Describe your latest book. I Saw a Man is a contemporary novel set between London, New York, Nevada, and Wales. The book opens with Michael Turner, a young widower, entering the house of his neighbors, the Nelsons, by the back door. Michael believes there is no one at home, but he is wrong. What happens [...]
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Inspired by Postcards from Penguin, a card collection based on classic Penguin book covers, one couple created a massive wall hanging tribute to their favorite books.
The couple posted the entire project on Reddit’s DIY section. In the photo set embedded above, you can explore the entire project from start to finish. Here’s more from the post:
We’re both huge book lovers, so we immediately began thinking of ways to use them in an interesting, decorative way … We tried various layouts, eventually deciding that a shifting color scheme would be the most aesthetically pleasing. We cherry-picked some titles that we were particularly fond of. Among them: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Gatsby, and 1984. Among the authors: H.G. Wells, Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler, and Graham Greene.
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By Max Saunders
This year’s television adaptation of Parade’s End has led to an extraordinary surge of interest in Ford Madox Ford. The ingenious adaptation by Sir Tom Stoppard; the stellar cast, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, Alan Howard, Rupert Everett, Miranda Richardson, Roger Allam; the flawlessly intelligent direction by award-winning Susanna White, have not only created a critical success, but reached Ford’s widest audience for perhaps fifty years. BBC2 drama doubled its share of the viewing figures. Reviewers have repeatedly described Parade’s End as a masterpiece and Ford as a neglected Modernist master. Those involved in the production found him a ‘revelation’, and White and Hall are reported as saying that they were embarrassed that their Oxbridge educations had left them unaware of Ford’s work. After this autumn, fewer people interested in literature and modernism and the First World War are likely to ask the question posed by the title of Alan Yentob’s ‘Culture Show’ investigation into Ford’s life and work on September 1st: “Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford?”
It’s a good question, though. Ford has to be one of the most mercurial, protean figures in literary history, capable of producing violent reactions of love, admiration, ridicule or anger in those who knew him, and also in those who read him. Many of those who knew him were themselves writers — often writers he’d helped, which made some (like Graham Greene) grateful, and others (like Hemingway) resentful, and some (like Jean Rhys) both. So they all felt the need to write about him — whether in their memoirs, or by including Fordian characters in their fiction. Ford himself thought that Henry James had based a character on him when young (Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove). Joseph Conrad too, who collaborated with Ford for a decade, is thought to have based several characters and traits on him.
I’d spent several years trying to work out an answer that satisfied me to the question of who on earth Ford was. The earlier, fairly factual biographies by Douglas Goldring and Frank MacShane had been supplanted by more psycho-analytic studies by Arthur Mizener and Thomas C. Moser. Mizener took the subtitle of Ford’s best-known novel, The Good Soldier, as the title of his biography: The Saddest Story. He presented Ford as a damaged psyche whose fiction-writing stemmed from a sad inability to face the realities of his own nature. Of course all fiction has an autobiographical dimension. A novelist’s best way of understanding characters is to look into his or her own self. But there is an element of absurdity in diagnosing an author’s obtuseness from the problems of fictional characters. This is because if writers can make us see what’s wrong with their characters, that means they understand not only those characters, but themselves (or at least the traits they share with those characters). John Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier, appears at times hopelessly inept at understanding his predicament. His friend, the good soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, is a hopeless philanderer. If Ford saw elements of himself in both types, he had to be more knowing than them in order to show them to us. And anyway, they’re diametrically opposed as types.
Ford’s psychology needs to be approached from a different angle. Rather than seeing his fiction as displaying symptoms that give him away, what if it is diagnostic? What if, rather than projecting wishful fabrications of himself, he turns the spotlight on that process of fabrication itself — on the processes of fantasy that are inseparable from our subjectivities? To answer the question of who Ford was, we have to look at the ways his work explores how we understand ourselves through stories: the stories that are told to us, the stories we tell ourselves; the myths and histories and anecdotes that populate our imaginations. Where Moser had concentrated on what he called The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford — trying to identify biographical markers in episodes in novels — I found myself in quest of ‘the fiction in the life’.
