were in before was disorientating and unstable.
It’s the suddenness of the change that’s important. Because what The Handmaid’s Tale, ultimately, is how easily such sudden changes can happen. What we think of as normal, it wants to communicate, is precarious, fragile, precious. What one day may seem unthinkable can seem, the next, thinkable. The next, inevitable; the next, normal. One day you’re buying toothpaste and thinking about lunch; the next you’re starving in a concentration camp, with rotten teeth. One day you’re whatsapping your friends about 13 Reasons Why; the next you’re stuck in an enforced marriage to a militant extremist. The aesthetic shock of going from such a recognisable world to such an unrecognisable one – and the way the recognisable one seems to shatter like a pain of glass to reveal the latter behind it – makes us aware of how quickly what’s normal can change. As one of the Handmaids’ re-educators, Aunt Lydia, tells them: ‘Girls, I know this must seem very strange. But “ordinary” is just what you’re used to. This may not seem ordinary to you right now. But after a time, it will. This will become ordinary.’
The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t about any specific historical moment. It’s about the present, the ongoing present. The idea of the present. Margaret Atwood’s present as she wrote the book, my present as I write this, your present as you read it. The flashbacks in the TV series, with their abundance of contemporary detail, intensify that feeling of being-in-the-present that the strangeness of Gilead shatters. This can happen at any time, Atwood wants you to know. Which isn’t to say that she wants you to live in fear; she just wants you to cherish the freedoms you have.
If The Handmaid’s Tale is about Donald Trump, then it’s because it’s about the possibility of seismic change – of waking up one day and finding yourself in a new world order, with no way back to the old one. Whether Donald Trump’s presidency represents such a seismic change – well, that’s something that remains to be seen.
]]>Last year marked the 90th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. Yet back in the 1920s, few would have expected its appeal to last so long. On publication it met with a glut of hostile reviews, sold poorly, and by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, was practically forgotten. It was only at the end of the 1950s that a gradual build-up of enthusiasm finally secured Gatsby's place as a modern classic, widely anthologised and soon incorporated into American school curricula.
But why is it so good? Writer Maureen Corrigan attempts to explain it in her new book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures. After a lifetime teaching and thinking about the novel, her insight comes down to the paradox in its style and subject matter: seeming to be a glittering love story, it reads more like a hard-boiled detective thriller. In wrong-footing the reader as he does, Fitzgerald is able to “survey the rotten underbelly of the American dream” with unparalleled precision. “The Great Gatsby,” says Corrigan, “is an elegant trickster of a novel, spinning out all sorts of inspired and contradictory poetic patter about American identity and possibilities.” Gatbsy himself, in the words of an early admirer, is “extraordinarily American, like ice-cream soda with arsenic flavouring”. This was the secret of its appeal, and perhaps also the reason why the book took a few years to swallow.
While discussing Corrigan's book in The Washington Post, academic Steven Moore (and author of the colossal and on-going The Novel: An Alternative History) even found himself moved by her contention that The Great Gatsby is the true “great American novel”, in spite of its modest scale: “I used to think it was too short to qualify as the Great American Novel – for a country as big as America, surely that honor should go to a sprawling work like John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. or William Gaddis’s J R – but Corrigan almost convinces me that bigger is not necessarily better.”
Maureen Corrigan's So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures is published by Little, Brown.
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In a joint interview, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan discuss their writing in The Daily Telegraph. We all feel the pressure of time more these days, says Amis, “and for a very good reason. There’s been an acceleration in one event following the other in our modern world, and writing reflects that… the arrow of plot and development has to be much sharper than it used to be. The great wallowing baggy monster where you follow various digressions – that’s gone, too.”
Amis adds that as he grows older, reading the proofs of his last novel is “torment”: he wants to move on to the next.
“I don’t know if you had a period of this [he says to McEwan], but in the old days, in the Seventies and Eighties, if I had no date or arrangement in an evening, I would think that a bottle of wine and a five-hour read of me was the dream night.”
“Now it’s five bottles of wine and no read of you,” says McEwan.
