Is It the Writers' Fault?

Ms Baroque puts her mind to answering Henry Porter's question, Where are our Orwell and Dickens? and comes down to the view that we writers had better start getting our political act together. In today's Guardian, however, playwright Anthony Neilson bemoans the fact that much of our theatre is downright boring due to a contemporary playwriting concern with issues at the expense of story-telling. Like Porter he seems to be blaming the writers themselves, but, as I have said on my other, writer blog, my hunch is that a lot of this is down to the pressures on playwrights from theatre policies. As I indicated in my last post here, writers are now under such marketing pressure - whether of the populist variety predominant in the publishing industry and our larger theatres, or the bureaucratic mission-statement sort still holding sway in our alternative theatres - that they are no longer always in control of subject matter or even of style.

I went to the theatre last night and when I lit this morning on Neilson's statement that theatres are too often failing in their unique task of providing 'live magic', I thought: Funny he should say that...

It was the Library Theatre press night for Chapter Two by Neil Simon. The lights went up on an immaculately designed set: the living rooms of two flats. Nineteen-seventies? New York? - don't ask, I neither really know or care: in spite of the suggestion of surrealism in the two simultaneous locations, it was so rigidly (and yet somehow surreally) naturalistic and indicating so ominously what was to come that the Bitch's heart sank and her mind stopped focussing right from the start. And it came. A long silence while the audience 'appreciated' the set and its emptiness of people and developed an expectation. And then, just as we had expected (no surprise, no magic) a middle-aged man came in with a suitcase, put it down, and laboriously went through the usual, only-to-be expected rituals of someone returning from holiday.

The Bitch's partner yawned noisily. The Bitch, furious, biffed him in the ribs. As an occasional actor, the Bitch knows only too well how attuned an actor is to the responses of the audience and its tiniest sounds, most particularly in those first moments on that first night... The Bitch's partner hissed: 'But it's so boring!' and the Bitch wanted to crawl under her seat.

But he was right: as Anthony Neilson says, Boring an audience is the one true sin in theatre. Neilson is talking in the main about over-consciously political or 'poetic' theatre, but the same objection can be applied to hackneyed naturalistic theatre. OK, so this was a period piece, you could say, and OK, much of last night's audience - which, at the risk of sounding ageist and classist, was middle-aged, even elderly, and middle class - seemed to enjoy this play a lot better than did the Bitch and her partner. But I'd say that the laughter was too comfortable, and far too automatic, and one could ask why a present-day theatre wants to put on such an unchallenging piece.

What Neilson is saying is pretty important: we do need to challenge, as Henry Porter has said, but we need to do it in ways that first and foremost transport and entertain. But then what do you do when the first priority of publishers and producers is to pander to the market which wishes not to be challenged?

Whether Novels Matter

Plenty of meat in the newspaper literary pages this weekend, and some to delight the Bitch. Jed Mercurio, flouting Milan Kundera's warning that film adaptations of novels steal their essence, describes with relish in the Guardian the process of doing so (though I'd say not without revealing the odd doubt). However, a posthumous essay from Susan Sontag in the same paper sounds a deeply serious note about the growing encroachment of television culture on novels and on their crucial role in our social and intellectual life. Sontag says:

What serves "the modern" is standardization, homogenization. (Indeed, "the modern" is homogenization, standardization. The quintessential site of the modern is an airport; and all airports are alike, as all new modern cities, from Seoul to São Paulo, tend to look alike.) This pull toward homogenization cannot fail to affect the project of literature. The novel, which is marked by singularity, can only enter this system of maximum diff usion through the agency of translation, which, however necessary, entails a built-in distortion of what the novel is at the deepest level - which is not the communication of information, or even the telling of engaging stories, but the perpetuation of the project of literature itself, with its invitation to develop the kind of inwardness that resists the modern satieties

Television distances, she says, whereas novels pay attention and require the reader to do so:

I would argue that the mindset [the media] foster and the appetites they feed are entirely inimical to the writing (production) and reading (consumption) of serious literature... On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diffusion, for translation - the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies - is designed to render obsolete the novelist's prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.

These should be words close to the hearts of us novelists but Henry Porter in the Observer suggests that our well-known writers are now colluding with this non-engaged market culture. None is engaging with the urgent issues, he says:

...the widening gap between poor and rich, the seething anger of the underclass, the steady attack on the rights of those who cannot protect themselves, the war in Iraq, the regular deaths of British soldiers in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, rendition. Instead, he says, the widening gap between poor and rich, the seething anger of the underclass, the steady attack on the rights of those who cannot protect themselves, the war in Iraq, the regular deaths of British soldiers in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, rendition.

Instead, he says:

Nowadays, there seem to be an awful lot of middle-aged blokes dragging their tortured souls around the literary circuit, fretting about their display in Waterstone's.

Maybe he shouldn't be blaming the writers, though. Maybe the reason they're tortured is that their most political and 'singular' work, like that of the Bitch and others of her acquaintance, is not always the work which is published or produced, but is pushed away into drawers, declined by the publishers and producers as 'too challenging' for the market.

It's All Relative

Children's laureate Jacqueline Wilson answers a question for the Guardian:

How do you feel when you read reports of how fabulously wealthy you must be?

I wish it were true. It's very odd. People see JK Rowling and assume that if you are high-profile children's author you're in a similar position. I certainly earn far more money than I ever dreamed possible, but give or take a lovely house for me, a nice house for my daughter, a few treats for friends, money there in case I gently lose it myself and need a nursing home, there's not huge wads of money. I'm very small beer compared with actresses and rock singers.

The Bitch (who is reliant on someone else for a roof over her head, whose kids will have to get their own houses, and who when she loses it anything but gently will no doubt be off into the sunset with a plastic bag or two) has to smile.

Bookshops at Risk

Last night the Bitch and her partner went to a reading at Manchester Waterstone's Deansgate, and it was just like the old days: a thrilling display of books from the radical small press Dedalus, the publisher Eric Lane and his companions travelled to be there in person, two Dedalus authors - Nick Royle and Andy Oakes - reading, a small but intensely dedicated audience, nice red wine and bookish conversations before and after, and everyone, thus mellowed, (including the impecunious Bitch) buying far more books than they might otherwise have done, and going away with a new body of literature to relate to and purchase in future.

But you can't help thinking it was just a last dying gasp: Robert Jones, Deansgate events manager responsible for the evening, announced his departure in a fortnight's time to Bath, where he will help to run a new independent bookshop being set up by Robert Topping, ex-manager of Deansgate and king of that old author-reading era. And this morning we read that HMV is to close 30 of its Waterstone's stores and reduce the number of 'highbrow' books it stocks to combat falling profits which it blames on the encroachment by Amazon and the supermarkets. (Will this give some breathing space to independents like the new one in Bath, or will they continue to fall similarly prey to the internet and the supermarkets?)

And how about this from Monday's Guardian article on the books people fail to read: "The important thing from a bookseller's point of view," said a spokesman for Waterstone's, "is that people buy the books in the first place." Understandable of course, but yet another indication of the increasing enforced commodification of literature.

Crumbs for Bottom Feeders

Here's one effect of those big advances:

The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage... But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.

Thanks to Charles Lambert and Debi Alper for pointing me to the link.

Best of What?

