12. Words of Wisdom for Creative Writers

 



 



One of the problems of single sex boarding schools, and presumably unisex boarding schools too, though I have no knowledge of them, is to fill after class hours and weekends with activities that are developmental or productive or, at the very least, absorb the energies of the pupils. A continual programme of activities, generally of a communal kind, ranging from compulsory sports and games to voluntary clubs and societies for photographers, wood-carvers, musicians, bird-watchers, cavers, chess-players, metal workers, model-makers, stamp, coin and butterfly collectors, debaters, would-be politicians, is laid out to keep idle hands and minds from mischief.

One such activity at Wells Cathedral School when I was a boarder there in the nineteen fifties was a regular evening set aside for the headmaster, or some other member of staff with a literary bent, to read excerpts from ‘great literature’ to the assembled boys. These readings, which inevitably produced generations of school leavers with a well-honed antipathy to ‘great literature’, were scheduled under the title of Other Men’s Flowers. (The notion that women might have been responsible for ‘great literature’ was not, in those days, even a matter of casual speculation, which was very fortunate for would-be women authors and perhaps explains why bookstores run special promotions to entice men into bookshops.) 

The passages chosen for these floral tributes to ancient genius were either texts thought to be of an ennobling and uplifting nature – Mark Anthony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Julius Caesar, Keats’ ‘Ode to a nightingale’, Wordsmith’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’, Robert Browning’s ‘Home thoughts from abroad’, and other favourites of literary anthologies – or texts of a stoical and pathetic kind, dwelling sentimentally and mawkishly on the mysteries of life and death – Gray’s ‘Elegy in a country churchyard’, Goldsmith’s ‘The deserted village’, Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, Henley’s ‘Out of the night that covers me’, Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop. Occasionally there would be a reading from Tom Brown’s Schooldays or from Nicholas Nickleby so that we could appreciate how fortunate we were in comparison to our Victorian counterparts. Each pupil was encouraged to enter his own favourite literary excerpts in a personal Commonplace Book, set out in his best handwriting with subject and author index.(1) 

During my occasional flirtations with creative writing I have been pilfering, filching, raiding the gardens and orchards of other writers for the flowers and fruits of their experience, seeking words of encouragement and exhortation. Clearly writers, like other cultural heroes, are expected to offer pithy comments about the secrets of their success and to be articulate about the mechanics of their profession. Indeed whole books have been devoted to quotes from writers on writing.(2) Here are a few that I particularly like:

·         ‘… the usual writerly method [resembles] the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests.’ – Margaret Atwood.(3)

·          ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.’ – Iris Murdoch.

·         ‘The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.’ – Arthur Miller.

·         ‘Write what you write… Write to make your soul grow.’ – Kurt Vonnegut.

·         ‘The only writers I respect are those who have put themselves completely into their work. Not those who use their skilful hands to do something. This isn’t writing in my opinion. A man who can dash off a book, let’s say, and say it’s a good novel, a best seller, even of some value, but it isn’t representative completely of him, of his personality, then there’s something wrong there. This man is a fraud in a way, to me. All he put into his book was his skill. And that’s nothing. I prefer a man who is unskilful, who is an awkward writer, but who has something to say, who is dealing himself one time on every page.’ – Henry Miller.

·          ‘Annie Dillard said you should write as if you’re dying. Nadine Gordimer… that you should write as if you were already dead and it no longer mattered what anyone said about you.’(4)

Finally a favourite passage from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead:

‘Rilke, in his Sonnets of Orpheus, makes the underworld journey a precondition of being a poet. The journey must be undertaken, it is necessary. The poet – for whom Orpheus is the exemplary model – is the one who can bring the knowledge held by the Underworld back to the land of the living…’

‘You have to sit down and eat

with the dead, sharing their poppies,

if you want enough memory to keep

the one most delicate note…’ [Sonnet 9, Pt I]

‘This poet doesn’t just visit the Other World. He partakes of it. He is double-natured, and can thus both eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale.’

    
 Go to the underground. But come back alive.

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1. I have my own Commonplace Book still, dated ‘Autumn 1958’, full of schoolboy dreams, hopes, depressions and vanities. It seems unremarkable stuff now, but has one surprise. Carefully copied out on page 29, which I have titled ‘WOMEN’, is a verse from a Rupert Brooke poem, ‘The Chilterns’:

                        And I shall find some girl perhaps

                        And a better one than you

                        With eyes as wise, but kindlier,

                        And lips as soft, but true.

                        And I daresay she will do.

For years I thought that this was a Spike Milligan piece. I don’t think the tutor of my dating class at Cambridge (see blog 7) would have been impressed by such a misattribution.

2. For example, The quotable writer: words of wisdom from Mark Twain, Aristotle, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost, Erica Jong and more, edited by William A. Gordon (2000).

3. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002).

4. Keyes, Ralph, The Courage to Write (1995); also the source of the Murdoch and Miller quotes.

11. "In the Name of God and of Profit."

Statue of Francesco di Marco Datini, Prato, Italy. Photo by Nigel Haworth

This morning, November 26th, Kim Hill had a fascinating couple of items on her radio programme: a small piece about a 100 euro note, reminiscent of the adventures of the 1770 banknote in my blog 9, and a substantive interview and discussion with Jane Gleeson-White about her book Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World. Jane Gleeson-White's work focuses on the spread of double-entry book keeping following the 1494 publication of Fra Luca Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportione et proportionalita, a kind of encyclopaedia of mathematics.