Now “the thought of snuggling down to my early work (laughs) would horrify me,” says Amis, “especially as sitting on my shelves are not only all the books that I haven’t read, but all the books that I want to reread, by other writers.”
McEwan says he doesn’t read his own novels. “I don’t look because it just doesn’t interest me… Partly it’s because we’re required to be constantly explaining ourselves [to interviewers], which ultimately anaesthetises you against your own work.”
Discussing his latest book, The Children Act, on Radio 4, McEwan said he thinks most contemporary novels are too long. He prefers shorter ones which can be read in one sitting. “Very few really long novels earn their length. My fingers are always itching for a blue pencil [to edit them].”
Martin Amis and Ian McEwan discuss what inspired their latest respective novels The Zone of Interest and The Children Act:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11076975/Martin-Amis-and-Ian-McEwan-in-conversation.html
Wordsworth’s famous poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ is 200 years old this year. Writing in the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring traces its history. It arose, he says, out of a walk Wordsworth took with his sister, Dorothy, in April 1802. Dorothy recorded the trip in her own journal, and her perspective helps bring the scene to life. Arriving at a section of woods, she and her brother encountered a bank of flowers:
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.”
For Piepenbring, Dorothy's prose description of the scene outstrips the verse of her brother. The image of a “belt” of daffodils “about the breadth of a country turnpike road” gives a sense of rootedness that the poem, with its woolly clouds, lacks. On the other hand, as Piepengring acknowledges, it might just be that Dorothy's lesser known account of the scene feels fresher and more vibrant. Perhaps the poem is just too well-known.
Dan Piepenbring wrote about Wordsworth and Dorothy on the Paris Review blog on April 15th:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/15/still-golden-after-all-these-years/
To listen to Seamus Perry reading 'I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud', and talking about the poem for Connell Guides, click here.
What would happen to the villains of children’s literature nowadays if the Crown Prosecution Service were able to make the mud stick? The Times consulted the Ministry of Justice…
*J.K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort: 134 years in jail for crimes including genocide, murder, attempted murder, terrorism and child abuse.
*Mr McGregor, Beatrix Potter’s gardener and threat to Peter Rabbit: £6,000 fine for hunting rabbits without a licence.
*Fagin: 14 years for child slavery, 10 for grooming and six months for theft (not the gallows, as in Oliver Twist).
*Captain Hook: 69 years for piracy, incitement to violence, terrorism, theft, child abuse, animal cruelty and attempted murder.
Reported in The Times, Saturday February 1st 2014.
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Writing in the catalogue of the 2006 exhibition Searching for Shakespeare, Tarnya Cooper upheld the widespread assumption that the work was produced by a professional painter, but Duncan-Jones disputes this. Studying the notebooks of George Vertue, an art historian (1684-1756) who took a special interest in the portrait, she notes Vertue's own comments on the work: in two direct references to the painting, he puts it down as the work of “John Taylor”, a player and painter, before each time crossing out the words “and painter”, as if to reinforce the fact that the artist was not a professional.
It's quite logical that Vertue would have inferred that the “Jo” of “Jo: Taylor” stood for “John” – it was one of the most common names of 17th century England. But Duncan-Jones explores a new possibility – that it stood instead for the far less common “Joseph”. And, indeed, there was a Joseph Taylor who performed Shakespeare's plays, rising to prominence in 1610 as the likely successor to the great tragedian Richard Burbage. This Joseph Taylor – a player, not a professional painter – has been overlooked by scholars, but first appears listed in 1610 as a member of the Duke of York's men. Something of a prodigy, he was lauded in Jonson's 1614 play Bartholomew Fair: “I thinke, one Taylor, would goe neere to beat all this company, with one hand bound behind him.”
But if Joseph Taylor was the artist, when was the painting painted? Received wisdom has it that Shakespeare could barely have met Taylor before he retired to Stratford. “According to the earliest accounts of Shakespeare's life, these men had little time to meet, let alone to become close friends,” says Duncan-Jones. If Taylor was the artist, then Shakespeare must have remained in London after 1610. The widespread assumption that he moved back home is based on Nicholas Rowe's 1708 comments that Shakespeare “is said to have spent some years before his death at his native Stratford”. But Rowe himself never visited Stratford and, living “before the age of thorough archival research – sent many subsequent biographers along a purely speculative track”.
