Waterstone’s windows in Piccadilly may be full of romantic books for Valentine’s Day but I am re-reading a novel so deep, so dark it takes my breath away. Published a year before her death in 1848, her sister Charlotte called it ‘moorish, wild and knotty as the heath’, ‘hewn in a world workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’, ‘from no model but the vision of his (her) meditations’. ‘With time and labour the crag took human shape and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half-statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.’
Emily Bronte died aged thirty; I recall seeing her poems in tiny spidery handwriting in the British Library and visiting the parsonage in Haworth years ago with its chaise-longue, covered in torn black leather, where she lay dying from consumption. What a masterpiece she achieved in such a brief life.
Two scenes from the novel have stayed with me over the years, as if I had read only them yesterday.
The first is when Cathy confides to their housekeeper, Nelly Dean, that she may marry Edgar Linton. Unbeknown to them, Heathcliff is listening at the door, but steals away before Cathy reveals her love for him.
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’
‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how much I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’
Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to return a rich man but is only reconciled with Cathy, now married and living at Thrushcross Grange, as she lies dying.
How they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.
'You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this…'
At the end of the novel the narrator encounters a young boy who has seen Heathcliff and a woman on the heath.
Wuthering Heights will be shut up ‘for the use of ghosts as choose to inhabit it’, the narrator says.
‘They are afraid of nothing. Together they would brave satan and all his legions.’
Or would they?
I sought and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot – and Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Friday, 28 January 2011
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Selected Poems by Laurie Lee
I've loved reading Laurie Lee for over forty years. I was standing on a crowded tube train recently, sifting through this selection in preparation for our poetry group. Each month we prepare poems on a different theme; next Thursday we read poems on 'Night'. I found a wonderful selection and have short-listed Night Speech, Town Owl, Sunken Evening, Twelfth Night and Christmas Landscape as some of my favourites.
Field of Autumn, the one I love best from this anthology, is sublime and reading it again makes me love it more.
This slim volume, reprinted in 1983, is compiled from three separate volumes. The poet wrote movingly, 'They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and friendship.' Laurie Lee died in 1997 but his work lives on.
Field of Autumn, the one I love best from this anthology, is sublime and reading it again makes me love it more.
This slim volume, reprinted in 1983, is compiled from three separate volumes. The poet wrote movingly, 'They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and friendship.' Laurie Lee died in 1997 but his work lives on.
Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage
Written in memory of three separate conflicts: 9/11, VE Day following the end of war in Europe, and civil war in Cambodia, these poems are compelling reading: lean, strong, masterful.
I watched Out of the Blue, broadcast on Channel 5 to commemorate events five years before. It follows an English trader working in the World Trade Centre on the day of the terrorist attacks. I hope it is repeated later this year, when another five years will have passed. I visited Ground Zero in 2003 and a few years ago, across the river from Manhattan, observed the New York skyline without the twin towers we remembered from years before; re-reading this poem brings it all back. And so it should.
All lost.
Now all coming back.
We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing recalls VE Day, sixty years on. A work colleague once recalled feeling depressed when the War was over and going to her GP to be told that ‘the surgery’s full of people like you’. Simon Armitage explores the aftermath of war in this powerful poem.
Cambodia is close to my heart ever since our trip there eight years ago. I fell in love with this tragic beautiful land, ruined, wrecked but not totally ground into oblivion. I still weep for Cambodia, for those hacked to death during Pol Pot’s reign of terror and those still living through nightmares of the past as they scrabble in the dust, trying to survive. Armitage’s poem was commissioned for BBC Radio thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
I watched Out of the Blue, broadcast on Channel 5 to commemorate events five years before. It follows an English trader working in the World Trade Centre on the day of the terrorist attacks. I hope it is repeated later this year, when another five years will have passed. I visited Ground Zero in 2003 and a few years ago, across the river from Manhattan, observed the New York skyline without the twin towers we remembered from years before; re-reading this poem brings it all back. And so it should.
All lost.
Now all coming back.