There is an interesting counterpoint in the book keeping practices of an earlier Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, ‘The Merchant of Prato’. Born around 1335, Datini was the son of a taverner in the Tuscan town of Prato, a few miles north-west of Florence. His father died in 1348, a victim of the Black Death which killed about a third of the population of the area. By the time of his own death in 1410, Francesco, without the advantage of patronage or family connections, had built up a personal fortune of 70,000 gold florins which, along with his substantial house, he bequeathed to the poor of the town. He also bequeathed to posterity a remarkable record of the business, personal and family life of a Renaissance merchant. He saved every letter and business document that he received and instructed his managers, who were spread across Italy, France and Spain, to do the same. This treasure trove of documentation was discovered in Prato in 1870 - ‘some 150,000 letters, over 500 account books and ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, 400 insurance policies, several thousand bills of lading, letters of advice, bills of exchange and cheques’, plus letters of credit and contracts (Origi, Iris, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, London, Jonathan Cape 1957:11).

Datini established trading houses in Prato, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca and Ibiza. He traded in ‘lead and alum and pilgrims’ robes from Roumania, slaves and spices from the Black Sea, English wool from London and Southampton and African or Spanish wool from Majorca and Spain, salt from Ibiza, silk from Venice, leather from Cordova and Tunis, wheat from Sardinia and Sicily, oranges and dates and bark and wine from Catalonia’(Origi:12). He made cloth in Prato, which is still a major centre for textiles and knitwear, and he opened a bank, trading in bills of exchange as well as financing trade in commodities. Although a member of the Wool Merchants’ Guild in Prato, and of the Guild of Silk Merchants in Florence, Datini was, argues Iris Origi, a self-made Renaissance merchant rather than a clannish member of a small, locally focused medieval community of craftsmen and shopkeepers. He is, argues Iris Origi, one of

            a handful of men whose marketplace is the whole of Europe, and whose ambition and enterprise are as wide as their field of action. Here most men are still ordering their lives according to the precepts of the Church and the statutes of the Guilds, but a few are already merely using these rules as a screen behind which to form their own audacious schemes. The unquestioning orthodoxy of the Middle Ages is giving place to the sceptical, inquiring mind of the Renaissance, and among the pioneers of the new order are the men who perforce have had to depend upon their own enterprise, adaptability and shrewdness, to achieve their ends: the merchants (Origi:19).

           

Origi’s picture of Datini is of a commercially astute but mistrustful and fretful man immersed in every detail of his business and household affairs. He is acutely aware of the precariousness of his material success and of the threats posed to his business by political upheavals, piracy, plague and famine, and the potential dishonesty of his employees and business associates. As he grows older, he becomes more and more anxious about his spiritual well-being and fearful of his prospects in the after-life. Only two things, suggests Origi, were consistently important in Francesco’s life - trade and religion. Although he was ‘capable, in the pursuit of his business, of a life as industrious and exacting as a monk’s’, and was miserly by nature, he ‘never failed to conform to the conventions of pious practice: he neglected no fast-days, assigned a due proportion of his profits to alms and charity, built chapels and adorned churches’(Origi:15). Both his business contracts and his private letters ‘began and ended with a pious formula; the Ten Commandments stood at the head of his ledgers’(Origi:306), where it was also customary for a merchant to write out the dedication: “In the name of God and of the Virgin Mary and of all the Saints of Paradise, that they may give us grace to do right both for body and soul”(Origi:66). "On the first page of Datini’s great ledgers stood the words ‘In the name of God and of profit’, and those were the only goals to which these merchants aspired: profit in this world or in the next, as if the whole of life were one vast counting-house - and at its end, the final Day of Accounting"(Origi:13; my emphasis).

Unlike a growing number of his merchant contemporaries, Datini did not leverage his financial independence and commercial success into social position or political influence. His social networks were largely defined by his family and his business connections. He was, says Origi, ‘the typical parvenu - boastful and ill at ease’(Origi:155) among his social betters and, on occasions, obsequious in his attentions to those whose favour he wished to cultivate. His interest in local political affairs extended only to their impact on his business ventures and to the taxes that might be imposed upon him. Unlike the great international bankers and trading companies of the period, his scale of operations was such as to leave him largely free from political pressure. They, in contrast, were increasingly liable to be heavily involved in affairs of state, often to their detriment:

            they could not well deny a loan to a foreign prince who could at any moment expel them from his dominions, or refuse to pay the mercenary troops called in by their own city to defend its walls. Thus they were the first to suffer from the repercussions of political or military disasters; one could almost say that the greater or more powerful a company was, the more certainly was it doomed to failure (Origi:102-3).

How the tide has turned.

13. My Mum and Other Huts

One of the few books Sharon and I have accessible here (all the rest being in storage at present) is STILL LIFE (2010), a coffee table size book of photographs taken inside the Antarctic huts of Scott and Shackleton by the New Zealand photographer Jane Ussher. Sitting flat on a shelf in our lounge because it was too large to fit into our packing boxes, it caught my eye as I sat down planning to write about my Mum's hut.

In photography and the fine arts a still life is generally a depiction of inanimate objects within a framework imposed by the artist. The subtle composition of these everyday taken-for-granted artefacts or items from nature - their lighting and framing in the lens of the camera - is designed to make us view them with a more attentive eye. Among Jane Ussher's Antarctic hut photographs, for example, are close ups of pieces of rope, broken egg shells, boxes of dog biscuits, rusted fuel tins, jars of provisions, bones of dead birds, boots and shoes and medical supplies together with shots of the huts, their furnishings and the surrounding landscapes. The presence of Scott and Shackleton and the members of their expeditions is brought to life by the images of their workaday Antarctic world. There is stillness and within that stillness there is life.