Yet another 'Best of', this time Granta's second Best of Young American Novelists. For Cult-of-Youth watchers, the cut-off age has come down from 40 to 35 (and in my opinion Jack's explanation does nothing to dignify this), but the really interesting thing to me is the fact that 7 of the 21 are not novelists at all but short-story writers. Jack says:

Reading the submissions, it seemed to us that many story collections deserved as much if not more attention than the novels, that there was a great liveliness and insight in them...

You could look on this as a good thing, more proof that short stories are in the ascendant, but I wonder. Why call these writers novelists, then? Why not call the list Best of Young American Fiction Writers? Short stories are after all a very different form from novels, requiring very different narrative skills, and not all writers of one can write the other. You read on and it becomes clear:

...often, given their binding structure of character and location, they were nearly novels in any case. This accounts for the number of writers on our list (seven) who have yet to publish a novel.

Ah, so they were short story collections aspiring to be novels! And notice that yet, implying that old notion that short stories are merely an apprenticeship for writing novels.

Money Again, and Life versus Literature

In a comment on my last post, David Isaak alerts us to the fact that he continues his theme of publishers' advances. Here is his latest thought-provoking post.

And in a Guardian profile playwright Martin Crimp touches on a continuing theme of this blog, his desire to separate his life from his work and a culture insistent on conflating the two:

...he finds being interviewed unsettling: he doesn't want to talk about his family ("People you're close to shouldn't be part of your public world"), his life in London, or indeed anything except his 20-odd plays and translations, least of all the personality behind them.

Advance Thinking

Macmillan New Writing author David Isaak has an interesting post about the matter of publishers' advances which relates to my own post of last year.

Like the Macmillan New Writers, the Bitch has also recently done a deal which does not include an advance and, skint though she is, quite frankly she doesn't give a damn. After the experience of having a (different) book put up for auction under a new pseudonym (as a concession to the cult of the Next New Thing) and then dropped like a hot brick when the hoped-for half a million or whatever didn't materialise, the news from her new publishers that they are interested in nurturing her career as a writer - rather than just in her book as a single commodity - is music to her ears.

Amazon Marketplace

As I describe on my other, author blog, when one of my novels went out of print, I printed a revised edition myself. The other day I looked it up on Amazon Marketplace, the place where second-hand books are sold. There were copies of this revised edition being sold there as new. NEW? That's odd, I thought: the new copies are on Amazon Advantage, the facility for publishers, and apart from that it's only I, as the publisher, who have new copies, and those bookshops which have ordered it from me. I looked closer. One of the Amazon Marketplace sellers describes their copy of my book as 'sourced direct from the publisher': it seems that some of those Gardners orders were for bookshops or companies selling through the net.

In his Guardian Bookseller column yesterday Joel Rickett comments on the threat which publishers see Amazon Marketplace as posing:

...there are now hundreds of small companies specialising in importing books, or even finding them in charity shops and posting them up. They are able to offer such low prices because of the standard £2.75 charged for UK postage, of which they receive £2.26 - much more than it costs to post an average book through the Royal Mail. Publishers are convinced that the Marketplace option eats away at their sales, but it has so far been impossible to discern by how much. A new piece of research shows how popular the service is among students: nearly 29% of students bought their last secondhand course book from Marketplace, compared to 12% from their university bookshop. Many of them will also re-sell those books via the site; that's the kind of perpetual exchange that gives publishers nightmares.

In the same paper yesterday, Stephen Page argued that it is only by embracing the opportunities for publishing and marketing offered by the net that publishers will be able to combat such threats.

Enough to make the boat list

Oy-oy-oy, another pesky list, and Robert McCrum has some good tart things to say about it, and about lists in general.

The End of the Literary World?

Rich food for thought about novels and their future in today's Guardian Review: Giles Foden bemoaning the fact that 'literary' is a term of abuse, Milan Kundera reflecting on the nature of novels and their creation, and Stephen Page arguing for a more, rather than a less, significant role for publishers and editors in the digital age, all of them circling a central preoccupation expressed thus by Stephen Page:

The world emerging at the start of the 21st century is full of threat to those who create. The desire to commodify all art as some form of entertainment, and the growth of a monoculture based around mass-market tastes and distribution, make many writers feel precarious.

Giles Foden has it in for Richard and Judy and their producer Amanda Ross (who recently stated that she hated the word 'literary' since readers bring to it negative associations) and says:

Personally, I'd rather not listen to the twitterings of a pair of permatanned nincompoops on literary matters.

Well, personally, I'd rather people didn't blame the messengers (or insult them so personally), but to some extent Stephen Page concurs:

For all their great benefits, one of the effects of Oprah Winfrey's book recommendations in the US, and to some extent Richard & Judy's in the UK, is that they create a migration towards a small number of books.

Kundera's fascinating piece is excerpts from a forthcoming book from Fabers. An idea which jumps out for me in the wake of Zadie Smith's recent argument that novels are essentially expressions of an author's personality is Kundera's notion that art, including the novel, is an artist's/author's property to alter or suppress as he/she sees fit (an idea which I discuss on my other blog in relation to my own work). The piece ends on a reflection about the novel as novel, and whether it can survive:

For turning a novel into a theatre piece or a film requires first decomposing the composition; reducing it to just its "story"; renouncing its form. But what is left of a work of art once it's stripped of its form? One means to prolong a great novel's life through an adaptation and only builds a mausoleum, with just a small marble plaque recalling the name of a person who is not there

an issue which I also discuss, in relation to my own writing experience, here.

World Books?

Do you know, I'd really rather not talk about this:

The World Book Day poll for the ten books the world could not do without.

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that the Bitch hates lists, that they bore her stiff and that she has a constitutional aversion, rooted no doubt in ancestral trauma (those peasants, servants and slaves still floating about in her genes, those relatives who failed the eleven-plus), of anything which smacks of EXCLUSIVITY or COMPETITION, or choices made by any select few, most especially a self-selected few.

And she's sick of saying these things, but guesses they need to go on being said:

I'm all for schemes and ploys which draw attention to books, but I would venture that polls like this may even be counterproductive: they do nothing to encourage a spirit of inquiry about books and to broaden the canon. Time is the best critic, said Martin Amis earlier this week, and the Guardian suggests today that this list proves it. But look at all those childhood favourites and school staples turning up on the longer list, and 'time' turns into 'nostalgia' and a lazy reliance on the status quo. And the 'top-ten' list which emerges is not only the result of this impulse rather than of any true test of literature, but offers a closed conclusion, a tiny section of the spectrum of literature, beyond which, it could be implied, we need not look, because it is the definitive best.

The Prof Does not Profess to be the Greatest

So what does Professor Amis, last week dubbed 'the greatest living British author', think of such an idea? The same as JG Ballard, Louise Doughty and me: this morning on Radio 4's Today programme he called such comparisons 'futile' and offered his opinion that 'the only critic is time'.

Literary Credentials

Here's a giggle, courtesy of Cristina Odone, Observer, today:

Emma Soames, editor of Saga magazine, whose career took off when she was appointed editor of the Literary Review, attributes her success to being mistaken for a book-loving bluestocking. 'In fact,' she cheekily confesses, 'my only literary qualification was to have had an affair with Martin Amis.'

The Greatest Living Joke

Well, here's one game you won't catch the Bitch joining in: Who is the greatest living British author? (Guardian, today.) And here are the comments which best echo the Bitch's thoughts on the matter:

JG Ballard:

This is one of those questions that makes one suspect we are in the trough of the literary wave.

