Two new biographies are a reminder of Dickens’s vast social imagination.
By Michael Levenson|Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, at 6:40 AM ET
Dickens! Should’st be living at this hour and should’st be writing for Slate and publishing fiction online. The world needs vivid laughter, wider vision. Even just to recall the names of characters—Smike, Scrooge, Guppy, Copperfield, Nell—is to wake to lost possibilities of what novels can reach and do. All our talk of the middle class these days is fine, but Dickens knew the higher and the lower, the much lower: the mudlark, the wasting orphan, the prison child, the crossing sweeper, the dun, the dustman, the shabby clerk, the street philosopher. He knew the textures of their everyday lives, their talk, their walk, and the urban abyss yawning near.
He turns 200 in February (party at my house, everyone invited), which is one good explanation for two new biographies appearing just in time. But it will be good for all of us to stage his cell-break from “Classics” and to let him be where he belongs, always on the reading shelf marked “The Way We Live Now.” Think back to the three-and-a-half decades of the career, from the spectacular appearance of The Pickwick Papers in 1836, which brought world fame to a 24-year-old, to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished when a stroke blew through his frantic brain in 1870.
Wonderful article!! Above is the briefest of excerpts…click on the link to go the full article…and it is certainly time to revisit Dickens!! We had a wonderful study of BLEAK HOUSE in Paris…what Dickens would you like to study?
Tonight we start our Salon study of Midnight’s Children, the ‘Booker of Bookers’. I am wondering about the criticism levied against the works shortlisted that are considered “too readable”. Gets us back to the issue of what makes a great work of literature; is the first criteria that it is difficult to read?
One lucky author will receive the Man Booker Prize 2011 tonight, walking away with £50,000 (and record-breaking sales).
The award began in 1968 when Booker McConnell Ltd, a “firm dealing in sugar, rum, mining machinery, and James Bond”, announced a £5,000 prize for fiction to be awarded to a British or Commonwealth author. WL Webb, the Guardian’s literary editor at the time, was one of five judges.
The inaugural winner, in April 1969, was PH Newby, a BBC controller, for his work Something to Answer For. In an interview with the Guardian when the prize was announced, he said that he might “build a new study” with his winnings.
The Booker has been mired in controversy almost from the beginning. In November 1972, winning author John Berger protested against Booker McConnell’s activities in the Caribbean by donating half of his £5,000 prize to the British Black Panther movement.
While some winners have long faded into obscurity, several literary giants grace the winners list. Iris Murdoch won in 1978, for her work The Sea, the Sea; Salman Rushdie triumphed with Midnight’s Children in 1981; and Kinglsey Amis, AS Byatt and JM Coetzee have all claimed the prize (the latter twice, in 1983 and 1999).
Perhaps the biggest literary battle came in October 1980, when William Golding (Rites of Passage) squared off against Anthony Burgess (Earthly Powers). Burgess refused to attend the ceremony unless he could be guaranteed a win. He couldn’t, and Golding triumphed on the night.
This year’s shortlisted authors have spoken out against library cuts, Julian Barnes describing them as “a kind of national self-mutilation”, but they’re not the first Booker writers to support libraries.
In 1981, nominee John Banville wrote a letter to the Guardian requesting that the prize be given to him forthwith; with the prize fund he would buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries, “thus ensuring that the books not only are bought but also read – surely a unique occurence.” Sadly the judges didn’t comply, but he did win in 2005, for The Sea.
A leading article in 1984 called for “a year of wit and dexterity and literary larking”, for a winner to be judged on “pure enjoyment” rather than “assumed grandeur”.
By 1994, the tide had turned and the Booker was losing credibility, Richard Gott describing the prize as “a significant and dangerous iceberg in the sea of British culture that serves as a symbol of its current malaise.”
This year’s shortlist, denounced by some as “too readable”, may be the last to hold sway over literary editors, if not over what the public reads: a new Literature prize, to be awarded to more literary works, was announced last week.
In the immediate wake of the riots, much was made of a particularly telling detail of the huge disturbance that took place in London’s Clapham Junction. Nearly all of the shops on that stretch of road were attacked. Many were broken into. Some were stripped bare. A shop that sold party accessories and donated part of its profit each year to worldwide children’s charities was set ablaze and gutted. One shop, however, was untouched – a bookshop.
