Excerpts: Writing Home (Alan Bennett)

Writing Home is one of John’s favourite books, and I’m glad he made me read it despite my complete unfamiliarity with Alan Bennett’s work. In some ways it’s an experience akin to reading the very best (I use that word loosely, and won’t bother to clarify it) blog/online diary combinations, except that you can curl up in bed with this, and it is consistently charming. Thought I’d put a few favourite entries up here before I return the book to John (with many thanks!):

1982
5 April, Yorkshire. I walk round the village at half past ten, the shadows from the barns sharp and clear under Larkin’s “strong, unhindered moon”. “This must wait”, is my foolish thought, “until I have written something that permits me to enjoy it.”

1983
20 December, New York. I am reading a book on Kafka. It is a library book, and someone has marked a passage in the margin with a long, wavering line. I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves. It is a long, dark hair.

1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal’s new novel about Lincoln. “I thought it was meretricious.” “Really?” says Gore. “Well, meretricious and a happy new year.” That’s the way to do it.

7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at University College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who’s like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat – Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, “And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole.” Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, “Cole, not Dole.” In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

1986
4 March. Read Winnie the Pooh to an audience of children at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Many have never been in a theatre before. I battle against the crying of babies and the shouts of toddlers and end up screaming and shouting myself hoarse. It is Winnie the Pooh as read by Dr Goebbels.

No Simile Intended

From Cryptonomicon:

“The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air-conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German and American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green so dark it’s almost black.”

I reread this paragraph a couple of times, struggling to figure out the simile. Then I finally realized there wasn’t any. He meant real monkeys.

Clockwork Orange, The Eye In The Door, The Passion

“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”
– A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

One of my all-time favourite passages about music, and certainly one of the most distinctive. The other day some words from it came to mind when I was listening to Sigur Ros, so I thought I’d put the whole passage up here for everyone else to love too.

Elsewhere in reading, I finished Monday’s library books and headed back for more yesterday: Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), The Ghost Road (Pat Barker, the last book in the Regeneration trilogy), Art And Lies (Jeanette Winterson), The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman).

From Monday, The Eye In The Door was a worthy sequel to Regeneration, which says a lot given that I loved Regeneration. It moves away from Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to focus on Billy Prior, who had initially intrigued me less than the former two because he was completely fictional, as opposed to being a war poet I entered the story already loving. The book’s success, for me, lies in two accomplishments: firstly, making me interested in Prior as an individual beyond morbid fascination with his war experiences, and secondly, the idea of divisions within the self in almost everything the book explores, from homosexuality to class conflicts to Prior’s psychological problems to Dr Rivers’ difficulties in treating Sassoon. Engaging stuff, and Pat Barker’s accessible writing style helps a great deal.

Loved The Passion. Loved the language, loved the imagery, loved the quirky humour, loved it, loved it, loved it. Not exactly a hard-hitting book of ideas, and not particularly insightful even with regard to its major theme (passion, unsurprisingly), but all the way through I felt caressed by words, and often, that’s all I need or want.