Louise Doughty:

The title of "Britain's greatest living author" is a deeply silly moniker to give to anyone, and probably the kiss of death. Amis was lionised in the 80s, but that made it inevitable that people would turn on him - remember all that absurd stuff about his teeth. Getting the crown should strike fear into the heart of any author. I prefer to think about great books rather than great writers... The need to identify "great writers" is a boy thing... In the end it is not for us to identify the great writers. We don't have any sense of perspective. Kafka published virtually nothing in his lifetime, while Pearl S Buck won the Nobel prize for literature.

Because they end the piece with Louise Doughty's contribution, you suspect the Guardian agrees with her, and that their tongue is firmly in their cheek. After all, the article is actually titled Who is the greatest of them all? and we all know who asked a similar question, and what happened to her.

Writers Reading

Daniel Green at The Reading Experience adds some interesting thoughts about Creative Writing courses and innovation, mainly in relation to the reading experience of writing students, which has apparently taken a nosedive. He offers an extract from an interview with Stephen Dixon in the Baltimore City Paper, in which Dixon states:

[If] you have a history of having read [important literature], you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.

Here We Go Again

Oh dear, this is getting boring, but you feel it shouldn't pass without comment. Erstwhile Bad Boy of theatre turned Guardian columnist Mark Ravenhill has joined the ranks of those privileged with a public platform who condemn the more 'democratic' opportunity for comment which the internet provides.

He does make some new points which are worth considering. It's not democracy, he says: true political democracy in this country is dead (and I won't argue with that), and this seeming democracy of the internet is in truth just a sop to make us believe otherwise, and that no one with any power takes any notice of the views aired by the public therein.

But then he doesn't seem to believe in democracy anyway. Things have got a little confused, he says, but right from the start he seems to confuse things himself. He starts out reasonably enough (except that we can guess where he's going): Not so long ago writing a certain type of letter was enough to make you a figure of fun. But then in his next sentence he appears to be referring not just to 'a certain type of letter writer' but to all writers of letters to public bodies: Writing to the newspapers, the BBC or the prime minister made you an archetype as recognisable as a fat mother-in-law on a seaside postcard (let's pass over his apparent collusion with the viewpoint implied by this last comparison). This slippage allows him to go on to do as others have done before him and lump all internet commenters together and compare them with the green ink writer ... 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' and to pronounce that they should be regarded with patronising amusement.

But - though one gets weary of repeating it - as there were always different newspaper letter-writers, so there are also different internet commenters, some superficial, others serious and worth taking seriously unless you want to collude with a government you believe deaf to the people.

Apart from which, not everyone who uses green ink is Disgusted of TW - a past editor of mine, for a start!

Creative Accounting

I have my own questions about the boom in Creative Writing courses, which I've aired here and here, but today in the Guardian Claire Armitstead considers the most fundamental one, Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

Whenever I'm asked that question I think of the fourteen-year-old girl I taught in a Glasgow school, whose weekly stories were as good as many a first novel, and more mature than some. I could teach her nothing. I was her copyeditor merely, pointing out the odd spelling mistake. It goes against my educationist grain to say this, but faced with that you just know that great writers are born.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Carver said the same, and the fact that American universities have produced so many of his clones proves the point: what you can't teach or impart, as Armitstead's article indicates, are genius or flair or originality. Technique, I agree, can be taught to some extent, and the ability to be critically self-aware. But after that, as Armitstead says, what Creative Writing courses offer are time and space and permission, and that most precious commodity of all - whatever anyone else says - contacts. And you do need all of those last, as well as sheer bloody-minded determination, because I tell you this: I was certain, absolutely certain, that that pupil of mine would be a great writer one day and I have watched out down the years for her work to appear in print, but (unless she has a pseudonym) it hasn't. (And I can't tell you how sad that makes me, even if the truth is that she simply lost interest in writing, because I'm sure we've lost out.)

Armitstead's article ends on a sour note, though, and suggests a dispiriting cynicism behind Martin Amis's recent appointment at Manchester:

The boom is not so much about making great writers as about universities trying to attract students and making more money by appealing to young people with impossible dreams.

In my experience, they're often not so young, actually, and when publishers are on the lookout for babes in arms... Well, do the maths.

Youth, Age and the Universities

It is a truth universally acknowledged by publishers that writers must not grow older, and a truth which must be dealt with by writers that they do. Pricking up her ears for the current lingo at the bus stop at school coming-out time is one of the Bitch's now customary practices, and even Zadie Smith, hardly any time ago considered The Voice of Cool Youth, must now, in the Acknowledgements for On Beauty, thank her younger brothers for advice on all the things I am too old to know. And now here's Martin Amis giving as one of his reasons for taking on a Creative Writing Professorship at the University of Manchester the fact that he wants to keep in touch with how young people think.

Martin Amis getting down with the students - I guess their recruitment will go through the roof. Meanwhile, in the other, Metropolitan University just down the road, Andrew Biswell's Writing School continues to flourish and to hold practically weekly author readings to which the public is invited. Last night an almost full house gathered to hear Rose Bailey and UA Fanthorpe and was saved the disappointment of their non-attendance due to flu by a last-minute stand-in from tutor Simon Armitage, and treated to extracts from his alliterative translation of Gawain and the Green Knight, and to some pretty funny new prose poems.

What or Who You Know

Well, I'm sorry to say I misrepresented the case of Marie Phillips in my last post, and here's her comment which I've pulled up:

Hello! Strugglingauthor here. Just a quick correction. Dan Franklin was not in fact shown my novel by the Cape rep, he was shown it by me. The Cape rep did however tell me (or rather, my boss) that Dan was a good bloke who would probably read it if I sent it to him because he's one of the few remaining editors who do read unsolicited m/s's. A fact which I am now happy to tell people unconnected with bookselling for nothing. It's not always who you know, but it might be what you know.

Big and Little Publishers and the Myths of Publishability

During the autumn there was a skirmish in the litblogs about whether or not it's hard to get published. Susan Hill upset struggling-writer bloggers by stating that if a writer is good, he or she will get published, and that all that publishers are looking out for is good books. Susan also argues for people to be realistic about the fact that publishing is a business, and that publishers need to be able to sell their books, so presumably her definition of good books includes saleability. Anyways, for her it seemed to follow - although I'm not sure she ever actually stated this - that if writers were failing to get published, it must mean that they weren't producing good books. In any case, she called for blogging writers to stop whingeing and claiming that publishers don't look at their slush piles and that you need contacts just to get read.

Susan's 'talent will out' argument is an old and familiar one, and has been trotted out by Robert McCrum in the past, but by last spring even Robert McCrum appeared to be taking a different view, and it seems to me that these issues need unpacking.

Today, the Guardian reports that the winner of the Costa awards, Stef Penney's first novel The Tenderness of Wolves, was turned down by 'many publishers' before it was taken by the new independent publisher Quercus, and that Brian Thompson's shortlisted memoir, also from a small independent publisher, was rejected by ten others. I keep coming across such examples: the brilliant writer Tamar Yellin (whom I am proud to say we published in metropolitan) is now winning American prizes with her novel The Genizah at the House of Shepher which a British literary agent failed to sell and which was eventually published by the American Toby Press. You could say that talent did out in the end with these authors, but it is easy to imagine authors losing heart and giving up earlier than this, and that without the existence of those small publishers even these novels might not have seen the light of day.