Simon, the manager of Black’s, the camping shop across the road, told the London Evening Standard’s David Cohen: “They smashed our window, ripped the plasma TVs off our walls, took all our jackets and rucksacks. I saw them go into Claire’s Accessories, break into NatWest, liberate our neighbours Toni & Guy of hair products. They carted off iPods from Currys, clothes from Debenhams, mobile phones from Carphone Warehouse. I was horrified. But Waterstone’s, directly opposite us, was untouched. For the looters it was as if it did not exist.”
At the time, I thought that this observation was bang-on. Because I never use betting shops, or print shops, I simply don’t see them. Bookshops, I always notice, because I love reading. Bookies are a different matter, because I never go into one and place a bet.
Those rioters at Clapham Junction, to generalise, probably didn’t even see Waterstone’s. Bookshops don’t even register, because they offer nothing that is wanted. To me, that seems like a miserable omission from a life, and an ignominious, debilitating exclusion from a civilised culture.
On Twitter, however, a comment suggesting that if the rioters had nicked a few books they “might learn something” was retweeted time and time again, for days, as if it was the acme of wit. There seemed to be little understanding that the tweet was cruel, superior, patronising; that it mocked the afflicted and blamed the victims of an education system that left swaths of people not just unable to read, but unable even to register the existence of a shop that sold literature. Failure on that scale is not individual. It is systemic.
This week’s report from the Ministry of Justice rejects the government’s theory that gang membership lay at the root of the riots. Background analysis suggests instead that the predominant feature of the rioters was something else. Among young people arrested during the riots, more than two-thirds were classed as having special educational needs and one third had been excluded from school in the past year. Just as our prisons teem with people who cannot read properly, so for those terrible nights did the streets of our cities.
The tragedy is worsened by the fact that Britain has finally had its longstanding difficulties with literacy rubbed in its face just as the money to tackle the problem is ebbing away. I feel so angry that this failure has been ignored or denied for such a long time, even though it has been apparent for many years. The left, on the whole, has spent the last decade excusing an education system that lets down the people whom it is supposed to care for most. Even now, much rhetoric suggests – wrongly – that all is well, apart from the withdrawal of educational maintenance allowance, and the establishment of a few “free schools”.
I became aware of the state system’s problems with teaching literacy when my own son, and a number of his friends, were not learning to read and write at primary school, but were instead becoming hostile to reading and writing, in a school setting that saw this as unremarkable and untroubling. Looking into the matter further, I found great cause for concern.
On international comparisons, British literacy rates were remarkably poor, and were declining rather than improving. The Daily Mail was splashing critical headlines about the same subject, and the whole thing was dismissed on the left as rightwing “scaremongering”.
In 2006, I suggested in the Independent that one secondary in my locale, whose boast was that “47% of pupils passed five GCSEs at A* to C”, could be more accurately described as churning out 53% of pupils who were “functionally illiterate”. Peter Wilby, in the New Statesman, dismissed this as “a preposterous statement” with “no basis in knowledge” and “daft”. The pass rate I quoted, he argued, was the same as that at his own grammar school, 45 years before.
Wilby’s own assertion, that an inner-city comprehensive on special measures was performing to the same standard as a grammar school, half a century ago, seemed much more preposterous to me. It was also considerably more dangerous in its own complacency than mine was in its despairing and urgent hyperbole.
Yet, the complacency continued. As recently as 2009, Edward Leigh, of the public accounts committee (PAC), produced a damning report on literacy in England, which was rebutted forcefully. Leigh told the BBC that “anyone who believed the government could meet its target of 95% adult literacy and numeracy was living in cloud cuckoo land”. This, when “even doing so would only bring England to the level currently achieved by the top 25% of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries”.
In response to the PAC report, Barry Sheerman, Labour chairman of the Commons’ schools select committee, said it was a “thin piece of work”, based on little evidence. “To make sweeping generalisations about adult literacy and numeracy,” he added, “does a disservice to everyone, learners and teachers, across the country.”
At that time, the Labour government was still insisting that primary schools were fine. Any problems in the system started at secondary school, and academies were there to sort that out.
We’re not much further forward now, although at last it is acknowledged that far too many children start secondary education with their primary education very much incomplete. And now, here we are, living in a country that can muster whole gangs of people who don’t even appear to register the existence of bookshops, let alone consider books to be objects worth stealing.