 

It set me thinking about the psychological huts we build, places where we feel most at ease with ourselves and with our lives, content and relaxed in the moment. For my Mum it was her hut at the bottom of the garden in Malvern, an old tin shed with just enough room for a bed, an easy chair, a bookcase, a small table and an electric fire. This was Mum's retreat and at every opportunity she would take off there after lunch to put her feet up, have a read and doze off. [A granny nap; I am of a napping age myself now and no longer delude myself by calling them power naps.]

Mum had covered the walls of her hut with pictures and photographs, mostly from old calendars of Scotland and Malvern. As any kiwi of overseas origin will attest, overseas relatives can deluge you at Christmas with calendars of the beautiful local landscapes and heritage buildings you have mysteriously abandoned. I often feel that these gifts come with a gentle reproach for my distancing myself so greatly from my relatives - remember these places? remember us? I can respond in kind, as if to expiate this dislocation from my roots, with pictures showing the grandeur of New Zealand's natural heritage and stunning images of wild places where I have never ventured. See these, I say, surely you can understand why I would rather live here? Although I have many happy memories of Brighton from childhood to my last visit in 2008, my brother and I have an implicit understanding that he won't send me any more calendars of the city where he lives, particularly ones devoted to its most photographed structure, the derelict West Pier, and I won't send him any more of New Zealand.

Mum loved the hills of her youth in Scotland, especially the Pentlands on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and the hills of her maturer years in Malvern, Worcestershire. She and Dad were great walkers. They spent their honeymoon walking in North Devon and all our childhood holidays included long walks somewhere. There probably wasn't a photograph in her hut that didn't trigger one or more memories of times she had spent out in the hills with family and friends.

After Dad died, when family visited, Mum would gladly give up her bedroom to us and take off to spend the night in her shed. We had images of her accidently setting the place on fire and triggering shock-horror headlines in the Malvern Gazette about these selfish cuckoos from New Zealand who had ousted an old lady from her home and sent her to sleep in the garden shed, followed by an account of other recent cases of elder abuse in the area.

My psychological huts have generally been my studies. When we moved here last month my priority was to set up the study whereas Sharon's, much more practically, was to have the kitchen organised. Here is a photograph of my study in Milford and part of a piece I wrote about it in 2004.

One of my favourite places is my study. It is on the top of my house, three stories up. In my study I am surrounded by riches. Family photographs; holiday mementoes; favourite books carted from place to place over many years; half-written stories shoved in bottom drawers; pieces of dialogue that end abruptly without resolution; hats from faraway places, wistful reminders of journeys taken, journeys never taken and journeys wrongly taken; Sophie’s Fan, a gift from a Chinese friend that touched me deeply, provoking a poetic translation of its inscription.

In my study I have the prompts to reconstruct the dramas of my life. When I am bored with that, I can gaze out at the windsurfers careening madly across Lake Pupuke in a strong north westerly, becoming airborne briefly and then, out of control, somersaulting into the water with an electrifying soundless splash. Like marlin. Or shooting stars. Or apprentice writers.

ANd so clouds fALL Here
Now in Orewa we have a study set up but very few books on the bookshelves. The old desktop computer has been sold and the laptop is used mostly in the downstairs living area. There are just a few treasures kept from the packing boxes to put on the desk or hang on the walls so here are some still life images of my present hut. I hope you can can see me among them.

The black and white framed photograph on the far left was one of a series titled "Shuttered Spaces" taken as part of the 2002 University of Auckland Summer School (see Blog 7). The other photographs in the series are currently boxed up in the garage awaiting transfer to our new apartment next year.

 

The clown was purchased in Mount Manganui in 2002 during my first holiday away with Sharon so it, together with La Barca Italian Restaurant in Mount Manganui Road - run at that time by Francesco Manna - has special memories. For a time the clown hung upside down on our bedroom wall in Milford simulating the tarot's hanging man. Beneath him was the caption:

THE HANGING CLOWN

"Extravagantly accepting life's chances and hazards, the suspended mind, anarchic, irrational and venturesome, sets out on a voyage of self-discovery."

He looks a little unsure about that, doesn't he?

10. Composition with the devil's tools

The Austrian architect Frederick Hundertwasser (1928-2000) called straight lines "the devil's tools".

Hundertwasser is best known in New Zealand for the Kawakawa toilets and his 1983 design for a new national flag, the green spiral Koru Flag (an upright version of the design can be seen in photos 5 and 10 of the link).

the circle and the line

define, refine, confine

the circle and the line

9. The Adventures of a Bank-Note.

...by the Yorkshire clothier, I was paid to a wool-stapler; he paid me to a Nottingham weaver; the weaver changed me with the landlord at the Bull in Bishopsgate-street; the landlord paid me to the one-eyed Norwich warehouse-keeper; from him I went to a gingerbread-baker for gingerbread sent by the waggon into the country. By Timothy Treaclebread the gingerbread-baker, I was paid to Mrs. Coppernose, a rich brazier’s widow, for rent: all this was performed in less than three hours. The duce fetch these men of business, says I to myself, they give very little rest, either to money or bank-notes.

______________________________________________________

Thomas Bridges' The Adventures of a Banknote was published in London in two volumes in 1770. Two further volumes followed in 1771 and a new edition of all four volumes was printed in 1772.

