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Nigel Jarrett's Blog
Fri, 2012-02-17 12:24 | 
Nigel Jarrett
My writer's day for you non-writers thinking of emulating me and the rest of the scribbling clan starts bleary-eyed. That's because I'm nocturnal, though even at night there are distractions. I was once disturbed by a clan of hedgehogs fighting over a saucer of cat's milk at 2am. With good reason are they called hogs. They screech, run and fight each other. Behind me, my two young children slept on, oblivious. The children oblivious, the hedgehogs delirious. I wrote a poem about it - Nocturne - which was published by Poetry Wales. After breakfast, if I haven't got a review to send somewhere, I open up 'Notepad' on the laptop and stare at a blank screen until something comes. It usually does. Something like, 'One evening, my grandfather brought home a Victorian brass microscope and a box of glass slides. One of the slides showed the Lord's Prayer written on a speck of paper the size of a pinhead...' I stare a bit longer but nothing extra arrives. So I think of how to get rid of 'one evening' or the repetition of 'one' at the start of both sentences or that redundant 'brass', though 'brass' is vivid. (The writer must always be in mechanical and creative mode simultaneously.) Then I realise what I've written is possibly something I've read, but I cannot remember where. Then I do remember; it was in Marches Past, the diary-style autobiography of the late and lamented art critic Peter Fuller - lamented by me, at any rate. But instead of scrapping those two sentences, I think of modifying them to something similar but not plagiaristic. Such as, 'My Uncle Jack was always bringing me odd things when I was a kid. Once he brought me a sealed jam jar full of sheep's eyes in formaldehyde. My parents were livid...' Promising. Then I realise that there are uncles all over the place in my stories. I think I feel sorry for their avuncular status, though in most cases they are other people's fathers, brothers, cousins. But I often see them as grandparents - those elderly watchers who have been stripped of their parental powers and who, in many cases, attempt to subvert the influence their children, our parents, have inherited. But I'm wandering, because it's obvious I can't get started. I decide to wade through the book publisher lists. Most publishers don't accept unsolicited manuscripts, digital or not. Others don't accept anything except from an agent. So you need an agent to get a publisher interested but you can't get an agent because the publisher hasn't published you. After coffee and after rolling my clean socks into balls and stuffing them artistically in the drawer, I go into essay mode. Perhaps Cambria magazine would like a piece on Welsh stereotypes. They've taken stuff from me on Welsh newspapers and other subjects. I write a par, two pars, three and decide I'm on a roll. But I postpone the rest of it because I have three CD reviews to write for Jazz Journal and they involve complicated personnel lists. I finish them, tired out. I email Cambria's editor to see if it's worth continuing with my current opinion piece. Yea, she says. Yea, I say. After tea, I'm at it again: 'Becky was an odd girl at the best of times but when she walked out of the waves at St Ives with a message in a bottle and handed it to me with a strange look on her face I knew we were at the start of an adventure. For the message read, I killed him. It wasn't Rodney, it was me...' Possibilities. It won't be a crime thing; I hate that genre. But, alas, it will have to wait, whatever it turns out to be. 'Masterchef' calls, and that's me cooked for another day.
Tue, 2012-01-31 20:03 | Nigel Jarrett
The last time I knocked at the door of the house where Albert Camus is supposed to have lived in Lourmarin, I was told that it was someone's home with no public access. I had on a previous occasion stumbled across his grave in the local cemetery, marked by a crude granite slab with his name on and with rosemary growing wild on its surface. While I was there, a red squirrel scampered across it.
Lourmarin is on the southern side of the Luberon mountain range. Over its hump on the road from unprepossessing Apt, home of sickly glazed fruit, is a sign for Bonnieux and Menerbes, the Provencal places raised to dubious renown by Peter Mayle, a writer with no philosophy, at least none that explained his view of that perfumed land as a place where eccentric and infuriating Frogs occluded an Englishman's dream of idyll.
The road winds down to a flat tree-lined avenue into the village, one of the trees bearing unmistakeable signs of collision with a vehicle, probably a car, but without the cheesy floral tributes, now commonplace in Britain, twined to the trunk to mark a fatality. A friend now living near Aix says that on the roads of France, despite the frequently lunatic driving, there are few accidents but that when one does occur there is carnage. The ill-fated drive from Lourmarin to Paris, taken by Camus in 1960 without motorways to divert the racers, must have been soporific and hair-raising. As an accident it was one of the aforementioned few, but its effects were catastrophic. Camus was killed. He was just forty-six.
