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^{© Clarissa Upchurch}

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born poet and translator who came to Britain in 1956 as a refugee. He studied painting at the Harrow School of Art and the Leeds College of Art and Design before publishing his first book of poetry, The Slant Door, in 1979. In 2005 he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection Reel. He has translated Hungarian poetry and drama into English, including works by Sándor Márai, Ottó Orbán, and László Krasznahorkai. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Paul Sweeten corresponded with George Szirtes by email.

Your relationship with English is often understood in terms of your absorbing it as a second language. You have lived in Britain for most of your life, so has this now become a journalistic preoccupation, or are there times when English still feels like a second language to you?

There are times—moments, especially when speaking Hungarian—when English does feel like a second language and, perhaps, no bad thing, at least some of the time. The sense of language as a material body is useful for any writer, especially a poet. I myself think it odd that I should be a poet in English: it is as if some distinct and fortunate transformation had occurred at an early age. But if so, I am inside the change, not outside, so journalistic preoccupations are perfectly valid.

Does that sense of language as a material body become heightened when translating? Christopher Ricks once described translations as “cover versions”; is that your sense of the process, and do you take many artistic liberties when translating Hungarian poets into English? How much George Szirtes, for instance, goes into your translations of Sándor Márai?

Yes, that sense of material body is heightened in translation: each language destabilises the other: that means we become more aware of the fallible body of each language. One language asks: Can you do that? The other replies: I can do this, which is like that. The first language cannot know if it is properly understood: language two understands there are some things it can’t do. Their joint experience is uncertainty of intention and meaning and the sense of limit in both. I like Ricks’s definition though. There is, after all, a genuine quality in Blondie’s version of “The Tide is High” that is not quite the same as the quality of the original by the more obscure Paragons. My Márai is not better than Márai, it is just a possible English Márai that depends entirely on the Hungarian Márai. As far as Anglophone readership goes, Márai was the Paragons and my version, with a bit of luck, is Blondie. The big difference is I don’t get fame and money whereas Blondie did.

“Taking liberties” suggests something faintly criminal, or at least improper. Is there a proper behaviour towards the the original text in poetry? How many different English interpretations do we have for, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? There is an area of likely agreement but new readings continue to be offered. Which of the interpretations is the most proper? At what point does the reader begin to take liberties? I am generally within the sphere of propriety if only because I am aware of translating unknown poets, often for the first time. If Don Paterson translates Machado he feels no such obligation.

I’ve heard you talk about arriving in Britain with nothing but a book of photographs, and anyone familiar with your poetry will be aware of how important a role the captured image plays in it; there seems to be something of Keats’s Grecian urn figures at work, characters frozen in artifact. What do photographs mean to you?

I still have the case of photographs, though I have shared the actual photographs with my brother. My own mother was a photographer, and as a child, I remember watching her work at the light-box, retouching and hand-colouring. I wrote about these activities before I became as involved as I now am with photographs and photography. They are tied in with memories of mirrors (as in “At The Dressing Table Mirror”, a poem about the death of my mother, published in 1976). So mirrors and photographs are related. Broadly speaking, I think Barthes gets it right in Camera Lucida. The photographic moment is fascinating because it is by its very nature tragic, a memento mori. The moment has, by definition, gone. The record of the moment anticipates and includes the moment of going. Of course there are great photographers and ordinary snapshots. The great photographs are those where the image is not merely record but symbol. Everything is precisely where it had to be in order to generate a meaning beyond itself. Record and symbol are endlessly fascinating. Keats’s figures are frozen in a formalised moment, in a state of stylised desire. In that sense they too are potent symbols.

That symbolism in great photographs can hold an almost happenstance quality. It seems with painting there is more a sense of the artist’s hand; it’s a more contrived form, perhaps, but much of the beauty of poetry is in its contrivance. Did it feel like a natural transition to write poetry after studying painting?

I was writing before I started to paint, but I took to painting (at school, very late, after Christmas in my third year of Sixth) with great enthusiasm. There seemed to be the freedom to create one’s own cosmos in painting. Then there was all that glorious messy physical stuff. Language is the equivalent of that stuff. The power to create a cosmos is similar. I still love looking at paintings but am much more aware of them as constructions. Maybe part of getting older is the desire to be closer to life, as photographs seem to be.

The collection for which you won the T.S. Eliot Prize was Reel. I’ve always liked how tercets look on the page, and in that collection their spacing gives me the impression of a slide projector. How did you see that particular form working in relation to the other aspects of the poems?

The title poem of Reel is written in terza rima, as is a good part of the book—practically the whole of the first half, including “Meeting Austerlitz”, “Noir”, “Sheringham”, and “Flesh: An Early Family History”, a terza rima sequence with some eclogues in between the sections. I adapted Dante’s terza rima because it is an ideal episodic narrative form, (as in the Commedia) each verse clipping into the next, each section sufficient to articulate a central event. The slide projector effect you mention is for me a film clip that contains its own brief narrative, each episode part of a broad theme. There is, incidentally, a very new book, A Companion to Poetic Genre (ed. Erik Martiny), for which I wrote the terza rima chapter.

Having taught creative writing for a number of years and having kept a very active online blog, do you feel that the role of the public poet has been given greater breadth by these relatively recent developments—writing schools and worldwide discussion media—or are they merely incarnations of the kind of platforms to which writers have always had access? I don’t mean to say that you undertake public readings, teaching, blogging or anything else merely as “George Szirtes: Poet”, but your success has come at a time where writers are expected, to use Martin Amis’s word, to “perform”. Did you ever have a sense of that part of your life accelerating; after you won the Eliot, perhaps?

