The Reader Online

Over dinner in a Soho restaurant recently, Jane Davis asked Howard Jacobson to recite a poem. Here’s the result. Jane has form, by the way.

Beatrix Potter was always frank about the violence and amorality of the natural world. In the year that Jemima Puddle-Duck turns 100, have we missed the point about her stories?

Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck is 100 years old this year and to mark the occasion publisher Frederick Warne has released a special collector’s edition of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck with a shiny gold cover. Potter herself was a practical and forthright woman whose abilities as a farmer and land manager helped invent the English Lake District as it exists today. She favoured conservation, but was also committed to the idea of the countryside as a living and working place.

Now though the most visible aspect of the Potter legacy is soft-focus nostalgia, with an emphasis on a ‘Beatrix Potter experience’ of cuddly talking animals and home decoration. Potter’s stories and the characters she created have become big business and her pretty illustrations have made marketing the brand easy. What’s not to like, after all, about a picture of Peter Rabbit on a tea towel, Jeremy Fisher casting his rod on a scented notelet, or the venerable duck herself recreated as a china figurine? I love the Lake District and I spend as much time there as I can, but this aspect of it drives me crazy.

It is probably inevitable that the Potter industry should be more interested in the nostalgic sheen of her drawings than the stories themselves, because as anyone who has actually read them will know, violence and death are everywhere in the books. They also appear in much more realistic ways than in regular fairytales. So for instance Mr McGregor really does want to put Peter Rabbit in a pie, and it will be a real pie with a real rabbit in it. When Tommy Brock the badger makes off with the Flopsy Bunnies, and plans to eat them, it isn’t a metaphor for something else.

As if the immediate threat of being snuffed out were not enough, Potter’s readers also learn distinctly adult existential lessons about mortality and fertility. The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is a case in point. Jemima is charmed by a ‘foxy-whiskered gentleman’ to attend a dinner party at which she is to be the main course. So far, so much good advice for naive Edwardian girls. But another life lesson comes at the end of the story, when Jemima’s rescuers, the foxhound puppies, eat her eggs before Kep the collie can stop them.

Potter’s own childlessness may well be tied up in Jemima Puddle-Duck’s efforts to raise a family. Having ‘rescued’ her from what they believed was a bad match, Potter’s parents condemned their daughter to a childless future. Looking back at her life as she wrote the book in middle age, perhaps Potter saw herself, like Jemima, as a ‘simpleton’ who had made bad choices. Jemima Puddle-Duck goes on to lay more eggs of course, but only four of them hatch because ‘she had always been a bad sitter’.

It is a shame that the softer side of Beatrix Potter’s stories has come to dominate the landscape around her reputation. For me one of the most attractive things about her books is their balance of vulnerable fluffy bunny rabbits and hungry foxes. Realism is part of their charm and many of the stories are explicit about the animals’ human qualities being a fantasy. Mrs. Tiggywinkle is nothing more than a hedgehog at the end of her tale and in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter loses his clothes and becomes just another frightened animal on the run.

Whether or not the Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is a rueful reflection by Potter on her own life, it is certainly a tough and disturbing story that is only partially softened by the gentle prettiness of the illustrations. Of course it is important that children should realise that not everyone has their best interests at heart. But it is the casual violence of the eaten eggs, and Kep’s stoic indifference as Jemima is ‘escorted home in tears’, that makes this story so wonderful and so chilling. Children can take it, even if the Potter industry would rather not think about it.

by Chris Routledge

In 2005 Monica Janssens was diagnosed with panic disorder and severe depression and admitted to the Priory Hospital. Monica has written a novel inspired by her experience and about the stigma that still attaches to depression. Here she explains how reading helped in her recovery.

“O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.”

–William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene V.

In the midst of a severe depressive attack it takes a Herculean effort to read the label on an anti-depressant bottle, let alone absorb the page of a book and remember what you’ve just read. But that doesn’t mean literature doesn’t have a place in the lives of the mentally ill. From both experience and observation, I would argue the contrary and, judging from the 7,700 titles listed by Amazon under “Depression”, I’m not alone. The panic attack which landed me in the Priory in the summer of 2005 was indescribably painful. For some peculiar reason King Lear (an old favourite) came into my mind and only by going to bed with the book, and reciting some of the verse, could I finally cry myself to sleep.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. If you’re feeling desperate and suicidal, reading King Lear is hardly going to cheer you up. But expecting literature (no matter how powerful) to alleviate depression when it’s in full swing is unrealistic. What literature can do, however, is make us feel less alone. That counts for a lot because depression is isolating and it’s the isolation which, more than any other single factor, leads to suicide; curiously, during both world wars suicide rates in England fell dramatically.