Like other worlds, the absurd world is what it is. Where random lines cross, events occur. Philosophies are sometimes difficult to retail in terms unphilosophic, but it's fair to say that for Camus the world, our life, is essentially the survivor's experience, and survivors do what they can with their legacy, assuming they do not wish to disown it by self-immolation. We are in the world, we enjoy it, we take responsibility for our acts, deferring to no god. The casualty can apportion blame but the buck stops, as they say, at ground level, among our own kind. We - well, some of us - are not sinners waiting to be punished by divine visitation.
What's really absurd is the complex relationship between Algerian Camus and mainland France, where more people than in Britain and other northern European countries live in fear of purgatory and damnation and in hope of a favourable outcome on judgement day. While the southern Mediterranean coast is a cultural world away from the sophistication of Paris, it is still, like the rest of the country, the place where a little old lady dressed in black will appear from nowhere to usher a woman in shorts out of a church. So Camus, had he been religious, would never have been a Catholic, nor should he, a sickly man, have found northern climes particularly congenial. He was, though, an immigrant - legal, yes, but an immigrant all the same. Yet whereas his modern counterparts, casualties all, bring with them a religion which is causing all sorts of convulsions in a nominally Catholic country professing to be civilised and secular, he brought a borderline nihilism that must have been equally reprehensible. In theory, a loser on two counts at least.
What would he have made, I wonder, of the new socio-religious issues, as the Muslim immigrants face financial hardship, unemployment, economic disparity and widespread ostracism? The majority are unskilled workers engaged in the lowest-paid menial jobs. A growing number are willing to work for lower wages in comparison with the local French labourers. Consequently, unrest has become endemic in the industrial towns, especially in the port cities on the Mediterranean. Over a decade ago, in a prophetic act, youths set fire to seventeen cars in Nice to avenge the death of an Arab, killed in ethnic violence. It was the second outbreak of ethnic clashes in one weekend, following a shoot-out in the town of Dreaux, in which a man was killed and eight others were wounded. Racism and ethnic violence are still on the increase, threatening the stability and integrity of French society. Living in an affluent country, the incomers have grown more depressed and disillusioned and are vulnerable to antisocial tendencies and psychological complexes. When they are not exploding, they are simmering.
It would not really matter if the new immigrants, also in revolt among the depressed suburbs of northern Paris and elsewhere, had lost their religion. Their physical appearance would be enough to trigger hatred and suspicion among the natives. In a sense, Camus could not speak to them in the mass, only as individuals. He knew poverty in Algiers but he sought redemption in sensuality ("catching my breathing with the world’s tumultuous sighs") and that‘s a personal thing. In various places he denied being an existentialist, but it is difficult to see how his beliefs and ideas could appeal to the masses, especially those under immediate threat of intimidation, hopelessness and violence, except in terms of the group as a collection of individuals, always a slow, if not impossible, process of conversion. But he also recognised that rebellion was not just an individual act. The rebel, he writes, believes there is "a common good more important than his own destiny" and that there are "rights more important than himself." Rebellion is exercised in the name of "certain values which are still indeterminate but which he (the rebel) feels are common to himself and to all men." On the other hand it would have been interesting to know what he would have said to an oppressed people finding their consolation and political solution in organised and militant religion.
The last time I went to Lourmarin was on a murky summer’s day before dawn, driving my wife, my brother and my sister-in-law through it to an assignation with a hot-air balloonist northwest of the Luberon between Roussillon and Gordes. It was my wife’s birthday and the balloon flight was an anniversary treat, organised in Britain over the phone and kept secret from her until the very last minute. Like flying by plane, ballooning presents even to the intrepid and fearless a background threat of disaster. My sister, who preferred to watch us from a distance than brave the basket herself, asked us if we had read the opening chapter of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, in which a father, clinging to the rope of a balloon accidentally ascending with his young son on board, is swept away to disaster, and the would-be rescuers, in one case living afterwards with the guilty belief that he had selfishly saved himself rather than help those in distress, drop away to safety one by one. We had. But our faith was in the balloonist, even when he could not guarantee that we would see the promised sunrise above the mist and clouds, a prospect for which we had paid handsomely and which may, we quietly suspected, have encouraged him to take risks. Nothing untoward happened. We were blessed with a miraculous sight - a cloudless sky, a rising sun, and the Luberon in the distance like a dozing brontosaurus - as we floated on a nimbus sea, our tiny balloon shadow chasing us.