Inside that question nestle a good many others. There are various senses of the word “perform” here. The blog didn’t start out as performance, only in the sense that all writing is performative, but as notes that had an implicit, if unknown, public aspect. In other words I didn’t think the blog had anything directly to do with my fortunes as a poet. It was an interesting toy that made me think. It still does, though I am aware that it very quickly became an aspect of what you call, “George Szirtes: poet”. I do however believe my thoughts on this or that matter, as expressed on the blog, are read by some people with not much interest in poetry, let alone mine. In that respect I am “George Szirtes: human being (poet)”, a concept I rather like because of my growing belief that poetry is an aspect of being human, rather than an exclusive fully self-defining identity. I am, on the other hand, primarily known (if I am known at all) as a poet and a translator, albeit of a peculiar kind that might be described as George Szirtes: human being—English language writer of Hungarian birth, some links with Jewishness (poet and translator).

The question is partly whether I “perform” that. Larkin said he didn’t give readings because he couldn’t go round pretending to be himself. Any public appearance is a form of pretending to be oneself—and I mean a simple visit to the doctors where one behaves as one believes one should behave to doctors, just as much as being on stage as “George Szirtes: poet” not to mention all the other descriptive material. Performance is itself an aspect of human existence. What complicates matters is that for some time now publishers have depended on poets reading in public to sell the books because most bookshops don’t stock poetry, or only very little. At the same time an entire genre of “performance poetry” has developed in which the stage performance is of primary importance.

What did the Eliot Prize mean? In the first place it meant that three poets on one occasion chose my book over others. Three different poets on another day might have chosen something else. Nevertheless, the fact that they chose it meant that from then on I was one of a small group of poets who had been awarded the prize and that the prize would now enter the performative definition: George Szirtes (poet, Eliot Prize winner) plus the rest.

Frankly, I am with Larkin in some respects. I am glad of what the prize has brought me: a lot more attention, a lot more invitations, all those things you might call “acceleration”. The poetic vocation is psychologically insecure so it’s nice to be assured that the work is thought to be of some value. It is nice, but it is stupid to believe assurances. It is good that it should give one confidence to go on and try new things, but it would be stupid to go and do the same things all over again. Being a poet means living on one’s wits and nerves: those are best kept sharp. Best not be cosseted or flattered then. Plough on.

The role of the public poet? The public role of the poet? I don’t think I am a very public poet, but am aware modern technology has opened new channels of communication that, especially in the case of younger poets, has led to a new kind of consciousness. This may be more a matter of amplitude rather than of a radical change of kind. In any case, it has changed the old notion of being “public”: a whisper can very quickly become public material. I know I live in that world, that it swirls around me. I try to add the odd well formed sentence to it because doing that helps me think and has in some way modified the way I write poetry too. That is part of ploughing on.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is the editor-in-chief at the Oxonian Review.

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In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick offered a thought experiment. Would any of us, given the choice, enter an “experience machine”?

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences […] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Would you plug in? (Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick)

Nozick argued that one would not plug into the machine, even if one could plot a “realistic” life of peaks and troughs, good days and bad: the kind of raw experience favoured by John Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave new World. Comfort, after all, should be avoided at all costs.  “I don’t want comfort,” said Savage. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” Nozick thought that one would refuse to enter an experience machine whatever one could program into it, as pre-programming one’s life would hold no relation whatever to one’s sense of worth, and as such would be deeply unsatisfying for the user at the time of making the decision. In short, we want our successes and failures to be products of who we are. We want freedom. We want “real danger”.

On Tuesday 17th May, nobody won the €15 million EuroMillions jackpot by correctly predicting the outcome of seven randomly selected numbers between the values of 1 and 50. The probability of winning, according to Wikipedia, was 1 in 116,531,800. Despite these odds, at £2 a line one might have thought playing worth the risk, particularly when the jackpot before last stood at €121,019,633. Indeed, many millions of people did think it worth the risk, and one in particular proved all those who didn’t entirely wrong.

Gambling, like the experience machine, can be understood as a concentrated lifetime experience, a no-nonsense way of gratifying one’s venturous spirit without the need to try very hard, be good at anything or, with the innovation of online poker, even put shoes on. What’s more, if successful, gambling will set you up for life. You wouldn’t have to work, you wouldn’t have to clean, you wouldn’t have to cook; you could have a driver, a pastry chef, a valet, and you could pronounce “valet” in any way you liked because you would be free from the insufferable bourgeois pressure of impressing people. You could finally relax, or, to offer a synonym, you could finally spend money.

Most means of gambling require at least some measure of skill, either integral to the game in question or by way of some fun-injecting token (think of slot machines, where the act of “holding the cherries” from a flop of cherry/cherry/bell will occasionally congratulate the master tactician to the value of another spin). Lotteries, however, do away with flashing lights, do away with fun, and give it to us straight: regardless of how many people believe they have a “system”, winning is blind luck—blind being the operative word—which is perhaps why the EuroMillions draw is so un-enticing a prospect for this reviewer.

What sort of congratulations would be in order, what sort of fist-pumping and joy-jumping could be had, when the method by which one prospered—so disproportionate to the windfall appropriated—could have been performed by a calculator having been dropped down stairs, revealing the winning numbers? Indeed, playing the lottery seems wholly at odds with Nozick’s experience machine conclusions, yet many of us seem entirely comfortable with the idea of “making it” in the world without real danger, without even a gestural nod to one’s personality or beliefs or previous efforts; for nothing, in fact, but the cost of a ticket. We do, it seems, “plug in”: we plug in to the lottery machine in full knowledge that the random ball-generator will not consider us for our business acumen or artistic talent or the way we look or behave in the world. It, like the experience machine, does not discriminate.

