In response to Deckard. (Who he? Oh, never mind)

Someone (‘Deckard’) left a comment on this website on a previous post and this was going to be my response. However, it got a little long, so I thought I might post it here and direct Deckard to this entry instead of leaving my response in the comment section. That also means I shall have another blog entry under my belt. It might, perhaps, help if I preceded it with Deckard’s comment but what the hell. Here is a link to the page where he left his comment.

I’ll start off by being facetious: a bus time-table ‘starts nowhere and ends nowhere’ except that it’s sequence is linear and it starts ‘in the morning’ (birth) and ends ‘in the evening; (death). Isn’t that ‘just like life’? Actually, you’ll get as many definitions of ‘life’ as there are snake oil salesmen, ‘mystics’ and self-help gurus. At the end of the day all you can do is pay your money and make your choice. None is ‘true’, none is ‘false’.

You might have argued — but you didn’t — that ‘because life is unpredictable and we can’t know what fortune or misfortune it might bring, Hemingway championed stoicism in the light of that unpredictability: deal with what life throws at you and be true to yourself, you have no other choice’. Or something. But as I say you didn’t.

I worked for newspapers all my life, as a reporter for several years, then — most pertinently —as a sub-editor / copy editor (they are the same thing), and I am very familiar with that you can do with words and ‘meaning’, how you can subtly manipulate the reader, which, face it is essentially what ‘literature’ is all about, the one variable being the ‘why’ and for what purpose you might try to manipulate the reader.

As for ‘reducing the veil between literature and life’, there are as many reasons and motivations for trying to produce ‘literature’ as there are writers trying to do so, and even more if those writers have been drinking. (NB I get very irritated by all the snoots who lay down the law on what ‘is literature’ and what ‘isn’t literature’. If you’re interested on knowing why, read this.)

Joyce might have thought A Clean Well-lighted Place was masterly, but I don’t. It is simply a slight take on despair and loneliness and little more. And I have read enough, often quite off-the-wall, interpretations of Hemingway’s novels and stories now to treat a great many with more than a pinch of salt. You mention the ‘lost generation’. Well, this quote might interest you on that score. It is by Frank L. Ryan in his book The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway:

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

There’s this from Hemingway’s friend John Dos Passos (who he later lampooned in To Have And Have Not) who reviewed The Sun Also Rises for the New Masses and wrote:

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight . . . When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona . . . reminds you of a travel book . . . it’s time to hold an inquest.

Think about it: after just one (for its age) ‘shocking’ volume of ‘modernist’ short stories, the novel everyone had high hopes for was already creating second thoughts. Here’s what the Times Literary Supplement said about The Sun Also Rises at the time:

Now comes Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises] . . . more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different . . . The Spanish scenes give us something of the quality of Mr Hemingway’s earlier book, but they hardly qualify the general impression of an unsuccessful experiment.

There’s this from Time magazine:

A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young author Hemingway. His short work [In Our Time] bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately . . . Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables in . . . Paris. He has chosen to immortalise the semi-humorous love tragedy of an insatiable young English war widow and an unmanned US soldier . . . The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained, quite subtle . . . But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake’s favorites, and presumably, author Hemingway’s, too, ‘Oh, what the hell.’

Then there’s this from another Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar, Matthew Brucolli in Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success:

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’

That last observation from Brucolli is pertinent: the thinking became ‘this story/novel is good because it’s by Ernest Hemingway and because it’s good, Hemingway must be a good writer.

I have spent a great deal of time on a website I have called The Hemingway Enigma and you can find it here. I’m a firm believer in the subtlety of the world — at what point in a rainbow is it ‘more red than blue’? — but if I had to reduce my take on Hemingway to ‘a soundbite’, it would be this: he was a moderately talented writer, though limited in scope, who struck very lucky for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with him, and who came to believe his own bullshit. (Tip for younger folk reading this: don’t ever do that, it’s a real no-no).

In his book Fame Became Him, John Raeburn has analysed the ‘Letters’ Hemingway wrote for Esquire (for which he was paid bloody well, far more than other contributors) and demonstrates how Hemingway came to be accepted as an authority and expert in all kinds of areas — wine and find dining, sport, warfare, travelling, hunting and

fishing and so on — simply because he told people he was. It was that simple. He was even said to have had a literary reputation in Paris long before he had published a word: he was known as ‘a good writer’ because he said he was. Hemingway talked a very good game.

In fact he was said not really to be a very good shot (his dicky left eye didn’t help) and all his talk of ‘going to war in 1918’ boils down to four weeks with the Red Cross, three of which involved driving ambulances several miles behind the front. Oh, then there’s the claim that he was the youngest commissioned officer in Italy’s Arditi (their ‘shock troops’). There was a great deal of the Walter Mitty about Hemingway.

What, you ask, Hemingway the Nobel Laureate? Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? In short, yes. These things do happen: look up ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, ‘the Hitler Diaries’, ‘The Turin Shroud’ and many more, all very good examples of how we believe what we want to believe, often merely because that’s what our peers believe.

Oscar Wilde is reputed to have remarked about the passing of Nell Trent in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop:

‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears . . . of laughter.’

Something similar might be said about the ‘passionate’ love affair of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkly in A Farewell To Arms. Anyone who can seriously accept as even halfway real the adolescent coo-cooing between the two lovers and their eternal declarations of love for the other has not matured beyond his or her teenage years.

Henry and Barkly (who strikes you as not even escaping one dimension) talk of very little else in the nine to ten months they know each other. Not one conversation between them is recorded by Hemingway which might have come from anywhere but a trashy romantic novelette. A writer of genius? Up to a point, Lord Copper.

. . .

You mention the ‘masterly’ short story (in James Joyce's opinion, though not mine) A Clean, Well-lighted Place. Well, here is a story for you, a true story:

On Christmas Day 1973, I was working as a barman in public bar of The Galleon in Dock Street, Dundee (and I have no idea now why the pubs were open but they were). The pub had two other lounge bars, but they were empty. It was just me, the manager and a man of about 60 getting steadily drunker and talking about killing himself.

With nothing better to do, except every now than then to get him one more of what he was drinking every, I outlined to him why he shouldn’t bother topping himself and that, don’t worry, things will get better. In those days in Scotland bars shut at 10pm, so at 10pm we kicked him out and shut up.

Then on my way home up the Perth Road, through completely empty streets, I encountered another drunk. He was well away, steaming. He was wearing a flat cap and I took this off, stuck a £10 note inside it and put it back on his head. Why? Because 450 odd miles away from my family, I thought it would be nice to give a least someone a present, and it tickled me pink to imagine his astonishment the following day, or the day after that, or the day after that to discover that £10 in his cap.