The concept of depression was formulated less than a hundred years ago, yet it’s interesting that some of the best literature describing the condition was written before it was recognized. Take Keats’s poetry. If Keats had been alive today he would probably have been diagnosed with depression: nobody can come up with “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden-eyed despairs” and not be a sufferer. Keats, of course, was a Romantic. The Romantics were influenced by Goethe, whose semi-autobiographical tale The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) ended in a suicide and supposedly led to 2,000 readers doing the same thing. At university I took Russian Literature in Translation as an ancillary to my English degree, which may have been a sign of my depressive leanings. The Russians have a reputation for producing melancholic literature of the highest order; it seems deeply ingrained in their psyche. Chekov’s The Seagull ends in suicide, as does Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both works were thought to be influenced by Hamlet–a portrayal of the archetypal, inward-looking depressive if ever there was one–in which Shakespeare, like Dostoevsky, focuses in painstaking detail on the central character’s mental anguish. Modern English writers take a more understated approach to describing depression. Graham Greene’s chief protagonists are invariably tortured souls with self-destructive tendencies (The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The Heart of the Matter), while the alcoholic Jean Rhys was haunted by Mr Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre and wrote a prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea, exploring the causes of her derangement.

Nowadays, the literature of depression is divided into two main categories: self-help books and either confessionals or autobiographically-based novels. Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar falls into the second camp and is a rewarding read, but if the act of writing is cathartic it was not cathartic enough to prevent Plath committing suicide. The same is true, of course, of Virginia Woolf who describes so tenderly in Mrs Dalloway the horrors of shell shock, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’m not sure what the depression self-book market is worth, though judging by the number of titles available it must be a lot. For the first six weeks of my therapy I couldn’t read even half a book and this is where self-help books score: you can dip in and out of them, take it one step at a time. You don’t always have to start at the beginning, either. The one that worked for me is Tim Cantopher’s Depressive Illness: The Curse of The Strong because it seemed to know exactly how I was feeling. It didn’t beat me up for it. In fact, it made me feel special–sensitive and responsible–because I had the wretched illness in the first place. I’d read a page a day, then re-read it the next day.

Part of my treatment involved creative writing classes. We’d have a picture to describe in a set time, then we’d each be invited to read it out. That was the nearest we got to shared reading, or, given our low concentration thresholds, any kind of reading. With the research being done on the therapeutic benefits of reading aloud, I believe there’s a strong case for making it more of a feature in rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals.

By Monica Janssens

This coming Saturday (17th May),The Reader Organisation working with the award-winning Brindley Arts Centre in Runcorn, presents another of its highly enjoyable Readers’ Days: fun, friendly and thought-provoking days for everyone who loves reading, writing and talking about books.

As it is the National Year of Reading, we are following the month’s theme of ‘Mind and Body’ to bring you an exciting and varied series of talks and workshops from members of The Reader Organisation and local writers.

The programme for the day includes:
• a talk by Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, about the origins and the practice of the nationally acclaimed ‘Get Into Reading’ project;
• a discussion by Caroline Smailes (author of the superb novel In Search of Adam) about how writers use their own memories to create their plots and stories;
• a journey through poetry - from birth to death, run by poet Rebecca Goss exploring changes that affect our bodies and mind in universal and personal experiences;
• a workshop led by  Chris Routledge, Editor of The Reader Online, which explores, how once the body has gone, over time stories cover up the real you;
• and a chance to take part in a Book of the Film and the Film of the Book workshop with Ella Jolly about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an inspirational tale of the strength and power of the mind in the face of physical adversity.

All this and much, much more!

Interested?

The programme for the day is available to download here: readersday08programme and contains all the information about the event. Tickets cost £20 (£15 concessions/£12 income support and leisure card), which includes lunch, and morning/afternoon refreshments and can be booked via the Brindley Box Office on 0151 907 8360. 