We had travelled through the world of Camus that day on a road he must have used himself. Chance events got us safely to the lift-off site when they might have sent us hurtling into a gorge on the D943. Above the haze our senses reeled, and then we descended to a still-foggy morn, for a brief moment enjoying a Meursault-eye view of an altercation on a farm and, in the distance, a car speeding along on some crazy errand towards a van coming in the opposite direction with melons inexplicably falling out of the back like dambuster bombs. For a long time afterwards, France was more than what we had hitherto been prepared to accept and enjoy. Filling up with petrol in the back streets of Ales (not Arles), we might have been in Medea or Ksar El Boukhari, except that there was no dialogue between stone and flesh, only despair and menace. We had come down to earth.
Fri, 2012-01-20 12:06 | Nigel Jarrett
Always investigate a commonplace in case it's nothing of the kind. When I began the novel I finished last September (while wrestling with Funderland), I had discounted the idea that fiction written by long-serving journalists about newspapers were legion, especially those featuring former investigative reporters on the muckier national dailies. I could find hardly any.
Two of my better-known antecedents were Evelyn Waugh's Scoop! and Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, the latter being the most believable in terms of my main character, a once-celebrated Fleet Street prodnose with a once-debilitating drink problem. I include a quote from Frayn's book at the beginning of mine: it concerns the part played by Piele's wine bar in the sight, glimpsed from a high window at the Guardian, of a distinguished journalist being 'rescued' from a brief pavement sojourn by colleagues who lever him upright and return him inside, with difficulty one assumes, for 'medication'. I've always been amazed at the number of writers whose deathless prose is forged under the influence - among the moderns Malcolm Lowry, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe; and not a few practitioners wedded to daily deadlines and uninterested, while employed by Press magnates at least, in writing books of any kind.
There's every reason for a lifelong journalist to write fiction. Half of what he has created is widely believed by a cynical public to be in that category. Furthermore, Graham Greene reckoned that his stint as a sub-editor on The Times taught him how to trim the metonyms of a novel if not how to envisage its architecture. But plotting requires only imagination, the over-active form of which leads to the grubby reporter's worst excesses. Employed in writing fiction, it needn’t hurt anyone or lead to admonishment by the Press Complaints Commission. And it draws on practices of Masonic detail with which to regale and enlighten the reader.
When my anti-hero, the Hardy-loving Bunny Patmore, talks of writing a story - an honest and accurate newspaper report is always a 'story' - in three short sticks, he is referring to the length of newsprint columns, and when he recalls his father, a printer on the Daily Mail, he uses metaphor to explain the workings of Linotype machines, the clattering behemoths that produced metallic text if the print union members who manned them after a long apprenticeship felt in the mood, which they did for 95% of the time, despite what the anti-union brigade says when re-living the days of Wapping and the introduction of new technology. Although I introduce Bunny to a modicum of self-questioning (self-doubt I've postponed for a follow-up book), the way he negotiates the situations I’ve invented for him is also part and parcel part of these internal practices.
Like Bunny, I cannot let go. I’ve always believed in the myth of the reporter as writer - meaning 'writer' as fanciful man of letters. The drudgery of much newsroom work, and reporting unappreciated on the hoof in the rain, is miles away from the idea of the journalist as revered belletrist; moreover, Alistair Cooke and James Cameron notwithstanding, journalists have always been more fourth-rate than Fourth Estate. Bunny makes much of the profession's further demotion from the latter and the former is often a status granted with excessive generosity.
Part of the backstory in my novel concerns Bunny's failed marriage. Although his wife died while they were still together, the union had perished in an alcoholic haze, one of the reasons why Bunny enjoys ordering Britvics in the most menacing of saloons. Every journalist married or in a long-term relationship is by definition privileged. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that when my two children were growing up I was out, either at evening meetings or at weekend and midweek sports events. It is over the top to say that on every Sabbath I was recovering from fatigue, but from Sunday lunchtime till midnight I was already thinking of the next day and what lay in prospect, be it plaudit or bollocking. Others just became used to it.
