Edinburgh Book Festival Round-Up (2): Colm Tóibín

This blog post is about an event on 13 August 2012. 

I had planned to write more about the Edinburgh Book Festival in later posts, but it now seems so long ago that it would feel a bit out-of-date. However, I did want to write about the Colm Tóibín event for a number of reasons:

1. His name is one I can never say without feeling awkward. I think the correct pronunciation of it -- at least the one Tessa Hadley used at the event -- is COL-um tuh-BEAN, but it sounds a bit pretentious to say it that way (like referring to 'Paree' or 'Firenze' without a hint of irony), yet ignorant to say it any differently. I wonder if Tessa Hadley checked with him about how to pronounce it at the event. I'm glad it wasn't me. I'd have probably stood there in an agonising dilemma, because on the one hand he probably gets asked that all the time and finds it annoying, but on the other hand saying it wrong in front of 570 people (a sell-out audience at the RBS Main Theatre) would be pretty embarrassing too. It was already warm enough in there without having a hot flush of mortification to deal with.

2. Tóibín is an author I have admired for a while now. I once listened to a podcast in which he was discussing his novel Brooklyn, which won the Costa Award in 2009, and I was so enthralled by his gentle, slightly nasal, Irish-New-York voice that I immediately went and bought and read the book.

It's about an Irish girl, Eilis, in the 1950s, who moves to Brooklyn to seek her fortune. It's all very understated -- no AS Byatt-type encyclopaedic detail, no Madeline Miller-type syrupy-pseudo-poetry, to name a couple of recent prize-winning authors -- and it's very hard to put your finger on what makes it so good. It is precise, it is compassionate as Tolstoy and Hardy and Henry James are (James being a particular love of Tóibín's), and it is balanced; Eilis is non-judgmental and non-aggressive, but both of these qualities appear more as absences than anything else, because she is also incredibly passive. There is tragedy, but Tóibín writes about it as something essentially low-key, banal, and to be expected.

He has the same clear sight and light touch in The Master, and I noticed it again in a story called 'A Priest in the Family', which comes from his collection Mothers and Sons and which I found in the anthology The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. It concerns an old woman, Molly, who discovers that her son, a Catholic priest, is about to go on trial for child abuse. The passages of dialogue almost reach a Hemingway-like level of minimalism because of the lack of interiority -- she only reflects when alone, and not even very deeply then -- which, along with the ingenious decision to focus on the mother, makes the story really quite chilling.

3. His approach to talking about books is one I find extremely sympathetic, and one that was reinforced by his conversation with Tessa Hadley (see previous post). They were trying to search for a word that described the variations in tone and colour that make up a work of literature. They went through 'aesthetic' and 'pattern' before eventually hitting on 'texture'. This word quite rightly brought out the curious sensation that reading feels physical -- it has a rhythm which is not quite the same thing as the speed at which you are reading it. It is to do with the interaction between the words, the eye, the brain, and the white space around the paragraphs. Ending a paragraph with the sentence "It was over" is quite different to beginning a paragraph in the same way. I think it was this sensation they were trying to pin down.

Tóibín teaches a class at Columbia University, where he is Mellon Professor, and explained to an amused audience that he tells all students, even the ones with "massive PhDs", to leave all literary theory at the door. To students who drawl that they can only read in a Lacanian way, he responds like an Irish fishwife: "Not in here, you won't." Saying this, his rather geometric approach to texts, looking for patterns and so on, sounds quite narratological in its method. He explained that in The Portrait of a Lady and Mansfield Park, amongst other novels, the fact that the heroine does not have parents both allows and forces her to come into her own, and thus the story is born. (This is particularly true of the silly or dead mothers in Jane Austen, where aunts and sisters tend to be more important.)

Pressing his Russian Formalist-style musings further, he proposed that it was irrelevant for readers to say they 'liked' or 'disliked' characters in novels: the character serves a function in the novel and is not there to excite that kind of emotion. This sounds a very ascetic approach to reading, and one that a great many readers will surely disagree with, but I see his point. A character is necessary to the novel; there's no point complaining to a novelist that the character isn't this or that. Assuming some competence on the part of the novelist, changing the character would take it away from the novel that the novelist wanted to write.

Focusing on only the text is very out of fashion nowadays, but I admire Tóibín's approach because it encourages extended and careful reflection on the craft with which a text has been put together, and I don't think extended and careful reflection on anything can be a bad thing. Nor is he blinkered: his new book, New Ways To Kill Your Mother, is a series of essays on the relationships between writers and their parents (Yeats and his father, J.M. Synge and his mother, and so on). Clearly, he appreciates the value of biography, and probably more than many.

Tóibín has a long-term interest in parental-filial relationships, judging by the title of Mothers and Sons (2006), which some might slyly suggest is typical of a gay, solitary man. However true this may be, he is a superb writer, who displays a wonderful slow generosity when being interviewed, and makes you feel that he really does understand the slow, minute pains associated with being alive. Perhaps he gives a faint impression that he feels more pain than most, for whatever reason; but he's clearly doing what he loves best of all, and he does it with a modest virtuosity that continues to inspire and excite me.



(The next few posts will focus on a different theme, which is as yet undecided. Never say I'm not helpful.)

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.