The premise of the adventures is a simple one. This anthropomorphised bank-note, on its route of exchange, becomes an acute observer testifying to more than the restless urgency of business. In the course of ‘his’ travels (the excitement early in life of being doubled up carefully and put into the bosom of a young wife clearly marks the masculinity of this particular promissory note), Bridges’ bank-note comments on the social, political and literary scene, records the material trivia of everyday life, and eavesdrops on the conversations, ribald tales, racist stories and sexual liaisons of his respective owners and their friends and acquaintances.

The father (‘the person that deposits cash for a bank-note may properly be called its father’) of Bridges’ bank-note storyteller is a poet. On receiving thirty guineas from a publisher for a manuscript of verses, the poet pays his rent and his debts at the chandlers, at the tripe-shop (for cow-heel and pig’s liver), at the pot-house (for pennyworths of beer) and at the bakers. Having twenty-one pounds, six shillings and ninepence three farthings left over, and realising that such a sum is insufficient for the purchase of a knighthood, the poet decides that the best way to raise his dignity is to send twenty pounds to the bank for a bank-note payable to Timothy Taggrhime Esq.

            After the Bank has dubb’d you an esquire, no man will dare to say a word against it; you may then boldly add the title esquire to your name the very next work you publish...The fathers of the generality of bank-notes are noblemen’s stewards, placemen’s gentlemen, city userers, knowing stock-jobbers, bankers’ clerks, and bishops’ toll-gatherers: from such roots what branches can you expect? But my father was another kind of an animal to what any of these creatures were: he was the first of his profession that ever entered the Bank to carry money, and I verily believe he will be the last.

           

Thomas Bridges was the son of a Hull physician. For a time he was a wine merchant and a partner in the firm of Sell, Bridges and Blunt in Hull. When the firm collapsed in 1759 as a result of the failure of its banking activities, he took up his pen and flourished briefly as a minor dramatist and populist writer, producing a comic opera, humorous verse pieces and burlesque poems. His ‘travestie’ of Homer’s Iliad, written under the pseudonym ‘Caustic Barebones’, was promoted as being ‘adapted to the capacity of honest English Roast Beef and Pudding Eaters’.

Bridges promised as many as twenty volumes of his bank-note’s adventures but mercifully only four volumes appeared in print. Whether Bridges or his publisher or the public initially tired of these tales and overheard conversations from all walks of life is unclear. The format was not an original one. A short tale, Adventures of a Halfpenny, had been printed in the twice weekly London periodical The Adventurer in April 1753. In 1760 the first volumes were published of Chrysal; or The Adventures of a Guinea, 

Wherin are exhibited views of several striking Scenes, WITH Curious and interesting ANECDOTES of the most Noted Persons in every Rank of Life, whose Hands it passed through IN AMERICA, ENGLAND, HOLLAND, GERMANY and PORTUGAL.

Written by Charles Johnstone, a not very successful Irish lawyer, two further volumes followed in 1765. Chrysal - the name is derived from the Greek word for gold - is a guinea coin. Chrysal is both material currency and a metaphysical representation of the spirit of the gold from which it was minted. It has psychic qualities, ‘a power of entering into the hearts of the immediate possessors of our bodies, and there reading all the secrets of their lives.’ Johnstone’s coin is not only a recorder of commercial transactions and pecuniary ambitions but a motivator for them: ‘when the mighty spirit of a large mass of gold takes possession of the human heart, it influences all its actions, and overpowers, or banishes, the weaker impulse of those immaterial, unessential notions called virtues.’

The eighteenth-century money-as-story-teller format did not end with Bridges. Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee, Wherin are interspersed various anecdotes Asiatic and European, published in 1782, added a further flavour of international commerce to the genre.

Whereas the novelist Sir Walter Scott viewed stories told through the passage of coins from person to person as ‘an ingenious medium for moral satire’, Deidre Lynch, in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998), described them as ‘fictions of social circulation’. She analysed these eighteenth century narratives within the context of a society trying to come to terms with the increasing importance of market exchange, and commercial activity generally, in structuring human relationships and everyday social interactions. In her view, giving literary voice and character to coins and banknotes - personalising and anthropomorphising money - was one of a number of ways in which men and women in the eighteenth century sought to understand their increasingly commercial society. It served in part to humanise ‘an economic system that, in an era marked by greater financial risk-taking in business and estate management, by an increasing dependence on credit arrangements, and by more and more bankruptcies, made English men and women uneasy.’

Sound familiar? 

8. A Place to Stand, A Place to Sit.

In the autumn of 1998 I became a grandfather for the first time. My granddaughter, Courtney, was born in Saudi Arabia and, at the age of four weeks, made her first overseas trip, travelling with her American-born mother to visit myself and my wife in London and her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Courtney has three passports, British, American and New Zealand.

Courtney’s father, my eldest son, has two passports, British and New Zealand, and an American green card. He made his first overseas trip when, as a child of five, my British-born first wife and I took him, together with his four year old sister and two year old brother, on a package holiday from Britain to the Black Sea coast.

 

I was born in Scotland and first acquired a British passport at the age of nineteen in order to hitchhike around Europe. My first air travel, at the age of twenty seven on a rackety old Vickers Vanguard turboprop from Heathrow to Glasgow, was paid for by John Laing Construction who I was contracted to at the time on a research project. In my thirties, after becoming a New Zealand citizen, I obtained a New Zealand passport too. In 1998 my renewed British passport also became a passport for the European Community. 

 

My mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and father, born in London, England, obtained their first passports in their late twenties to take up nursing and teaching posts respectively in Nigeria. Although living in England for most of their lives, they never travelled to Europe.

My paternal grandparents never travelled outside Britain. Nor did my maternal grandfather. My maternal grandmother had one overseas trip when she went to South Africa in her seventies to visit her eldest daughter.