It is the small publishers who prove Susan Hill's argument that 'all you need do is send your manuscript off to an editor' - as the Bitch can testify with her own recent success with the independent publisher Salt. But it really is not the same with mainstream publishers. To begin with, big publishers seldom look at unagented work. To counter this notion Susan Hill quoted the phenomenal success of Marie Phillips, who had indeed dubbed herself Struggling Author, and whose forthcoming debut novel Gods Behaving Badly was picked up overnight by Cape director Dan Franklin without the mediation of a literary agent. Later, however, Marie, who worked in a bookshop, revealed on her blog that Franklin was shown the novel by the Cape rep. People who pointed this out were seen as crying sour grapes, but as far as the Bitch is concerned - well, a Cape rep once also offered to show her novel 'round the office' (though that was before she'd even written it, and by the time she had he was no longer repping at the bookshop she frequented - shucks!) and although of course it's not to say that anyone in 'the office' would have necessarily picked it up, if they had, the Bitch would most certainly have felt that she'd had a leg-up.

And it's not that easy to get an agent even to look at your submission (the Bitch, though previously published, has standard rejection cards), and when you do get an agent to take you on, well, as the Bitch can vouch again, it's all about marketing and hype and not the book - this is not my fantasy, those are the words of an agent - and the agent tries to set up an auction, and if he fails, if there isn't a scramble for the book within four days, well, in the current state of affairs, where a book has to be 'hot', where there has to be a big buzz going round about it, he's just not going to sell it, and he has to give up on it, however great he thinks it is as literature, and however well he thought it would sell.

Susan Hill says publishing is a subjective business, and as an ex-publisher of a literary magazine the Bitch can agree that on the independent publishing level it is. But now, with the big publishers, editors' decisions can't just be subjective: as Miss Snark has indicated, however great an editor thinks a book is as literature, however much he or she loved it personally, she can't publish it if she doesn't think it will sell enough to recoup the advance for which an agent is angling.

But who knows what sells? As I've pointed out before, current marketing philosophy has its huge blind spots. To knock on the head the notion that otherwise good books turned down by mainstream publishers must inevitably lack the saleability factor, here's the Guardian quoting Simon Robertson, Waterstone's fiction buyer, and Foyles' Kate Gunning respectively on the Tenderness of Wolves: 'Will be a monster paperback'; 'Broad commercial appeal'.

To Be Green or Not to Be

Oh dear. I knew there was something scratching at the back of my brain when I wrote yesterday about the new, more convivial atmosphere at Manchester's Library Theatre, and it did hit me later in the day: what was I doing, thrilling about the use of PLASTIC CUPS?!!! And here today in the Guardian is Mark Fisher, my eco-conscience personified, asking how green our theatres are.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Library Theatre

Last time I went to the Library Theatre I moaned about the institutional ambience, and the way it can affect one's enjoyment of a play. Last night I went again. Well, I don't know what's happened, but what a transformation!

We were there to see Chris Honer's production of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead. Press Night was inevitably going to be crowded for such a famous play, and there were actors I knew to gab to, but there was something more creating the sense of excitement which previously I'd been missing. Why did the air seem more charged with expectancy? Why did the foyer lights, and the lights in the bar, seem brighter? Was it warmer? Yes it was! I had worn an extra jumper in readiness, but I had to take it off! And when we ordered our pre-show and interval drinks, we were told that it would be cheaper to buy a bottle, which came with a dish of mixed spiced olives (and which they kept corked for us during Act 1), and someone came round offering us plastic cups so that we didn't have to gulp our unfinished drinks but could TAKE THEM INTO THE SHOW!

But I don't think it was just this convivial atmosphere which made me enjoy a play which I have seen twice before without any such enjoyment. I have always had the oddest feelings about R&G, and about Stoppard plays in general. Stoppard ought to be my hero, since I'm always being pulled up by theatre script readers for employing those very techniques for which Stoppard is lauded - non-naturalistic dialogue, long speeches in which characters engage with ideas - and I have complained elsewhere about the insistence on naturalism in contemporary theatre. But Stoppard's plays have always seemed to me to justify those naturalist objections, since they have always come over to me as cold metaphysical exercises.

But it wasn't like that last night. For the first time for me, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, played by Leigh Symonds and Graeme Hawley, were utterly, comically and tragically human in their plight as pawns in a greater game they don't understand. Other productions I've seen have been consciously stark and modernistic, but this one, done more fittingly in Shakespearean dress, was rich in all ways: visually and choreographically and thus emotionally, as well as metaphysically, and I'm telling you, my mind has been changed about this play.

It's a hard thing for a writer to say, this, but you're nothing without a good director, in the end.

Book Review: Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blachman

This blog is not primarily a book review blog; it's only occasionally that I've written about a book, and then it's been a book which I just happened to have read. Cynical Bitch though I am, I had naively assumed that review bloggers were doing the same but more often, and when the dispute about blog versus newspaper reviewing broke, the fact that many bloggers were being sent books by publishers was news to me.

Then Vintage asked me if I'd like a copy of Anonymous Lawyer - a Novel, the book of the famous blog, published in the UK this week. Instantly I was dubious, and a question which had been much discussed was thrown into stark relief for me. Would my critical independence be compromised? For I must say such an offer seems a heck of a lot more like a 'gift' than one mediated impersonally by a literary editor (and I have noticed that bloggers have begun thanking publishers in their blogs for their copies). But hey, a Bitch is a Bitch, and this was a blog book, surrounded by specific issues of blog anonymity, and I was very interested, so in the next instant I emailed back and said yes.

Turns out Jeremy Blachman, the author, is a man after the Bitch's own heart - in fact, he's a bitch and a half. The blog, initially anonymous, is a hoot and deservedly popular. Purportedly written by a hiring partner in a large Los Angeles law firm - monstrously vain, scheming and sadistic, but ultimately vulnerable - it exposes with broad satire the nasty underbelly of corporate law. There was much speculation about the identity of the author and whether or not the blog was fictional, which is amusing to read now, but the author was finally outed as a Harvard law student whose recent experience of student internship in a law firm was from the other side. An astute editor picked up on Blachman's thus clearly fictive skills and the book, or at least the idea of the book, soon followed.

It's hard to believe in retrospect that the blog was ever thought to be anything but fiction, which shows the power of context. The novel takes the form of the original blog - interspersed with emails - and its style and voice, those of a satirically exaggerated (unreliable) narrator, are identical:

We have students lining up to hand us their resumes, yet we've got a 30 percent annual turnover rate... That makes my job a bit of a challenge. How to stay positive about selling students on the excellence of this place when we have to make sure the boxes of copier paper aren't tied up wih rope - because that rope is just too tempting. One hanging every so often is to be expected, but when there's another one every time we get new office supplies it starts to get a little difficult to work.

The blog is smartly shaped into a proper story - that of Anonymous Lawyer's scheming to oust his rival to the chairmanship of the firm - but the novel is more complex, both structurally and thematically, than this. Rather than simply being the means of telling a story, the blog is a crucial aspect of the wider story. It's the place where Anonymous Lawyer postures (though sometimes letting his mask slip), but it is counterpointed by the emails in which a different reality unfolds. Initially there is some fun (which Blachman must have had in real life) at the expense of those emailing to guess AL's identity, but eventually someone emails who really does know who he is, his anonymity is threatened, the incriminating blog becomes the potential means of his downfall, and the stage is set for further machiavellian manipulations. Thus the novel goes beyond the scope of the original real-life blog to become not simply an expose of the evils of corporate law but a witty comment on the nature of blogging and anonymity, and on the double-edged power and vulnerability of bloggers.