He would, not doubt, believe it ‘a miracle’. I knew and know better (and that £10 would now be worth just under £100 ($126) today). He, too, might, like you, suggest that ‘life is absurd’. Actually, life ‘is’ merely what we choose to make of it at the time. It is no one fixed thing.

In the picture above, ‘X’ marks the spot where my good deed took place and I gave a Scottish drunk £10 for Christmas at about 11pm on December 25, 1973, as I made my way home. I can remember the occasion as though it took place just 48 years ago! It was just opposite the building where the Students’ Union then was (they have long had a spanking new one). I have reproduced the picture in B&W because this was another era and things were different then.

Two more stories (if you’re interested)

Today I posted two more stories in the Deadlines for Writers website, and you can read them if you are interested. One is called A Tense Relationship and the other Friday Lunch With Sam. 2 Both are very short because the word count — sticking to it is a feature of the site — was only 750.

If you have any comments — if, but, as usual, I’m not holding my breath — please make them.

As always what a reader thinks is ‘wrong’ with a story, where a reader thinks a story doesn’t work if far more helpful than ‘that was just fab! Utterly, brilliant!’ You can tell me that if you like, but I won’t believe you and will lose some respect for you into the bargain.

So, beware!

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What do Edward Gibbon, tomatoes and peanuts, paedophiles, Ernest Hemingway and bullshit have in common? Nothing. They just all feature in today’s 1,000 words (well, actually 1,499, but let’s not quibble, eh? It’s spring

One thing which puzzles me a little about writing fiction is the widespread use of the ‘first-person narrator’. I say ‘puzzled’, but it really doesn’t puzzle me as such. I see it more as technique many writers resort to (‘to which writers resort’ Ed) because, in a sense, it is ‘easier’. I know that because I have also adopted it in one or two of the comparatively few short stories I’ve written (as, of course, does Hemingway in his first two novels, which is pertinent to this entry).

For those of us with, to put it bluntly, the gift of the gab, that is those of us who can apparently bullshit at the drop of a hat, the ‘first-person narrator’ is a god-send. It becomes almost like day-dreaming, you get those day-dreams down on paper and your laughing. Well, I admit it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to get away from the ‘universal narrator who is all-seeing, all-knowing and a total pain in the butt, ‘first-person narration’ is the obvious way to go. But, as I say, I, at least, regard it as something of a cop-out.

As for ‘getting it all down on paper’, I should write ‘on paper’ as everything is now digitised. And the emergence of word-processing software is, for me at least, another god-send. I re-write a hell of a lot, and the prospect of writing, even a short short story, on a typewriter, then having to re-write it again and again as you revise it for however many times you want to do so to get it as you want is not a happy one.

Yet that’s what writers did until computers came along. In fact, take it back even further, to the late 18th and 19th centuries: writers wrote by hand and each subsequent draft was also handwritten. I suspect, though, that they weren’t too fussed either and all the scribbling must have been a pain (‘Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon’, the Duke of Gloucester, King George III’s brother, is said to have told the historian when he was presented with the latest volume of Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the writer, right).

I also suspect that, just as I believe the ‘writing’ pretty much always first takes place in the mind, those writers who had to write by hand spent a great deal more time actually thinking about what they were going to write. I mean you don’t want to get several thousand words down on paper, only to realise somewhere down the line you had fucked up (or, more politely, taken a wrong turn and written yourself into a corner).

Here might be a good point to mention Anthony Trollope’s novel Lady Anna. I haven’t read an extraordinary amount of Trollope, but I have read some, and it can be pleasant and entertaining reading. But Lady Anna was odd: it didn’t flow as it might (and as the prose I like should) and was oddly disjointed, even occasionally a little dull. A little later I discovered why that might have been: Trollope wrote the novel on board the ship on his long voyage to Australia to visit his son.

He was in the habit of writing, more or less strictly, 1,000 words every day, and once that had been done, he simply knocked off for, I suppose a glass of claret. Furthermore, he didn’t bother re-reading what he had previously read before getting down to that day’s 1,000 words, which might account not just for the oddly disjointed nature, but all manner of, often dull, repetition. Bet you didn’t know that, but to be fair, nor did I until I found out. But where was I? Oh, yes, ‘first-person narration’.

Perhaps I’m being more than a tad purist when I say that as far as I am concerned there should be ‘a reason’ why some bod is tell her or his story, and it would follow that reason would be an intricate part of the story. So, for example, in Lolita, the paedophile Humber Humbert has written a memoir by way of ‘explaining’ and possibly even trying to ‘justify’ what he did, including the usual bull from paedos that he was somehow ‘led on’ by Dolores Haze. After completing the memoir, Humbert dies of a heart attack and the memoir is then given up for publication by a psychologist.

Overall that makes sense. But what about, for example — chosen because I have read them comparatively recently, the ‘first-person narrators’ of Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms? Why exactly did Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry tell their stories? Well, I know why: because Hemingway is almost always writing about himself (he does seem to have been extraordinarily self-centred in the literal meaning of the word, as well as its usual meaning) and those to main characters were more or less proxies for him. I suggest a better writer would have gone the extra mile and given her or his first-person narration context, as Nabokov did in Lolita. It could be anything, bloody anything, but whatever is was would serve as a frame for the narrative voice.

Another point to make is the element of sequence in a first-person narration (which, as I point out) usually hang about in mid-air for not much of a good reason. Say I went to the local Chinese restaurant for a meal and halfway through a cook burst out from the kitchen fleeing another cook with a meat cleaver and trying to chop the first cook in half. I meet you the following day and tell you all about it (and by the way, the murder did not take place as the manager and his son managed to pin down the second cook, who immediately burst into tears. It seems he had just had news from back home in Shanghai that his father had been killed in a car crash and took exception to a dismissive remark the first cook made. Thought I might tell you in case you were getting worried).

‘Jim,’ I say (and you are Jim, obviously, although that most probably is not your name, but it will have to do for you as part of this example), ‘guess what happened last night! We saw a Chinese cook trying to kill his mate with a meat cleaver!’ I might then carry on and give more details, but by bit, filling in the story which you (Jim) has a nosey fucker want to get.

What I would not do is nab you and say: ‘Well, it was towards evening on a dull day when my partner, who is eight months pregnant, got it into her head that she wanted — no, needed! — a plate of sweet and sour pork. Naturally, I agreed that we shouldn’t just get a takeaway Chinese meal, but actually go for a sit-down as we hadn’t done so for a while. Well, as we were looking though the menu and considering whether to have starters . . .’ That is not going to happen. But that is pretty much always what happens in first-person narratives.

Here’s another good example where it works: Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. One point of the novel is that the narrator is ‘unreliable’ — very modern and even more modern as Ford was one of the first to do that kind of thing. And not only does he tell his story, he tells different versions of it and his mendacity is crucial to the novel. Thus the ‘first person narration’ works.