Building on an array of modern scholarly work, Duncan-Jones notes that “we are now aware of documents testifying to Shakespeare's continued residence in London”: not least his acquisition in 1613 of a large house in Blackfriars. Latterly put down merely an investment purchase, it now seems likely that Shakespeare did in fact live in the house, and didn't return to his home town until shortly before his death in 1616. The Tempest enjoyed huge success in the 1613-14 season, so that “this was hardly a moment at which Shakespeare would have chosen to rusticate himself to Stratford”, while “almost illegible” diary entries by his friend Thomas Greene “indicate both that Shakespeare was resident in London, and that he was largely indifferent to local affairs in Stratford.” If Jo: Taylor is read as Joseph Taylor, his painting suddenly becomes a crucial piece of evidence. The inevitable conclusion is that the Chandos portrait was made “somewhere between 1610 and 1615”, and is therefore testimony to a complete re-reading of the Bard's later years.
Treasure Island Map
In his book Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi argues that the relationship between literature and map-making has been unfairly overlooked, and that it may offer scholars a new lens for literary analysis.
Writers, Turchi argues, often rely on imagined landscapes to inspire their narratives. Robert Louis Stephenson's 1881 invention of Treasure Island, for instance, was predated by a painting he drafted of the imaginary locale. It was only after a long contemplation of the image that the author decided to begin work on his famous novel.
The appearance of a printed map in a book can have a similarly important influence on the way we read. In the 1940s, J.R.R. Tolkien commissioned a government cartographer to produce a map of his “Middle Earth”. Pauline Baynes, who had worked in the Ministry of Defence making maps during World War Two, produced a specimen of such high quality that Tolkien felt compelled to recommend her to a friend who had a similar project in mind. Soon afterwards, Baynes had also completed the famous maps of C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Both these maps have come to define reader’s experience of these fantastical worlds. Knowing that there is a diagram tucked inside the back cover, we look closely for place-names so that we can quickly line them up with the picture. Though we might have been fine without it, the map becomes a vital part of the imaginative process as soon as it is present.
Middle Earth Map
Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination is available from Trinity University Press
]]>Vladimir Nabokov is best known for Lolita, the novel that scandalised thousands of readers in the 1950s and 1960s. What is less well known, Mary Ellen Hannibal suggests in the journal Nautilus, is that Nabokov’s lifelong interest in butterflies had a strong influence both on the novelist in general and on his best-selling novel in particular.
Having fled Russia in1919, Nabokov studied zoology at Cambridge University and eventually settled in the United States. Lepidoptery (the study of butterflies and moths) was a constant source of comfort and enjoyment to him during his turbulent early life. He acknowledges this in his autobiography Speak, Memory, recalling that it was at the childhood home of Vyra, on the outskirts of St Petersburg, that he learnt the correct technique for netting the delicate insects, as well as the right methods for preserving and displaying them under glass.
Later, in the US, Nabokov's continued enthusiasm for butterflies prompted him to make long journeys with his wife Vera as his chauffeur (he never learnt to drive). This exposed him to the middle-American landscape of motels, diners and freeways, and lepidoptery was eventually translated into one of his protagonist Humbert Humbert's favourite activities in Lolita. Brian Boyd, the author of Nabokov's Butterflies (2000) believes that were it not for Nabokov’s interest in butterflies, America itself might never have appeared in such sharp focus in the author's work.
In her report, Mary Ellen Hannibal notes that it is only in the past few years that Nabokov's work in the field has been reappraised as a serious contribution to science – he published 18 papers on the subject – and not just the enthusiastic writings of a hobbyist. In the same way (largely in response to Boyd's book) butterflies are increasingly thought to have been a key motivation for his literary work, rather than merely an entertaining diversion. It was certainly a pursuit he pursued with passion: if he hadn't been forced to leave Russia, he once said, he might never have turned to fiction, but remained content with a net, a few glass cases, and his beloved insects.