The potential for cultural dislocation in these changing travel experiences is clear. One of the conventional concepts of culture is that it provides a localised focus for a sense of personal and group identity, a shared sense of place. Here, across the five generations from my grandparents to my grandchildren, there is increasing dis-place-ment, geographically, socially, psychologically, culturally. And it is a common pattern.

 

It is relatively easy to ‘place’ my grandparents in their economic, social and cultural contexts. On my mother’s side, lowland Scots, hard working petit bourgeois Edinburgh shopkeepers whose social and cultural life was built around family and the Presbyterian church. On my father’s side, Londoners, granddad travelling to the city daily and working his way up from office boy to boardroom in an import-export merchants, grandma managing the suburban Wandsworth home of five growing sons. Both families are readily defined by the parameters that social scientists long considered appropriate for capturing and mapping social structure and social change - ethnicity, nationality, class, occupational status, social mobility, residence, religion, marital status, family size. Such categorisation, while it simplifies and distorts the reality of my grandparents’ lives, and masks the richness and sadness of their experience, nevertheless gives them an apparent location within relatively fixed boundaries, a ‘place’ of their own.

The categorisations of social science, the storylines and scripts of history, the images of portraiture and photography, the selectivity of memory, all have the power to fix our forebears, to locate them, to give them a substance that they possibly never had, and to provide stereotypes and veneers that hide the anxieties, confusions and terrors of their subjectively lived experiences. For the generations who lived through two world wars and The Great Depression, for example, how could it be otherwise?

Our desire to pin our ancestors to some fixed place is a function of our own sense of dis-place-ment, dis-location, a mirror trick of perspective. In reconstructing our ancestors we construct a sense of ourselves. Indeed in many societies, naming conventions from generation to generation, usually predicated on patriarchy, reinforce a sense of family continuity - Johan Rasmussen’s son, Erling Johanssen; James A Baker II’s son, James A Baker III. In Maori society knowing your whakapapa, your genealogy, is part of the process of knowing yourself and of identifying you within the wider Maori community. Magazine articles on prominent Maoris respect the tradition. A profile of the poet Hone Tuwhare, an ‘elder statesman of New Zealand literature’, identifies him as ‘Northland Maori of Nga Puhi, Ngati Korokoro, Tautahi, Uri O Hau and Te Popoto ancestry’. The success of Alex Haley’s Roots, and the massive growth of interest in genealogy in recent years, are testaments both to our need to find a psychological place for ourselves in the modern world and to the displacements of our personal and family histories. It is as though grasping something from the past provides the ballast to stabilise the present, an emotional compass for that night sea journey that is life.

But emotional compasses change in strange and surprising ways as a consequence of physical and cultural dislocations. For many years I thought of myself as a Londoner of Scottish nationality. Early in my working life I travelled each week to various parts of the United Kingdom. When I returned to London on a Friday evening, however grey and damp the atmosphere, I knew I was returning to my city, a city with all the excitement and confidence and unapologetic brashness of one of the great capitals of the world. Familiar accents, a shared sense of humour, the by-play of everyday encounters, the anonymous comraderie of the football terraces and the summer lunchtime crowd in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Hamleys toyshop, the Christmas lights in Regent Street, triggered an emotional response, as did the internationally recognisable icons of the city.

Other emotional roots of my early life were in Edinburgh, the city of my birth. Although we moved from Scotland when I was six years old, I returned many times on family visits or to stay with my aunt and uncle and cousins. We attended the Edinburgh Castle Military Tattoo. My heart swelled at the skirl of a bagpipe on the Castle battlements, the massed bands of pipes and drums, the whole tartan array. How surprised I was, then, forty years later, after living in New Zealand for twenty six years, attending, on a beautiful starlit autumn night, a Tattoo more magnificent than any preserved even in childhood memories, to find myself close to tears when the Fijian Army brass band came into the arena bringing in their train the warmth and colour and songs and dances of the South Pacific. Where is my Scottishness now?

Like many a six-year-old boy, I suppose, I wanted to be a driver of something – the local bus, The Flying Scotsman, a Spitfire, a crane on the London Docks, a fire engine, a steam roller, a racing car. Well, a tram driver really, but trams, other than the Edinburgh ones, were in their death throes, though I can just remember the trams in London when we went to visit my grandmother at Wandsworth Common. They only ran as far as Harding and Hobbs department store at Clapham Junction (‘arding ‘n ‘obbs as Dad liked to mimic), so we had to wait at the bus stop up the Northcote Road for the forty-nine bus to take us on to the Honeywell Road stop, and Dad used to irritate and amaze us because, with his long sight, he could pick the numbers of approaching buses long before we could. I think a lot of my childhood must have been spent at bus and tram stops and at underground stations waiting impatiently for the right number or the right destination to come down from Fairmilehead or along the Edgware Road or round the Circle Line and then scrambling on, hoping to grab the ‘best’ seat.

To this day I’m on the look out for the right destination and the best seat. Whether in buses, trains, boats, planes, theatres, cinemas, sports venues, at home or on the beach, I’m very picky about where I sit. I can dither around with my theories about the ‘best’ place from which to see whatever there might be to see – upper apartment or lower, north-east corner or north-west, lower deck or upper deck, back seats or front, facing the engine or back to the engine, window or aisle, forward or back of the wings, circle or stalls, behind the goal or by the touchline, the angle of the sun, the seaward side or the landward side, the flight path over the mountains. As some French poet (Baudelaire?) observed, we live in a hospital ward in which everyone wants to change beds. The folk by the window want to be by the door, and the folk by the door want to be by the window. There’s certainly a lot to think about if you wish to feel comfortable in the places you occupy in life, however temporarily.