Thought I’d get that off my chest. And as, elsewhere, I have promised my self to write every day (to stay in the swing of it all) I have now done my duty:

To come: why peanuts really jack me off, masquerading as ‘nuts’. And no they are not ‘a legume’ — you read that recently didn’t you. They are, in fact, a fruit! And along those lines, tomatoes are not ‘a fruit’ as you also read in that ‘interesting’ piece in the Daily Mail/Readers Digest/the White Canyon Bugle/New York Times kiddies’s section or wherever else you get your ‘knowledge’: they are — hold on to your hats! — actually ‘a nut’. Bet you didn’t know that, either. And neither did I until I made it up just a few moments ago. Bullshit? You bet and then some!

PS Here’s another interesting ‘fact’: an astonishing 87 per cent of people who could be bothered to fill in the questionnaire, in fact, have a full 33 per cent less knowledge that they assumed. Stick that in your pipe!

For once, an entry more personal than usual

I had a horrific night from Sunday to Monday, acid reflux again, and I slept for about 40 minutes all night, in something like five-minute naps. If you’ve ever had it you know not just how painful but how irritating it can be: there is no way you can get comfortable. You lie down, you sit up, you lie on your right, then on your left and on and on. Was on God’s telephone all night, too, and as I hadn’t eaten much, I was soon just retching, retching, retching.

I think I know what caused it: sorting out the house and various other things I cleared out my dad’s wine cellar and took home a bottle of Gewürztraminer which I opened on Sunday afternoon for a barbecue at my daughter’s. Uncorking it, the cork broke and where it broke there was a lot of red disfigurement. The small remnant of the cork dropped into the wine, but I sniffed the wine and it did not seem off.

So I drank it, over the next four hours about three-quarters of the bottle. I must admit it wasn’t as pleasant as I expected a Gewürztraminer to be (and had been when I had previously had a glass or three). It had an oddly, out-of-character bland dimension to it. I did not, though, taste ‘off’.

The retching had made my chest really painful and what with also being super-tired, I stayed in bed, slept, read, slept and read a little more. And, to get to the point of this entry, I brooded (as one does when you are below par, which I most certainly was).

I have racked my brain for how I might improve things between myself and my wife. For a few weeks we got on well, in as far as the atmosphere was fine, mainly because I’d settled on a strict policy of keeping my mouth shut, not reacting and generally turning the other cheek. (I can be sarcastic, which doesn’t help, and I do have to watch my tongue. I read years ago that sarcasm can be a hurtful as physical violence. Something for you to ponder if you, too, tend to sarcasm.)

All that came to and end, however, while I was cleaning out the garage of the cottage I inherited, in which my daughter now lives. She and he husband need it to store stuff in and it was full of shite. (Getting there, by the way, will finish the job today, so I can get back to concluding this Hemingway bollocks, the irresolution of which has also been hanging over me.)

You see, my wife, has a tendency, a very marked tendency, to interfere, stick her oar in, insist you do things her way and other equally bloody awful traits. And I reacted. I couldn’t stop it. She also has to have the last word, though I long ago solved that one by deciding never to have the last word. It does put an end to the bickering but it can also irritate.

So there I was in bed, brooding, and wondering just how, how, how I might find some way to make peace, harmony and quiet the norm in this house rather than an occasional treat. And then I realised: I can’t. And the reason is my wife’s personality and character.

I realise that this will now come across as a neat, nasty and wholly unfair piece of character assassination, but that, honestly, is not what is intended. I have been wanting to write this entry, publicly, for many years but found I couldn’t. What I have found, though, is that articulating something, whether in speech or here in written word, can sometimes unlog a jam and, perhaps, that is what might happen now.

My wife’s family is strange. I suppose that might be said about every family, but if every family is strange, at least they are strange in greater or lesser ways. A little background might help.

My wife’s grandfather, Wesley after whom our son is named, grew up on the moor and only child. I know nothing about his parents or my wife’s grandmother. Wesley was a Methodist and a religious fanatic. I was told — and cannot verify this — that one day when after his son, Roy, my wife’s father was born, he believed he got a revelation from God instructing him to abstain from sex for the rest of his life. How his wife felt about God’s message I don’t know, but she died at 42.

At some point in the 1930s the farm where my wife grew up, another farm and two cottages (one of which I know live in) went up for sale for a comparatively low price. In fact, they were said to be a bargain. Wesley bought them and he, his wife and Roy moved down from the moor into the farm.

Wesley lived, it seems, for ever. I think he was 100 when he died about 15 years ago. After he retired he stayed on at the farm, I imagine as something of a brooding presence. That might seem on my part to be romantic speculation, but in fact it isn’t. His rapid Methodism was now really given rein, and he wrote letters to all and sundry denouncing people and their immoral behaviour.

The cottage in which I live is literally just a stone’s throw from the farm and a family called Saundery were living in it during the war. Just down the road, at Hengar Manor, was a large camp of American GIs and it seems Mrs Saundery liked to go down there and distribute here favours (whether for free or for money I don’t know). When Wesley found out — and nothing stays secret for long here in St Breward, a fact of life I deal with by not event trying to keep anything secret) — he evicted Mrs Saundery and her family. That can’t have been easy for them, especially during the war. Ruthless, was Wesley. And he did — forgive the cliche — rule the household with a rod of iron. No alcohol was allowed at all, worship and Sunday school for the children.

My sister-in-law, who also married into the family, tells me that when she went for Sunday lunch with the the family, there was complete silence. Not a word was spoken. And that silence has been adopted by my wife and other’s in the family. And boy is it disconcerting! She, too, has not got used to her husband (my wife’s brother) saying nothing for hours, sometimes days on end. And after 25 years of marriage I haven’t got used to it either. And nor do I!

I am sociable, gregarious, chatty, indiscreet, at meals at home we were always chatting, latterly as my older brother and I became teenagers about less trivial matters. And I miss conversation. When I visit my sister in Germany, it’s just the same: the company talks! And I find it exceedingly odd that people don’t. Well, in my wife’s case, I do believe the atmosphere in which she grew up shaped her character. But that’s all fine and well, but she isn’t just someone I am talking about, but the woman I share this house with. And I am fed up! That’s what I was brooding about.

I have long thought of moving out, especially now that neither of our children is dependent on me. It would be easy as I inherited my stepmother’s cottage (where my daughter is living for the moment — she lives there rent-free on the assumption that the money she and her husband are saving will go, they say that’s the plan, on buying their own home. I suspect it won’t be that simple, though, but I shan’t go into details here).

What is stopping me — I could always find somewhere nearby to rent — is that I don’t much like living on my own. I got very lonely in London in the early 1990s when I had just turned 40 and believe me that kind of loneliness can almost become physical. And it is well known that loneliness is widespread. 