Mary Ellen Hannibal's article 'Speak, Butterfly', appeared in Nautilus on December 19th, 2013
]]>According to The Independent article, 'The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 2, 1923-25, review' there are "6,000 or so of Ernest Hemingway's surviving letters, addressed to more than 1,900 recipients and running to nearly three million words" which would eventually fill at least 17 volumes.
Here are samples from three of those letters:
To F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I wonder what your idea of heaven would be— beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”
To a friend – on bullfighting: "It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It’s a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.”
To a friend – on learning to write: “God knows you’re in the most depressing and discouraging surroundings–but that’s what makes a writer. You have to catch hell. You’ve got to take punishment … Write a lot–but see a lot more. Keep your ears and eyes going and try all the time to get your conversations right.”
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Before “Mark Twain” he was “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”. And before “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” he was “Sieur Louis de Conte”, “John Snook” and even “Josh”. Samuel Clemens, America’s classic satirist, used a litany of pseudonyms before settling on the name we know him by today. In the latest issue of the Mark Twain Journal Kevin MacDonnell reveals how and when Samuel Clemens decided conclusively to adopt Mark Twain as his pen name.
Up until now there have been a number of competing theories about Clemens’s pseudonym. Most popular is the suggestion that the name derived from the riverboat call, “by the mark, twain”. Twain was an old-fashioned way of saying two, and the call referred to sounding a depth of two fathoms, which was just safe enough for a steamboat travelling down the Mississippi. The problem with this interpretation is that “twain” would have been an uncommon word choice on the Mississippi – MacDonnell’s research shows that Clemens’s own journals from his steamboat days use “mark two” instead of “mark twain”.
Another theory surfaced while the author was still alive. In 1873, The Nevada Sentinel reported that the name came from Clemens’s habit of spending his nights drinking at the Old Corner saloon in Virginia City, a bar that “always had an account with the balance against him” tallied in chalk marks on the wall. Clemens supposedly asked the barman to “mark twain” against his tab so often that the phrase became a nickname.
When Clemens stumbled across this interpretation in a newspaper he decided to settle the issue once and for all by responding in a letter, which reads: “‘Mark Twain’ was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune: he died in 1863 and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear.”
MacDonnell, however, argues that this response is only a symptom of Clemens’s notorious tendency to tell tall tales and stretch the truth. MacDonnell’s research led him to discover a sketch that uses the name in 1861, two years before Clemens says he adopted it. The magazine in question was the comedic journal Vanity Fair (unrelated to today’s Vanity Fair) – which Clemens later referred to as an early influence on his work. The sketch depicts a group of Charleston mariners who are “abolishing the use of the magnetic needle, because of its constancy to the north”. The characters involved are named “Mr. Pine Knott”, “Lee Scupper”, and “Mark Twain”.
The three names are nautical puns: the first for dense wood, the second for a drain and the third for shallow depth. Clemens took a liking to the latter, adapted it and invented the Captain Sellers story later in order to promote his burgeoning series of riverboat writings. Though MacDonnell’s theory may undercut Twain’s self-romanticisation, it reveals his cunning in developing an authorial brand. Of all Twain’s tall tales the history of his name may be the tallest.
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Flavorwire identifies famous books originally rejected by publishers. Here are four:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is one of the best-selling novels of all time, with over 50 million copies sold since its debut in 1955. When Nabokov was trying to publish it, many publishers worried they would be tried for obscenity. One editor told Nabokov: “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation… I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is one of the best-selling novels of all time, with over 50 million copies sold since its debut in 1955. When Nabokov was trying to publish it, many publishers worried they would be tried for obscenity. One editor told Nabokov: “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation… I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”
The Ginger Man by James Patrick Donleavy
Donleavy’s first novel was considered so risqué that he was rejected by over 35 publishers before Olympia Press finally agreed to publish it in 1955. Olympia, though, decided to publish the novel as part of a pornographic line of books. The author ended his agreement with the company, but was sued when he published a less offensive version of the book with another publisher. The novel has since sold over 45 million copies and has never gone out of print.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s diary is one of the best-known holocaust stories, and her book has sold 30 million copies around the world. Surprisingly, the tale wasn’t popular with publishers and was rejected 16 times. One publisher even noted the story was barely worth reading because “the girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level”.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm was rejected four times before going on to sell 20 million copies. The main problem Orwell faced was that his book criticised communism while Russia was allied with Britain during World War Two. T.S. Eliot wrote Orwell a rejection letter himself, explaining: “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the current time.” It wasn’t until a few months after the war ended that Orwell was able to secure a publisher for the story.