And Courtney's grandchildren? Where will they stand? Where will they sit?

7. LitCritShit



I started my university studies ‘reading’ English, as trendy and popular a subject in the sixties as Media Studies became in the nineties. When asked “Where are you studying?” and “What are you reading?” - the latter question not meaning what books are you reading but what degree are you taking - I would self-deprecatingly and casually say, as if oblivious to the status implications of my answers in the eyes of anyone who cared enough to ask such questions, “Cambridge” and “English”. I would then wait smugly to see what awe the information invoked.

The university and its English programme were rightly held in high esteem and the staff whose lectures I attended included great names to drop in literary society - C.S. Lewis, Raymond Williams and F.R. Leavis. Don’t get me wrong. It was a privileged and wonderful experience but it was about ‘reading’ English not writing it. The purpose of our studies, and the practice of our own writing as undergraduates, was critical analysis and dissection of creative literary works. At no time were we encouraged to write original material of our own yet we developed considerable skill as critics, that category of indeterminate matter that in the eyes of many creative artists is beneath contempt – ‘people who find lice in bald heads’, Balzac called them, and D.H. Lawrence’s epithet – ‘they are smoking, steaming shits’ - doesn’t really belong in a genteel blog like this.

One consequence of my two years of study of English – I then changed my degree and graduated in Economics – was that I was hugely admiring of quality creative writing and totally intimidated by it. I had effectively internalised the analytical critic to such a degree that I self-censored my own creative efforts and was intimidated to the point of silence as a potentially creative writer myself. I was not alone in this.

Auckland Anniversary Day, Monday 28 January 2002
It’s Auckland Anniversary Day so everything that floats is out on the Waitemata Harbour or Hauraki Gulf and Lake Pupuke has a thin covering of windsurfers gliding gently round in the breeze. I have been lying out on the front deck reading (well skimming, more accurately) A.S. Byatt’s Possession. One of the first things I came upon is the experience of one of her characters, Blackadder, when studying English under F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. It is reminiscent of my own experience of all that lit-crit-shit. Byatt writes:

Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them. He devised an essay style of Spartan brevity, equivocation and impenetrability.

Byatt goes on to describe a seminar on dating short quotations from novels or poems. Many, like myself, were terrified of making absolute prats of ourselves by dating something early Victorian which turned out to be a modern pastiche of early Victorian literary style and had within it all the clues as to its inauthenticity, if only we had had the wit to see them. [Of course that’s how tutors and lecturers (and barristers) make themselves look so clever – they only ask questions to which they already know the answers.]

And that is why I am only skimming A.S. Byatt. I found in an early school report a teacher commenting that I should articulate my own opinions more forcefully. Which rather presumes that I knew what they were at that age, or indeed now. The problem with reading authors of ‘literary fiction’, like Byatt or Saul Bellow, is that their skill and artistry and use of language totally puts you off writing yourself. Now that I want to write for myself, in my own voice, I feel it best to avoid reading too much quality fiction (or am I just being lazy?).

I had the same experience in the photojournalism workshop last week. On the Monday afternoon before any of us had gone out to K Rd to take some photographs (which we did on Tuesday mostly), the tutor Wayne showed us a video presentation he had put together of his current work. It was on the Dance Culture, that all night stuff with body surfing and ecstasy and the DJ is a big star remixing the music by hand as he goes. They were colour photographs and the images were quite stunning, the kind of thing you just know takes an immense amount of skill and professionalism and a very long apprenticeship to handle with such confidence. I loved it but it was quite off-putting too and I nearly didn’t bother on the Tuesday to go back and take photos of my own. But I did and they were OK, so that was a good lesson for me not to self-censor so much; because I’m not a creative genius doesn’t mean I should hide what talents I do have under the proverbial bushel.

That realm of privacy behind the public façade is not just what my Journeying on the Circle Line novel is all about but also, rather astonishingly when I came to see what I had shot on the workshop Tuesday, what my photographs turned out to be about too. About outside and inside, and the inside of the inside, and the creation of private space in public places. 

So I have been busy finding all sorts of exciting and interesting parallels between photography and writing, realising that the creative impulses and technical craft in both have remarkable similarities – the image in the mind translated or mistranslated to the image on the paper (what you photograph/write is never quite what you set out to photograph/write when you start out); - the new stories you can create when you look at your work, photos, life, writing, marriage in retrospect; - the fun of the creative conceptual stage (the 10% imagination) and the relative drudgery of crafting it all into a finished piece of work (the 90% perspiration, the hours in the darkroom painting with light, the endless fussing over whether you have exactly the right word/image to convey the precise meaning, texture, ambience you are after).

Anyway, it’s a lovely day so I must go take a paddle along the beach and not spend it all inside. I wandered along to Thornes Bay yesterday afternoon and watched the Volvo round-the-world yachts go up the Rangitoto Channel to pass on the shoreside of the tallship Soren Larsen (which some will remember as the Charlotte Rose in The Onedin Line) moored off Mairangi Bay, on their way to Rio via the Southern Ocean. There was a good breeze and they were doing about 17 knots and I hadn’t realised before how powerful they are – partly their height and chunkiness, and partly the way they stand to the wind tipping over at an angle like they do. It made the power boat flotilla in pursuit seem puny by contrast. And so different from the skittish windsurfers blasting across Lake Pupuke, periodically capsizing in a great splash of sail and board rider. Like writers.