The second reason is that if I moved out, my wife would be fucked: I pay all the bills, every last one. She doesn’t have a job as such and over the years worked for her younger brother on the farm and latterly for her sister-in-law in the B&B business. But she has fallen out with both of them, though I suspect more her brother than her sister-in-law. But then falling and and feuding with others in the family is common.

For many years about 15 years ago there was a terrible split down the middle (which I kept well out of), and in the proudest tradition of the Kremlin individuals — it was then her father and older brother — were erased from existence. I’m not easily shocked, but at the time my jaw dropped at how it all proceeded. Just how to you deal with that kind of mindset. I’m buggered if I know.

So there you have it. I think I’m obliged to admit that I’m no saint, but I can honestly say that sharp tongue and all, I get on — and far, far, far prefer getting on — with people than not. And as for being no saint, I doubt whether many grand faults would be laid at my door. Possibly they could, but off-hand I can’t think of any.

Right, now I shall publish this. It was going to go on my ‘secret’ blog, but what they hell, stand up and be honest. Other men and women might find themselves in my position and by proclaiming my problem maybe they will be helped a little with insight. And maybe they have some good advice to give me.

Pip, pip.

Later . . .

I was going to add something which occurred to me yesterday while ill in bed — well, sort of ‘ill’ in that I was recovering and catching up on a lost night’s sleep, but since then something else might offer itself to be mentioned. But first things first.

When I consider my own situation, I’m bound to be honest and admit that apart from being half of an appalling marriage, I’m perhaps luckier than many. When I hear, especially now in lockdown, of the situation some find themselves in, I do realise — cliche alert — that one must be thankful for small mercies.

OK, I’ve had two heart attacks, the first on May 2, 2006, and the second on November 15, 2018. But apart from that, I believe my health is better than not, and not many can say that.

That second heart attack, I suspect, might have been avoided had I not smoked so many cigars after that first heart attack. I kidded myself on, as we do, that ‘it’s safer than smoking cigarettes because I don’t inhale’. Well, no you don’t really inhale as such, not like you do with cigarettes, though simply by the way you smoke cigars (by the way I smoked cigars, not the passive tense), some smoke gets into your lungs.

More to the point, the nicotine in the cigar does get into your blood — through the membranes in your nose rather than your lungs — and nicotine thickens the blood, and otherwise your blood is saturated with carbon monoxide and your oxygen levels drop (writes Dr Eustace Knowall, physician to the stars, i.e. supplies them with prescription drugs and had only been struck off twice).

Apart from my health, I consider myself luckier than some in other ways. OK, you might want to live in a city — ‘He who is tired of London, is also tired of boring, self-important, self-regarding farts like Samuel Johnson’ — but I don’t. I grew up in the countryside for the first nine years of my life and far prefer it.

Yes, I know you can’t get your hair done in the next hour or so and Iranian delis are at a premium (the nearest to us here in St Breward, North Cornwall, is in Caen, and careful how you say that. OK, there are several in London, but frankly they are not as good).

Financially, I’m certainly not rich, but I get a generous state pension, the small house in Brum brings in a small, but useful sum, each month (when I’m not faced with, as over these past 18 months, having a new boiler fitted and then a whole new bathroom suite), and we manage — though as I pointed out above I pay all the bills, every last one — to live within that small income. Life is not expensive out here in the wilds of Cornwall away from the bright lights of Bodmin, Camelford and Wadebridge.

The thing is: I miss conversation and companionship, an essence of a good relationship. Boy, do I miss it! There’s a world of difference sitting out in the sun of an early evening sipping a glass of something and sitting out in the sun of an early evening sipping a glass of something with someone you like, respect, find interesting and can easily chat with and in whose company you relax, relax, relax. Boy, do I miss it. However, at this point I really am obliged to sound a good warning that — new cliche alert — the other man’s/woman’s grass is always greener.

That brings me on to the second point: I am most probably viewing the situation through my own sanctity. But am I really that great?

Well, obviously I don’t know. I can sincerely say that far more often than not I get on with people and with those who I might not much like, I still choose to be polite and diplomatic and hope they don’t cotton on that I think they are pretentious, dull fucks (or getting as close to that state as dammit).

Only others could and can give you a honest account of my character, faults, flaws, virtues and drawbacks, but as there’s is no one I can at present quickly put you in touch with, tough titties.

As for my wife, well, one thing I distinctly remember was the evening of February 20, 1996, a Tuesday. I, my brother-in-law Andrews the younger brother of above) and someone else, who I can’t offhand recall, were having a very quiet and very limited stag night at The Old Inn up the road.

In the pub, I bumped into one Jeff Hollister, who was already five sheets to the wind. Jeff, who lives just down the road, when told that the following morning I was marrying CF, merely said something along the lines of ‘bloody good luck with that’. I know what he meant.

One last time: I’m 71, 72 on November 21 — is there still a true love out there for me? Does that sound pathetic? Yes? Oh well.

PS to the previous entry: three very enjoyable pieces of music (though, perhaps, not to everyone’s taste) by Stockhausen, Schoenberg and Webern

In a previous post I spoke about ‘abstraction’ in music, painting and — possibly — writing. Just now, to make my point about how some of us, including me, ‘don’t like / understand music, but absolutely love the sound it makes’, I appened three videos of performances of music by Stockhausen, Schoenberg and Webern. Rather than go through what I previously wrote in summary form why not, dear reader, get your finger out and, if you are interested, read that entry here. Here are the three pieces again:

NB I was told a great anecdote about Stockhausen which might be apocryphal or it might be true. He was once rehearsing an orchestra in a new piece and informed one player he did not want him (or her) to come in with his/her part until he/she felt she was in communion with the music of the the universe.

 

‘But, Herr Stockhausen,’ the player asked, ‘how will I know when I'm in communion with the music of the the universe?’

‘I shall tell you,’ said Stockhausen. 

Here is a Stockhausen piece:

The Schoenberg:

And finally the Webern: 

PS Not quite ‘abstract’ but equally as engaging. Pressure point by Duncan Lamont (new to me, too, but there you go). Just looked him up: he died two years ago at the age of 87. You can find more about him here. If I were a better guitarist and formed a band, this is the kind of music I should like to play.

Here’s a favourite of mine, Kiss That Whispers, by Dave Fiuczinski’s Headless Torsos. I might have posted this before, but as Sam Goldwyn said ‘If the like it once, they’ll love it twice’.

I actually used it in a short video I made (with my then very unsophisticated mobile phone) at an student art exhibition I went to with a friend at which his son had work on display. Here it is:

:

More piccies to delight small minds (and large ones if you have one)

All these images are nothing put dicking around with Photoshop, manipulating snaps I took. I like them as I like a lot of abstract stuff, whether images or music, but they have no meaning at all. All they are is random images. You might like them in some way or not.

