By Jonathan Holt, a London-based writer and editor.
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The world is full of them now. But I wonder: do images like this one remind us of our fears or only desensitize us toward them? Or does that miss the point entirely: they're there to sell more sweaters?
'Bloody George Bush', Marc Jacobs Women window, Bleeker Street,
New York, earlier this month
I read part of Finders Keepers, Seamus Heaney’s selected prose, for the MA workshop. It’s a heavy book that includes the poet’s speeches, essays and radio scripts. Wonderful stuff. All prose, but with the poet always standing behind the prose writer, ready to fashion something mythical or metaphorical with the extra set of hands.
I introduced the group discussion by reading a short paper (as requested; I don't go around with them in my satchel just waiting to be asked -- okay, maybe one or two), which, given its reception (how to know when you’ve missed the point of a session completely…), I may now conveniently lose from my hard-drive:
Our first glimpse of the poet at a young age has him lost in the pea-drills, weeping as he hears faint, familiar voices approaching. It could have happened to any child. But the way he describes it, the way others have described it over and over to him, elevates it to one man’s mythology of himself.From here, it’s just a hop, skip and ferny jump to the boy Seamus standing under a hollow tree imagining himself to be “a little Atlas shouldering it all.”
Essentially, illuminatingly, we’ve got a poet who has found his voice reflecting, in that voice, on how he found it. Or them. Because you could say that this book tells a life story in its author’s several voices (the ones he uses when addressing a literary crowd, for example, or a radio audience, or the readers of a local newspaper).
There are some lovely, candid vignettes showing us what it’s like to be a boy with an interest in words in a place where instead of picking up a book after a hard day’s work, the man of the house lies on the sofa rehearsing “the acres, roods and perches of arable and meadow land in a formal tone and with a certain enlargement of the spirit”. A place where any reader is unfavorably compared to a bachelor farmer cousin, where the reader, a boy, is asked to do a small ‘recitation’ when relatives visit.
Any North Carolinian knows this place. And so I’ve wondered, thinking back to the speech Seamus Heaney gave at my college graduation there 11 years ago, whether, standing there, he felt at all like the boy on the recitation box.
Certainly many present knew nothing of ‘Digging’ or the Nobel. Billy Graham shuffled to his seat on the platform with a “shake your booty, Billy” from somewhere in the sunlight and yellow chrysanthemums. But he was one of ours. For the white-haired foreigner who read us verse about the May Fair and Paradise Lost, and spoke of being “true to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge,” the response was more decorous, a truly Southern reception. I doubt, though the thought lingers, that’s why it didn’t make the book.
As seen on Hudson Street, New York City, last week.
I was about a third of the way through The Turn of the Screw last night when we reached Greenwich on the train. It’s required reading for my course. The prose has a velvety compulsion to it. It is Henry James, after all. But it’s an old-fashioned horror story and thus not really my thing. Besides, I’ve seen the opera.
Why do all old-fashioned horror stories have to include a governess, a large country house and a woman in black, I’d asked W. earlier, and he’d said that’s what makes them so much fun.
It was dark. We were pulling suitcases, and so we did not turn up the cobbled street that leads, ultimately, to too many steps. As we walked the long way around I became aware that we were not alone. A woman walked behind us, and, yes, she was dressed in black. Her shoes clomped like horses’ hooves. We crossed the street, and she did too. We veered right at the fire station, and she followed.
I was sure we would lose her as we turned onto the desolate, strangely winding street with the abandoned playground. She turned too. ‘The woman behind us reminds me of the book,’ I whispered to W. ‘The scary woman in black.’
He glanced back. ‘She’s wearing a black velvet dress,’ he said, ‘just like you’d expect.’ We were jointly spooked, and she was gaining on us. We scooted around the bend, and, glancing back, I got a pretty good look at her. Young, plain, real, exactly as the Master might have imagined her.
We got to the door, and – my keys, they were nowhere to be found. But neither, as I looked around, relieved, was she.
Glimpses of a hot autumn weekend in the Village, West and East. The bookshop is Three Lives on 10th Street. Go there and forget Barnes & Noble or Borders ever existed.
Jonathan Franzen is about to go out on a limb. Or so he says, and the hypothetical protrusion he has in mind is this: that maybe the leap of faith a writer takes while writing is not so different from the leap a reader takes, especially now that reading is as unfashionable as knickerbockers.
Now I’m putting words in the bestselling author’s mouth, but for the purposes of ironic appreciation, for which we have convened here virtually, they’ll do.