Compared to some of the canonical modernists like Joyce or Eliot, Ford is unusual in writing so much about his own life — a whole series of books of reminiscences. They’re full of marvelous stories. Take the one with which he ends his book celebrating Provence. He describes how, when he earned a sum of money during the Depression, he and Janice Biala decided it was safer to cash it all rather than trust to failing banks. They visit one of Ford’s favourite towns, Tarascon on the Rhone. Ford has entrusted the banknotes to Biala. “I am constitutionally incapable of not losing money,” said Ford. But as they cross the bridge, the legendary mistral starts blowing:
And leaning back on the wind as if on an upended couch I clutched my béret and roared with laughter… We were just under the great wall that keeps out the intolerably swift Rhone… Our treasurer’s cap was flying in the air… Over, into the Rhone… What glorious fun… The mistral sure is the wine of life… Our treasurer’s wallet was flying from under an armpit beyond reach of a clutching hand… Incredible humour; unparalleled buffoonery of a wind… The air was full of little, capricious squares, floating black against the light over the river… Like a swarm of bees: thick… Good fellows, bees….
And then began a delirious, panicked search… For notes, for passports, for first citizenship papers that were halfway to Marseilles before it ended… An endless search… With still the feeling that one was rich… Very rich.
“I hadn’t been going to do any writing for a year,” mused Ford, recognising what an unlikely prospect it was. “But perhaps the remorseless Destiny of Provence desires thus to afflict the world with my books….” Yet for all the wry cynicism of this afterthought Biala remembered that “Ford was amused for months at the thought that some astonished housewife cleaning fish might have found a thousand-franc note in its belly.”
Ford’s stories, for all their playfulness, also earned him notoriety for the liberties they took with the facts. Indeed, Ford courted such controversy, writing in the preface to the first of them, Ancient Lights, in 1911:
This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute [....] I don’t really deal in facts, I have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. This can not be done with facts. (pp. xv-xvi)
He called his method Impressionism: an attention to what happens to the mind when it perceives the world. Ford is the most important analyst in English of Impressionism in literature, not only elaborating the techniques involved, but defining a movement. This included writers he admired like Flaubert, Maupassant and Turgenev, as well as his friends James, Conrad, and Crane. He also used the term to cover writers we now think of as Modernist, such as Rhys, Hemingway, or Joyce. Though most of these writers were resistant to the label, they wrote much about ‘impressions’ and their aesthetic aims have strong family resemblances.
One feature that sets Ford’s writing apart is his tendency to retell the same stories, but with continual variations. This creates an immediate problem for a literary biographer wanting to use the subject’s autobiographical writing to structure the narrative upon. Which version to use? Which to believe? They can’t all be true. And their sheer proliferation and multiplicity shows how he couldn’t tell a story about himself without it turning into a kind of fiction. In one particularly striking example, which Ford tells at least five times, he is taking the train with Conrad to London to take to their publisher corrected proofs of their major collaborative novel, Romance. Conrad is obsessively still making revisions, and because he’s distracted by the jolting of the train, he lies down on his stomach so he can correct the pages on the floor. As the train pulls into their London station, Ford taps Conrad on the shoulder. But Conrad is so immersed in the world of Cuban pirates, says Ford, that he springs up and grabs Ford by the throat. Ford’s details often seem too exaggerated for some readers. Would Conrad really have gone for his friend like that? Would he really have hazarded his city clothes on a train carriage floor? The fact that the details change from version to version shows how fluid they are to Ford’s imagination, but there’s at least a grain of plausible truth. Here it’s the power of literature to engross its readers, so that one could be genuinely startled when interrupted while reading minutely. So, as with many of Ford’s stories, it’s a story about writing, writers, and what Conrad called “the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel… before all, to make you see.” And perhaps one of the things Ford wants us to see in this episode is how any aggression between friends who are writers needs to be understood in that context — as motivated as much by their obsession with words, as by any personal hostilities.
That is why a writer’s life — especially the life of a writer like Ford — is a dual one. As many of them have observed, writers live simultaneously in two worlds: the social world around them, and world they are constantly constructing in their imaginations. Impressionism seemed to Ford the method that best expressed this:
I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass — through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.
