Edinburgh Book Festival Round-Up (1): Tessa Hadley and Sarah Hall

I'm doing a couple more posts about authors I saw at the Edinburgh Book Festival. This blog post is about a talk given at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Monday 13th August 2012. A later will be about Colm Tóibín.

This event was in the Guardian Spiegeltent at the Festival, at 10.15; I thought it was at 10.30 and was about a minute late, much to my embarrassment. They had to play some music for a couple of minutes whilst I and a couple of other latecomers scurried in and blushed all over the place. But, once in, I enjoyed this event very much. Both writers have short story collections out: Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference (which I've read) and Tessa Hadley's Married Love (which I haven't). The talk was therefore about the particular nature of short stories, what they are like to write and to read. I've never actually read anything by Tessa Hadley, but as her particular interests include Austen, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Colm Tóibín (more of whom another time), I'm already quite a fan of her. Here is her 'author statement' on the British Council website, which I think is rather nice:

I love the irresponsibility of short stories. Writing short, you create with a free hand. Each new development you imagine can be drawn in to the story without consequences, with all the lightning-bolt effect of a first thought, no requirement to elaborate a hinterland. A quickly scribbled indication of background can stand in for a whole city, a whole past. And yet I can’t stop wanting to write novels too.  Novels see things through. The reader is in for the long term; the writer is in for a sizeable stretch of her life. In a novel there’s not only the dazzle of the moment, but also the slow blooming of the moment’s aftermath in time, its transformation over and over into new forms. I love to write about the present, and the past that’s recent enough for me to remember. The fiction writer’s ambition is modest and overweening: to take the imprint of the passing moment, capture it in the right words, keep it for the future to read.

Both writers read extracts from their work, and the subsequent discussion focused substantially, like the passage above, on the difference between novels and short stories. It was chaired by Sue MacGregor, who was just what a chair ought to be: directing the writers in places where you would expect them to be modest (insisting on reading out parts she thought were particularly brilliant), but not conspicuous or interrupting the flow of discussion.

There was a lot of talk of the impact of a short story, the fact that it is like a punch or an explosion, it has to be engineered very strictly and must have a sense of being "tightly-strung". Sarah Hall mused that it was a bit like throwing a pot: you have to get it right on the first "throw", and can't save it by reworking if the first go isn't right. I'm not sure how much I agree with this -- I think a patient craftsmanship can improve things a lot more than writers (including myself) would like to admit -- but I do agree that short stories tend to come from a particular 'feeling' rather than the kind of scope you need for a novel. Hall also talked about the judgment you have to make about a short story, deciding whether it could "go the distance" into a novel, or should stay in the short form. This is something I've often wondered about things I've written -- whether they should and could be teased out and extended, or whether this would lead to 'padding' and dampen the whole effect -- so it was good to hear. Not to mention the apparently 'banality' of this idea, the admission that writing is often as much to do with logistics and practicalities as inspiration and vision.

Tessa Hadley was the one who really impressed me, though I'm not sure why. She was lively and quick and extremely eloquent, and self-effacing. I almost wondered whether she had erased the sense that younger writers have of writing being bound up with your own attractiveness. I don't think this is a stupid or judgmental thing to say. I have this feeling myself more frequently than I'd like to admit, and been conscious of it in things I've given people to read. I have also on occasion sensed it in things friends have given me to read (and not always that young, either!).

Sarah Hall, in my impression (which is of course pure speculation), hasn't quite got rid of this sense yet, and it shows in the collection: many of the protagonists of the stories are women obsessing in one way or another about a relationship with a man; the book cover itself shows a naked woman with her back to us, on several different cover designs. I wondered how much these women were fictional versions of herself -- more than in the usual way for a writer! Perhaps this is an unfair way to belittle her writing -- after all, female sexuality is a perfectly valid and important subject -- but it was a feeling I had as I read the stories on the way up to Edinburgh, and seeing her in person gave me the same feeling again, so I'm standing by it. I should, however, say that I liked some of her stories very much, in particular 'She Murdered Mortal He' (the title, according to Google, taken from a Bob Dylan lyric). She can create a sense of oppressiveness and draw out a tense moment in a way that makes for good reading.