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So what might ‘abstract writing’ be (apart from, sadly, a little tedious the longer it went on)?

GIVEN that who was a modernist artist and what constituted a modernist work is these days unhelpfully vague, it is not an easy subject to talk about. In music and the plastic arts it might prove easier to distinguish ‘modernist’ art from what else was being produced at the time, but literature presents an additional problem: it deals with words, whether in prose or poetry.

Music — essentially a noise or, if you like, pure sound — and pigment — essentially a medium refracting light — are in themselves abstract and wholly without meaning. Whatever cultural, ritual, social, personal or emotional ‘meanings’ we attribute, for example, to a certain colour, that colour — that is the ‘light refracted through it at a certain wavelength’ — is in itself ‘meaningless’. The same is true of a note or a combination of notes — a noise or a combination of noises. It is nothing but ‘noise’ (or more genteelly ‘sound’). But words are a little different.

Words do have meaning (and leave aside, for a moment, the possibility that what you understand by a certain word is not quite what I understand by it, though often we might not know that). We use certain words because they have a certain meaning, and that makes communication, verbal and written, possible. But words have other attributes: they have a sound and they also have — well, it’s difficult to find just one word to describe it. All of the following carry elements of that somewhat elusive attribute: ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’.

For example, take the verb ‘to shrive’ or one of its various derivatives. I first came across it as a young boy reading Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur And His Knights of The Round Table and I have rarely, if ever, heard it used since, though a familiar derivation is ‘Shrove Tuesday’, the day before Ash Wednesday when in less heathen times (or better, from my point of view, the heathenism was of Roman Catholic and later Anglo Catholic variety) when believers souls were ‘shriven’ to be pure for Lent.

Were I to use the words ‘shrive’ or ‘shriven’ in everyday conversation or writing here in this blog, it would convey information quite apart from the sound of the word (whether heard or read) and its meaning.

Some of that information would be about me: the word is old-fashioned, not to say archaic, so why am I using it? Do I believe that in the context in which I am using it that it is the only possible word that could be used? Am I by using it simply some pretentious git trying to persuade you (the listener or reader) that I am ‘deep’, ‘well-read’ or ‘intellectual’?

Some of that information would be ‘external’: why is ‘shrive’ being used when a more modern alternative might be available? With its archaic overtones, it might also subtly influence the sentence in which it appears in some way or another. There are many possibilities, all of consequence over and above the sound of the word and its meaning.

Apart from what using the word might convey about the speaker or writer, there are the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ the word itself has: and these are, in fact, harder to define, so perhaps I should offer two other examples to try to elucidate those vaguer ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’.

How about ‘fealty’ and ‘loyalty’? Fealty might itself sound archaic, but it is in more common use these days than ‘to shrive’ (and using it would not necessarily make you sound like a pretentious git) but more to the point using it instead of loyalty might convey subtleties because of the varied ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of both words. I suggest that ‘fealty’, in a sense, goes over and above plain ‘loyalty’.

Loyalty might imply that under most circumstances I would offer my support to whoever or whatever I am ‘loyal’ but might, as moral being, hold back from doing something illegal or immoral. With ‘fealty’ there might be no such scruples and I would be fully prepared to demonstrate my ‘fealty’ if needs be. That’s the background, and to 

put it in context, I suggest that the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of both words help to convey more than they seem to in the following two, very similar, sentences:

His loyalty to the Conservative Party / Republicans was unquestionable

and

His fealty to the Conservative Party / Republicans was unquestionable.

Writing this, of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not those two words convey the same to you as to me (and thus whether my point stands or is pretty much nonsense).

But whether you do or not, it boils down to this: the fact that I might chose to use ‘fealty’ where ‘loyalty’ would seem to work perfectly well, implies that I don’t think ‘loyalty’ would work perfectly well and that ‘fealty’ carries ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ which convey better what I want to convey.

It is this facet or dimension of words, a facet or dimension over and above and apart from their ‘sound’ and ‘meaning’, which is another tool for writers (and one, I have to add, many writers don’t seem much to care for in that many seem simply to ignore it).

I feel ‘closer’ to music than the plastic arts, but I don’t believe ‘sound’ and ‘pigment’ (or whatever material an artist working in the plastic arts is using) has that facet or dimension. We often hear that a certain musical key or mode has a certain ‘quality’ (and artists might make similar claims about different colours, for example, that blue ‘is cold’), but I suggest that the ‘quality’ is not part of the essence of the sound we are hearing but simply our human perception of it.

That is not the case with words, though I have to admit that the use of ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ might fail if a listener or reader is not familiar with a word I am chosing to use specifically because of what I believe to be its ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’, Oh, well. You can’t win them all.

. . . 

The above began as part of what I am at the moment writing about Hemingway and his alleged ‘modernism’, but I switched it to this blog as it is something I wanted to write anyway. It occurred to me some time ago when I was wondering, for the umpteenth time, whether ’abstract writing’ is possible.

We have ‘abstract music’ and ‘abstract art’ and, on the face of it ‘abstract writing’ should also be possible. I have to admit that of course it is possible, but — well, I think it less likely than not to succeed, in the sense of ‘being interesting’, ‘being engaging’ or by whatever yardstick you want to judge ‘success’.

Oh, and you might also object, and not without reason or cause, that ‘achieving success’ or ‘succeeding’ is not the an appropriate measure for ‘art’. As usual, it comes down — very boringly, it has to be said — to definitions: surely simply achieving what you want to achieve when you create ‘art’ can be regarded as ‘a success’? But that aside, just what might a piece of ‘abstract writing’ consist of?

I suggest that the shorter the piece — in verse form or a short piece of prose — the greater chance it has of holder a reader or listener’s interest — that is, engaging them. But as the piece gets longer, I suspect that the prospects that readers or listeners are happy to sit through a ‘performance’ decline very fast.

The sound of words — as in ‘the music’ they might create — would be very helpful in ‘engaging’ listeners. This is most probably why verse is so attractive (when it is attractive): it is the ‘musicality’ of the piece of verse which might carry it even though we have no idea what it ‘means’ or what the writer is hoping to express (and it’s ‘musicality’ might well be one of the elements he hopes will engage a reader or listener).

Equally helpful in ‘engaging’ listeners would be the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of different words and their juxtaposition. I suppose in theory the ‘meanings’ of the words read or spoken might also be useful if their juxtaposition created some sort of pattern, though I’ll tell you now, I’m busking here, trying to give the idea of ‘abstract writing’ a sporting chance to exist.

And to be frank I can’t even persuade myself: I rather think readers and listeners would, despite themselves and their conscious expectations, be suckered into expecting eventually to have ‘an overall meaning’ to the piece revealed. But there is none — it’s abstract.