Here is an extract taken from our latest eBook release: The Connell Short to Henrik
Ibsen's A Doll's House written by academic Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr.
Here is an extract taken from our latest eBook release: The Connell Short to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (now in print format) written by academic Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr.
MYTH 1: Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury saw a production of Ghosts as part of her Jubilee celebrations in 1897. It is simply unfathomable that this ever could have happened: why on earth would they go to see a play that had been refused a license by Her Majesty’s government’s own official censor, the Lord Chamberlain? It would be utterly inexplicable. And that is exactly why George Bernard Shaw thought it up – such a deliciously improbable event, so irresistible to imagine, presented in an 1897 article as if it were true.
Henrik Ibsen by Gustav Borgen
This bit of Shavian mischief was then incorrectly rendered as fact by Michael Egan in his book Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, a book that is one of the first sources anyone interested in Ibsen turns to. Tore Rem in a recent book on Ibsen (Henry Gibson) corrects the error but it lingers on, a booby-trap for new generations of Ibsen scholars and readers. It is important to correct this “factoid” because it gives a completely false sense of acceptance of Ibsen in England at a time when in fact his plays were still controversial and apt to shock – especially Ghosts, which was not granted a license until 1910.
MYTH 2: Ibsen is only interested in domestic drama. Despite his reputation as a domestic dramatist, Ibsen is not exclusively interested in interiors. Though many of his plays are domestic dramas – A Doll’s House is set entirely inside one house, for example – many of them are strikingly aware of nature and bring it on stage, whether literally or metaphorically. Ghosts, for instance, asks for a huge picture window showing the scene outside: endless rain and a gloomy view of the fjord.
Avalanches occur in three of Ibsen’s plays, and in Peer Gynt the lovely Solveig pursues Peer on skis, an entrance as memorable as that of the vibrant Hilde Wangel hiking onto the stage in her mountain-walking costume and walking stick in The Master Builder. The mermaid-like Ellida in The Lady from the Sea enters dripping wet from swimming in the fjord. Water, snow, mountains, the elements: nature is everywhere, and deeply influences Ibsen’s characters. He was a pioneer in using drama to explore and stage how environment works on character.
1917's adaptation of A Doll's House
MYTH 4: Ibsen is old-fashioned and boring. For many decades of the 20th century there was a mistaken sense of Ibsen being “a fuddy-duddy old realist,” as Toril Moi puts it in her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. This says a lot about the shortness of memory, because at the time (the late 19th century), realism in drama was revolutionary, and naturalism even more so. As Moi argues, Ibsen’s realism and naturalism have been misunderstood and have led to the assumption that he was only the precursor of modernism and not one of its foremost examples. In the theatre, realism and naturalism were key parts of modernism, not merely forerunners to it, and Moi shows how integral these developments were to what became known as Modernism, particularly in the plays Ibsen wrote from 1880 onwards.
The quintessential modernist, James Joyce, so revered Ibsen that he wrote his first substantial article on the playwright (a review of When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen’s final play) and, more importantly, tried to emulate Ibsen’s work in his own play, Exiles, written around 1915. Other modernist writers lauded Ibsen’s work precisely for its mining of the psychological subconscious, rather than for his realist depictions of bourgeois life; the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke admired Ibsen’s “ever more desperate search for visible correlations of the inwardly seen”, while the Belgian Symbolist dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck sought to emulate what he dubbed Ibsen’s “dialogue of the second degree”, or the implied text beneath the spoken words.