We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing recalls VE Day, sixty years on. A work colleague once recalled feeling depressed when the War was over and going to her GP to be told that ‘the surgery’s full of people like you’. Simon Armitage explores the aftermath of war in this powerful poem.
Cambodia is close to my heart ever since our trip there eight years ago. I fell in love with this tragic beautiful land, ruined, wrecked but not totally ground into oblivion. I still weep for Cambodia, for those hacked to death during Pol Pot’s reign of terror and those still living through nightmares of the past as they scrabble in the dust, trying to survive. Armitage’s poem was commissioned for BBC Radio thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?
When Graham Greene died in 1991 Kinsley Amis called him ‘until today, our greatest living novelist’. Having re-read The End of the Affair I am inclined to agree. Published in 1951, it still reads well, evoking a war-time love affair that began in London during the Blitz. It is the perfect novel to read on dark January days and cold winter nights.
A memorable passage recalls Bendrix going to the cinema with Sarah to watch a film adapted from one of his novels.
At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote you know,’ but couldn’t keep on saying that. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for one this was my dialogue and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant.
For a few seconds I was happy – this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new…
His obsession with his lost love draws him to find out the truth. Bendrix hires a private detective to find out what really happened to end his love affair with Sarah Miles two years ago.
When Graham Greene died in 1991 Kinsley Amis called him ‘until today, our greatest living novelist’. Having re-read The End of the Affair I am inclined to agree. Published in 1951, it still reads well, evoking a war-time love affair that began in London during the Blitz. It is the perfect novel to read on dark January days and cold winter nights.
A memorable passage recalls Bendrix going to the cinema with Sarah to watch a film adapted from one of his novels.
At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote you know,’ but couldn’t keep on saying that. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for one this was my dialogue and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant.
For a few seconds I was happy – this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new…
His obsession with his lost love draws him to find out the truth. Bendrix hires a private detective to find out what really happened to end his love affair with Sarah Miles two years ago.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
Back from a weekend in Geneva I decided to re-read this short novel and Booker prize winner, published in 1984.
A solitary writer takes time out staying at a hotel on Lake Geneva one late September, reflecting on past events and observing others staying at the hotel. This is Anita Brookner’s writing at its best: restrained, elegant, enigmatic.
Dressed for dinner in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of 'Beneath the Visiting Moon', then on re-reading them, realised that she had used the same device in 'The Stone and the Star', and crossed them out.
She recalls a conversation with her agent discussing the changing romantic market, saying that women still prefer ‘the old myths’. ‘They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true…’
‘Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero… this is a lie, of course. In real life it is the hare who wins. Every time.’
‘In life, I mean. Never in fiction. At least not in my kind of fiction.’
Edith’s solitary existence is upset by the presence of Mr. Neville and she is forced to consider her future.
One rainy day, when I have time to spare, I will gather up all my second-hand copies of Anita Brookner’s novels and work my way through them, slowly, methodically teasing out her detailed descriptions of characters and places. I am in no rush; it is a project I am content to savour.
A solitary writer takes time out staying at a hotel on Lake Geneva one late September, reflecting on past events and observing others staying at the hotel. This is Anita Brookner’s writing at its best: restrained, elegant, enigmatic.
Dressed for dinner in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of 'Beneath the Visiting Moon', then on re-reading them, realised that she had used the same device in 'The Stone and the Star', and crossed them out.
She recalls a conversation with her agent discussing the changing romantic market, saying that women still prefer ‘the old myths’. ‘They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true…’
‘Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero… this is a lie, of course. In real life it is the hare who wins. Every time.’
‘In life, I mean. Never in fiction. At least not in my kind of fiction.’
Edith’s solitary existence is upset by the presence of Mr. Neville and she is forced to consider her future.
One rainy day, when I have time to spare, I will gather up all my second-hand copies of Anita Brookner’s novels and work my way through them, slowly, methodically teasing out her detailed descriptions of characters and places. I am in no rush; it is a project I am content to savour.
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