At this point I, who loves music of all kinds, must confess that I am forever unconvinced when some young Baltic or Persian or Scottish or Peruvian composer has a piece she or he has written performed and insists something along the lines of ‘it’s about the courtship by the ancient stone god of one of the water nymphs’ or ‘I’m examining the frugality of love and respect in a post-modern environment in which desire has become redundant’. Or some such (there’s a lot of it about).

Doesn’t do it for me. I’m firmly a man described by Sir Thomas Beecham who said ‘The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. That’s me, except that I do like music, and I really don’t care who knows. I can listen to what I’ve been told classical orchestra players often refer to as ‘squeaky gate music’ for hours and hours: I just love the sound and — for me at least — it is totally without meaning. Oh, and until I looked up the exact wording of the Beecham quote, I thought it began ‘The English don’t understand music . . .’ which would have suited me and my argument better. But there you go, you can’t have everything.

I think because for all of us words are so closely wedded to meaning of some kind, ‘abstract writing’ or rather attempting to create it faces an additional hurdle. I mean would you really want to read or listen to 80,000 words of gobbledegook however nice they sounded?

Right, that’s me shriven. And here are two pieces of music along the lines of the above, the first by Stockhausen more abstract than the other, the second by Schoenberg and finally a piece by Anton Webern. I have no idea what any of these pieces ‘mean’(as some might argue — me, I don’t think the ‘mean’ anything), but I do know I enjoy listening to them and others like them a great deal.

NB I was told a great anecdote about Stockhausen which might be apocryphal or it might be true. He was once rehearsing an orchestra in a new piece and informed one player he did not want him (or her) to come in with his/her part until he/she felt she was in communion with the music of the the universe.

 

‘But, Herr Stockhausen,’ the player asked, ‘how will I know when I'm in communion with the music of the the universe?’

‘I shall tell you,’ said Stockhausen. 

Here is a Stockhausen piece:

The Schoenberg:

And finally the Webern: 

PS And just because I like this style of drawing

A few piccies

A few more piccies, taken on a dog walk today, then dicked around with in Photoshop. The idea is to produce (I hope) interesting and attractive ‘images’ rather than true-to-life photos.

How do you get from ‘devil dogs’, the red tops and keeping in with Fleet Street news desks to EC president Ursula von der Leyen, her cock-ups, EU tardiness, Brexit and covid and the vaccines to a pointless, drunken spat I had with my sister? Er, I don’t know. So just read on. Once you’ve found out — if you find out — get in touch, ’cos I like to know myself

PS I had, as my next post, intended to post loads of semi-inarticulate images and pose the question ‘When is art art and when is it just a load of idiots quite possibly talking bollocks? A meditation’. Well, this latest post (which I bloody hope you’ll read, you ligging wasters) superseded it, so that will have to wait for another time. But you can view the images here.

Doing my ‘Hemingway: Wanker or not? You decide’ blog, I discovered ‘pages’, which is now proving useful as you can see those images on a dedicated page. The post and whatever related words I can think up to go with them will eventually appear.

I haven’t pontificated about the EU here for a while, so the time has come to rectify that appalling state of affairs. Like everyone else (and that means you, too, none of us is special), I can only judge what’s going on by what I’m able to pick up from the media, and all too often the coverage isn’t at all comprehensive because newsdesks follow their own agenda and we don’t even get half of what is happening. On that last point, let me explain a little.

Several years ago, there was a spate of attacks by Rottweilers on their owners and often on their owners’ young children, some of which ended in death. The first time it happened, it was, of course, very sad news and was reported nationwide. So ever-alert news agencies around Britain kept an eye out for similar attacks.

This was when the world was still in black and white and before the internet and email and ‘social media’ and all the rest and in those days, I believe, such news agencies would make a decent living. They scoured every last local paper, evenings and weeklies, scavenging it for any news they thought the nationals up in The Smoke thought would interest their readers.

Thus after that first attack, popping up pretty much every day for several weeks was a report of another attack by yet another ‘devil dog’ (as some astute Fleet Street sub-editor nicknamed the Rottweilers). In fact, thinking about it now, I don’t believe it was primarily Rottweilers who did most of the attacking, but some hybrid dog — a pit bull terrier? — bred specifically to be fierce, dangerous, ruthless, appeal to Nazi skinheads and look particularly menacing in a red-top photograph.

Over those few weeks, it seems, somehow, in the manner we saw in the film 101 Dalmatians, word had spread among the ‘dog community’ that it was time to attack, attack, attack, kill, kill, kill, and if you could get at a babe in arms being suckled by a young mother, so much the better. Then it all stopped.

It was as though the word out on the streets in dog land was ‘no more attacking, lads, no more killing’. Actually, what had happened was straightforward: after a couple of weeks of appalling, frightening, what is the world coming to, questions in Parliament, advice on Radio 2 ‘devil dog’ deaths, Fleet Street’s newsdesks decided — and

these guys are pros (in both senses) and really do know what they are doing — that Joe Public had had enough of those particular tragedies and was keen for some new kind of tragedy. So en masse the papers moved on to a new, sexier story.

You can be very sure that the incidence of deadly ‘devil dog’ attacks before that first deadly attack hit the headlines was by no means lower and suddenly shot up. And you can be surer that after all those ‘devil dogs’ had suddenly decided to call it a day for the incidence of such attacks did not fall.

It was just — well, newsdesks were no longer interested in ‘devil dog’ stories, so news agencies throughout the land no longer kept an eye out for them and didn’t bother trying to flog them. Thought you might like to know. So just because it’s not ‘in the papers/on the telly news’ doesn’t mean it’s not important or not happening. Might be an idea to get that clear.

. . . 

As I say, I can only write about what I read and hear (and, possibly, to which I might add my wise two ha’porth, though I shouldn’t bank on it); and as far as the EU is concerned, there are just two stories current. I’m sure there are more, but I’ve not heard much.

Those two stories are that the EU — apparently — has made a complete balls-up of trying to end the covid pandemic by getting everyone vaccinated. I say apparently, but it is far more likely not to have been the fault of ‘the EU, but of one Ursula von der Leyen and her style of leadership. And she’s a piece of bother, it seems.

As a minister in the German government, she was accused, though subsequently acquitted, of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. Though she was cleared — an investigation concluded that although just over 40% of the thesis had been plagiarised, there had been ‘no intention to deceive’ (and I can’t quite get my head around that last bit — von der Leyen couldn’t have been that attentive while writing her thesis if she didn’t realise she was copying someone else’s work). It’s not a particularly useful to have noted on your CV that you were accused of plagiarism but go off — people talk and, more to the point, your enemies make sure it is not forgotten.

The highest post she reached in the German government was a pretty high one — she was appointed defence minister in 2013 — and by all accounts she didn’t shine, although we should always be aware of the malign influence and gossip spread by whatever are the opposite of ‘well-wishers’. Though again, you have to ask yourself why someone acquired a coven which did not like to see her flourish.