Ford’s life was dual in another important way, though. Like many participants, he felt the First World War as an earthquake fissure between his pre-war and post-war lives. It divided his adult life into two. His decision to change his name (after the war, which he had endured with a German surname), and to change it to its curiously doubled final form, surely expresses that sense of duality. Ford was in his early forties when he volunteered for the Army — something he could easily have avoided on account not only of his age, but of the propaganda writing he was doing for the Government. His experience of concussion and shell-shock after the Battle of the Somme changed him utterly, and provided the basis for his best work afterwards. Though he wrote over eighty books, most of them with brilliance and insight, two masterpieces have stood out: The Good Soldier, which seems the culmination of his pre-war life and apprenticeship to the craft of fiction, and then the Parade’s End sequence of four novels, which drew on his own war experiences to produce one of the great fictions about the First World War, or indeed any war.
Max Saunders is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English and Co-Director at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, editor of the Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Good Soldier, and editor of Some Do Not… (the first volume of Ford’s series of novels Parade’s End).
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Image credits: Still from BCC2 adaption of Parade’s End. (Source: bbc.co.uk); Portrait of Ford Madox Ford (Source: Wikimedia Commons).
Blog: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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JacketFlap tags: Graham Greene, Leslie Wilson, Saving Rafael, names of characters, Mountain of Immoderate Desires, Nicht Ohne Dich, Add a tag
So - you have a character in your book, and they have to have a name. First names are difficult enough. I have two baby's names books in my study, both very well thumbed, one in English, one in German. Sometimes a name attaches itself to a character at once, like Jenny's name in Saving Rafael - and Rafael's - or sometimes I change it several times before I find the one that's right.
In Saving Rafael, I called the horrible Nazi family next door some name I've forgotten, then decided that wasn't right, so I flicked through various German books I possess and found the name Mingers. I fell about laughing and decided this was the one. Young and older readers have appreciated the joke, so I am vindicated. The Gestapo man who interrogates Jenny is called Brenner, which means 'burner,' because I felt this gave a sense of someone who causes pain. Germans would get that more than English-speaking readers, but Mingers is a pun that will be lost in the German version (Nicht Ohne Dich, Boje Verlag, out now). Jenny's family name is Friedemann which means 'peace man' - I felt an appropriate name for a German Quaker and his family.
Sometimes place names are good for a character - like the inadequate missionary in The Mountain of Immoderate Desires. On a visit to the White Horse of Uffington, I saw the name of a village, Fawler, and thought, yes, that's right for the man, since he collapses under pressure. Sometimes I just take names off the spines of books in my study..but in my novel of the English witchhunt, Malefice, I took all the names of characters from the 17th century Parish Records in Waltham St Lawrence, the village on which I based my fictional Whitchurch St Leonard.
Graham Greene used very common names for his characters, for fear of being sued - Brown, Grey, Smith, etc… and I have sometimes invented German names and do a websearch on them to see if they come up. If they do, I have to invent again. You can sue for libel on behalf of the dead in Germany.. People who know about English poetry will comprehend why the vile concentration camp guard in Saving Rafael is called Grendel. It's not a German name.
For other, less sensitive characters' names, I have harvested them from the plates of apartment blocks in Germany, which is what I'm doing on the picture here.
On the other hand, reality does perpetrate jokes that one would hesitate to put into fiction. Opposite the orthodontist I used to go to in Mansfield Road in Nottingham was a greengrocer's called Flower, and a florist called Onion. I think they were just one house away from each other. And would an author, apart from a comic one, name the three hairdressers in a town Sharp, Blunt, and Brittle? That was in Kendal, in the 50s and 60s. My husband had two risk assessment colleagues called Dr Hope and Dr Luck. One could go on forever, and the correspondance column of the Guardian recently did..
How do other people decide on characters' names?
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At the end of his autobiographical memoir, Graham Greene says:
'For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. A writer's ambition is not satisfied like the business man's by a comfortable income, although he sometimes boasts of it like a nouveau riche.
...
The writer has the braggart's excuse. Knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects...'
The real satisfaction lies in putting those things right, in other words in the writing itself.
Graham Greene was a great writer, one who understood not only how prose works, but the inner workings of those who produce it.