But going back to Tessa Hadley: she read Elizabeth Bowen's story 'The Jungle' for the series of short stories podcasts released by the Guardian in 2010, and I was very struck by the way she captured tension and tone and mood with a very calm, restrained rendering (see previous post on authors reading their own work!). Though I have never read any of her fiction, she has mysteriously installed herself in my list of favourite literary figures. And, later the same day, she chaired the event with Colm Tóibín. More of which in a later post!

Alice Oswald at the Edinburgh Book Festival

I frankly think that some poets, reading their own work, have a tendency to spoil it (a poet whose name rhymes with 'fluffy' springs to mind.). They over-express, they over-dramatise, they leave massive pauses, they try to become an actor -- which they conspicuously aren't -- and to make their work into a monologue or verse drama -- which it conspicuously isn't. Poetry, especially lyric poetry, is a voice in a space: either a physical space like a hall, or a white paper-space in a book. It does not actually address anyone. It requires intense attention on the rhythm and focus of the words, and I believe that this should largely replace the need for any 'acting'. (Except perhaps in the dramatic monologue, the deliberate 'cross-over' form, done so beautifully by Robert Browning and Tennyson and co.)

However, sometimes readers of poetry, even actors, manage to get a slow, low, calm intensity that directs the listener's attention straight onto the words, not the reader's voice. Ralph Fiennes' reading of Four Quartets is the perfect example.* And, thankfully, Alice Oswald's renditions of her own work are another.**

Oswald is a poet I've admired for many years now. She writes largely about nature and humans' relationship to it, and is often associated with Ted Hughes. There certainly are clear links, but she doesn't emulate his quasi-shamanistic approach. She has said in past interviews that her writing tends to revolve around water and its movement, because it is one thing that constantly changes in all landscapes, even in ways that are not immediately noticeable, such as the rising and falling of groundwater levels. This interest is particularly obvious in Dart, her second collection, which focuses on the River Dart in Devon and its presence in the lives of people around it (and which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002).

Oswald's other most obvious defining feature is her use of imagery which is almost geometric or mathematical, focusing on shapes and colours and literal movements: "sections of distance tilted through the trees", or "the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines". She combines this with a rich texture of sounds and rhythm - for example, "Green shines rain / Like a looked at thing being turned in all directions". For me, in the second line of that quotation (from 'Ideogram for Green' in Woods etc.), the movement from the thick K/L sounds to the ING sounds and finally to the harder consonants of D/N/S towards the end suggests the "looked at thing" being turned, creating a kaleidoscopic mix of phonetics. And there are examples like this everywhere.

Her familiarity with the natural world is evident everywhere: she is a trained gardener; she produced a book of botanical poems with etchings by Jessica Greenman, Weeds and Wild Flowers; her play-poem Sleepwalk on the Severn captures the night-time wildlife and movement of the Severn estuary; and so on.

However, she is a classicist by degree, and has returned to this interest in her most recent collection Memorial, a re-imagining of the Iliad, which she describes in the introduction as a kind of "oral cemetery". She is aiming to imitate the ancient Greek tradition of lament, where a professional poet would work with women of the community to orally build a picture of the dead person. By paraphrasing from the Iliad mini-biographies of soldiers killed in the Trojan war, and mixing in directly translated Homeric similes, she creates a tapestry of mourning and death in amongst the constantly shifting, and mostly destructive, natural world.

But the poem is clearly meant for oral delivery, as the Iliad and poems like it would originally have been experienced by an ancient 'readership'. And, at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 14th August, an oral delivery is exactly what Alice Oswald gave us. She chose to recite the poem from memory, which she did fluently and powerfully (notwithstanding one slightly long pause when I assumed she had temporarily forgotten what came next). The recitation lasted for about 75 minutes, which, as she observed at the start, is a challenge for modern audiences. However, the crowd sat largely motionless throughout, a challenge in a stuffy festival tent - and made even more challenging by the gory nature of parts of the text:

... a spear / Thrown by Diomedes pushed hard in by Athene / Hit him between the eyes it split-second / Splintered his teeth cut through his tongue broke off his jaw / And came out clean through the chin

(For some reason Blogspot won't let me put a block quote on multiple lines without messing up the formatting. Apologies for this.)



That the poem is most suited for oral recitation is most obvious in the fact that each of Oswald's translated Homeric similes is printed twice in a row on the page, tempting a silent reader to skip the second iteration. The performance was enough to suggest why: an attentive listener, familiar with the words from the first time around, could use the second time to focus on the intonation and rhythm and penetration of the words. For me it helped with understanding the function of each simile on both levels: the literal image, sometimes with its own internal metaphors (a hawk chasing a dove "snares her with a thin cry / In praise of her softness"); and its relationship to the endless deaths of the men.