Equally less impressive is the fact that she only got the job last December of European Commission president because neither of the two favoured candidates could win enough support and von der Leyen was a ‘compromise candidate’. A rather unkind way of putting it that she was no one’s first choice (and there were whispers, probably from those who are the opposite of ‘well-wishers’ — I’ll look it up later — that many in the German government promoted her as the compromise candidate for the job because they were glad to see the back of her.)

. . . 

It might well have been in keeping with her allegedly less than proficient stewardship of the German government’s defence ministry that when a mini crisis developed over the EU-wide acquisition of anti-coronavirus vaccine, it was von der Leyen who made a drama out of a crisis.

The EU had first-off all persuaded (probably for the best of reasons) that the vaccine acquisition and roll-out should be handled centrally. But it was very slow getting started and began to look very silly when those bastard Brexit British, unexpectedly it has to be said given their handling of the pandemic was otherwise less than spectacularly good, got a very good march on them. Then AstraZeneca which was producing one of the vaccines, announced that one of its factories Belgium producing was having problems and informed the EU that its order would be delayed.

What put von der Leyen’s nose out of joint was the same company was still able to produce and deliver to the Brits (who had, to be fair long got their order in). What did she do? She briefly sanctioned what can only be seen as a smash-and-grab raid on a deliveries of the vaccine as it crossed the border from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. This — it is important to note — was dead against the advice of her diplomats who are not dumb. She reversed ferret very soon, but by then the damage had been done.

This, though, led to highlighting the second piece of EU news which has come my way: the dog’s dinner that is the ‘protocol’ on how to handle trade between the EU and the UK when it passes through the island of Ireland.

And I have to be specific in that rather boring way because that protocol insists that Northern Ireland is, de facto, in the EU customs union and that there will be no border checks between the Republic and NI. Instead — and this is where it gets very, very silly — there will be some kind of ‘customs checks’ on goods being transported between

 

NI and the UK mainland. Well, there will if you are the EU and there won’t if you are the British government trying to keep the loyalists in NI happy.

It was your classic fudge, but an intricate part of the ‘Brexit trade deal’ which both the EU and the UK knew was a time bomb, but had nodded through because both sides were desperate for a deal and neither side could come up with anything the other side could sanction. All this took place under von der Leyen’s watch. I suspect she won’t see out her time and when she gets her watch it will be tin-plated.

. . . 

Here’s another the $64,000 question: what can we — or anyone — do about the bloody customs checks (EU) and no customs checks (UK) fudge? That must be sorted out before various loyalist and nationalist gunmen/criminal smugglers in NI decided to sort it out the only way they know how.

Brexit is only 42 days old, but it does seem to be coming apart at the seams rather sooner than even I expected. OK, it is a done deal (and the ones responsible, the Rees-Moggs, the Farages, the Johnsons etc, will never be held to account, ever. They will retire to their stash, write their memoirs, take the ermine and command huge sums for waffling after dinners up and down the land; and it seems thoroughly pointless and a waste of time not to take stock of the situation and pragmatically investigate what can be made of a very bad job. The trouble is that when I say that to people — to Remainers — I am immediately regarded as some kind of traitor to the cause.

Along those lines, a few years ago, I had a long, animated and inebriated debate with my sister (born half-British/half-German like me, but now married to a German, living in Germany for the past 38 years and with dual nationality) about three months after the referendum. ‘The British should never have voted for Brexit’, she said — repeatedly.

‘But they have, and there’s now bugger all we can do about it,’ I answered, repeatedly. The ‘debate’ got nowhere (as we all got more drunk. You can find a fuller account of it here).

She accused me — wrongly — of being a closet Brexiter, I accused her of fighting yesterday’s battles. But fighting yesterday’s battles is still what too many are doing.

We are where we are. I suspect a toxic combination of covid and Brexit will do a great deal of damage to the UK and the next government — probably Labour — will have to deal with it. But in the meantime the world rolls on and other things happen.

For example, I believe the EU — quite apart from Brexit and the pandemic — is probably in for a rough ride. Its awful response to the pandemic has revealed that it is not the wondrous institution of its own estimation.

Quite apart from Brexit, there are forces in the EU — look no further than Hungary and the current political top dogs in Poland as well as their tacit allies (mainly former Soviet bloc states) who are more than happy to accept the goodies and the handouts, but are not in the slightest bit sold on the enlightened, liberal values the EU likes to think it represents and is keen to encourage.

On Hungary and its nasty little leader Orban and his systematic destruction of various liberties, not least Press freedom, the EU tried to at tough, then caved in. That caving in has weakened it considerably. And Orban can carry on strutting.

Over this past year, covid as rather spoiled the — well, illusion is the only word I can think of — of EU unity and solidarity. When push came to shove member states were less inclined to look to the centre than themselves. The finally agreed to allow the pandemic to be handle centrally, and then von der Leyen and I don’t know who else screwed it up. OK, she has apologised blah, blah, but that wont’ save her: her rivals will have long memories.

The EU is not von der Leyen, you might object. No, she isn’t. But such was the flawed unity of the EU that she — as I say a compromise candidate, as in no one’s first choice — got the nod.

In my book, Brexit (which, dear sister if you are reading this, I still regret) is to some extent also the fault of the EU. The way I see it British membership was not only in British interests but also in the EU’s. The UK performed a valuable role balancing Germany against France as well as giving a voice to a number of smaller members who were glad it could speak out on their behalf.

All that has now disappeared and in my view the EU will be the poorer for it. So I believe balancing a desirable outcome with its ‘principles’ (and let’s face it at the end of the day in politics principles are always negotiable) should have tried to be more accommodating to help Britain remain a member.

Yes, I’m familiar with all the arguments as to why the EU could not ‘bend the rules’, and I think they are all very poor and unconvincing. In realpolitik anything and everything is possible if there is the political will. SOME solution could and should have been found. But it wasn’t.

As for the post-Brexit future for the UK, I still insist, let’s wait and see how the land lies, if only because there is sod all we can do about it now and in the immediate future.

. . . 

I’ve just posted some random images on a related page. One of them is this (below) and, looking at it, I was wondering whether I might just get away with claiming it is a lost version of The Turin Shroud. Answers please on a postcard and if you are a woman and I fancy you, I might even offer to buy you a drink.

Lockdown or no, it’s time to take a — guilt-free — day off

For well over a year, I’ve been contributing to a website called Deadlines For Writers. I know I have mentioned it before, but as some reading this now might not have read my earlier entries about it (this one of them and this is another), so I’ll briefly recap.