Marriages often fail because the journalist may have interests outside his job, which itself, in the company of miserly employers, is more than full-time. By that I mean it is often poorly-paid work that makes unreasonable demands, in the provinces at least. Also, journalists enjoy extending their hours with bibulous longueurs. Pursuing other interests involved stealing time from the early hours and from evenings when you were at home and able to prevent fatherhood and a marriage from caving in. I don't think I did much to ensure their survival. But survive they did.
Bunny Patmore was once a heavy drinker, and I've seen plenty of them, though I've never been one myself, a deficiency that has maintained my good health (touch Formica) but prevented too many colleagues and acquaintances from becoming shoulder-leaning friends. There were newsroom tyrants above me who never touched a drop and could attribute their longevity to the discipline which drink would only have eroded. Temperance is the cousin of tyranny.
Among the undisciplined and intemperate was Alex (I change his name), who was banned from driving after being breathalysed following an accident outside the office at 8.30am, on his way to the local Assize court. Then there was Jack, now dead, who on his first day was sent out to cover a story about the rising price of bread, returned, took an hour to type a sentence of Biblical magniloquence, left the office and was never seen again. Someone still owns the copy paper bearing his words, as a surreal memento of eccentricity and pathos. I seem to recall that he was related to the actor Richard Burton, or one of Burton’s paramours.
There were others innumerable, elbows ever close to a pint, who hinted at mysterious backgrounds, often London-based and peopled by the famous, but who steadfastly refused to write an intro of fewer than fifty words or a story shorter than five hundred. They often smoked pipes and cigarettes till their throats sizzled with cancer.
Bunny Patmore, now a non-smoker as well, is all and none of these. He belongs in their company but he is not me. For that, I’m both glad and a tad regretful. I never made it to the Modern Babylon, so never trod its gilded pavements or sat on them in befuddled despair while colleagues replenished my glass and the rest of the world waited on my next pronouncement, made in conditions of utmost sobriety.
Newspapers, the smudgy, rustling and eponymous bringers of tidings good, bad and irrelevant, are on their way out. Newspapers themselves tell us so, while they feverishly develop ever-more-complex website alternatives that many might read but no-one will be prepared to pay for when print versions become things of the past. Advertisers, currently being wooed by newspaper companies to display their wares on the aforementioned web pages at a price, will turn tail and create their own, leaving newspapers to fly, wind-assisted, up an alley to their damp or inflammatory demise. Web-based 'newspapers' will never spawn a Bunny Patmore. His fingers - or, at least, his old man's - were uniquely ink-stained. And his love of books, especially Thomas Hardy novels, may well die with him. Like 'new world' (as in ‘brave new world’), the expression 'new media' has chilling connotations for Bunny and his contemporaries, among whom I remain your obedient scriptural servant.
Thu, 2011-12-29 16:34 | Nigel Jarrett
In a rash mood one might mock Blackberry Winter, Rose Tremain's short story for the Daily Telegraph's Christmas Eve issue. (The DT called it 'exclusive', proving that nothing is sacred when the blats are competing with each other.) For a start, it appears to be aimed at the DT demograph in defining the kind of middle-class tribulation to which none of its members hopes to be exposed. But does it actually subvert the paper's conservative 'lifestyle' world of material comfort and prosperity, in which nothing troublesome from outside should detain it for too long?
The characters are classic DT - a narrator who runs a successful gift shop (note 'successful'); a lover who is a professor of English and a poet, and his parliamentary-lobbyist wife; a rude mechanical who speaks the local vernacular; and a mother privileged enough when young to have decamped with her family to an idyllic rural Norfolk. The narrator, a single woman approaching fifty, is dying to wrench her lover from his wife with the eagerness she nurtures in wanting to be rid of her decrepit and fractious mother. The lover clings to his marriage, maybe reluctant to give it up for the uncertainties of life with another poet (two poets under the same roof: oh, my gawd!). In DT terms already part cad, he risks becoming a complete one.
In a less rash mood, however, one might regard the story's events as the collision of those bothersome outer troubles with the DT template, the storm-driven detritus in the mother's garden being their emblem. No wonder the narrator offers to get rid of it herself, the menial having refused to do any longer what others expect of his lowly status. I guess Tremain, like most writers, wants it both ways. Yes, this is DT territory; no, it's not exactly a critique of it. But it muddies the waters and maybe suggests a tributary of the sort on which the narrator and her brother as children pretended to be floating Tahitians. Nothing wrong with knowing enough about Tahiti to want to imagine being Tahitians. But at least in another life they might not paddle their way to being so determinedly obsessed with style, wealth and appearance. Why do I think they would, and why do I think the DT would probably not have countenanced a story in which two poets live under the same roof having left behind the sham and smugness of their former selves? Great title, though. When is a blackberry not a blackberry? When it's a hand-held, miniaturised inter-com device.