Jonathan Gottschall has an article in the Boston Globe which supports my view that academic literary criticism has reached a dead end and is slowly dying. This is partly to do with demographics I think. The average age of academics has been rising for years and while younger scholars struggle to find a foothold ideas and approaches that might otherwise have been pushed aside linger on. And on. The recent arguments over whether academics should retire at 65 shows how deep-rooted the problem is; it is based after all in careers and personal positions and final salary pensions. And of course the most powerful individuals–also frequently the oldest–hire and promote successors in their own image, breeding weaknesses into the flock.

Gottschall points to intellectual failures: the lack of scientific testing of literary theories and the way in which literary criticism finds supporting evidence rather than attempting to falsify its claims. In many ways his description of English resembles descriptions of the field of psychology before the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. Nevertheless this is an optimistic article suggesting that a more scientific approach to literature might bring with it a resurgence in literary studies as a way of understanding the human condition:

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

This proposal may distress many of my colleagues, who may worry that adopting scientific methods would reduce literary study to a branch of the sciences. But if we are wise, we can admit that the sciences are doing many things better than we are, and gain from studying their successes, without abandoning the things that make literature special.

Read more …

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Byron’s poem ‘When We Two Parted’ is one of the most famous of all love poems and probably the greatest of all ‘breakup’ poems. But the most striking thing for me is the way this poem cuts through sentimentality to offer a direct and emotionally true realisation of how things will be: the lover will be left in ’silence and tears’ while the loved, who has moved on, apparently feels nothing. This kind of tough Romanticism was called hard-boiled when Hemingway did it a century or so later in the 1920s.

When We Two Parted

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow–
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me–
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met–
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

By Philip Davis, Editor of The Reader magazine.

Editorial

It was the re-opening of the beautiful Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool and The Reader was asked to provide a panel for the occasion. Members of the audience would be invited to submit a problem and the panel was supposed to suggest a book that would help with it.

If on the day of the event you had offered me the choice between going ahead with it or sticking pins in my own eyes, I might well have chosen the pins. It is not that I believe in art for art’s sake alone. I hate the idea that literature must not sully its beauty or diminish its autonomy with the thought of human usefulness. But equally I don’t in the least suppose that books offer direct solutions or utilitarian cures. Literature is not a set of practical self-help books - and for my part ‘How to Overcome Depression’ is just the sort of user-friendly book that makes me depressed in the first place.

But I was wrong: it turned out to be a surprisingly serious and rather moving event. I’ll give you just one example, because it was the one I mucked up. A quiet man in his late sixties said that a few years ago he retired after a lifetime spent being a mechanical engineer. Now he found that not one of the firms he had worked hard to maintain existed any more. Unlike someone who wrote books, he said, he had outlasted his work and had nothing to show for it all.

Of course, stupidly, it was only afterwards that I remembered what I should have said. I should have directed him, specifically, to the account of Daniel Doyce, the great neglected inventor in chapter 16 of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Nobody will listen to Doyce; it is hopeless trying to get civil servants to pay attention to an invention that actually would benefit the whole nation. Wouldn’t it be better to give up, says his friend Arthur Clennam. ‘A man can’t do it,’ says Doyce:

You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.

Says Clennam:

You are not finally discouraged even now?

‘I have no right to be if I am,’ returned the other, ‘The thing is as true as ever it was.’

I wish I had remembered this in time. There is in it something rightly defiant of outcomes.

What the retired engineer said was sad but admirable. It made me feel oddly proud that what he spoke of was not just his problem: nothing we do may outlive us. Here is another quotation I only thought of later. I found it years ago in Norman Mailer’s account of a notebook of his in which he wrote down the good things he had read. And one of the literary passages which that wild man of American literature had noted down was this - unlikely though it may seem - from the work of the Edwardian English gentleman, John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga:

he still knew that he could help her no longer, nor could anyone else, for she had come now into that domain where her problems were everyone’s problems, and there were no answers and no doctors.

This is the territory literature inhabits: that holding-ground for  human thought which exists in between a writing that is merely arty at one extreme and a writing that is merely message-bearing at the other.