It is 10.30pm on the first night of the New Yorker Festival, and the floor is open to questions. Franzen has just read, with polish and panache, a new, unpublished story about a middle-aged couple whose professed lack of ambition is their bond and their undoing. Before that, the revered Ann Beattie read a story about a Halloween coincidence.
We could have left the Cedar Lake Studios after the ‘thank you’, walking silently into the enlightened night, and that would have done me. But it was a package deal, this event, and the Q&A is part of the package.
There are no stupid questions, we’re told in school, but that’s a lie. At an event like this there are only stupid questions. The best we can hope for is that some of the answers will be less than stupid, or that someone’s question will be so stupid that they get tasered and we all make the news.
As a young man leans into the mic to ask, ‘Was there a single piece of fiction that made you want to be a writer or that, you know, helped you when you were making that transition from not being a writer to being a writer?,’ I am struck with a sense of doom. Look around. Everyone in this room is either an aspiring writer or a longsuffering friend.
I’m getting an image. Wait, no, yes, it’s of the New York Times bestseller list, and it’s blank except for the numbers, because across the land people are too busy writing -- or thinking about writing -- to pick up anyone else’s book.
Right at this moment, thousands of people are clustered at other discrete Manhattan locations, at the feet of Martin Amis, Jeffrey Eugenides, A.M. Homes, Colm Toibin, pummeling them until, we hope, they crack and hand over the secret. How can I make it like you have?
Hesitantly answering the question, Jonathan Franzen says he remembers being enthralled by Flannery O’Conner, and especially by the suffering she did in order to write what she wrote. Eighteen people write down ‘O’Conner, F.’ in their notebooks. If I had my notebook I might scribble ‘Writing blindfolded, one dinner out a year (on his ann-i-ver-sary), self-styled legend?’ But I don’t. Besides, in this subfreezing air-conditioning the suffering of the writer’s life has become too much.
Time’s up. We saunter into the warm night. Two shiny black cars await, and not for us. They’re for the authors.
Image: window, creative agency, Hudson Street, Saturday.
Your imagination is a room. What kind of room is it? What’s in it? What’s not in it that you’d like to have in it?
Now, I’m not going to hit you with my response to every semi-cheesy exercise from the creative writing workshop (you probably already know what piece of furniture you are), so don’t even ask. But just this once, as you’ve been so kind:
I wasn’t surprised to find out that my imagination is an old lady’s living room, with fading magnolia paint on the walls (ugh) and an uneven floor covered in ancient linoleum that’s worn brown at the slope. Of course there’s a rinky-dink piano in there, and an old TV set with clumps of foil on the antennae.
What’s missing is the British Library, but who has room for books when you’re being squished in by the old lady, her dead brother and every member of your extended family who ever lived, all of them dressed for a wake? They’ve been so quiet in their anticipation? dread? hope? boredom? that I hadn’t even seen them here. And now I must dash. I’ve got some serious noise to make. (Out! Out!)
If you don’t have enough creative prompts in your own life – and really, who does? – you definitely need this. Alas, it’s too late to join the 5,000+ people who submitted their responses in hopes that they’d be published in Learning to Love You More, The Book. But there’s a launch party in Brooklyn on Saturday night. See you there?
To a remote corner of the Barbican complex last night for a preview of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the film adaptation of Blake Morrison’s memoir, starring Colin Firth as Blake and Jim Broadbent as the father. It opens in the UK on Friday.
‘Every movie you make is a series of deaths,’ the director, Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, Hilary and Jackie) said afterward, speaking about the frustrations of the filmmaking process. With some movies, watching them is too. And this is one of those movies, but only because such is the subject matter. A dying father, a son putting old angers to rest.
Proving Tucker’s point: scriptwriter David Nicholls seemed to experience a small death (posthumously to the project) - or I would have anyway - when someone in the audience commented with awe that a single line from Blake’s mother had defined her character masterfully. The line wasn’t his. It had been inserted at the insistence of the actress, Juliet Stevenson.
But from the viewer’s perspective the film showed none of the deaths that had gone into its making. A flawless cast, stunning, muted scenery. No pretensions, no cheap laughs, no overlabored scenes of the writer at his desk. An artful and economical use of mirrors and reflections – a technique borrowed, Tucker said, from Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, next to which on the shelf the DVD of this film could proudly stand.
And as writers with screen adaptations go, Blake Morrison, the real Blake Morrison, is a very lucky man.
(Full disclosure: he is also my tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London.)
The Global Village (Tell Tales vol 4)
With my short story, 'The Experiment of Life'
Common Ground: Around Britain in Thirty Writers
With my chapter on creativity in the City