Not that the wit doesn't sometimes wear thin. The serial nature of a blog allows for - maybe even requires - some repetition, but a novel with its demand for development is less forgiving. I found this funny at the beginning of the novel:

He fired his assistant on the day she announced she was pregnant... At least I wait until they come back from maternity leave before I tell them they're fired.

but by the end of the novel, when this joke was still being riffed, its lack of subtlety, the very thing which had made it funny, had palled.

This isn't a subtle novel, and nor is it meant to be; its fast pace and rude wit are probably best taken at a sitting. At first I was suspicious of it as a publisher's cynical marketing conconction - a sentence in Blachman's Acknowledgements runs: Even when I was sure I couldn't write this book I never felt [my editor's] confidence waver. But the Acknowledgements refers to Blachman's prior aspirations as a fiction-writer, and the book justifies them.

But, hey, speaking of marketing, what about the product? I simply couldn't get this paperback to stop springing shut on me, and I've got bad enough RSI in my thumb without having to strain it further that way. And when I finally cracked the spine to make the book lie flat, all the pages came unglued and fell about in my hands.

Who said books last longer than blogs?

Quietly Chilling News

Admittedly I've been too busy writing even to blog, stuck up in my study from 7 in the morning and into the evenings, lost in a made-up world, so I may have missed many things, but I didn't see another reference to that death threat to Orhan Pamuk until today. Today the Guardian reports in its international pages that the Turkish novelist has cancelled a book tour as a result of the apparent threat called out by Yasin Hayal, accused by the Turkish police of orchestrating the murder of the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink.

The Matter with Books

So the Bitch stumbles down into the kitchen this morning, switches on the kettle and the radio, thinking about the scene she will write today, and wait - what was that on the radio? Orhan Pamuk (the Turkish novelist)? Someone's threatened his life? The Bitch jumps to attention, but the item's over, the briefest of mentions.

In some places novels can be a matter of life and death. In other places this fact is a matter of little or relative consequence, not even mentioned on the TV news.

Jenny Diski has posted sardonically here and here on what novels, on the contrary, mean in our country. And John Baker provides a link showing what some books mean to some people.

The Reading Endeavour

I have argued before in this blog for a greater role for writers in the debate about how we should read fiction, and here is Zadie Smith taking that role in yesterday's Guardian, and quoting as her mentors those other great writer-critics, Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Virginia Woolf.

This second half of Zadie's fiction 'tips' takes a little more work from the reader than last week's offering, though that's perhaps fitting in view of what she has to say about the role of the reader, and she is wrestling - with the writerly honesty which last week she advocated - with concepts which are subtle and nowadays unfamiliar.

Readers, she says, have a duty as great as that which she has outlined for writers, and of a similar nature, a duty which she feels they have generally abdicated. She identifies two kinds of contemporary 'failing' reader or critic: firstly the 'system' reader/critic:

In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand ... We want [novels] to be wholly sufficient systems of ideas ... to speak for a community or answer some vital question of the day

and secondly, the 'corrective' reader/critic, who more properly relates to a novel on an individual, personal level, bringing to it his own tastes and prejudices, but less properly fails to admit to himself that this is what he is doing and imagines that he is applying universal aesthetic criteria.

Both types of reader are in consequence closed to novels which fail to fulfil their respective preconditions. Ideally, she says,

Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion - allow me to call it an expansion of the heart - in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with.

Like Woolf, she concedes that a perfect meeting of minds between writer and readers is of course never possible; we must always fail in the endeavour, and indeed it is this failure which makes each novel, and each reading, individual and fascinating. But it is the willingness to make the endeavour which allows us to 'fail better.'

Show Us a Few Wrinkles

Here's a thought from the Bitch (not that she hasn't had it before):

Say we accept Zadie Smith's contention that writing is forged from an author's personality, and that therefore the greater the personality the greater the novel. And say we accept that, while clearly some fifty-year-olds are idiots and some fifteen-year-olds geniuses, on the whole, in general, skills and personality are enriched by experience.

What then are the implications for the future of our literature in a culture powered by worship of the Next New Thing?

What Novels Are For

Bournemouth Runner at The Art of Fiction and others were pleased about one particular aspect of Zadie Smith's Guardian article: the fact that she highlights a problem previously discussed on this blog, the problem which the commercialisation of fiction publishing presents for many writers:

By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so... Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule. Novels that submit to a shared vision of entertainment ... will always be welcomed. This is not a good time, in literature, to be a curio...

...Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about ... [novelists'] duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.

The Discomfort of Oversimplifying

It's only fair that I pull up Susan Hill's comment on my last post, pointing out that my final reference to her concept of 'comfort-blanket' books misrepresented and oversimplified:

The two things are not incompatible.. Comfort blanket books can be great literature at the same time. Or not. A comfort blanket book is, by definition, one which you have read before enough times to know very well and to be guaranteed delight, pleasure, interest, even intellectual stimulation - it has nothing to do with being lulled to sleep. It has everything to do with the certain expectation of reward. I do not mean, by 'comfort blanket books' ones which are necesssarily easy to read or have happy endings or are undemanding.. I do mean those which I return to knowing that although I may get something new out of them, I will also get a repeat of something old - in the best sense - too.

The Great Mind of Zadie Smith

Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow bloggers me hearties, I commend to you one of the most serious and insightful minds in the literary world today: that of Zadie Smith.

Today the Guardian publishes an article by Zadie (and which I understand to be extracted from a promised book) on the nature of fiction and the condition, in creative terms, of the fiction writer. At the end of a week of blogosphere dispute about whether fiction writing 'should' be a painful experience or one which is fun, here is Zadie's (to me searingly accurate) view of 'the land where writers live':

...a country I imagine as mostly beach, with hopeful writers standing on the shoreline while their perfect novels pile up, over on the opposite coast, out of reach. Thrusting out of the shoreline are hundreds of piers, or "disappointed bridges", as Joyce called them. Most writers, most of the time, get wet.

As a result, she says, writing fiction can be 'some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you'll ever do'.

In illustration, she gives us the fictional story of 'Clive', who sets out to write a novel, and finally completes it:

Somehow, despite all Clive's best efforts, the novel he has pulled into existence is not the perfect novel that floated so tantalisingly above his computer. It is, rather, a poor simulacrum, a shadow of a shadow. In the transition from the dream to the real it has shed its aura of perfection; its shape is warped, unrecognisable. Something got in the way, something almost impossible to articulate and Clive must suffer the bleak sense ... that his novel was not only not good, but not true.

And what is this truth which would make for the perfect novel, but which inevitably evades the fiction writer? It is, says Zadie, the truth of the self, the writer's character, a fact little acknowledged by critics writing with the legacy of TS Eliot's injunction to separate the 'personality' of the writer from the writing:

To writers, writing well is not simply a matter of skill, but a question of character ... Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great.

She is careful here to make the distinction between crude autobiographical facts - an obsession with which, as I am always saying, can get in the way of a reader's receptivity to the writing - and the idea of a writer's personality in the truer sense. Personality, she says, 'is much more than autobiographical detail, it's our way of processing the world', and a writer's style is 'a personal necessity ... the only possible expression of a particular consciouness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth'. And when a writer fails to find the style which does this adequately - as he or she always must, to a greater or lesser extent - then writing inevitably becomes an endeavour of failure and disappointment.