As I read this, I was struck by the truth of it. I'm sure there will be many who will deny it, but they know in their hearts that this is true. We ARE never satisfied. Once we are over the first great hurdle, that of getting our work published at all, then there are other goals to achieve: prizes, sales, money, fame, recognition. We need other people to recognise the worth of our work, and through that, ourselves. Even if we gain everything, prizes, fame, money, the whole works, then we still know that our star will inevitably fade. Success is fleeting, at best.
We now have more ways to shout, to keep our courage up. We can blog, tweet and twitter, post videos on YouTube. We can be out there, like barkers at some virtual literary fair, shouting out out wares, bidding readers to come see, come buy, know about us. I wonder what GG would think about all that?
Yesterday, I came across the wise words of another great writer: Margaret Atwood.
I was directed by Adele Geras to fictionbitch.blogspot.com where I found this quote from an interview in the Literary Review:
'...people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don't ... an author's job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea... There is still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don't understand it - who don't like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do...'
I guess people will say, she would say that, wouldn't she? Just as it is easy to dismiss Graham Greene's words - how much more successful can a writer be? But I don't think these observations come from self satisfaction and complacency. They come from the very things that make these two such successful writers: their powers of observation, depth of insight, honesty and courage to express thoughts that might be unpalatable, but are nonetheless true. The only real satisfation has to come from the words we put down on the page and the connection we make with readers, no matter how many, or how few.
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Ten days ago I reported on the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Book Award Presentation, which took place at Seven Stories, The Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle, UK – and I definitely want to tell you more about this wonderful place! We’re lucky – we live reasonably close to Newcastle, though far enough away that it took us a few years of living here to get ourselves there, which we did in the last school-holidays. I now know that the path will start to become a well-travelled one…
The name of Seven Stories not only refers to the axiom that there are but seven stories in the world told in an infinite variety of ways, but is also played out in the Centre’s daily life: it is housed in a seven storey building that is open seven days a week for a seven hours a day.
The late-nineteenth-century building was originally a mill warehouse. Many original features have been restored and the interior spaces have been designed with imagination and children in mind. The criss-cross of original beams in the top-floor room, beautiful to behold, also gives you a start, as you realise that there is a weird, curvy beam, winding its way through all the other beams – what structural use can it possibly be? Aaah – it is a bookshelf! And as it snakes its way down almost to floor-level, it houses enough copies of Julia Donaldson’s Playtime! for young visitors (and older ones too!) to come together and put on a play in the theatre corner, with the help of a sumptuous array of costumes. These include Donaldson’s and Axel Sheffler’s creation, the Gruffalo and the Mouse (and by the way, read this lovely interview with Julia Donaldson by Vulpis Libris - Part 1 and Part 2). Under this panoply of beams are also to be found a story-teller’s area complete with its exuberant throne, and a vast selection of books for a family storytime.
The current exhibitions are All Aboard, Away We Go! and From Toad Hall to Pooh Corner – both a feast for the eyes, ears and hands, and each with its own beautifully produced interactive trail. During our family visit, we chanted Mrs Armitage’s Mantra (“What we need, what we really need…”) and flew a plane while marvelling at Robert Crowther’s intricate paper-engineering from his book Flight. We discovered new-to-us old stories, like The Little Train, ostensibly by Dorothy Craigie but really written by Graham Greene and illustrated by Dorothy Glover (read this great post from Bear Alley for the full story…). We toot-tooted our way to (imaginary!) destruction in Toad’s car and, the highlight for me, we gazed on original’s of Robert Ingpen’s beautiful illustrations for Wind in the Willows, then looked at them in the book, while listening to the appropriate extract, seated in a replica, from the illustration, of Badger’s kitchen. Perfect!
I was astounded, when speaking to Lynda Jackson, Seven Stories’ Exhibitions Curator, to discover that these exhibitions are not permanent but usually run for about eighteen months – and the really good news is that they can tour elsewhere after their space in Newcastle has been taken over by something else… And I was given a sneak preview of what the next something else, From The Tiger Who Came to Tea to Mog and Pink Rabbit: A Judith Kerr Retrospective, will look like. So we’ll definitely be going back in September and I’ll tell you all about it!