Of course, you could also see the first iteration as applying to the death described before it, and the second one as applying to the death described after it: the physical deaths often do not link so closely to the similes which follow them as to make them a clear 'unit' within the poem. The effect, therefore, is of a catalogue of specific deaths combined with a series of meditations on the nature of death itself -- it is like mules, exhausted by toil, or poppies being flattened by heavy rain, or a woman who stops spinning, or a fish jumping out of the water onto the sand, or fleeing fawns suddenly giving up and standing still. And this helps the poem to gain its "enargeia", its "bright unbearable reality", by the reduction of a narrative drive to something like Death is this, and also this, and also here, and also like this.

Oswald's reading certainly enhanced the enargeia she invokes. Her face, with its heavy fringe and angular jaw, is strong and makes you hope you never have to disagree with her. During the reading, she moved her head, and very little else. Her poetry-reading voice was low and only moderately expressive, as it was on the other two occasions I've seen her read. She slightly emphasised alliterations and rhythms. The impression was of an intense power and focus: she was telling us, not reading to us, but she was telling us as a poet, or a poet-prophet, rather than as a mourner or an actor. (Maybe there is something faintly shamanistic about this.)

The title Memorial suggests the timeless status that many classical texts enjoy, because the poem specifically sets out to remember the 'common men' who are sacrificed in epic conflicts -- including modern global conflicts, where casualties are barely a name who passes over the radio waves one day and into obscurity. There is of course an irony in the fact that these men get a short stanza each, if that, and no more -- nowhere near a whole book like Achilles or Odysseus -- but Oswald did not set out to construct them as individuals; rather she illuminates their value, briefly, before slaughtering them. The mixture of significance and insignificance perhaps encapsulates the essence of an army: no army exists without individuals, but both individuality and individuals are disposable in the name of a greater cause.

How different the problem of individuality in armed forces is from the problem of individuality in the civilian world, I don't know. Probably not very. And so Oswald's work does what all good poetry should do: it spins out and out and out and forces us to take cover from our own nature until the slaughter can be ended -- or, depending on how you look at it, completed.


* No, I'm not being paid by Faber and Faber.
** Really, I'm not. They just happen to publish really good poetry.

Sense and Sensibility: Notes on Rereading

A quick preface to the first article of this blog. I had an old blog but it has been several years since I posted with any regularity on it, and I think the direction of my blog-style writings has changed since then. So, I've started a new blog - not that there will necessarily be any more coherence in the themes, but hopefully it will reflect my modern, twenty-five-year-old self with more accuracy.

I've just finished reading Sense and Sensibility, which I hadn't read in full for a good few years - possibly since my second year of university, if not before then. Like many, I'm a big fan of the Ang Lee film (1995), which won an Oscar for Emma Thompson's adaptation from the novel and started some fantastic actors: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Thompson of course, Gemma Jones, Harriet Walter, Imogen Stubbs, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton - so many, in fact, that it seems like a 'best-of-British-acting' reunion (perhaps foreshadowingthe Harry Potter films, which star at least six of the same actors ...?). The film is charming and funny, and includes some lovely original music.

Rereading the novel, the first that Austen published (in 1811), served to remind me of several things that the film leaves out through the need for economy:

A. Pairs of sisters
There are three pairs of sisters in the novel, and only one in the film. Marianne and Elinor of course are in both. But the film leaves out Lucy Steele's elder sister Nancy. Nancy, by the way, is rather important in the novel, since it's her that reveals Lucy's secret engagement to Edward to her prospective in-laws and sets in motion the chain of events which eventually leads to the happy ending. In the film, it's Lucy who does this herself, which is not inconsistent with her general character, but robs the film of the interesting contrast between one pair of sisters who, although very different in some ways, are both artless and behave with integrity (the Dashwoods), and the other pair who are irritating, greedy and false (the Steeles).

There are also Mrs Jennings's two daughters, one of whom was cut from the film, along with her four children, leaving her husband, Sir John, Mrs Jennings's son-in-law, a widower. This does raise a question of characterisation: what happened to his wife/Mrs Jennings's daughter, and why are they both so cheerful about it? The dead woman is never once mentioned in the film, which does start to stretch the bounds of credibility a little. I can understand why they'd cut her in the film, as she's pretty dull and doesn't add to the plot particularly, but her absence does make both Sir John and Mrs Jennings seem rather callous.