I came across Deadlines For Writers when I was googling for websites or magazines who might carry short stories and to which I might submit some. Having said that, I must admit my ‘output’ till then had been anything but prolific, and the whole point about finding such websites and magazines was to help me, as they say, get my shit together, get my finger out, put a rocket my arse, get bloody working — in short to become less of a talker about writing, or, in my case, a ‘thinker about writing’, and get stuff down on paper. ‘Stuff’ might not be the word folk who are ‘passionate about literature’ care to hear, but it does the job.

In fact, I rarely, if ever, talk about writing and don’t find it interesting when, occasions, others do. We are all apt very soon to be talking a grand amount of nonsense. To illustrate that point, here’s a quote from the writer A.L. Kennedy I came across when I was writing an entry for my Hemingway project, in this case mentioning his ‘rules about writing’ and his rather silly ’theory of omission’.

Kennedy tells would-be writers:

‘No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.’

Contrast this with the exceptionally airy advice to writers from Jonathan Franzen:

‘You have to love before you can be relentless’

and

‘Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

I don’t doubt Kennedy’s arty types who wear black pullovers and enjoy their self-inflicted misery would persuade themselves they know what Franzen means when he speaks ‘being relentless, and are only too eager to accept that their fiction is a ‘personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown’, but I don’t, though this easy-going liberal firmly believes in that in most matters it’s ‘each to his own’.

As for his snobbish dismissal of ‘writing for money’, I have to say only an successful author like Franzen who, I should imagine, is no longer obliged to write for money, could dismiss ‘money’ so easily. It’s notable how the notion that ‘money is unimportant’ is only adhered to by those who have it. Those on their uppers might sing a different song.

Yes, I’m sure (i.e. I’ve never sold a word of fiction and am now unlikely ever to do so, so I’m in no position to strike an attitude) ‘writing to make money’ is something of a fool’s ambition and that when you sit down to write, you might be better advised to have a loftier motivation.

On the other hand, though, ‘writers’ and would-be writers are free to write what the hell they like: and if someone sits down to produce ‘chick-lit’ or sci-fi instead of ‘serious literature’ (whatever that is though, presumably, it’s what Franzen turns out), who is anyone to dismiss them or their work? I’ve never read a work of chick-lit in my life and the last sci-fi story I read was at least 50 years ago. But I don’t doubt in their fields (as in others) there is the good, the bad and the indifferent, and surely trying to do something well, whatever you are doing, is admirable enough?

My final point though, and this is one I would put to Mr Franzen were I ever to meet him is that for all the honours, awards and prizes you are given and however much you are assured you are ‘one of today’s leading writers’, the sincerest form of flattery by far is being paid. When folk part with their money, you know they are being more honest than when they assure you ‘what a marvellous chap you are, and such a good writer’.

But there, I’ve already blown myself off-course and it’s lucky this is nothing but yet another insignificant blog entry and nothing more.

. . . 

I’ve found Deadlines For Writers to be invaluable: membership costs nothing (although you can get ‘an evaluation’ of the work you submit for if you opt for paid membership) and the routine is very simple. Every month the organiser (I think there’s only one) posts ‘a prompt’ for a short story (and there’s another for a piece of verse) and stipulates a word count. Then it is up to the member to write and submit a story (or piece of verse) every month. These are then posted on the website, and if you are lucky other members read them and comment on them. Sometimes those comments are useful (though bear in mind, judging by the kind of stories that are submitted, each member has different notions of ‘what works’ and what doesn’t. Sometimes the comments make it plain that, either you didn’t succeed in doing what you set out to do, or the commentator simply isn’t in tune with the kind of story you want to produce.

I should add that as far as I am concerned when evaluating a piece of fiction (or, for that matter, a piece of music or a work of plastic art) the most useless words are ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Quite apart from the fact that judgment is subjective, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ convey nothing. Far, far more useful are ‘interesting’, ‘boring’, ‘engaging’, ‘confusing’ and other such observations, and as far as I am concerned being told by someone (who judgment I respect) for example where I seem to have gone wrong or where the reader lost the thread or where something wasn’t convincing are far more useful than being patted on the back and schmoozed. Fuck schmoozing. I loathe schmoozing. Show me a schmoozer and I’ll show you dishonesty.

The upshot is that Deadlines For Writing has been for me a great, great motivator. OK because of the stipulated word counts, which have ranged from 2,500 words to just 500 words, my stories aren’t very long, but I’ve now written some. And what with the ‘essays’ I’ve been turning out for the Heminway project, I seem finally have got into the swing of ‘writing regularly’. And that, dear hearts, brings me to what was to be the point of this latest entry.

. . . 

Over the years (and I’ve been writing this blog for eleven years now) I’ve joked about this an that, not least my age. That, really, was just a form of defence: in some ways I haven’t liked getting older and, crucially, being regarded by the world as ‘an older man’ at all. So making jokes about ‘being 95’ or ‘being 110’ was, I think, just a way of warding it all off, pretending I didn’t really care. But the fact is that I was born in 1949 and in the late autumn I shall turn 72.

That is another, though minor reason, why literary superstardom, a perpetual round of drinkies in North London with other literary hacks and profiles in the ‘serious newspaper’ are certainly never going to come my way. And, by the way, a few months ago, I read two novels which were highly lauded by the great and good who pass judgment, and I thought both were bollocks.

One was The Sea by John Banville, and you read can my review here, and the other was Saturday by Ian McEwan, and my review is here. Both writers are getting on a little but still literary darlings of the Western World, laden with honours and regarded as all-around artistic good eggs. What does that say for my judgement? I don’t know, but I’ll repeat, both novels, for one reason or another, were in my view shite. I must remind you, though, chacun à son goût (and, yes, although I’ve long been familiar with the phrase, I did have to look up the spelling).

The point about giving my age is that I am now retired, but to this day still feel guilty if I ‘haven’t done some work’. That work is no longer sitting on the third floor of the Daily Mail office in West London and checking puzzles against hard copy, proof-reading pages and hunting down errant commas, but — well, writing of some kind.

Since I began the Hemingway bollocks in July 2019, writing more of that and slowly moving towards conclusion has been my ‘work’. And I have been getting far more disciplined about getting down to it (which was one of the essential points of undertaking the projects, though I still have some way to go). But, I’ll repeat, I somehow I fritter away the day and don’t do very much, I feel horribly guilty. That is odd, but true. There is no obligation at all do it, quite apart from finishing it: but I have to. No one will know whether I do succeed and, far more to the point, no one will give a flying fuck: but I shall know and care!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’ve come up with a solution: officially to give myself two days off a week. So on those days I wake up and do what the hell I like — piss around with Cubase in my shed and record, surf the net aimlessly, watch shite on Amazon — it doesn’t matter: this will be my time off and I shall have nothing to feel guilty about. Anyway that’s the plan.

Pip, pip.

If you are interested, there are more ‘rules on writing here’. Some are sane, some most certainly not. My favourite is the very good, one-word, advice to writers from Neil Gaiman: ‘Write.’