This is the one duty of writers, she says: 'to express accurately their way of being in the world' and a great novel is one which can do this, however alien to a reader the way of being expressed. The duty of readers is to meet this halfway, she says, and reading too is a skill to be honed:

Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced.

In a week when people have been posting about 'comfort-blanket' books, Zadie reminds us that books are meant to prevent us from what she calls 'sleepwalking through life.'

Prizes Prized?

Prompted by the Costa awards, announced this week, and by a post on the Guardian books blog by Lemn Sissay (a judge this year for the John Llewellyn Rhys Award), Jessica Ruston at the Book Bar has some perturbed thoughts about book prizes in general.

Sissay reveals the interesting fact that publishers and agents agree from the off that certain books will be entered for prizes as a way of guaranteeing press coverage for a book. Jessica wonders if this is 'tighten[ing] down the circle of books that get press coverage even further'.

My book group will be interested. They are constantly exclaiming: 'How on earth did this win a major prize?', and one of them practically threw a book across the room this week for being a 'typical Booker type book'.

Critic Mutation

Today Arts Guardian leads with an article by Peter Bradshaw titled Call Yourself a Critic? reflecting on the blogger/newspaper debate. He stresses the revolutionary nature of what has been happening:

Part of what's happening is that newspapers have, for hundreds of years, been a one-party state, and the net has brought that state to an end. Before the web, there was no serious opposition to the press in the press. Newspapers might express the most virulent opposition to every other institution in British public life: to the Church of England, political parties, the monarchy - anything but the press. Our media sections have nothing like the full-throttle, uncensored criticism of the press routinely expressed in blogs.

As a newspaper critic he says that this new critical attitude by bloggers to newspaper arts criticism has been a bracing, invigorating but often uncomfortable experience, and concludes:

The web and blogging have hugely increased the scope for such debates. The critic is finding that the newly empowered bloggers do not share his or her opinions about the new film, play or book, and especially his or her high opinion of him- or herself. So critics must sharpen their wits, clarify their opinions - and, just as importantly, get a sense of humour about themselves.

Both Bradshaw and music critic Dorian Lynsky in a companion article muse thoughtfully on the style of debate which has ensued and will ensue in future, but while Lynsky avers:

In an ideal world, there should be room for both print critics and online ones, with plenty of overlap between them. Good writing is good writing, wherever it appears

he slips into hierarchical Us-Them mode after all, appearing at one point to refer to newspaper critics and bloggers as critics and readers and concentrating on the commenters on his own posts (reactors to 'real' criticism), and the print version of his article is titled significantly, Calling all my hecklers.

Speaking for myself, I will never forget the feeling of exposure the first time I put up a post all without the protection of the time-honoured authority of the printed publication (which I have also experienced), and it is through writing their own blog posts that these journalists are coming to experience this for themselves.

PLR, RIP?

Today, along with every other writer who registered, The Bitch gets her Public Lending Right statement.

Sheesh. Nine titles and what she gets is… well, not enough to make herself a good meal, leave alone buy one out.

Well, The Bitch can’t really complain. Six of those titles were dispensable-commodity jobs, novelisations of a children’s TV drama series, which she was persuaded to write (under a different name) while a single parent and her kids wanted designer trainers like all the rest – transitory paperbacks soon disintegrated and sold off or chucked in the library dustbins. (Good fun and good writing exercises, though.) And as for her three literary titles (two short novels, one reincarnated in a revised edition), well, they were initial-imprint paperbacks too, and came from minority presses and weren’t published in the first place in any true sense of the word, so were never likely to achieve great library borrowings.

But there’s a section on the form this year there never was before: a space to renounce your claim if you haven’t recorded any loans for a number of years. Maybe this is a special version of the statement sent out to those whose loans have dropped, but I wonder: is this a new acknowledgement that Public Lending Right, once fought for so diligently by Maureen Duffy and others as a way of giving writers some reward for the continuing lives of their books in libraries, is now, like publishers’ advances, just a short-term flash-in-the pan? That, as Susan Hill has complained, libraries too see books as dispensable commodities, and themselves no longer as the custodians of literature….?

Chin Up, Writers!

Susan Hill has posted a complaint, or at least an expression of amazement, that so many aspiring-writer bloggers complain about the pain of writing. Writing should be fun, she says, and if not, then for goodness' sake, give up.

Mm. Well, yes, it's fun when it's going well, it's especially fun when you're writing something comic, it's even exciting when you're writing something tragic; it sure is the bees knees when you get something published, and it's out of this world when people write and say they've liked your work. But as Bookseller to the Stars comments beneath her post, for writers undergoing rejection there's a panicky sense of 'is this really worthwhile?' that can take a good deal of the oomph out of the system.

And surely, with our history of novels which have made it after numerous earlier rejections (Watership Down, Life of Pi, We Need To Talk About Kevin for starters), no one would advise a writer to give up simply because they've been rejected so far?

As for the writing process itself, Susan does concede that there can be frustration and anxiety involved. Some books are difficult to write, she admits, and of course she's right that in the end you can get glorious satisfaction from finally writing them.

But then she does like to stir things up, doesn't she, our Susan?

Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

Today Grumpy Old Bookman has an interesting post on the publishing difficulties faced by new writers nowadays. There has been some dispute on the web about whether good new writers do indeed face particular difficulties, but GOB makes a convincing case. He is referring to genre writers, and in particular thriller writers, but it seems to me that his points could be made across the board.

GOB points out that Jack Higgins had written several competent but unsensational books before he made it with The Eagle Has Landed - similarly with Ken Follett. Present-day publishers, he says, are no longer prepared to allow writers to grow in this way, but seek an instant hit from the off. Nowadays any new writer whose first book does not promise to be an instant hit will be unlikely to get a foot in publishing. The comments are interesting, too: there's an instance of a previously published SF writer who can't get back on the ladder because, as GOB says, publishers want younger writers who will 'look really cool on Richard and Judy's sofa'.

GOB applauds the use of Lulu.com as a way around this problem (he reviews Ron Morgans' thriller Kill Chase which has been published this way). And it is of course this ethos which several new independents have been launched to counter. Then there's Macmillan New Writing, established specifically to allow new writers to develop without the pressure of earning back an advance. If the one example of MNW which I've read is anything to go by, Roger Morris's Taking Comfort (reviewed here), it's not just competent practice pieces that are being picked up this way, but literary gems.

Susan Hill's Books of the Year (2006) Prize

It may be clear by now that the Bitch is not a lover of lists, and is wary of the competitive whiff of 'best-ofs', but she has succumbed to Susan Hill's current project in which bloggers are asked to submit nominations for Books of the Year (one fiction book and one non-fiction): it's a chance, after all, to further promote one of the two debut novels I have loved this year and have posted about here and here.

Slippage

Once upon a time when the Bitch was a soppy little girl and long before she became a wise-ass city type, she knew everything about the countryside, and birds and animals, and her especial love was flowers. And she loved Wordsworth too because he did, and even after she became a cynical city type she had to admit that a big thing in her writing was a sense of the seasons, for which reason while writing she always had to keep her pathetic fallacy detector well polished.