Thu, 2011-12-08 19:05 | Nigel Jarrett
Gareth Ludkin, who edits the Cardiff glossy listings mag Buzz, gave Funderland a decent review. But the magazine, in a previous issue, took an extract from one of the stories for its 'Microfiction' slot and called me Neil Jarrett. While I bitched at this because it might have affected sales of the book - if you're the writer, anything can affect sales - it amused me to think that if the cack-handedness had been extended to my surname I could have basked in comprehensive authorial obliteration, or CAO as it's known in the trade. Funderland by Neil Jowett actually has a certain ring to it. My favourite, off the top of my head, would have been Nicky Remedios. Funderland by Nicky Remedios. By Nicky Remedios Jr. By Nicky B. Remedios. It wouldn't have sold dramatically more books but it might have helped. To sell sight unseen in great numbers your name needs to bludgeoningly monosyllabic. Funderland by Rip Torn, or Tex Bloch, or Jeff Steel. Nicky Diogenes - that's good but polysyllabic. If we were discussing an article, not a book, and it had been accepted by a literary magazine called The Penniless Press, it might not have borne a name at all. The quirky editor, Alan Dent, has a love of CAO but is not sure how to achieve it. In one issue he listed separately the contributors and the titles of the works. Then, I think, he published the texts in one issue and the list of authors in the next, still not matching one with the other. He stopped short of not mentioning the writers at all; it would have been the ultimate test of authorial vanity. I'm sure he would have been prepared to lose his own name from one of his witty editorials, believing the text sacred, the author's identity neither here nor there. While I was interested in his view as pure theory, I thought the pursuit of anonymity to be both unnatural and misguided. Perhaps this is because I used to be a newspaperman. A journalist should never hide behind a pen name especially when the hauteur it signifies is pompous, such as an athletics correspondent calling himself 'Corinthian'. The Daily Mirror's political sage, Bill Connor, wrote under the name of 'Cassandra'. As a teenage gump I thought this sounded ostentatious, even though I was in part-receipt of a classical education. I knew two Sandras. When I started my newspaper career, I used to speculate on how one would ask for Mr Connor and other ante-diluvians on the phone, assuming one wasn't aware of their real names. 'Hello - could I speak to Cassandra, please?' 'Is Corinthian around?' Or the replies: 'Sorry, Heraclitus is in a meeting. Can I help?' 'Who are you?' 'Democritus'. 'Nah; I'll ring later'. Alan's view also seems to me to block one's curiosity and deny himself the advantage of pre-publicity. To announce that the next issue will be featuring an essay called 'The Labours of Exposition' would carry less weight than if he also said that it was by P.J O'Rourke. On a newspaper, your work bears your name so that you can take the rap, should it be downwardly administered. In the sense that some names, like Nicky Remedios and Nigel Jarrett, mean nothing, Alan is probably right. Then again, a reader might want to know who the perpetrator of this month's twaddle is so that he can take avoiding action whenever he sees the name again. I once suggested in a sixth-form debate on literary criticism that our admiration for the work of, say, Maxim Gorky would be seriously diminished on our discovering that he had been a paedophile. My intention was to make the link between the writer and his words essential, the more we knew about the former making the latter take on a different complexion. This is well-scuffed 'lit. crit.' ground. John Berger said Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows had a totally new meaning once you knew that the artist committed suicide only hours after painting it. (Berger bollocks: it looks exactly the same to me.) My reason for sticking my name on something is practical: the writer of cheques needs to know who the payee is. Anyway, Neil Jarrett is my son's name. At this moment he is booking a suite at the Hotel D'Été, Juan-les-Pins, and passing himself off as the author of a short-story collection which he hopes will soon achieve cult status. When is a typo not a typo? When it's a complete fuck-up.