Yet the parliamentary opposition feels it can truthfully insist that this is the consequence of cuts that were announced months rather than years before the riots occurred. Labour has said sorry for a number of mistakes it made during its time in opposition. It would do well to apologise for its inadequate and blustering denials of the depth of Britain’s literacy crisis as well, and start coming up with some plans that would decisively address this baleful problem. I’d certainly be glad to mark my cross against that.
It was a very good salon and I really don’t think I would have taken on this huge and mysterious work without you. It was definitely worth going through the whole work—it is wonderful to actually experience real learning again as I know I did throughout the Divine Comedy (it got so much easier!).
I liked going round and having everyone pick out their passages—I think this worked well. I also think it could work well to identify anyone’s particular knowledge of an area and ask them as appropriate, to provide some background.
I also liked the probing questions you asked about why Dante would have spent so long on a topic or what he was trying to convey. Your questions do help guide the conversation especially when we—as always—manage to veer away a bit.
Thank you so much for your time and guidance through the work—that afternoon in the yard when the weather was divine, the food was abundant, and the conversation was intellectual I just had to pinch myself.
What?!? No mention of Hamlet??
“…the rest is silence…” Or Antigonus in Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by bear.”
I have to agree however that Dickens does get the emotions well-aligned in his death scenes. Bathed with pathos…
What makes for a great literary death scene? This is the question I and the other four judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature have been pondering in advance of an event at the Cheltenham festival.
I find many famous death scenes more ludicrous than lachrymose. As with Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Dickens’s Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the passing of the awful Tullivers in Mill on the Floss, dragged down clutching one another as the river deliciously finishes them off. More consciously designed to wring laughter out of tragedy, the suicide of Ronald Nimkin in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint takes some beating, with Nimkins’s magnificent farewell note to his mother: “Mrs Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.”
To write a genuinely moving death scene is a challenge for any author. The temptation to retreat into cliché is powerful. For me, the best and most affecting death is that of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. I remember my wife reading this to me out loud as I drove along a motorway. We were both in tears, as he says his farewell to his errant son, Nelson, and then runs out of words, and life itself – “enough. Maybe. Enough.”
But death is a matter of personal taste. The other judges were eclectic in their choices. Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, admired the scenes in Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm. At the end of the chapter that seals the fate of the six men on board, Junger writes: “The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water.” “The details of death by drowning,” Highfield says, “are so rich and dispassionately drawn that they feel chillingly true.”
Meanwhile, Erica Wagner chose the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. “A typhus epidemic is raging through Lowood school, but Helen actually has consumption, which leads Jane to believe she won’t die (she thinks if you just take it easy your consumption will go away). So the death is an extra shock.”
Chair of the judges, Vivienne Parry, chose Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. While commenting that “Dickens spins out Nell’s decline for many chapters until I’m personally ready to shoot the girl myself”, she also argues that “we are only able to scoff because so few of us have experienced the death of a child, whereas it was a common experience in Victorian families.”
The fifth choice, from Joanna Bourke, is the death of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Who else is in the first rank for last things?
At the end of October, Michael Sheen and Ian Rickson offer their vision of this poem unlimited at the Young Vic. The upcoming Salon study of Hamlet will be an ideal launching pad to this performance…in the past, we have organized salon nights out to a production of the work we have studied–incredibly gratifying for all.
Hamlet contains some of Shakespeare’s most transcendent language–but the complexity and the layered nature of the thoughts and themes require some time. As a Salon member said recently “What I love about the Salons is that I am forced to slow down and reflect; to just think instead of rushing to do…and I understand so much more because of that.”
What is Hamlet about? Themes include the most precise questions of loyalty, revenge and allegiance, what it means to be human, the role of fate and self-will, the truth of madness- the essences of human experience. The language must stand up to the weight of these themes- we will closely examine the words and structures to decide if it does and if so, how. As I seek to describe the text, I am aware that the terms approximate that of a wisdom tradition. Harold Bloom, one of the twentieth centuries’ most highly regarded and prolific literary critics, puts Shakespeare even more emphatically in the role of deity:
“Shakespeare is my model and my mortal god…Hamlet is part of Shakespeare’s revenge upon revenge tragedy, and is of no genre. Of all poems, it is the most unlimited. As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death, it competes only with the world’s scriptures.” (Harold Bloom, Hamlet, Poem Unlimited, 2003)
“Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Friday; it’s amazing how much more there is to be got from a book than just reading it alone. I think the format of the evening works very well too. There are enough breaks and good chunks of time to really get some good work done. And of course you do a brilliant job of guiding and leading the conversation.”