B. Willoughby's appeal
I had completely forgotten that Willoughby comes to see Elinor when Marianne is seriously ill at the end of the novel, begs Elinor to forgive him, and pours out his love for Marianne. It's a typically morally dubious decision on Willoughby's part, since he's already married to a rich young lady and is rather rude about her during his conversation with Elinor, but it serves to underline his very real love for Marianne and encourages us to see his downfall as tragic, the result of fundamental flaws in his character, rather than deliberate manipulation or evil.

In the film, this is cut, and we simply see Willoughby perched on a hill, looking down with a mournful expression at the double wedding taking place below him. On the whole, I think this was a sensible decision. The drama of Marianne's illness would have been interrupted, and the film unnecessarily lengthened, by its inclusion, and the symbolic exclusion of Willoughby from the celebrations makes him the rather lonely, regretful figure that Austen presents, but in a more efficient, visually-striking way.

C. Mrs Jennings
Mrs Jennings is a widow in both novel and film (where she's played by Elizabeth Spriggs). Along with her son-in-law and daughters (daughter singular in the film), she is continually both helpful and irritating to the Dashwoods through her lack of tact and perpetual cheerfulness. She is introduced as "a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar". She teases Elinor and Marianne and practically everyone else about romantic entanglements, real and imagined, and Marianne is often quite rude to her because she fails to see that most of Mrs Jennings's comments are well-meant.

What is developed much more in the novel, and gave me a lot of joy to read, was the fact that Mrs Jennings rises in the estimation of Elinor and Marianne throughout the book because of her loyalty and good sense. Four quotations are enough to illustrate this:

1. When Mrs Jennings is defending Edward for keeping to his engagement with Lucy:

'Then,' cried Mrs Jennings, with blunt sincerity, no longer able to be silent, 'he has acted like an honest man. I beg your pardon, Mr Dashwood, but if he had done otherwise, I should have thought him a rascal.'

Here, Austen cleverly has Mrs Jennings act as the ventriloquist's dummy for the reader. She says what we're all thinking: that Edward's actions prove him to be so honourable as to give up his own chance of happiness and fortune - what a hero.

2. When Marianne is ill at Cleveland, the residence of Mrs Jennings's daughter Charlotte and her husband Mr Palmer:

Mrs Jennings, however, with a kindness of heart which made Elinor really love her, declared her resolution of not stirring from Cleveland as long as Marianne remained ill, and of endeavouring, by her own attentive care, to supply to her the place of the mother she had taken her from; and Elinor found her on every occasion a most willing and active helpmate, desirous to share in all her fatigues, and often, by her better experienced in nursing, of material use. 

Again, Austen has been clever enough here to make Mrs Jennings not only kind, but actually useful and skilful. We begin to see her true worth lies beyond all her hilarity and cheerfulness, in true loyalty and generosity.

3.  When Marianne leaves Cleveland, having recovered, --

... after taking so particular and lengthened a leave of Mrs Jennings -- one so earnestly grateful, so full of respect and kind wishes as seemed due to her own heart from a secret acknowledgement of past inattention ...

The reader wholeheartedly supports Marianne's other conversions, to see that Willoughby is a scoundrel and Colonel Brandon a gentle and passionate lover - and therefore we are inclined to agree with this one, which seems to suggest that Mrs Jennings's good qualities should take precedence in our overall judgement of her character.

4. In the penultimate paragraph of the novel:

... and fortunately for Sir John and Mrs Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them, Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing, and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover.

Mrs Jennings, still desperate for romantic gossip, is unrepentant. One possible interpretation is that she has no need to repent: her gossip has done no real harm, so she doesn't need to change. Another way of reading this is to admire Jane Austen for not making Mrs Jennings a completely likeable character, even at the end, when the characters have been properly sorted into the good, the bad, and the just-about-pitiable (i.e. Willoughby). We are much more sympathetic towards her than earlier in the novel, but we are made to remember what her essential character is like, and this possibly introduces a bittersweet note into the conclusion, as well as an amusing one.

In between reading Austen novels, I sometimes start to wonder whether her importance has been overblown. But every time I reread another, I remember: she is subtle and brilliant and deserves to be praised in the highest terms.