There is a danger here of professing an objection to lotteries with all the sanctimony of a fire-and-brimstone minister. After all, could any of us honestly say that we would refuse millions of pounds on the basis that we didn’t earn them by some precious notion of self-worth? What society, after all, can judge fairly, outside of the lottery machine, who should and shouldn’t prosper? Having won the lottery or having built an Empire, a euro is a euro (or about £1.14), and as Nozick said himself, “while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there.” Perhaps we have underestimated the thrill of getting lucky. By playing the lottery we do not condemn ourselves to actually winning it, but merely relieve the pressures and avoid the humiliation that all other methods of pursuing success present to us. At the insular Lotto booth, we enter anonymously a low stakes arena in which no choices can be bad choices, but only unlucky ones.

What then becomes of the pursuit of happiness? Enlightenment writer Adam Ferguson said that:

Happiness is not that state of repose, or that imaginary freedom from care which at a distance is so frequent the object of our desire, but with its approach brings a tedium, a languor, more insupportable than pain itself. [Happiness] arises more from the pursuit than the attainment of any end whatever. It depends more on the degree to which our minds are properly employed than it does on the circumstances in which we are destined to act.

The obtainment of wealth, “that imaginary freedom from care”, so frequently results in happiness because it is so often paired with the mind’s proper employment: a successful business deal, a decade’s hard work, a well-calculated bluff in a game of poker, even. As the currency of so many forms of success, money has acquired its own value as a gratifier in and of itself: detached from all manner of endeavor, lucrative raffles such as EuroMillions advertise a lifestyle synonymous with entering an experience machine or with cheating at a computer game: a brave new world where anything is possible, full of tedium and languor because of it.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Sebastian Faulks
Faulks on Fiction: The Secret Life of the Novel
BBC Books, 2011
384 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1846079597

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It has been more than a century since A.C. Bradley asked us to remember, when considering the first scene of King Lear, that Cordelia “grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters”. Contemplating the lives of characters before their first speech and beyond their last was common in the Victorian era, though no critic acquired quite the reputation for treating literary figures as though they were real people as Bradley. Adopting the moralistic approach of 19th-century novels, Bradley’s imaginative portraits earned him the ridicule of many critics, among them L.C. Knights, who titled a 1933 essay “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” by way of illustrating the irrelevancies of such questions. Since then, psychoanalysis has returned to literary criticism, though it is no longer directed at fictional characters. The new subject, despite the efforts of Barthes and Foucault, is the author. Critics tend to ask biographical (or “based on” questions, as Sebastian Faulks calls them) more than any other. It is on this question of emphasis that Faulks on Fiction proceeds to adjudicate:

How did we come to this? It’s not, after all, the natural state of affairs. A child first marvels at the invention of a story; he doesn’t ask who Rumpelstiltskin was modeled on.

Faulks on Fiction, which accompanies a BBC television series of the same name, returns to a Bradlean form of criticism, one that invites us to consider, for example, that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith “at thirty-nine, must have been born in 1945” and that Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice would be “happy with her children” in later life. Indeed, Faulks makes no attempt to disguise the unfashionable nature of his approach: “I have looked at all these characters as though they were real people and tried to make them work without reference to their authors’ lives.”

Faulks’s evocation of a child’s appreciation of literature goes some way to explain why Bradley’s approach faced so much opposition in the reign of New Criticism. Held against the skeptical intellectualism of modernists, character-construct theories were seen as reductive, superficial, and wholly unsophisticated, just as if a child had conceived them. The damage seems so lasting that Faulks’s attempt to reintroduce the method, if only for a general readership, must come on bended knee. “This book does not purport to be a work of literary criticism,” he writes, “still less of scholarship”. Nevertheless, the approach here is highly methodical. Faulks expends two thirds of any discussion summarising his subject’s arc—or, if we may, his subject’s life—marshaling the events of a classic story to suit his purpose before offering a somewhat novel interpretation on its “hero”, “lover”, “snob”, or “villain”. His Lizzie Bennet has her heart set on a life with Jane more than one with Mr Darcy, while his James Bond is a brand-name snob in the league of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.

To impose the possessive pronoun on these assessments is slightly mischievous (it does not fairly acknowledge Faulks’s objectivity), yet they are occasionally presented not in the light of the human condition, but according to the personal circumstances in which Faulks formed his opinions. He begins his points with “The first thing I noticed…” and “Once I had decided…”. Referring to the acknowledgements, one finds that Faulks “was encouraged to include” such personal touches. “Some readers”, he adds, “may prefer to skip these bits.” Loathe though one is to consider a writer’s intentions in a book wishing to reaffirm the “Death of the Author” principle, one cannot help but wonder whether Faulks was goaded by his publishers to make the most of his notoriety. The result, at times, amounts to something like a reader’s biography. That reader is Sebastian Faulks, Author, and he doesn’t let us forget it.

The anecdotal approach begins in good humour:

When I went round the country doing readings after my fourth novel Birdsong came out in 1993, most people could not conceal their disappointment. They had expected me to be 105 years old, French and—in some way—female.

Faulks’s incessant point is that our appreciation of literature is suffering because of a preoccupation with the biography of writers. It is therefore strange that we must find out that he “pretended to have read Tom Jones at the age of seventeen”, “first read Orwell at the age of fourteen”, “first read Nineteen Eighty-Four while learning to speak French in Paris as a student” (during which time he was “presented with a bill so large [he] couldn’t eat lunch for ten days”), and “had not read Wuthering Heights since 1969 until forty years after [he] opened an old second-hand Penguin on a flight back from New York”. All this before the chapter on James Bond, in which Faulks recounts in detail the creative process which led him to write Devil May Care (2008). He “wanted settings that had a fearful or unsettling ring” and “didn’t want to lose the expected broad-brush grostesquerie of Ian Fleming’s villains”. So while insisting that we leave Kingsley Amis out of Jim Dixon and Monica Ali out of Chanu Ahmed, Faulks is not prepared to follow his own lead and allow us to leave him out of Faulks on Fiction.