Excerpts from the London Literary Salon News
September 11, 2011
Highlights To the Lighthouse Salon starting Sept. 19
A potent day…a day that deserves reflection and some understanding of how we can be human together. So many days carry within them the history of suffering and struggle- one event should also ripple out to the others…how can we learn? How can we hear each other? How can we break through the boundaries that divide?
This past Friday a dynamic group gathered to consider Frankenstein over five hours…and we went miles: Many thanks to the voices that came together in the light of that amazing book. Some wonderful Salons ahead:
September/October Salons:
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf starts week of September 19; runs for five weeks: £65
o Monday afternoons 12:30- 2:30
o Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM
• Paradisoby Dante starts week of September 12; runs for five weeks: £70
o Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (celebratory dinner to be scheduled in October)
• Midnights Children Three sessions: Thursday evenings Sept. 22, 29 October 6 7:30-10 PM £60
• Young Writers’ Workshop for Writers 12-16 years old: Wednesdays 4:30-6 PM runs five weeks: £70
• Measure for Measure Intensive Sunday October 9th & October 16th 7-10 PM £50
To the Lighthouse **Starts NEXT WEEK*** space remaining in both afternoon and evening studies
– by Virginia Woolf
In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognizable – and revealing to each reader. Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”
And a poem that evokes the sound of the waves…
Lake Song
Colette Inez
Every day our name is changed,
say stones colliding into waves.
Go read our names on the shore,
say waves colliding into stones.
Birds over water call their names
to each other again and again
to say where they are.
Where have you been, my small bird?
I know our names will change one day
to stones in a field
of anemones and lavender.
Before you read the farthest wave,
before our shadows disappear
in a starry blur, call out your name
to say where we are.
*****************************************************************
There is something there I think about the idea of infinity and the importance for us in our humanity to see our place in time…and it would not be indiscreet for me to mention at this point that waves and movement of water are essential elements to this work.
For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermoine Lee’s wonderful biography. I encourage you to use the link here to read the whole review as it offers a good & brief summary of Woolf’s life and writings. The book, Virginia Woolf is a great read.
From ‘This Loose, Drifting Material of Life’ by Daphne Merkin
“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.
From its very first page Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: ”There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”
Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics & readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. It may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of violently changing world, as we go into the read. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.
Virginia Woolf is not always thought of as a social creature–her solitary tramps, descents into madness and disciplined writing periods seem to leave little room for a community of friends- particularly a community of such minds as John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey. But Virginia was regarded both as a great wit and hostess and a loyal friend with a wild sense of humor and an insatiable interest in her friends’ lives. Her ability to understand the depth and complexity of intimate relationships is what informs To the Lighthouse
‘Once more I cry aloud,” writes Clive Bell at the end of his 1954 essay What was “Bloomsbury”?. “Who were the members of Bloomsbury? For what did they stand?” Good questions.
The Bloomsbury group was not exactly a group. Nor was it merely a clique. There was no clear set of members, and no manifesto. It was, according to FR Leavis, merely a sort of coterie – of an inferior kind. DH Lawrence famously described various individuals associated with the group as “little swarming selves”. He imagined crushing them.
Leonard Woolf – a founding member – claimed that they were in fact “a largely imaginary group of persons with largely imaginary objects and characteristics”. According to Frances Spalding, in her indispensable illustrated introductory guide, The Bloomsbury Group (2005), the term is merely a useful “collective title for a group of friends”. Another way of looking at the Bloomsbury group is to see it as the coming together of two extraordinary families, the Stephens and the Stracheys, around whose effulgence a constellation of others gathered.
Leslie Stephen was a literary critic. His first wife, Harriet Marian, was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife, Julia Prinsep Jackson, was the niece of the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. His father was a permanent undersecretary in the British colonial office. His brother was a judge. With Julia, Leslie Stephen had four children: Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and Virginia. Julia Jackson died young, and when Leslie Stephen died in 1904 the siblings moved to 46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London, where they began to receive guests “at home”.