Last year, in the controversial short story "Lovely Dark Sleep" by Joyce Carol Oates, the poet Robert Frost made an appearance as a conceited, egotistical figure. This image of the poet has been widespread since his authorised biography, written by Lawrance Thompson and published while Frost was still alive. But the impending publication of his collected letters looks set to put paid to a misconception. The collection promises to "offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date", as Jennifer Schuessler puts it in the New York Times – uncovering a softer side to the poet and revealing Oates's presentation to be inaccurate and mean-spirited.
Frost, who died in 1963, is most famous for "The Road Not Taken", a poem exemplifying his knack for epigrammatic turns of phrase ("I took the one less traveled by"), and preference for straightforward structure. The technique led to immense popular success. Frost was certainly confident in his own abilities: in 1913 he wrote to one correspondent that "To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the master craftsmen of my time". But, as Clive James insists in the pages of the current edition of Prospect, he was not conceited. His London acquaintance Ezra Pound, armed with "infinite intellectual arrogance" of his own, highlights Frost's comparative humility: though the two ultimately fell out, Frost still felt able to describe his one-time champion as "the most generous of mortals".
James calls Lawrance Thompson's biography of Frost "dud scholarship". It is "relentlessly hostile" to its subject, he says. The popular image of Frost has been perpetuated by journalists, for whom it made "easy copy", creating a lasting image of the simple poet as “a manipulator without conscience". Both James and Schuessler argue that with the publication of the collected correspondence, this image looks set to be dramatically overturned.
Jennifer Schuessler's article appeared on February 4th, in the New York Times
]]>W.H. Auden was brusque, insular and severe. In his passport, he had his profession stated as “architect” because he thought that writers weren't taken seriously enough. But his literary executor Edward Mendelson argues that the poet's rough exterior was balanced by a “secret life” of humbleness and generosity.
]]>W.H. Auden was brusque, insular and severe. In his passport, he had his profession stated as “architect” because he thought that writers weren't taken seriously enough. But his literary executor Edward Mendelson argues that the poet's rough exterior was balanced by a “secret life” of humbleness and generosity.
Lifting the lid on a wealth of good deeds discovered “mostly by chance”, Mendelson illuminates a previously obscured munificence: money given to homeless shelters; advice offered to aspiring writers; even a story from a Canadian prison inmate who, having once written to the poet, “had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature”.
With his discoveries of Auden’s compassionate deeds in mind, Mendelson calls for a re-evaluation of Auden's work, paying more attention to his emphasis on human fallibility. One of the themes Mendelson points to Auden's concern “the banality of evil” (as Hannah Arendt called it), evident in his 1939 poem, “Herman Melville”:
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
The power of these lines is in their directness, and Auden's special skill was in broaching collective concerns through an intensely personal mode of address. “He might have thousands of individual readers, but he wrote as if speaking to one,” says Mendelson. Take Auden’s late poem “The Cave of Making”, which was written in his rural Austrian retreat:
More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
Amid all Auden’s gloom is a fierce egalitarianism, thinks Mendelson, for “a writer who addresses an individual reader presents himself as someone expert in his métier but in every other way equal with his reader, having no moral authority or special insight on anything beyond his art”. Such humility is at the core of Auden's work, and his secret benevolent acts seem only to underline it.
]]>When Twitter came up with the concept of ‘Vine’ videos, the world seemed to realise that its attention span had shrunk to 6 seconds. Writing in The Telegraph, Hannah Furness responds to the claim that literature must similarly “grab readers by the throat”, selecting the finest examples of novels whose opening lines do just that. Here are some of the best:
- “It was a quiet, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963
- “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - George Orwell, 1984, 1949
- “All children, except one, grow up.” - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 1911
- “Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.” - Albert Camus, The Outsider, 1946
- “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
Hannah Furness' article appeared in The Telegraph, March 10th.
“What passing bells for those who die as cattle?” The poetry of those who fought in the trenches of World War One has now been a vital part of our literary heritage for a century. Wilfred Owen's ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’ is among the most famous examples, with its powerful evocation of senseless suffering. And as with his bitterly ironic re-statement that “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori”, it is brimming with a profoundly subversive, anti-heroic sentiment.