Faulks’s other distraction, besides talking about himself, is ranking things—writers, novels—in terms of their greatness. This too is in the Bradlean model. During one of his lectures, Bradley invites four characters to the highest tier of Shakespearean roles: Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, and Falstaff. Similarly, Faulks provides us with a list (top ten, no less) of what he considers to be the best Sherlock Holmes stories. Elsewhere, we are reminded that “Orwell was not a novelist of the talent or skill of his contemporaries Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh or Henry Green”; Wuthering Heights is “Shakespearean at moments, but garish and clumsy in others”; and Thomas Hardy “had a moral and philosophical agenda, but he didn’t have the scientific or historical detachment to prove his point”. Mighty swings: these judgments stem from Faulks’s rejection of relativism, the “logic beyond reason” that sought to remove “better than” considerations in the 1970s and 80s. It survives today, much to his annoyance:

I remember, with intense embarrassment, hearing people with the rare privilege of a good education arguing on Radio Four that you could never suppose that the Divinia Commedia was in any way superior to the lyrics of Girls Aloud…

Embarrassing indeed, yet Faulks’s judgments occasionally reflect an antithetical “logic beyond reason”. He addresses questions of similar ridiculousness to that with which L.C. Knights intended to lampoon A.C. Bradley. “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” is silly, but was never posed by anyone in seriousness. The same cannot be said of “What is the ninth best Sherlock Holmes story?”

At their most elegant, aesthetic consideration and character criticism shirk the exploration of contextual perspectives in favour of articulating the passions of the reading experience; they are attempts not to know the material as a geologist knows rocks, but to comprehend its human power, that which may be felt as strongly by the casual reader as by the literary scholar. This universality of feeling is at the heart of the aesthetic response; it requires that the critic involve his audience in any reaction to literature. Why is it that we are patient with Darcy, side with Jim Dixon, and feel such sympathy for Tess Durbeyfield? Because of this universality, the aesthetic approach is suited to the cultivation of public understanding like no other model of criticism.

What is often overlooked by deriders of Bradley, and what should be borne in mind by those of Faulks, is that their efforts were intended to enlighten a general readership. In this endeavor, and for the courage to extend an outmoded response to literature, Faulks should be praised. Yet in the delivery of this response, Faulks’s persistent evocation of the critic’s personality only reinforces the culture of authorial celebrity that he rightly claims is detrimental to our appreciation of literature. That culture, as Faulks himself reminds us, is a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of taking a novel on the road, of talking about one’s writing in public, would have been obscure to E. M. Forster and John Steinbeck if not P. G. Wodehouse and Virginia Wolff. Gladly we welcome a return to language, a return to story, yet a book containing a celebrity author’s confessional interpretations of classic fiction proves an unwieldy vehicle for that return. In its acknowledgements, one senses that there may have been one or two “artistic differences” between Faulks and his publishers on this matter. The title, we learn, was not Faulks’s choice, but that of “a high person at the BBC” (the author’s preference was for “Novel People”). And so perhaps it was “high up” television executives who could not resist spotlighting their host, yet in leaving the rest of us in the shade, Faulks on Fiction forgoes the regular employment of one word whose implication to the universality of art is essential to the aesthetic approach. Compare Bradley’s portrait of Macbeth to Faulks on Mr Darcy:

So long as Macbeth’s imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we feel suspense, horror, awe; in which we are latent, also, admiration and sympathy … we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the scene where [Lady Macbeth] overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this scene shows us how little he understands himself. (A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy)

As for Mr Darcy, I was not much bothered by his reserve and his rudeness. I think I sensed from the title and the way the author wrote of him that there was some inevitable momentum in his favour, and that it might be foolish to resist…My indignation at Wickham’s lying and trechery made me so passionate in Darcy’s cause that I was able, like Elizabeth, to allow that emotion to sweep away the other, more well-founded, reservations about Mr Darcy. (Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction)

That word, present only in the former, is “we”.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Steve Tribe
The University Challenge Quiz Book
BBC books, 2010
576 Pages
£9.99
ISBN 978-1846078569

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Which demographic, nowadays, watches University Challenge? For that matter, which demographic ever did? Unlike witnessing Lionel Messi play football or strongmen bench-press tractor tyres, it can be mildly aggravating to watch students prove that they know things, and, in some cases, seemingly know everything. Despite this, Britain’s most taxing quiz is somehow comforting; no less charming or nostalgic than Antiques Roadshow or The Archers. The publication of a hefty quiz book, in commemoration of five decades of UC, ensures that we no longer have to wait for the show’s next airing to remind us of how under-read we are. We may simply turn to a page. This one, for example:

Your starter for 10:
A drama by Euripides of the fifth century BC, reworked by Goethe and adapted as an opera by Gluck in the eighteenth century, concerns which of the daughters of Agamemnon, a priestess in the temple of Artemis at Tauris?

Three bonus question on shoes in literature:
(a) Telling of a girl who is made to dance perpetually as a punishment for having worn her dancing shoes to church, eventually asking an executioner to cut her feet off, ‘The Red Shoes’ is a story for children by which author and poet?
(b) Set in Montmartre and concerning Vianne Rocher and her family, The Lollipop Shoes, published in 2007, is the sequel to which novel by Joanne Harris?
(c) Blue Shoes and Happiness is the seventh in a series of books by which Zimbabwean-born Scottish author?

Such questions may delight, repel, humble or abash; they are, unquestionably, all tough. It is not overly enjoyable to have the sense of one’s intelligence deflated subject by subject for five-hundred pages—no more so than it is to have Jeremy Paxman achieve the same feat in thirty minutes—so what accounts for the undeniable charm of this British institution? Putting our competitive natures aside, the fact that University Challenge ever did well as a television programme is somewhat surprising (launching in 1962, its representatives from courts and quads across Britain did not look the swinging type). Fifty years later, its existence—let alone its continued success—is positively bewildering.