Some of those guests included the friends that Thoby Stephen had made when he was at Cambridge. One of these friends was Lytton Strachey. While the Stephens were solid members of the Victorian upper middle-class, the Stracheys were eccentric adventurers. Jane Strachey, the matriarch, was a pioneering feminist. Her husband, Richard, was an engineer and administrator in India. Among their 10 children were Pernel, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge; Pippa, a leading suffragist; Oliver, a cryptographer; and James, the psychoanalyst, and editor and translator of the 24-volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
Lytton Strachey’s friends and associates included Leonard Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, the writer Clive Bell, the painter Roger Fry, and the critic Desmond MacCarthy. They too became drawn into the Bloomsbury set. Thoby Stephen died of typhoid fever in 1906, but by then many of the important alliances between friends and families had been established. In 1907, Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, with whom she had two sons. In 1912, Leonard Woolf married Virginia Stephen, at Lytton Strachey’s urging; Strachey had already proposed to Virginia himself, before quickly realising his mistake. “I think there’s no doubt whatever that you ought to marry her,” he wrote to Leonard. “You would be great enough, and you’d have the advantage of physical desire.”
The plots thickened. The roots became ever more tangled. Vanessa had an affair with Duncan Grant, who was Lytton Strachey’s cousin, and with whom she had a child. Lytton Strachey was also in love with Duncan, though he lived in a menage a trois with the painter Dora Carrington and their friend Ralph Partridge. Virginia enjoyed a famous affair with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. Somehow, the whole thing hung together. Bloomsbury, according to Virginia, consisted of a group of friends who shared an outlook on life that “keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years; and no amount of quarrelling or success, or failure has altered this.”
There are other members of the Bloomsbury group, too many to mention. Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians (2002) is a good place to start, but there is probably nowhere to finish.
Robert Baird addresses this question in Slate magazine
Please click on the link for the whole article…
Paradise Lost
Why doesn’t anyone read Dante’s Paradiso?
By Robert P. Baird
Posted Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at 8:10 AM ET
Dante’s Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno’s nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur’s choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, “One finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica.” (A cantica, or canticle, is one of the three titled parts of the poem.) The time is ripe to reconsider Paradiso’s neglect, however, since three major new translations of the poem we know as the Divine Comedy are coming to completion. (Dante simply called it his Comedy; in what was perhaps the founding instance of publishing hype, divine was added by a Venetian printer in 1555.) Hollander’s edition, produced with his wife, Jean, was published this summer, and two more are due out next year: one by Robin Kirkpatrick and the other—the one I’m holding out for—by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez.
What keeps people from the Paradiso? For one, it lacks the Inferno’s irony. The characters Dante meets in hell know the circumstances of their sins, but with few exceptions, they can’t see the justice in their punishments. The tension between their knowledge and ours generates a kind of dramatic irony familiar to modern readers: the irony of the unreliable narrator. Another problem is narrative: The Purgatorio is almost too successful in wrapping things up, so that by the end of the second canticle, Dante has done almost everything that seemed worth doing. He’s crossed hell and climbed Mount Purgatory, he’s purged himself of his own sins, and he’s come face to face with Beatrice, the woman on account of whom his whole journey was undertaken. It doesn’t help matters that for most of the Paradiso, Beatrice acts more like a schoolmarm than a lover, delivering long speeches that read like lectures in Scholastic theology.
When it comes down to it, though, the real problem modern readers have with the Paradiso is the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that “we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry.” As the quote suggests, our trouble with heaven is less a problem of belief than it is a problem of imagination. From the opening lines of Anna Karenina on down, all our best literature teaches us that narrative thrives on adversity, and so heaven presents itself as little more than a blank screen of beatific blandness, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. (Consider, by contrast, how successfully hell has been deployed as a metaphor for modern life: Under the Volcano, The Invisible Man, The Descent of Alette, not to mention “The Waste Land.”)
At first glance, Dante’s nine spheres of heaven look to be exactly the kind of bright, boring place we’d expect. When the pilgrim meets Piccarda in the heaven of the moon, the lowest of the nine, he asks why she doesn’t wish to be higher up, to be nearer to God. Piccarda replies (in Jean Hollander’s translation), “Brother, the power of love subdues our will/ so that we long for only what we have/ and thirst for nothing else.” A statement like this would seem to drain the Paradiso of all possible interest: wanting only what one has may be admirable in life but it hardly bodes well for literature.