It is an uneven poem, says the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. “The octave is full of sharp consonantal blows and images of violent chaos, and the sestet softens into a liquid gentleness – skilfully done, but at the cost of a slightly cloying romanticism. (“The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall,/Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds.”) Yet the stark opening is justly thought of as one of the iconic statements of the war.”
Since Homer, writers have been recounting the horrors of battle. But the First World War, when the mechanisation of weaponry made individual acts of heroism “virtually meaningless”, gave rise to a radically new sense of futility in the face of a “production line of technologically crafted killing”, says Williams, reviewing a new biography of Owen in the New Statesman. The early, poetic realisation of the war's inhumanity has been largely overlooked in the run-up to its centenary commemoration – as if such an anti-heroic reading only began with Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder. In reality, writes Williams, “the rot set in with the eyewitnesses” – above all the poets, including Geoffrey Stewart-Kennedy, Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones.
Williams draws attention to Owen's conception of the poetic sensibility as “childish”, highlighting the poems addressed to Arthur Newbolt – a boy befriended at Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital – which celebrate the innocent state of being “not yet young”. For Owen, the experience of the trenches transformed men into helpless children “confronted with unmanageable adult trauma and not turning away from it”. Indeed, keeping in mind that many of 1914-1918 casualties were barely out of childhood themselves should be an important part of our collective attempts at commemoration.
Rowan Williams wrote about Wilfred Owen in the New Statesman, dated 27th Feburary. A new biography of Owen, by Guy Cuthbertson, is published by Yale University Press.
]]>Can pessimistic novelists change the way they write? Thomas Hardy was one whose work seems to say "no". Shortly before starting work on The Return of the Native, Hardy wrote down in his notebook a quote from the poet-critic Theodore Watts:
“Science tells us that, in the struggle for life, the surviving organism is not necessarily that which is absolutely the best in an ideal sense, though it must be that which is most in harmony with surrounding conditions.”
Hardy lived according to these ideas. He himself was a committed atheist, and yet he persisted in attending church his entire life. His marriage was widely regarded as a failure, but he made no moves for a divorce. And from 1878 onwards (when The Return of the Native was published) his work reflects this stalemate: most of the ‘best’ characters in his novels meet unpleasant ends – largely because they are unable to break out of social conventions, financial woe or other difficulties.
The British novelist Tim Parks, writing in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books, argues that while great writers can change their outlook, most don’t. Hardy's struggles, says Parks, are clear evidence that “Most of our finest narratives, films as well as novels, however formally innovative and politically anti-establishment, are actually conservative, even inhibiting, in their consequences and implications”.
To read the Connell Guides to Thomas Hardy's Far from the madding crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles click on the books below!
]]>In recent years, several studies have examined the links between literature and science, a relationship known as “consilience”. Most prominent of these is Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist, which quickly became a bestseller after its release in 2012.
More recently, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's argues in Jane Austen, Game Theorist, that “game theory” – the “scientific” study of how individuals make choices in their dealings with one another – became popular in the 1950s and was frequently employed by Cold War strategists in the United States. Chwe, a professor of political science, insists that Jane Austen was an unwitting practitioner of Game Theory, particularly in her notion of “cluelessness”, which is otherwise explained as a temporary inability to think strategically.
In The New Republic, William Deresiewicz argues that in describing a world “in which young ladies have to navigate their perilous way to happiness”, Austen could indeed be seen as having anticipated the game theorists. “She did depict strategic thinking in everyday social situations with a new depth, a new detail, and a number of new techniques – literary techniques, such as free indirect discourse…” But, contrary to what Chwe seems to think, she was hardly the first in the field. As “even Chwe acknowledges”, literature has been “exploring the mind, and strategic thinking in particular, as long as it has existed”. Take The Odyssey, the story of a master strategist, or the schemers who scheme their way through Shakespeare’s plays.