Like many programmes of its vintage, it owes its survival in part to a much-deserved heritage status. Were it not older than most television executives, its seemingly unmarketable concept—rivaled only by Countdown, a show dependent on the entertainment value of anagrams—would surely be considered for that most undignified treatment: the revamp. But that simply wouldn’t do. In its original format, such subjects as “jewelry in Shakespeare”, “Benjamin Britten’s librettists”, “Latin third-declension neuter nouns”, “animals named after places in Kent” and, most fiendish of all, “mathematics”, are able to enjoy unadorned airtime. The questions may be difficult, but there is something in the music of their loaded grammar, punctuated with nouns of such lofty associations—Pericles, Agincourt, Rutherford—that makes one almost proud to announce “I don’t know” while appreciating that knowledge is one of those asymptotical callings: a never-ending pursuit.

Ignorance can be bliss, which is perhaps the point of University Challenge for those of us who can’t locate the island of Ta‘ū on a world map or find that the Fibonacci Sequence gets a little hazy after the first dozen integers. And of course the less we think we know, the more satisfying it is to get an answer right from time to time: (starter for 10) Iphigenia, (a) Hans Christian Andersen, (b) Chocolat, (c) Alexander McCall Smith.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Saul Bellow
Letters
Edited by Benjamin Taylor
Viking, 2010
608 Pages
£35.00
ISBN 978-0670022212

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When approaching a novelist’s letters, one is confronted with a form which exists somewhere between fiction and autobiography, the poetic and the practical, the work and the life. Some of the bare facts will be there; some of the artifice, too. Saul Bellow once said that “Fiction is the higher autobiography”, and indeed he was able to write Dangling Man (1944) because he knew what it was to dangle, to be a disillusioned Jew waiting in Chicago for the US army to draft him. Yet Bellow’s inference is close to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s observation that “a poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is a footnote.” While the memoir is perhaps the most direct account of a life, it is rarely the most intimate, honest, or entertaining. What we hope for in Bellow’s letters is that some of that artistic distance is applied to his correspondences; that we may see the great stylist of 20th-century literature project the details of his life with that same imagination which gave life to Moses Herzog and Augie March. It is therefore a relief to find, in the very first letter, sentences such as:

I take this opportunity…to tell you…something, Yetta, that more through uncertainty and cowardice than anything else I have not been able to broach to you. True, I am a self-confessed coward. Cowards we are all intrinsically, but the justification of cowardice lies in the confession.

Bellow, at the time he wrote this, was 17.

Bellow was born in Lachine, Canada, and raised in Montreal before moving illegally to Chicago, the city he later described in To Jerusalem and Back (1976) as “huge, filthy, brilliant, and mean”. How he came by this impression, or the powers with which to express it so cogently, can only be guessed from the letters. Here a significant divergence from the novelistic and autobiographical forms should be noted. With its private jokes and its episodic and omissive tendencies, epistolary writing often gives little away except to those for whom the sentences were originally meant. It is in this genre of eavesdropping that the general reader, particularly the biographical detective, is often left feeling entirely unattended. There are clues to Bellow’s makeup, however. His school friends:

were reading buckrambound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright, hearing incredible news from the great world of culture, talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology, and doing all this in Chicago.

It is with this spirit—inclusive, adventurous, distinctly American—that Bellow enrolled at the University of Chicago, only to move to Northwestern University when his father could no longer afford tuition fees at the former. His 20s were characteristically turbulent, uncertain, full of dead ends: a decade which saw him abandon graduate study as well as two novels. Having struggled to place a short story in a reputable magazine, he writes in 1942 that “somehow I have not clicked with editors.”

This “somehow” gives us an early hint of Bellow’s writerly gene. It wasn’t that he expected publication, but that he viewed his talent somewhat paradoxically; a rave-reviewing angel on his right shoulder and a disparaging devil on his left. Bellow judged his early story “Juif!” to be “immeasurably above” an earlier work, “The Dead James”, while he felt “miles and centuries away from The Very Dark Tress—whole developmental heights”, even while it was being considered for publication. He wonders in a letter to a friend whether he is “too demanding and exacting” to have berated himself over the state of his fledgling work, yet after consideration he decides: “I still feel that I was right.”

Feeling right about his wrongs put Bellow in esteemed company from a young age. He follows Tolstoy and Chekhov not simply because one can detect a Russian lineage in his work, but that he too possessed their impulse for self-degradation. At 27 he writes, “I have known one hundred sixty-nine brands of humiliation.” Thirty years later, having won three National Book Awards, Bellow was still counting the brands: “What does distress me is the thought that I may have made a mess where others (never myself) see praiseworthy achievements.”

His “demanding and exacting” eye, however, was not always turned inwards. Bellow was never too shy to tell a writer, publisher, or friend what he thought, even when what he thought was that his schoolmate Oscar Tarcov was “weak” and “childishly feeble”, or that one edition of Story magazine was “full of a coarse-grained piece of shit…a fictional version of the life of Robert Burns with lumps of half-digested haggis in it.” He reserved his prickliest words for reviewers—who wouldn’t?—taking aim at The New Yorker as well as its sister publication, the journal he calls “The New York Review of Each Other’s Books”. But that’s nothing compared to what he writes to his English publisher:

If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly” of me, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all. I’m not selling you a commodity. Your attitude infuriates me. Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgement or you are being terribly prudent about the advance.

Bellow’s comic derision of anything he found lacking in vitality—not least the literature of his day, a canon he saw as “for the most part phony, or empty-hearted, banal and bungling”—can perhaps only be rivaled by the curmudgeonliness of his contemporary, Kingsley Amis, a man whose fatherly duties passed to Bellow in 1955. Following Amis’s death, his son, the novelist Martin Amis, looked to the man he once described as “the greatest American author ever” for paternal support. Bellow replied that he would “willingly take up the slack as a sort of adoptive father.” Indeed, despite claiming that he “never enjoyed writing letters”, it seems that Bellow was a guardian to many hearts throughout seven decades of correspondences.