6. Stokeley Carmichael, Black Panther

Honolulu, Hawaii, Tuesday 19th March 1985.

Went over from my office at the East-West Centre to the University of Hawaii campus to hear Stokely Carmichael. Now there’s a name from the past - a sixties’ culture hero, founder of the black student movement and the Black Panther Party, coined the slogan Black Power, worked with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey Newton (who now has a PhD in New Consciousness History, or some such!) Bobby Seale (now running a barbecue business), Eldridge Cleaver (who wrote memorably in Soul on Ice about how frightening and special it is when two people open up their lives to each other; in his case to his lawyer).

Cleaver’s now a born-again Christian. All those black radicals either dead or diverted into the by-ways of history, into psychobabble, new age cults, suits and ties. Such a sell out. But not Stokely. Here he is, still only forty-three, tall, thin, stately, handsome as ever, now proselytising for the Pan American Revolutionary People’s Party. Into Marxist political education of black Americans in a big way but based in Guinea, West Africa, and calling himself Kwame Ture (Kwame after Nkrumah of Ghana and Ture, I think, after Sekou Toure of I forget which old French West African colony – Guinea perhaps). Stokely married the lovely Miriam Makeba who I saw in London years ago in the Bantu jazz musical King Kong where she was the lead singer, but they were divorced in the late seventies and now he has in his retinue another gorgeous African lady decked out in full tribal costume, headdress and all, plus young child. The revolutionary’s lot is not a happy one?

______________________________________________________________________________

Huey Newton became a crack cocaine addict and was fatally shot by a drug dealer in 1989.

Eldridge Cleaver became an active member of the Republican Party and died in 1998.

Stokeley Carmichael died in Guinea of prostate cancer on November 15th 1998 age 57.

Bobby Seale wrote a cookbook, advertised ice cream and worked in youth education programmes. He is still alive.

       

5. Mogg's Bakery and Jack Blandiver's Clock



 

Wells, Somerset; copyright Ian Rix 2005, licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence

Proust had his Madeleine cakes. I had Mogg's.

From the age of nine I was a boarder at Wells Cathedral School in Somerset, an experience that among other good things gave me a love of choral music sung within large high spaces. Drifting on a sea of memory lapping around my nine years at Wells, up pops Mogg’s Bakery. Mogg was a dayboy at school whose family ran a bakery in the High Street that sold a tart-shaped cup cake, the cup a semi-soft biscuit soaked in honey, the filling a marzipan butter cream sealed under a hard smooth top of lemon, strawberry or chocolate icing. Lemon was my favourite.

I almost sold my soul for that cake, desperate as I was to inveigle an invitation to join my housemaster’s Sunday soirees at which I had heard, to my chagrin, cakes from Mogg’s were regularly served to his coterie of favourite boys, along with Bach, Corelli and Isaac Stern. I will call him Mr Crabtree. He taught maths, listened in rapt devotion to classical music and roused his favourites for morning chapel by fondly tickling them beneath the blankets. He was a server at the cathedral and, dressed in scarlet gown, starched white surplus and ruff, carried the cross at the front of the processing choir at evensong flanked by his candle-bearing acolytes, Michael Skinner and Michael Watts, similarly clad in the scarlet and white symbolic of the blood and body of Christ. In these proceedings, to my mind, Mr Crabtree and his angelic Michaels displayed an unctuous piety, my distaste fuelled by the knowledge of their imminent partaking of Mr Mogg’s cakes in the cosy warmth of Mr Crabtree’s rooms while I was left in the cold dayroom to play table tennis with my friends.

Sometime later Watts was expelled along with Hedges. Neither of them returned after the Lent half term. We were not told why and left to grubby speculation in the whisperings of changing rooms and the lewd graffiti of toilet walls. Two boys less likely to be linked we found it hard to imagine. Watts was musical, a chorister whose voice had broken, a gangly boy from Chislehurst in Kent who hated sport and was banished to right back in hockey teams to hide his hapless skills. His father had been killed in the Normandy landings and his elegant socialite mother picked him up on parents’ weekends in a much admired 1938 cream Lagonda Drophead Coupe with a running board and British Racing Green upholstery. Hedges was a weekly boarder from a farm in the Mendip Hills, a stocky Fordson tractor lad whose fearless tackling as our first fifteen fullback was greatly missed.

I have other reminiscences of schooldays and of boys who only have surnames, names on labels stitched to each piece of clothing by painstaking mothers. Steer, who objects to me calling him a native and smacks me in my smart-arse mouth when I explain he is a native of Bristol. Fear, who falls over in the playground during our lunchtime soccer game and dies. Crane who, as a ten year old, keeps a pin-up photograph of Heddy Lamar in his bedside locker until, distressed by my puritanical self-righteous goading that he must love Heddy Lamar more than his mother, he tears it up tearfully. Poor Hoskins unmercifully bullied and provoked to fight and lose in the depths of the boiler room; little wonder I thought Lord of the Flies was a documentary. Surnames and nicknames. ‘Stinker’ O’Halloran. ‘Kipper’ Herriman. ‘Brat Thompson’, ‘Squirt’ Stephens. Only in insults do we acquire an identity of our own.

