August Blues / Wheel of Books

Every year I get the August blues. August is the time when I have most freedom, and I always hope to use that to get some writing done. Instead, a state of lethargy sets in, which gradually begins to dissolve as autumn approaches, with dark evenings, a bit of chill in the air and the prospect of another university term. That hasn't quite happened yet. It's plum season; the sweet-sharp taste of plums is something I associate with guilty and melancholy feelings at the thought of another summer I haven't done quite enough with.

As a matter of fact I finished a new collection of poems at the beginning of the month, so things haven't been as bad as all that - it's just that I haven't been able to get going properly on the projects that ought to come next. To cheer myself up, I am posting this wheel of books: the ten I have published in the course of my life, together with the manuscript of what I hope will be number eleven. The ten are as follows:

   WHOM, novel, published by Bloomsbury in 1989.

   Blizzard, poems, Faber and Faber, 1996.

   Dragons, poems, Faber, 2001.

   Where the People Are: Language and Community in the Poetry of W.S. Graham, critical book, Salt, 2004.

   Whereabouts, poems, rufus books, 2005.

   Mandeville, poems, Faber, 2008.

   Singing a Man to Death, short stories, Cinnamon, 2012.

   Muscovy, poems, Faber, 2013.

   The Book of the Needle, novel, Cinnamon, 2014.

   The Mabinogi, poems, Faber, 2017.

The eleventh book is called Wing (I have a fondness for one-word titles, as the above suggests), and I plan to send it to my editor at Faber on 1 September, after which I will have an anxious wait to see if it's accepted.

Meanwhile, I have reopened this blog, White Threshold. This has its origins in another idle spell, in late 2011, when I was just coming to the end of a period of research leave and wanted something to do to fill up the remaining time. I started a blovel or blog novel, called Starling City, with no great hope that it would come to anything, as indeed it didn't. The blog remains online in its unfinished state, and I doubt if it will ever be reopened as a blovel, though the novel idea may be worth returning to. (My struggles with the novel form are a topic for another post, as is my tendency to return to old ideas years later.) White Threshold, the companion blog of Starling City, named after a collection of poems by W.S. Graham, was planned as a series of reviews of fiction I considered to be underrated. You can still find those reviews here; I am pleased with them and would like to think they may attract some new readers to extraordinary writers like H.F.M. Prescott, Jerome Charyn and Richard Beard. But that project, too, fizzled out. The reviews were hard work, since I usually had to reread the books before writing about them, and I just didn't have the time to keep the blog going.

Now, though, I have become aware that my online presence is a bit patchy. I have a website, which I update very occasionally, and am on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I want to share things that are too lengthy and detailed for the social media sites and too ephemeral for my own site. And writers nowadays are expected to blog. In fact, for the last few years, I have taught a seminar on blogging to new doctoral students at Aberystwyth University, where I work, and have had to explain to people who usually know more about the subject than I do that I don't blog myself. Hence my belated reopening of White Threshold as a blog for anything I feel like writing about. Possible subjects are:

   My own writing;

   The contemporary literary scene, especially poetry and especially in Wales;

   Creative writing and the problems of teaching it

   Chess (I am the chair of Aberystwyth Chess Club);

   The ukulele, which I took up a couple of years ago, having been abnormally ungifted at music all my life, and which now gives me immense pleasure;

   Walking, and the beautiful Welsh countryside;

   Cooking;

   Badminton;

... and so on. I have come late to this kind of thing, because I have had a lifelong aversion to keeping a diary. (I am particularly indignant about the creative writing manuals which insist on it as prerequisite for other kinds of writing.) My attitude has always been that of T.S. Eliot, who described poetry as "not the expression of personality but an escape from personality". But most of the literary world is against me here, as is most of the online world. And the fact is that I have a lot of things I want to write about that I am not getting the chance to communicate. At any rate, it may help to keep the August blues at bay.

Richard Beard: Damascus

It is the first of November 1993, a significant date in Britain's history: we have just become part of the European Union. On this day, in a trope reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a boy and a girl are born to rather different but not untypical families. We are to follow their lives as they grow up, meet, drift apart and eventually become lovers. It's a state-of-the-nation novel, then, but if that genre suggests a tiresome earnestness, let me assure you that Beard's interpretation of it is every bit as unexpected as Rushdie's.

For a start, where is all this happening?

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in the Kingdom, in Quarndon or Northampton or Newry or York, in Kircaldy or Yeovil or Lincoln or Neath, a baby girl is born.