In touching letters to Philip Roth, Allan Bloom, and Susan Glassman (his third wife), Bellow airs his affections with the same vitalising honesty with which he vents his grievances. He addresses life (seemingly all life, without ever losing sight of his own) with an acute rawness, a sincerity in which one can detect the great pulse of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Herzog (1964). To Martin Amis he writes:

I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never seemed to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were very different. But now that looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection.

Bellow commits his powers of articulation to unburdening the great weight of human feeling with which he was simultaneously cursed and blessed throughout his life. One sees the truth in Amis’s facetious remark: “Bellow’s first name is a typo: that ‘a’ should be an ‘o’.” It is not right to say that under his rawness was a gentle heart, but that his heart—raw, gentle, unreserved—remained dedicated to comprehending itself in all its forms.

Presented with the one-way traffic of his outgoing mail, we keep company with the ghost of a writer whose great talent and affections are occupied in some other plain—a past of literary deals, bar mitzvahs, and funerals to which we were never invited. We intercept the frequencies of ex-wives and old friends and must translate them as best we can. Once private, now public: the letters of writers are paradoxical sources, and while Bellow’s are crafted with the same raging consciousness which drew his novels, anything approaching an autobiography remains illusive. His books continue to penetrate the human spirit more than any other of the last 50 years, yet the man appears to be, like the great American novel itself, seemingly ungraspable. In his own words: “I can never be picked up or put down.”

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Tom Hooper
The King’s Speech
See-Saw Films, 2010
118 minutes

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Winston Churchill, John Updike, Philip Larkin, and Marilyn Monroe all stammered, but with the exception of Larkin, who spoke in recordings with slight hesitations, it is impossible to detect that these people ever suffered with their speech. They simply outgrew or otherwise learned to negotiate their impediments by adulthood, as did Rowan Atkinson, Jonathan Miller, Bruce Willis, and James Earl Jones. One public figure who did not, however, was the reluctant King George VI, whose Empire Exhibition speech at Wembley Stadium in 1925 was by all accounts torturous for all concerned. The occasion is depicted in the opening scenes of Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, a moving portrayal of the monarch’s friendship with Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. Already tipped for Oscar nominations, its power derives from the restrictive and oppressive nature of stammers.

There is something of the school playground here. Like braces or freckles, a stammer is something one ought to outgrow. A source of moderate embarrassment of the very worst kind, for one is always suffering but never a victim, they are also a practical hindrance, one that lies dormant inside the sufferer until he is obliged to speak. Alcohol aggravates them, stress makes them worse. What makes stammers chronic, it seems, is hearing them begin from one’s own mouth. But perhaps the cruellest fate of the stutterer is that he is denied some of the simplest pleasures of self-expression.

From reading to his children to public speaking to the very basics of polite conversation (if only “please” didn’t begin with a plosive!), our protagonist George VI (known throughout as Bertie) is left feeling not only that he is a bad articulator, but that the roots of his articulations—his thoughts, hopes, and fears—are somehow deficient if they cannot be well-expressed. Told only to “spit it out” by his father, Bertie fumbles his feelings as much as his words.

The music of Bertie’s stammer—when and to what extent he struggles—acts as a Geiger counter to his emotional state in any given scene. Relatively comfortable with his family at first, he is later dumbstruck following the death of his father and the subsequent behaviour of his brother, who assumes the throne amidst controversy surrounding his engagement to a twice-divorced American socialite.

The stammer eventually becomes a tormenter which threatens to overrule Bertie at his nation’s hour of need. The looming ordeal of a required wartime radio address—a nine minute broadcast—creates a discomforting suspense that one struggles to imagine could be drawn from the simple act of reading aloud. But stutterers will know that reading aloud would have been to Bertie what revenge was to Hamlet: it is the thing he must do, wants to do, but the very thing against which his whole heart is guarded.

What we ask of Bertie is not that he galvanise a crowd or electrify the airwaves with an address worthy of Henry V, but that he simply speak. To do so uninhibited is an exercise rarely indulged by even the most eloquent among us, for while we all fret over the weight of our opinions and guard against the vulnerability of confiding in others, Bertie finds these insecurities buried beneath his anxiety of speech itself. Hooper’s film offers the view that stammering is not born of hesitation, and while it may be worsened by nerves, it is itself not the product of a nervous disposition. In a demonstration of the peculiar miracle of speech, its final scenes remind us that our contentment is so often reflected in the ability to articulate, both to ourselves and to others, what it is we want to say.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Mavis Gallant
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
368 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1408806104

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There are several pitfalls to avoid when reviewing books of “early and uncollected stories”. One of them extends to any collection of short fiction, and requires that the reviewer expend as few words as possible when summarising the events of each story he means to discuss. Otherwise, you know how it can be: nothing but a succession of short stories made shorter. In this case, no summaries are required, as Mavis Gallant possesses a Chekhovian gift for opening sentences. With each story’s first paragraph, the reader is able to find his feet in a single breath. “The three Marshall children were dressed and ready for the picnic before their father was awake”; “Jane and Ernestine were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted”; “Sitting next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beams of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road.”

Which brings us to another pitfall: comparing the short-storyist to Chekhov at the earliest opportunity. With that out of the way, we can move to the third (and most dangerous) hazard, which is to treat the fledgling and previously unpublished works of an internationally renowned writer as merely ‘noteworthy’ or, worse still, ‘of biographical interest’.