Well, she knows nuttin no more. As Steerforth has noted, there is ample evidence this season that things are changing fast. And what does this do for a writer? How dated our books will become. What anachronisms will occur - are occuring already: not so long ago in Waterstone's I picked up a novel written recently but set in the thirties which began with a reference to green leaves on the trees in October. Yet it's only in the past three years or so, I think, that the trees have still been green in October. And if we get it right, if we portray the past as it was - with leafless trees and bone-hard ground in October, will young readers believe us, or see our writing as unrealistic, or will we betray ourselves as unpalatably linked with a past which has gone (and God knows no one respects the past much nowadays)?

Susan Hill says she's going to record the things in her garden to check all this out, and here are my notes:

Here in South Manchester in January we have not yet had frost. There are fuchsias and roses still flowering in the gardens, and yes, there are still some trees with leaves on them, mostly yellow, but some green. Nasturtium plants are still trailing over the trellises, not black and slimy as they should be with frost. As last year, the jasmine over my front door, which is meant to flower in spring and summer, is coming into flower right now. On a Christmas walk, like Steerforth I found spring flowers - coltsfoot and tansy - and witnessed ducks taking part in mating rituals.

How will this affect our psyches as writers? How will it affect the kind of literature we write?

Not Blogging

'Happy New Year,' says the Partner of the Bitch, handing her the Guardian and that grotesque image of a hanged man's face. Words fail me.

But words have been failing me, blog-wise, for the Christmas period. With not much to discuss on the literary front and everything shrinking (or rather swelling) to the personal, there's not much to blog about for someone who's always banging on critically about the cult of personality. Even on my other, writer blog I try to stick to professional matters (unsuccessfully, I know), and it's more than just policy, it's superstition: I'm afraid of jinxing or using up the material I could put into my writing.

And then it seems to me that it's impossible to write about anything personal without fictionalising it anyway...

Yet how I loved Ms Baroque's vivid account of her Christmas with her children, and all her evocative personal posts, and those of nmj and Steerforth, for instance. It's made me think a lot about blogging. A blog is after all a public space - over Christmas twenty-odd people in Montreal, presumably students, came to my writer blog after Googling 'Themes in Compass and Torch' (one of my short stories) - and a writer always does well to be careful about his/her public image. Yet there's something so personal about the blogosphere - the language, the spontaneity, the discussions, and the fact that you really do feel you have made friends with like-minded people.

So I don't know...

I could tell you about literary-related things, I guess; I could stretch it and tell you about the things I did with members of our reading group: the Carol Concert in Bridgewater Hall with the Mozart Festival Orchestra dressed up in eighteenth-century costume and all the middle-aged women in glittery tops milling in the foyer, or drinks in the pub on Christmas Day, when the landlady came round and wished us all Merry Christmas so we felt we were in a soap pub rather than a real one. I could tell you about the literati party, when I talked for two hours to a Royal-Court produced playwright who has decided no longer to bother even trying with a British theatre system which has turned its back on the kind of play he writes, and to which a famous novelist turned up at the end with her parents in tow - but it was a private, not a public literary event so I won't mention their names. The two family parties - the one where my ex and my current sat down together with the kids, and the one with the Irish lot all singing and playing - don't qualify, of course. One New Year's Eve party does, as I talked for an hour to two handsome and disgustingly young marketing men about an issue I've addressed in this blog. Both agreed with my assessment that current marketing philosophy is about feeding into established practices, and both insisted that it is very difficult to 'market into the unknown'. Both however agreed, when they thought about it, that books (which can be intended conversely to surprise people or change their minds) require a new and different marketing strategy to be devised.

And then I went on to the crime-writer's party, whose name I had better not drop...

Daniel Green at The Reading Experience points to some interesting links about the nature of blogs: Robert Nagle answering the criticisms of George Will.

Happy New Year.

Heh Heh

Who said the book world was genteel? asks Maxim Jakubowski on the Guardian books blog. You ought to cry, but you can't help grinning at the tale he tells.

Thanks to Petrona for the link.

Christmas Quizzical

So the reviewing debate makes it into the Guardian Christmas quiz with John Sutherland as star protagonist:

Who started a vicious turf war between paid-up members of Grub St and the bloggers?

Here are my Christmas quiz questions:

1. Since most bloggers I read reacted humorously or thoughtfully, where was the viciousness?

2. And who introduced the notion of exclusive territory, as replicated in those phrases paid-up and turf war?

I tell you, John Crace (who compiles the books questions) is my favourite bookish satirist of all...

Campaigning Novels

I'll probably get shot down in flames for this post, but here goes.

In yesterday's Guardian Lucasta Miller writes about the recent discovery of a letter written by the Rev. Patrick Bronte soon after the death of his daughter Charlotte, which appears to disprove the established view that he was a domestic tyrant. Miller writes that it was Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, who established this unfavourable reputation, demonising the Reverend in her attempt to present Charlotte as a victim and thus excuse what she considered the 'damaged imagination' which had given rise to what were seen as Charlotte's 'immoral and unchristian novels.'

I have been musing ever since why none of this surprised me.

Now there are many things I like about Gaskell, enough anyway for me to agree a few years back to write a serialisation of Mary Barton for Radio 4, and to work for a week on a treatment (until the BBC told my producer that sorry, their mistake, wires had got crossed, but there was already another writer-producer team working on the same project). And one of the things I like about her is her campaigning zeal. But the fact is that a campaigning zeal is not unproblematic - for a biographer (warping and supressing the facts in service of the campaign to improve Charlotte Bronte's image) or for a novelist either.

Gaskell's own biographer, Jenny Uglow, makes much of Gaskell's belief in stories (her biography is subtitled A Habit of Stories). Discussing the writing of Mary Barton, she says: Gaskell knew that stories had a persuasive power beyond that of rational exposition. However, the very wording of this sentence reveals Gaskell's view of stories as a means to a different end, in this case the (undoubtedly laudable) campaign to illustrate the plight of the working classes.

I know many people who love Mary Barton unreservedly, but all of these people are and always have been middle class. For some of us who hail from rather lower orders it's hard not to read this book without a sense of the sentimentality with which the characters are depicted, or a knowledge that this was a book written for the middle classes, or to get through the following passage without a sense of exclusion:

...what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks ... there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining...

And, frankly, I find the novel schematic.

I feel similarly about some of the feminist novels of the seventies and eighties (excuse me now while I don my asbestos suit), in which organic aesthetic concerns were subsumed by a political voice - which is a hard thing to say because it risks seeming to endorse the view that all feminist novels were so.

But before someone writes and points it out, yes, I was on the judging panel the year Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories won the Portico prize - a work of impeccable scholarship and warmth which presents Gaskell in all her complexity. And, hey, I did love the TV adaptation of North and South not so long ago...

Never so Bad

Today's Arts Guardian presents us with its Review of the year, subtitled Why we've never had it so good.

Here are their categories: Theatre, Film, Visual Art, Music (divided into four sorts, each of which forms a category of its own: Jazz, World Music, Classical and Pop), Dance, Architecture, TV.

Books? No Books. There hardly ever is in these things. Why? Why don't books (at least books of creative writing - those potential categories Novel, Poetry or Short Stories) qualify as 'Art'? Are they any less 'art' than, say, Pop or TV? Or is it, on this occasion, that the compilers believe that in the world of books we haven't had it so good this year?

Or is it that art means entertainment now and words, unlike pictures and sounds, are just too damned abstract, or even too much like damned hard work?