The phrase keeps coming back, a refrain which is never repeated as the place names change all the time: "in Harlow or Widnes or Swansea or Ayr, in Reading or Glentoran or Nantwich or Hull". Beard seems to be taking the idea of the state of the nation literally: this novel is so "typical" that the action happens all over the country simultaneously. The whole point of realist fiction, of course, is to depict lives that give the impression of being individual, but which map in some way on to everyone else's, but surely, not since the medieval morality play Everyman has a writer been so upfront about it.

If what Beard does to fictional place seems bizarre, his treatment of fictional time is stranger still. Hazel Burns and Spencer Kelly are, as we have seen, born simultaneously, on the first of November, 1993. We see them meet as children, becoming, first friends, then telephone friends. We see them struggling with school, puberty and first romantic encounters, with a tragedy in each of their families, and with the onset of adulthood, all the time keeping in touch by phone without actually meeting. In a parallel thread, we see them in their twenties, on the morning after their first night together, as they try to decide what future, if any, their relationship now has. And it is still the first of November, 1993. Throughout all these changes, Britain has just joined the EU, the Great Britain Rugby League team has just beaten New Zealand, Federico Fellini and River Phoenix have just died, and it is National Library Week.

It's hard to explain the dreamlike effect of this simple, but, as far as I know, unique device. Most of the time, surprisingly, we don't notice it at all. After all, we're used to the action of a novel taking place in a different historical period, and precise dates seldom play much of a part in a fictional plot anyway. Novelists sometimes commit accidental anachronisms, like Jane Austen describing apple blossom in July (Emma), and usually get away with it, because we're much more interested in other aspects of their story. But Beard's calculated, nonchalant defiance of chronology keeps coming back, like his place-name refrain, slapping us in the face. The death of the heart-throb River Phoenix becomes a running joke, reacted to in different ways according to the ages of the characters; it is always Hazel's and Spencer's birthdays, as well as the anniversary of the family tragedy each of them has suffered; they meet for the first time on the beach and the incongruity of taking a British seaside holiday in November becomes another joke; there is a flashback to the earlier life of an elderly man, and, yes, even all those years ago, it was still the first of November 1993; and the future of the nation on this momentous but somehow rather obscure historical occasion is meditated on by a varied cast of characters from all over the country, many of whom are the same two people at different ages.

A note following the end of the novel gives us an insight into this chronological structure:

All except twelve of the nouns in Damascus can also be found in The Times of 1 November 1993.

This method, which one would never have guessed without the note, was clearly influenced by OuLiPo, the avant-garde group whose members included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, and which is associated with the idea of constraint as an aid to creativity: the classic example is Perec's La Disparition, translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void, an entire novel written without the letter E. Beard's constraint has been to take The Times for that particular day and generate his novel out of it, and the frozen chronology, though not a necessary consequence of that method, is a marker of it, the only such marker visible in the text. It is reminiscent of another Perec novel, La Vie Mode d'Emploi (Life A User's Manual), the action of which takes place simultaneously in various rooms of a Paris apartment building.

There seems to be quite a lot of interest in OuLiPo at the moment, and I've experimented with some of their methods myself, so I'm partisan. The obvious critique is that they're "artificial" (OuLiPo's adherents would ask how any art could avoid that), and make for brittle, superficial writing with no vision and no heart. Beard's novel refutes that view. I've had to spend so long explaining its oddities that I haven't given a sufficient idea of how joyfully funny it is; it is also, in places, very moving and, to use an unfashionable word that one does not normally associate with avant-garde literature, very wise. Ultimately, this is not so much a state-of-the-nation novel as a coming-of-age one, using its experimental techniques to bring freshness to the perennial themes of growing up and discovering love.

It's been a while since I wrote a blog entry about a contemporary British writer - in fact, I see now, Robert Irwin is the only one I have covered previously. Richard Beard has a website here; he is the author of five novels and several non-fiction books. Damascus was his second novel; the first, X20, the only other one I've read, is also excellent, and I've heard great things about his latest, Lazarus is Dead, which I really want to read. Meanwhile, why is a book as richly pleasurable as Damascus allowed to go out of print, when other, much duller novels are still in the shops? Like all the books I review on this site, it should be much better known.

Next time, an epic novel of theatrical life before the First World War, by a prolific writer now only remembered for two comic novels that received screen adaptations.