Gallant has published over a hundred stories in The New Yorker since 1951. The Cost of Living gathers stories written in the first 20 years of her career, between 1951 and 1971, when she lived in Europe (London, then Paris) after having spent her childhood in Canada and adolescence in New York. Like most debutantes, her early efforts were autobiographical. In Gallant’s case this produced stories populated with a cast of émigrés—people with multiple-nationality disorders, strays, and general lost souls. One wonders if Gallant’s early experiences mirrored those of, say, Madeline (of her story “Madeline’s Birthday”):

The days of her lifetime had been spent in so many different places – in schools, in camps, in the houses of people she was or was not related to – that the first sight of day was, almost by habit, bewildering.

Here and elsewhere, Gallant’s protagonists are adrift and estranged, often far from home—that is, if they ever had an idea of home to begin with—or else they are parentless or husbandless, jobless or at any rate, critically penniless. All of them, in one way or another, are lost in the world in which they find themselves.

Following in Gallant’s footsteps, Patricia, the narrator of the title story, moves to Paris for an artist’s life. Instead of the “easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time” that she hopes for, Patricia finds Paris “full of brats and quarrelling mothers”. Along with the majority of Gallant’s protagonists, Patricia’s idea of home is only rentable, temporary, and ultimately fleeting. In these stories of hotel rooms and strangers’ houses, we find that the greatest irony of the well-travelled is that they are inescapably tied to their lives as travelers, in constant pursuit of a life which stands still, if only for a moment. In contrast, those who have never travelled—the landlocked or abandoned—look to others who have left home with a painful longing, and the unavoidable conclusion that they are trapped. Stick or twist, in Gallant’s world there is no escaping one’s internal condition; for whatever satisfaction migration brings, it is a distraction at best, and at worst a repression. These stories provide a chorus of echoes for Robert Louis Stevenson’s quip: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

The brevity of these stories emphasises the entrapment theme. Despite their geographical scope, there is a claustrophobic locality to each tale, a constriction, which together with Gallant’s careful distribution of detail creates what V.S. Pritchett called the “glimpse through” effect so common in modern short fiction. We view the lives of her characters “from the corner of the eye, in passing”. In this regard she joins the company of Eudora Welty, Jane Anne Philips, and Raymond Carver: writers who harnessed the inherent domesticity of the short form by making the world seem a small, unchanging place. In his essay “Fires”, Carver recalls a bleak epiphany after a long wait at the laundromat (it was 1960, before he became a full-time writer, and he had been working long hours in menial jobs to support his wife and children):

I realized – what had I been thinking before? – that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through.

It is this very blend of chaos and small-change (reflective, perhaps, of a similar frustration in her early career) that pervades Gallant’s early stories. Despite the miles that some of her characters have travelled in order to satisfy their urges to begin afresh, they stumble upon the same realisation: that their lives for the most part are small-change things, that poverty is a universal constraint, and that—what had they been thinking before?—the one place from which they cannot escape is their own disillusion. Gallant begins in “Travellers Must Be Content” with the idea that “Success can only be measured in terms of distance travelled”, yet it is this notion which her characters repeatedly question.

Many of the stories collected here address the aftermath of the Second World War. Europe itself has become a broken home, fractured most obviously by the Iron Curtain, but also by the multitude of refugees, foreign troops, and disgruntled expatriates populating central Europe. The characters in “Willi”, “One Aspect of a Rainy Day”, and “A Day Like Any Other” struggle to retain their identities in the wake of the Allied victory. Post-war German citizens, particularly those still living in France, prove good subjects for Gallant’s abandonment theme—more so than the British, French, or Americans. Perhaps this is because Gallant, like Carver, preferred to write about losers. Her characters feel “disapproval almost as an emanation” or are “lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night”. Her losers are so good at losing that they risk overdosing on self-pity: “I came home tired every night, disinclined to talk. I saw that everyone in this hotel was as dingy, as stationary, as I was myself, and I knew we were tainted with the same incompetence.”

Gallant does offer lifelines to some of her lost souls. Having searched out a reunion with the root chord of her life in “Going Ashore”, Emma Ellenger approaches Gibraltar with an ecstatic optimism:

A tide of newness came in with the salty air: she thought of new land…A new life. She knelt, patient, holding the curtain, waiting to see the approach to shore.

Yet elsewhere, such optimism is to be distrusted. By the end of “Travelers Must Be Content”, Wishart’s “tirelessly creative” mind finally wears itself out. His Romantic notions of journeys and foreign lands must be put to rest. There is a feeling, when we leave him, that some moment of reconciliation has cured his compulsion for travel:

He took good care not to dream, and when the bus drew in at the Grasse, under the trees…he did not look like a failed actor assailed with nightmares but a smooth and pleasant schoolmaster whose sleep is so deep that he never dreams at all.

Gallant’s elegant sentences mark her arrival as a master of the short form. These are stories from a writer finding her feet, about people finding theirs, and it is with the greatest literary symmetry (and a touch of injustice) that a third of the included works have been homeless until now.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

It would be a well-educated guess to suppose that 3-D cinema will never yield an artistic masterpiece. That may not be enough to stop it becoming the dominant format in near-future years. Now that Avatar has broken every money record in film history, we should brace ourselves for the 3-D revolution. Coming to a distopia near you, old lookers will be remastered in three dimensions (Jurassic Park, Terminator II, Return of the King, etc), children will be bored to tears at anything flat shown on television, 2-D will become the reserve of art house, eventually warenting its own category at the Oscars, and any director working in two dimensions may have to do so under the accusation of “trying to make a point”. Films like 8½, The Pianist and 12 Angry Men will not be remastered, and perhaps that tells us something about the integrity preserved within the traditional format.

When Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, a little girl in a red coat symbolised the unobserved tragedy of the Holocaust. It remains an iconic moment in cinema, and its effect is almost inexplicable. Even without its wider meaning, there is something profound in that redness moving through the monochrome world; a profundity made greater by the distance that black and white cinema forces between an audience and the reality of history. With a single dash of colour Spielberg reminds us that this is fiction and yet, this is not fiction. When 2-D is as ancient as black and white, perhaps it will be the use of a three-dimensional object which adds meaning to an otherwise two-dimensional historical drama. The effect in Schindler’s List may not then be so moving, however, particularly when the little girl’s appearance will be anticipated by an on-screen prompt: PUT ON YOUR 3-D GLASSES NOW.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

The Habit of Art
Written by Alan Bennett
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
National Theatre until May 2010

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By now, Alan Bennett has written enough great plays to have set himself up for a proverbial fall from greatness. At this time in his career, certain responses are to be expected, chief among them the dismissive and worn out: “His earlier stuff is better.” It’s true that the author of Talking Heads and The History Boys invites unreal expectations, and so whatever came next would be an audience’s chance to dislike something, to balance the record, to relax in the knowledge that a national treasure is as fallible as the rest of us: a mixed bag, only human. We’d forgive him, of course. We’d say “nobody’s perfect”. Hearing that Alan Bennett was writing a play about the life of W.H. Auden, we would be forgiven for thinking this is it. This is the one that lets the side down. But even with these great expectations—the difficult 39th album—The Habit of Art, now showing at the National Theatre, reconfirms Bennett’s status as one of our finest playwrights.

When finding their seats, audiences would be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into the wrong side of the theatre. The stage looks authentically backstage: a half-made set of MDF doorframes and unpainted cupboards, stray chairs and loose papers, an Oxford gown limp on a coat hook and enough clutter to make the flat in Bottom look minimalist. This mess can be partially explained by the play’s rather complicated structure. From beginning to end, it is a play-within-a-play. A group of actors have been left to their own devices, abandoned by their director and given the task of rehearsing for a new drama showing at the National Theatre.

The scenes they rehearse focus on the lives of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Auden has returned from New York and faces a lonely retirement in his Christ Church lodging when Britten comes to discuss a new opera he’s working on—what will later become Death in Venice. Richard Griffiths plays the actor called Fitz, who is playing Auden, and Alex Jennings plays an actor called Henry, who plays Britten. It’s all very meta.

There is much in-character dialogue between Auden and Britten, but also much disruption of the rehearsal. For a third of the play, actors play actors, or writers, and the whole piece remains concerned with acting itself, writing itself—that is, with the habit of art. As a result, this is a play to “get” or “not get”; one with those terribly taxing things—layers—and one which will turn-off a good many theatre-goers merely for being too elaborate.

Still, Auden and Britten are, as most would agree, what the play is about. Bennett has bookended, at least for the moment, what has been almost ten years of successful and successive biographical films. And no subjects have been more to the public’s taste than great artists. There’s the Jackson Pollock film and the Shakespeare film, the Jane Austen film; Beatrix Potter, Truman Capote, and now Keats. Biographical plays are fewer, certainly, but perhaps only because plays are fewer. Shadowlands and The Invention of Love come to mind. And now we have The Habit of Art.

Yet this is a biographical play with a difference. As the writer of the play-within-the-play makes clear, the portrait of Auden offered to us will leave any audience asking, “Where is the poetry?”. There’s no sign of it. Not in the script, not in Griffiths’s portrayal, nowhere. It’s not what we would expect from a play about a poet. Consider the Keats film: when Ben Wishaw isn’t quoting or being quoted to, he stares wistfully into the middle-distance with a poetical glint in his eye; nightingales can be heard in the air and at any moment you expect a butler to walk in and announce,”‘You got a place where I can put this urn?’

Instead, Bennett’s Auden is an intellectual curmudgeon—so far beyond the concerns of the material world that it’s difficult to tell where the mess in his room ends and his clothes begin. Griffiths plays him droll, tired, a year from death, with the faintest suggestion that behind the Oxford man, the homosexual, and the lonely soul, there is a poet struggling to see the worth in his art. But he is lonely before he is a poet, and he is a homosexual before he is a poet. Griffiths’s performance is truly exceptional in its subtlety, and is wonderfully matched by Jennings, in whose Benjamin Britten there is more of the artist on display. He is passionate, erudite, plays the stage piano freely but without excess, and is in full danger of earning himself the title of Quintessential Englishman 1972. However, the dynamic (which seems the only word for it) between poet and composer is not given any serious attention until the second half of the play.

The meta-narrative of The Habit of Art, with its almost ridiculous complexity (comical complexity, certainly), is fulfilling enough to sustain the first hour. But full as it is with Bennett’s signature wit and ear for dialogue, we begin to ask where it’s all going. Particularly, where is our Auden? We know the man was a genius, so where is his profundity? Interruptions to the rehearsal are as frustrating as waiting for Godot as we desperately want the actors to get on with it and show us Auden being a poet.

Yet he never recites a line. Instead, with half an hour to go, Bennett gives us permission to forget about the rehearsal. Forget the layers, he says. For a long scene Britten and Auden converse without interruption, and we are given a heavyweight debate which is both surprising and moving. The men discuss their art, their habit, and what they reveal about their artistic processes satisfies every layer concerned. We realise that all this time we have been watching the pursuit of great art—the unconfident poet, the uncertain composer, but also the struggling actors playing them. The Habit of Art itself is a struggle, yet behind its barefaced devices is a playwright reaching for something beyond a postmodernist puppet show. All great art begins with the unshakable habit, and this seems to be Bennett’s meaning.

In the closing moments, Auden and Britten briefly revert to Fitz and Henry, who leave the stage before coming back to bow as Griffiths and Jennings. At this point, you would be forgiven for leaving the National-within-the-National thinking you had come out on the wrong side of the theatre. You might ask, “Where was the poetry?” and also “Where was the play?”. But Bennett’s great affirmation is the pursuit of art rather than art itself. In the absence of a single stanza of poetic verse, the drama makes clear that in acting, writing, and music, in the words of Auden himself, “what matters is the work.”

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.