Besides, and also contrary to what Chwe suggests, Austen’s concept of human motivation went way beyond any simple programmatic theory. She did not believe that people “think only strategically”. People, she knew, often act “out of habit or instinct or sudden emotion”; human behaviour is mysterious and often defies rational explanation. Indeed fiction like Austen’s “puts back everything the social sciences – by way of methodical simplification, or disciplinary ideology, or just plain foolishness – take out”. That’s why great literature responds to every fancy theory you throw at it. “Shakespeare was a game theorist, too – and a neuro-scientist, and a political scientist, and a Freudian, and a Marxist, and a Lancanian, and a Foucauldian, and all the –ists and –ians that we haven’t yet devised.”
No scientific theory can explain art. Science addresses external reality; art addresses our experience of the world. It “tells us what reality feels like”. That’s why Lehrer and Chwe are talking nonsense. But then, says Deresiewicz, quoting H.L. Mencken: “There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.”
In a visit to Princeton University Library, William Giraldi recently discovered Herman Melville’s copy of Paradise Lost. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations and Xs reveal something of an obsession with Milton’s greatest work, an obsession that came to define the writing – and rewriting – of Moby Dick.
In 1849 the manuscript for Moby Dick, which would be published less than two years later, was already longer than any of Melville's previous writings, but those familiar with the end product would have found themselves all at sea with this early draft. Captain Ahab, one of the great tragic heroes of American literature and Melville's best known creation, had yet to appear in the encyclopedic account of a whaler’s life, centered around the young sailor Ishmael.
It wasn’t until Melville had immersed himself in Paradise Lost that his work began to deviate from detailed descriptions of whaling to incorporate the story of an obsessive, vengeful captain, driven to hunt down the whale that had sunk his ship and bitten off his leg. Melville’s story drew on several contemporary accounts of aggressive sperm whales – along with the alleged killing of a real whale known as Mocha Dick – but any reader of Paradise Lost will also recognise Milton’s Satan in the forceful character traits of Captain Ahab. Both Satan and Ahab, defined by their pride and their obsession, their manic grandiloquence and epic resentment, retain the reader’s sympathy in spite of their madness.
Captain Ahab himself points out his parallels to the devil, telling his shipmates that that he is as “proud as Lucifer” and “damned in the midst of Paradise”. And in the pitches of his crazed speechmaking one can also detect the lyrical influence of Milton’s poetics: “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.”
It was on the image of Satan that Melville modeled Ahab’s tragic heroism – his solipsism, resentment and crazed determination to succeed. Without Milton’s Satan, Ahab would have had no leg to stand on.
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]]>A well-turned epithet often blinds to the truth, and nowhere is this more the case than in the writing of Oscar Wilde. His latter-day repudiation of journalism as “the adversary of the artist” has largely led his readers to forget that his own breakthrough came on the back of a newspaper article.
While studying at Oxford, Wilde famously declared:
“I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.”
But although his first foray into the literary world – a small book of poems released in 1881 – yielded reasonable sales, it was not only condemned as mediocre by the critics but also deemed plagiaristic by the Oxford Union.
For six long years he retreated into commercial journalism. Deliverance only came with the immense public success of a long article, “The Philosophy of Dress”, which has been recently rediscovered and republished in John Cooper’sOscar Wilde on Dress. In one fell swoop Wilde’s world was transformed: offers of commissions, lectures tours and the editorship of the magazine Woman’s World followed the printing of the article – all of which gave him the assured audience and financial security that underlay his literary development.
Wilde’s theme is somewhat surprising: an impulse to reform Victorian dress, which, with its insistence on the corset, was found by many of his contemporaries to be unhealthy and sexually objectifying. Wilde, being Wilde, added a further criticism – it was far too ugly:
“A well-made dress is a simple dress that hangs from the shoulders, that takes its shape from the figure and its folds from the movements of the girl who wears it… A badly made dress is an elaborate structure of heterogeneous materials... ultimately so covered with frills and bows and flounces as to become execrable to look at, expensive to pay for, and absolutely useless to wear.”
The article is written with the characteristic combination of wit and sweeping social criticism that would make Wilde’s theatre so popular, and includes the first printing of his aphorism:
“Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!”
After Wilde had developed a new source of income by writing for the theatre, he turned his back on journalism forever – aside from a few choice epithets that illustrate his contempt for his days as a reporter: “In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press.”
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