Sat, 2011-12-03 16:28 | Nigel Jarrett
A few years ago, weary of finding a magazine willing to publish an essay I'd written on politically-correct zoos, I contacted The Salisbury Review, which snapped it up and paid me handsomely within a few weeks of its appearance. The gist of the essay doesn't matter; suffice to say that I've always disliked the idea of keeping animals in captivity for the public to gawp at, and I'm even more suspicious of adducing scientific credentials to defend zoos as a means of preserving a species bordering on extinction. Perversely I always took my kids to the zoo and therefore felt cheated at the disappearance from them of animals whose enclosure is now deemed to be a sensitive issue, and its replacement by hectoring displays of how we (that's us) are destroying the planet. Why was I being asked to stare at an aquarium stuffed with used nappies? Goodness knows why The SR, a politically right publication, should have taken the essay. I like to think it was because my views were provocative. They certainly weren't of any political persuasion, unless political-correctness is, as seems often to be the case, the prerogative of the Left, and the Right pounces on all manifestations of its idiocy. At the end of the day, or the calendar month, I just pocketed the cheque. I've never been much interested in party politics. The party that does the right thing in the circumstances is the one to support. Thus am I the bane of party pollsters.
But you need to be careful. That first cheque having fluttered down like an Autumn leaf, I shook the tree again. Cheques arrived for an essay on the vulgarity of musical competitions and the odiousness of not comparing like with like; a lengthy book review about Britten and Aldeburgh; an account of a Delius premiere at Newport in the 1920s; a polemic on the deficiencies of the jury system; and, lately, a recollection of Philip Larkin as jazz critic. All the while I'd taken exception to some of the SR's views, or the views of some of its correspondents. I don't mind conservatism; often it's an admirable stance. But wander too far Right - or Left - and one hears the sound of grinding axes, some of them pretty vicious. There's nothing so telling as a plausibly-sounding viewpoint based on an unshakeable but hidden prejudice. I don't want anything to do with that. Have I been compromising myself? I don't think so. I also write for Cambria but I'm not a Welsh nationalist. I distrust nationalism because of the slippery slope it inhabits. I also write for modernist literary magazines but I wouldn't say I was a diehard modernist. Maybe I'm an opportunist. Most writers are. Beware the writer who comes strapped with political baggage. Just read the words. There's no more there than is indicated by them, and the bigotry of a bigot can always be spotted. What I'd never tell The SR is that I once wrote for Cyffro, the magazine of the Welsh Communist Party. I'm not, and never have been, a Communist, let alone a former one. But perhaps the extra-Right and extra-Left are the only ones who will say what others are frightened to for fear of condemnation by peers. Writers shouldn't be afraid of them either. Saying it as it is - that's a writer's function.
Wed, 2011-11-23 21:12 | Nigel Jarrett
Reading these days so often means reading novels. The bespectacled bookworm heading straight for you on the pavement with her nose in a paperback is almost certain to be reading some cult author, who is equally certain to be a novelist. It's never a thin Bloodaxe or a brick-thick biography, or even a book of essays. Well, hardly ever.You sometimes feel that experimentation should be in the air. But experiment in literature, as in music, operates in a cul-de-sac. It goes nowhere. Tristram Shandy and Ulysses are islands that didn't even spawn an archipelago let alone a continent. Much contemporary poetry, like much contemporary music, has no audience save the poet's impressionable peers. By that, I don't mean the difficulty of poetry should be a reason for not reading it or trying to understand it; I mean the difficulty is often created for its own sake, and in the land of the naked Emperor there are few who will draw attention to his nudity. The naked and the sparsely-clad are to be found in that grim land where poets who are academics speak with fawning syllables to other academics, who may or may not be poets. Add the magazines where their work is published and you have a suffocatingly enclosed world. Editor A publishes poet B who also edits a magazine in which C writes admiringly of A, who reviewed D after E had dedicated a poem to B in a competition judged by C and sponsored by A; F is enthusiastically lauded by A, B, C, D and E at a symposium, B publishing F's first pamphlet and inviting D to review it on A's recommendation. And so on. The problem with a school that has come and gone, such as Modernism, is that its critics will adduce its dull alternative as a reason for its demise. I listened in despair to a radio talk this week about American minimalist music - Glass, Reich, Adams, Terry Riley et al - as supporters espoused it as the viable alternative to serial music, with its pejoratively-described dissonances, lack of melody and ugliness. Actually, I'm still keen on Modernism and I'd listen to Schoenberg for ever rather than endure one hour of the god-awful Philip Glass, whose paper-thin musical materials are asked to bear heavy loads. Steve Reich I can stand, because he doesn't seem to take himself too seriously. The 'popular' minimalism of a Michael Nyman I'd unhesitatingly ban to save the proles from catatonic boredom, and increase funds to the WEA to help explain Stockhausen's kreuzspiel. What is there bar a novel, a biography and a poem? Why, there's Geoff Dyer. And there was, before he died, the wonderful Gordon Burn. I've just re-read But Beautiful, in which Dyer imagines the circumstances surrounding famous stories in jazz whose lack of detail and circumstance have earned them their legendary status. Take it away, Geoff. Anyone else up for it?