This issue of The Reader takes its sub-title ‘I live and write’ from George Herbert’s great poem ‘The Flower’, on a seemingly miraculous recovery from depression. ‘Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart/ Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone . . .’. It is dated 1633 and we read it at the Bluecoat. But one of the things that stopped me turning the car back on my way there was hearing a popular broadcaster on a local radio station airing his views concerning literature (not all things are perfect in Liverpool). He said, ‘The Classics! They’re for the students and the posh.’ This issue is about the relation between living and writing, living and reading, for those who may be neither students nor posh, the freshness of old things coming back to new life; as they did for Herbert: ‘I once more smell the dew and rain,/And relish versing.’

This is why, as well as publishing new writing, we have created a  series defiantly called ‘The Old Poem’ and also re-designed our Readers Connect section to feature a jury of different readers offering a verdict on a World’s Classic. It is also why we are thinking of starting a national campaign petitioning TV’s Richard and Judy to include old books as well as new in their promotion of reading. We launch our Shipping Lines literary festival here in Liverpool 7-9 November of this year: the lines are poetry’s connecting the world as the great Liverpool ships and their engineers once did. Let’s invade Richard and Judy’s London studio.

For more information on Shipping Lines or to register for regular updates please email reneeh [AT] liv.ac.uk or write to Renée Hemmings at The Reader Office (University of Liverpool, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG).

______

Editor’s Picks

In this living and writing issue, there are two novelists–Tessa Hadley and Philip Pullman–on what writing and reading the novel means to them. Read some excerpts from Melvyn Bragg’s new novel and have the privilege of being able to see some of his private drafts, showing something of how a novelist does it. Also (requested by many of our readers) there is a longer version of the article Blake Morrison published in The Guardian on the work of The Reader Organization in its outreach programme. Our new section ‘Book World’ concentrates on what is going on in the world of publishing and book-selling.

Our old friend, the poet Les Murray introduces the first in a two-issue presentation of his favourite Australian poets of all time: five in this issue, five in September.

Our new young friend, Morgan Meis writes from America on the bridges of the world.

Matt Simpson is one of the many distinguished poets based in Liverpool.

Stephen Sandy has sent us from Vermont a poem to launch our Shipping Lines literary festival: our editor first met Stephen when interviewing him on his memories of Bernard Malamud.

Two other pieces arise out of the more geographically limited wanderings of the editor. The interview with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is a continuation of the conversation between Adam and Phil at the Radio 3 Live Thinking Festival held in Liverpool in November last year. At about the same time the comedian Phill Jupitus came to The Reader office to record material for a Radio 4 programme he was doing on little magazines. We got these poems out of him before he got out of the door: look for the reference to his colleague Russell Brand.

The Reader issue 30 will be available from around the end of May. To subscribe to the magazine visit our shop.

Recently, The Reader Organisation has established itself as a company limited by guarantee and is applying for charitable status. This means that we are now an organisation in our own right and whilst we are still supported by the University of Liverpool we are no longer part of its constitution. The Reader Organisation is delighted to announce that novelist, journalist and ‘bibliotherapy’ advocate, Blake Morrison, has agreed to be Chair of our Board of Trustees.

Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, has responded in excitement to the news, saying:

I am so thankful for Blake’s support and commitment. To have such a high profile ‘voice’ for The Reader Organisation will enable us to go forward with added confidence; to get more people reading, experiencing and benefiting from great books.

Our connection with Blake Morrison was made when he travelled to Liverpool to visit reading groups from The Reader Organisation’s outreach project ‘Get Into Reading’. So inspired by what he witnessed he wrote a feature length article for the Guardian (‘The Reading Cure’, 5th January 2008), which focused predominately on our ‘Get Into Reading’ project and draws attention to the benefits for well-being through literature. Although scientific evidence for ‘bibliotherapy’ is inconclusive, it is becoming recognised that books can reach out and touch people in ways that are impossible in traditional medicine:

These reading groups aren’t just about helping people feel less isolated or building their self-esteem… More ambitiously, they’re an experiment in healing, or, to put it less grandiosely, an attempt to see whether reading can alleviate pain or mental distress.

We were flooded with responses after this article was published - from people from all over the UK and Ireland, as well as France, Italy, Germany, Denmark and the United States - a clear indication that there is a huge potential take-up of ‘Get Into Reading’ practice. Jane has been leading ‘Get Into Reading’ training days across the county, offering an introduction to the basic principles of the initiative and discussing the possibilities of implementing the project nationally.