Normblog Writer's Choice

The Bitch has had the honour of being asked by Norm to contribute to his Writer's Choice series.

Those Great Editorial Decisions

How about this?

Thanks to Laura Lippmann via Miss Snark.

The Bitch Is Not Top of the Class in Reading

I really meant it when I said that I don't know how Susan Hill does what she does: all that reading while writing and publishing and blogging and all the other things she does - and not quite in the way some people took it. My tone was pure wonder.

You know, when I go to her site and to those of all those other omnivorous readers, something tightens in my stomach: that very same feeling I used to get when I stood on the sidelines and all those mega-athletic types ran the hundred metres etc. I feel inadequate, and because it's books, and because as a writer I'm supposed to be a well-read type, I feel guilty about it too.

It's pathetic, I know, but I just don't find reading books all that easy. They can take me over. They can affect me in such a way that they fill my mind, colour everything, they can even change me, as both a person and a writer. It's like a love affair in fact, it really is: if I like a book, I'm transported, I day-dream it, with no eyes for any other, sometimes going over its imagery and language for days, or even weeks after I have put it down. For this reason, as I have written on my other blog, it can be quite lethal for me to read while I'm in the middle of writing something myself. And in a way, if books don't do this, for me they're not really worth reading . It's precisely the effect I would love to be able to have on others as a writer.

No need to tell me: Bitch as I am, I'm also pretty weedy.

Orwell and the Plain English Campaign

The debate on the Guardian website and on my post below, generated by Germaine Greer's award of a Golden Bull by the Plain English Campaign, has sent me back to Orwell's 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language.

No doubt the PEC would pull me up on that first sentence for its length, long sentences being one of their bugbears. And do you know, I have a hunch they would be right. Maybe the facts packed into it would be clearer and more quickly assimilated if I separated them. But the fact is, I can't be bothered to go back and do this because of the time and thought it would take without making it clumsy, and I've got a damned play to write. This is one of Orwell's points: that writing more simply yet with a satisfying rhythm takes time and thought. It's easier and lazier to pick up on euphonious ready-made constructions (which tend to be abstract and convoluted), and when we do this we tend to write with less thought. Orwell expresses an opposite idea to the one that to simplify language is to dumb down: by providing a translation of a Bible passage into modern-day speak he demonstrates that the simpler, more concrete language of the original is far more vivid and thus more meaningful.

There are some odd apparent inconsistencies about the PEC. It's very off-putting to me that that arch mangler of the English language, Tony Blair, is one of their supporters - the guy who has so dramatically mouthed (as if it's his own coinage!) one of the very cliches Orwell condemned all that time ago: stand shoulder to shoulder. But then (to unpick another cliche) you don't necessarily blame the bandwagon for those who jump on it, do you, and it's the vice of our age (so well demonstrated in Animal Farm) to lump together everything a person says as either good or bad, simply because of who they are. And just because the application of a set of principles is not always successful does not of course mean those principles are wrong. Anyway, some of the PEC's examples of clarification don't seem so bad to me:
Before: High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the on-going learning process.
After: Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.
I have to say, the first of these is the kind of thing I have satirised many a time in a radio play.

However, the thing which discredits the PEC for me is what seems to be a huge category error. Not content with the rightful target of officialese, at the end of their section on 'Long Sentences' they provide a list of creative works with exceptionally long sentences, including Ulysses (for Molly Bloom's long stream-of-consciousness monologue). It's not altogether clear that they are condemning them and that they have no notion that these long sentences are artfully constructed for specific and dynamic effect, but it looks like it (and anyway, I thought they were all about clarity?)

Nevertheless, I think that Orwell's six rules for writing English are useful for creative writers, and I have always tried to abide by them myself whatever I'm writing (not always successfully, of course, as that redundant 'myself' proves!). It's perhaps worth repeating them here:
i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii) Never use a long word when a short word will do. (This does not preclude the notion that sometimes a short word will not do.)
iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent. (Once again, this does not preclude the notion that there may not be an equivalent.)
vi) Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.

Little but Large

I am amazed and thrilled that a book of short stories can win a major award!

Today the Guardian announces that the winner of its first book prize is A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by the Chinese writer resident in the US, Yiyun Li.

Now I now that this book has not come from nowhere - it's already won several major international prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway award - and that the political import of these stories will have helped in this, but these are SHORT STORIES, for goodness' sake.

For years now the short story has been in major decline in Britain, to the point where it's almost dead, and I began this blog lamenting this fact. It's years since the fact that short stories don't sell became established publishing wisdom and many British writers - including me, originally a short-story writer - were forced away from short-story writing into other forms. It's years since, squeezed by market forces, the British print literary magazines, the last great haven of the short story, more or less disappeared (online magazines having yet to achieve the same kind of reputation with the literary establishment). (As I've written before, I've had my own attempt to combat this last decline, but found the battle so hard it left me no time to write.)

Depressingly, I've seen a more general contempt for the short story increase down the years, and signs that people no longer know how to read them. My reading group, for instance, won't touch them: they're not satisfying, some of the members have complained, you can't sink into them like you can with a novel, and anyway how could you discuss a whole book of different stories? They had not entertained the idea that a single really good short story could take as much time to discuss as a novel.

Now wouldn't it be nice if this award meant the turning of the tide?

Plain Mystifying

Noosa Lee at That's So Pants and Ms Baroque cheer Germaine Greer for her sarcastic response to her 'Golden Bull' award from the Plain English Campaign. Prof Greer receives this award for the following sentence in a Guardian article on October 23rd:

The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold.

'The unsynthesised manifold', as Greer explains in her more recent article, is a phrase from Kant's Critique of Judgement which should be familiar to students of aesthetic theory, and Greer says, to 'most reasonably educated Guardian readers'.

Now I agree with those who have said that the PEC are barking up the wrong tree here (legalese and political obfuscation are surely the better targets), and it's also true that, as Ms Baroque illustrates with examples from their web site, there is a dangerous linguistic dumbing-down tendency in their philosophy and practice.

But, I don't know... Maybe it's the ex-secondary-school teacher in me, a teacher of rehoused Gorbals kids who had arrived at secondary school at the age of twelve unable to read... Those contemptuous sniggers when I didn't make myself understood, those life chances which failure to understand meant those kids wouldn't get... Maybe it's the ex-twelve-year-old in me whose uneducated relatives looked so dismayingly uncomfortable when I used big words they didn't understand... But, the thing is, I'm not very happy with that elitist supposition about 'most Guardian readers', Greer's assumption (in her original article) that she had no need even to say where that phrase comes from, leave alone what it means.

It's all a question of who you are writing for, I suppose. Are you writing only for those who already understand everything about the subject you're addressing, or are you prepared to include those who don't?

What a Joker

What a wag that Jasper Gerard is.

Bloggers are the codgers who used to write letters in green ink banging on about speed humps or Judao-Freemason conspiracies, he writes green-inkishly, in a piece in today's Observer entitled 'Leave us some moron-free zones'.

They probably include gifted amateurs, he concedes, after a week of debate in which many have pointed out that plenty of professional thinkers blog - that wicked probably indicating that he hasn't bothered to look anyway. And slyly he manages to both misrepresent the motives of most bloggers and pander to the newspapercentric view of them as a threat by suggesting that the blogging of these 'gifted amateurs' might earn them what he codgerishly calls a proper job.