Sat, 2011-11-05 18:53 | Nigel Jarrett
Listen up, children. Great to have Funderland reviewed in the Guardian today. First time for a Parthian title for a while, I understand. Perhaps I'm being churlish, but the reviewer does commit a cardinal error in attributing to me quotes which belong to my characters and then saying that I’m occasionally prone to ‘over-refinement’. I mention this only because I believe the writer should be neither seen nor heard and because confusion between character and writer has led to a lot of unjust criticism. In the Funderland story called ‘Grasmere‘, a woman who is maybe dangerously close to her brother takes to faintly ridiculing her husband/partner; instead of saying just that he used to be a Cub scout (dull fact), she imagines him with his sock tabs sticking up as if raised by static electricity (risible fact). In ‘Dr Fritz’, a famous musicologist is beginning a decline into madness; when he hears a shepherd whistling-in sheep, he translates it, as a musician would, into a succession of musical notes and effects. These are the contexts in which the Guardian reviewer's quotes are set but he chooses not to mention them, making me look pedantic. The latter example is the worse because he says I have ‘a marvellous ear’, then, as an illustration of this, quotes the description of the shepherd’s whistle. It’s the good doctor who has the marvellous ear; I’m just his creator, skulking in the shadows. Imagine someone reviewing ‘The Pickwick Papers’ thus: Mr Dickens has a marvellous ear but is occasionally prone to demotic over-elaboration, as when he describes the sun as ‘vat awb shoinin an blayzin ot in the skoye’. Does he mean Sam Weller? He surely does; Dickens describing Sam Weller describing the sun. But there we are. They say all publicity is good publicity. I say all good publicity is good but some good publicity could be better. I've run a newspaper’s books section and reviewed books myself, so I can tell from a review, especially a brief one, how the reviewer has gone about the reading and the writing. It’s an art. Anyway, chuffed to have got Parthian mentioned in a national organ, where it belongs. Forget the quality; feel the width - and, in the case of the weekend nationals, the weight.
Sat, 2011-10-29 15:14 | Nigel Jarrett
To a signing of Funderland at Chepstow Bookshop. After sitting in Trappist silence, except for some banter about the vagaries of writing and publishing, the owner and I lured an unsuspecting browser into the 'Travel' section, stunned him with a copy of Hughes's Complete Guide to Minor Summits of the Auvergne, took ten quid from his wallet, shoved a copy of my book and a pound and a penny change in his pocket and dragged him to the nearby car park to recover. God, it's a hard life. And they think nurses have it tough! My neighbour, Mady Gerrard, had it tougher when she published her autobiography. Mady survived Auschwitz and the forced march to Bergen-Belsen before being liberated and ending up as a leading fashion designer in Manhattan. Boy, does she have a story to tell. But her book's only a bit about what she calls 'my Nazi jamboree'. And why not? Everyone expects her to rabbit on about how as a young Hungarian girl she was herded into a shed awaiting the gas chamber but escaped up a pipe and through a hole above the door. Next day, as a mere cypher reported missing (there was a space, an empty bed), she joined the search for herself. Kafkaesque, or what? Mady believes, I think correctly, that survival and the post-camp life were more important than endurance, which is why the horror takes up a small proportion of her book. Some books about survival make awful reading for surprising reasons. Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning opines that to survive the camps was to admit to being devious, cruel and opportunist. You had to be those or fall to the floor; if you fell, your fellow prisoners would be scavenging your body for goodies. Like Mady's relegation of her wretched experiences to a chapter at the beginning, Frankl uses his Holocaust recollections to expound a theory of meaning and purpose in lives battered almost beyond redemption. His Logotherapy reads almost like a quack American 'lifestyle' guide. Not everyone has Frankl's powers of self-containment in the face of the whiplash. But it worked for him. And it worked for Mady Gerrard, though she does say that if British troops had not liberated her camp when they did, she would have been dead in a week. In New York her knitwear was commissioned by Mrs Pat Nixon, Dionne Warwick, Shirley Bassey, the silent-movie star Celest Holm and many others. The end of Mady's book resembled a deflated balloon before a coda came galloping along on a charger, pennant fluttering and metaphors mixed. The British SAS officer who liberated her from Belsen - the first person she saw - was the subject of a Daily Telegraph anniversary feature a couple of years ago. They published a 1940s picture of him and Mady almost collapsed on recognising it. The two got in touch and now correspond daily. End of book. Which reminds me - we may have been a bit hard on that Chepstow browser today. Perhaps we should have bopped him with something less weighty. Hughes's Abridged Guide to Minor Summits of the Auvergne, for instance. A mere half-kilo.