As a genuine supporter of our work, we’re excited about forging this relationship with Blake. It will enable The Reader Organisation to build upon its recent successes and it firmly establishes us as the recognised authority in reading and health.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

A couple of weeks ago Jen Tomkins wrote a post about ‘dumbing down Shakespeare’. It turned out to be one of our most popular posts of the last month and since then I’ve noticed a rash of stories about Shakespeare–Jen was certainly down with the zeitgeist, if not the kidz.

Firstly Kirsten Reach writes on Shakespeare’s Blackberry in the Kenyon Review blog. The article references and summarizes a long piece by Stephen Power and picks up on his discussion of a hand-held and re-usable ‘writing table’ that was used in the sixteenth century (and later), for jotting down ideas and thoughts:

This is referenced in Act One of Hamlet, when Hamlet meets his father’s ghost. Though it’s debatable whether Hamlet is meant to be carrying his “table” in his hand and writing or speaking metaphorically, it’s clear that the “table of memory” he wipes clean is meant to be this convenient little writing gizmo.

Elsewhere, Shakespeare the thinker is the subject of a fascinating review article by Martha C. Nussbaum in The New Republic. Nussbaum asks “Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?”

This week’s featured poem, chosen because of its seasonal reference (I may not be in Italy but it is May) and the fact that it is the anniversary of Browning’s birthday this week (7th May, 1812), is a beautifully crafted work and a testimony of supreme power beyond human comprehension. Moving beyond the visual splendour of nature, realising that our “finite hearts” are unable to grasp the “everlasting wash” of the force beyond our experience, Browning executes the desire of humans to “catch at” moments of wonder but expresses that this is itself an impossiblity: we are forever “already so far out of that minute”. The idea of ”letting Nature have her way” and experiencing the sensations of the moment, rather than trying to “hold it fast”, is conveyed through the sense of nature’s omnipotent and “unahsamed” presence that cannot be translated by the human mind. Similarly, the lover cannot know its lover’s soul, trying to ”see with your eyes”; it can “catch the soul’s warmth” by standing away and allowing it to be for what it is but ultimately, “the good minute goes”. Just like the “everlasting wash of air” that encompasses the ”Silence and passion, joy and peace” of nature, human love is to be understood in the same way, to move “Onward, whenever light winds blow”: to learn that the pained “finite hearts that yearn” hold within them “infinte passions”.

Two in the Campagna

I wonder do you feel to-day 
  As I have felt since, hand in hand, 
We sat down on the grass, to stray 
  In spirit better through the land, 
This morn of Rome and May? 

For me, I touched a thought, I know, 
   Has tantalized me many times, 
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw 
   Mocking across our path) for rhymes 
To catch at and let go.

Help me to hold it! First it left 
  The yellowing fennel, run to seed 
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft, 
   Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed 
Took up the floating weft, 

Where one small orange cup amassed 
   Five beetles,—blind and green they grope 
Among the honey-meal: and last, 
  Everywhere on the grassy slope 
I traced it. Hold it fast! 

The champaign with its endless fleece 
  Of feathery grasses everywhere! 
Silence and passion, joy and peace, 
  An everlasting wash of air— 
Rome’s ghost since her decease. 

Such life here, through such lengths of hours, 
   Such miracles performed in play, 
Such primal naked forms of flowers, 
    Such letting nature have her way 
While heaven looks from its towers! 

How say you? Let us, O my dove, 
   Let us be unashamed of soul, 
As earth lies bare to heaven above! 
   How is it under our control 
To love or not to love? 

I would that you were all to me, 
   You that are just so much, no more. 
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free! 
   Where does the fault lie? What the core 
O’ the wound, since wound must be? 

I would I could adopt your will, 
   See with your eyes, and set my heart 
Beating by yours, and drink my fill 
   At your soul’s springs,—your part my part 
In life, for good and ill.

No. I yearn upward, touch you close, 
   Then stand away. I kiss your cheek, 
Catch your soul’s warmth,—I pluck the rose 
    And love it more than tongue can speak— 
Then the good minute goes. 

Already how am I so far 
  Out of that minute? Must I go 
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar, 
   Onward, whenever light winds blow 
Fixed by no friendly star? 

Just when I seemed about to learn! 
   Where is the thread now? Off again! 
The old trick! Only I discern— 
    Infinite passion, and the pain 
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Robert Browning, 1854

Posted by Jen Tomkins