I remember the rituals of school life. Taking my pullover, shirt, tie and vest off in one piece at night in order to enjoy extra minutes in bed in the morning before being chased into the showers and speed dressing for chapel. Cajoling the school barber on his monthly visits for a surreptitious look at his rubber Scotsman doll, which he squeezes between thumb and forefinger to make the kilt jump up and an erect pink penis pop out. Saving the cardboard milk bottle tops from my daily ration and flicking them competitively at the wall - nearest to the wall wins - to add to my cache. The endless round of clubs and sports and games to keep us out of mischief. Proud speech days and a shelf-full of books each with a school crest embossed on the cover and a citation on the inside – the first, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, ‘Junior School Prize for General Work, Form III, 1950’, signed by the Head Master, A. F. Ritchie, Prebendary Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, headmaster from 1924, who I discovered later was, under the pseudonym AFRIT, a man of some considerable importance in the history and development of cryptic crosswords. Subsequent prize books were signed by AFRIT’s successor, F. G. Commings, who comes to Wells from St Paul’s School in London, the school attended by Samuel Pepys, and has been one of Orde Wingate’s Chindits in the war.

I have kept two books about Wells. The older is The Story of Wells Cathedral by Richard Malden, ‘sometime Dean of Wells’. It has an inscription inside the front cover, ‘John S Deeks with all best wishes from A. C. Tarbet, Wells, July 23^rd/’58’, a gift from my former housemaster to mark my leaving the school. The more recent is a historical guide to the town, published in 1990, a birthday present to me ‘With much love and many happy returns from Mum.’ Clearly I was expected to retain fond memories of my school days there, and do, by and large. I was a bright kid and good at sport, the ideal recipe for a happy boarding school life. It’s only looking back that I recognise how emotionally deprived I was and what a hopeless grounding an all boy’s boarding school is for coming to grips with the other half of the world, the feminine half. I suppose all the boys vied in our different ways for the attention of the younger and prettier of the matrons at the school, or of the headmaster’s teenage daughter or the eighteen year old bride of our housemaster, craving some mothering. From my nine years at the school I have only one recollection that touches that emotional hunger. A few of us were privileged, as sixth form students in English, to travel periodically with the headmaster and his wife to Stratford-on-Avon to see performances of Shakespeare plays there. Travelling back late at night I fell asleep in the back of the car cradled in the arms of the headmaster’s wife. It seemed a magical place to be. But that is it. Nine years and that is it. It appals me now to think of such emotional deprivation.

Wells Cathedral has one of the oldest clocks in England. It is six feet four inches in diameter and records not only the minutes and twenty four hours of the day but the days of the month and the phases of the moon. It is first mentioned in 1392 when the sum of ten shillings a year was assigned to its keeper. When Mary and I visited Wells in January 1982, seven weeks before her death. she recorded the clock on tape. There’s a whirring and clunking sound as the clock prepares to strike the hour, a sound as familiar to my memory as Mogg’s cakes and Mary’s voice: 

“There’s this little mechanical man to the right of the clock kicking a bell with his heels. The clock’s going to strike. That’s the sound of the horsemen. The clock’s striking twelve… no eleven…these little knights on horses have come out of their castle above the clock… they’re going round knocking each other off their horses, then getting back on, doing it again. Eleven times. Cute as.’

Memories lapping memories.

There is more organ music on the tape, then the sound of the cathedral bells and our laughter. What strange chance journeyings we embark upon. And still that clock is marking the minutes and hours, the days of the month and the phases of the moon, and Jack Blandiver is kicking his heels to sound the quarters of the hour, and the horsemen are striking each other down and courageously jumping back into the saddle to repeat the course.

[some of the names in this piece have been changed]

4. My other online world.

The first three entries in my blog were under "More Conversations with Myself" but this seems to be a very cluttered place in the blogosphere so I have changed location. However, this is not the other online world I will introduce you to in this blog.

Some years back, shortly after I retired, I took the training programme to become an Age Concern visitor. I was then linked up with an elderly man in Milford who I visited weekly until Sharon and I went on an overseas holiday in 2004. While we were away he died. Frank (not his real name) was a good match for me since he lived and worked for much of his life in the London area as a highly skilled toolmaker in companies that I knew of (Marconi, De Havilland) and areas where I had myself worked in the engineering and furniture industries (Southgate, High Wycombe). So once we settled down each week we found plenty to talk about around his reminiscences.

But before we settled down Frank would have an almighty whinge about all the things that had bugged him in the previous week - his hospital experiences, the confusing state of his tabletop trays of medicines, the perceived neglect of his family, little domestic disasters with his much beloved Sydney silkie, run-ins with the local council about the state of the pavements, and all the general frustrations of being old and feeling ill. I came to feel that it was having things to whinge about that kept him going. When he seemed to be about done with his introductory coda, which could be all of fifteen minutes, and I was running out of what I hope were sympathetic noises, I managed to break away and make us a cup of tea. After that he relaxed and started to talk about his life, digging through albums, photographs and old magazines to illustrate the stories he wanted to share.

I made a vow, during my time visiting Frank, that I would never become a miserable old whinger obsessed by my health and frailty. As Sharon knows, it is a vow I have been finding hard to keep this year. It is my other online life, a life with a canula up my nose and a long line of plastic tubing linked to an oxygen concentator for sixteen hours in every twenty four. I have a C.O.P.D [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease] called bronchiectasis. Bronchiectasis is not particularly rare, though I have only ever met two other people with this condition - Tilly and Den, both brought up in England. There are internet sites on which I can share my experience dealing with the daily frustrations of my breathlessness and I intend to use them and confine my whinging to them. But if you know of anyone with bronchiectasis I would love to be put in touch with them.

So no whinging on my blog. Well, very little I hope. How I have ended up in this state is interesting, however, and involves an interlocking array of factors in my personal history - genetic, medical (mainstream and alternative), religious, environmental, political. I am still researching some of them and will share a blog with you when I am done. It will be called "A Social History of My Bronchectasis". Watch this space.