Tue, 2011-10-18 14:01 | Nigel Jarrett
Joyous launch of my book, Funderland, at Café Jazz, Cardiff, on Sunday. Thanks to all - about sixty - who turned up and to the musicians and readers who supported the event. Also present were one literary figurehead and sage (Rich Davies, head of Parthian, my publisher) and one poetic genius (Lloyd Robson, the Allen Ginsberg of City Road). Thanks to writers Rhian Edwards (also a droll songster) and Holly Muller, and musicians Kai Lena, Jamie Neasom and Zervas & Pepper, for putting up with background chatter, unavoidable on these occasions, I feel, especially in a jazz club.
Thanks above all to my nephew, Matt Jarrett. He organised the bash on his tod, employing what he mysteriously called 'rendition' and 'waterboarding' on the evening's acts - or 'turns' as we say at Cwmbran Workingmen's Club - as well as other methods routinely used by MI6, who I assume are a modern 'beat combo', like U2, UFO and XS. Sounds fun. Matt's a corker and his associates mad as a box of frogs. If you're in a pub pop quiz, get some answers from him before you start. And visit his record shop, Diverse Music, in Charles Street, Newport, a cornucopia of vinyl, CDs, merchandise and information about gigs and giggers. (Is that OK, Matt? And we did say used notes, didn't we?). I would have loved to have seen my wondrous editor, Eluned Gramich, there, but at UEA on Monday morning she had to talk at length about Ernest Hemingway, surely a contradiction in terms. (Only kidding, Eluned). She's on the creative writing course there.
I abandoned any routine I may have entertained for my time at the 'mic', as Rich wanted a Q&A session, and a good thing too. I was going to say that writers have obsessions and that one of mine concerned the Austrian composer Anton Webern, a member of the Second Viennese School. In 1945 he visited a relative in an Austrian town held under curfew by occupying US troops. Forgetting about the curfew or having gulped one glass of Schnapps too many, he stepped outside into the snow for a smoke and was shot dead by a drunken soldier on sentry duty. History isn't interested in the detail of the incident, only its arty consequence: the SVC reduced by a third. So I researched it and discovered that the soldier was Raymond Norvill, who lived a post-war life of remorse - presumably - before committing suicide. His family are now online, defending him against 'music-lovers' who regard him as an ogre. On the morning of the launch, I'd written an 850-worder called Who Killed Emil Kreisler?, the worrisome thoughts, possibly an extended suicide note, of a man who'd done something similar to Norvill. It's the one-to-one directness that gets me. Who snipered Wilfred Owen? When did Norvill discover that he'd blasted his way into the history of music? I should have read the piece. It contained the results of my boning up on Mid-West slang and it needed to be delivered with a Minnesota accent. Another time. Anyway, a magazine editor I've pitched it to today says he'll take it. Result!
A publishing friend of mine in London said book launches were routine and unproductive. Parthian would no doubt say that it depends on how you present them. I think Sunday's was an example to others and a rebuttal of what APFOMIL told me. Anyway, he also relates horrendous stories of publishing in the Modern Babylon. He should come to Wales. We know how to do it here without fear that there's a Random House accountant at the top of St Mary Street, looking like a member of a Press Gang at the end of a half-ploughed field - that's 'Press' as in 'Come and join us, laddy'.
That's it for the mo. I'm with my medical team, calming down. Will be up and walking - and seriously writing - soon.