In the meantime, I’ll be posting again soon about Seven Stories, with a closer look at its background and its role as a keeper of British children’s books, not to mention its superb children’s bookshop.
Well I envy you if you can go to Nova Scotia! If it were me, I think I'd approach Canada via the historical angle. The Viking site at L'Anse aux Meadows, and the history of the Native Americans, and the French arrivals and then the Scottish - and the various alliances and battles.
I agree it's a huge country, and difficult to make sense of from a distance - but I'd love to go to Quebec and Montreal... I've been to Toronto several times as my sister used to live there. There's a lovely board walk along the shore, and it feels different from an American city - the French influence is quite obvious, and of course all the signs are dual language, and all the distances are in kilometres...
So I hope you have fun! I'll look forward to your blog! :)
As a Torontonian now living in Germany, I found this a fascinating post.
It is hard to get one's head around "Canada" even for a Canadian. I think that's why most seem to identify strongly with the region they come from. The fact that most Canadians are relatively new to that land also affects the essence of what it means to be Canadian: it's a slightly amorphous thing, not like what it means to be British or German or just about anything else. And it's forever changing in the cities as the ethnic mix is in constant flux - making for a fascinating, dynamic identity, but a not-quite graspable one in its constant shape-shifting nature.
Don't be put off by those pictures of the Toronto skyline - one hardly ever sees the city like that, and then only from the islands - the city itself is made up of numerous neighbourhoods - each with its own very distinct character: Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown where the signs are in English and the languages of the inhabitants and the food is incredible; The Annex with its Victorian Mansions and funky mix of university students and professors, artists and writers; Queen St. West with loads of art galleries and interesting pubs and restaurants...
British Columbia is gorgeous! The culture of the First Nations People is very strong there which I found fascinating and wish I could have spent more time there.
I'm with Katherine - envious if you get out East! I never made it to the East coast, but it's also supposed to be stunning with a fascinating regional culture and history.
I hadn't meant to go on like this - sorry! I do hope you have a good trip - full of adventure and discoveries. I look forward to reading more on your blog!
Thank you, Katherine and Lynn. You've both given me things to think about. Canadian history is something I know little about. I must remedy that. And as most of my time will be spent in the east, your bits about fascinating regional culture and history, not to say anything of stunning landscape, are most encouraging.
I'm sure there will be a blog. I can't bear the idea of travelling without writing it all down. I'll probably do the same as with my Belize travels and have a Canada blog button on my website, so do look out for it. I'm not going until September but as and when I find things that are interesting, I'll probably throw them all in.
A post like this makes one want to start packing. So happy to hear you are off on another travel adventure. I'll look foward to your blog.
I wasn't in Canada long but one of my most magical memories is of swimming in a lake in the summer with all the mountains around. That, and all the warnings about bears the Canadians enjoy giving you. You'll have great time.
One thing I found odd was the pattern of place names. Here the language patterns of the names often indicate the local history - Viking names in the north etc. However, in Canada you see UK place names scattered almost randomly across the map - though presumably where settlers settled. Takes some getting used to.
Penny - lake swimming sounds good to me. Just back from Pembrokeshire [see this coming Saturday's Authors Electric] where swimming definitely wasn't the order of the day - though it has been every other year, and I'm definitely missing it.
Lynn - thanks for your comments on the essence of being Canadian. It's just this sort of thing I want to hear. From now onwards, and throughout the trip, I'll be trying to get a better understanding of what 'being Canadian' is all about.
When I first moved to Shropshire, I arrived without roots. I was born in London and grew up there, but I never felt as if I belonged. Maybe my mother's alienation rubbed off on me - a Guernsey girl fleeing Hitler's army during the Second World War, she never felt at home in London, or indeed anywhere else. But thirty-five years after my arrival here, I now feel like a proud Salopian. It's living and breathing a place over time, I guess, that makes it yours - if you want it to of course And, as you're experiencing as a Torontonian in Germany, once you've got that it remains with you wherever you go.
I'm a Canadian living in the UK. I love both countries, both are beautiful and dear to me in different ways. Those vast roads you talk about, they are long, and journeying through the praries on the trans-canada highway is dangerous. It will feel like driving through a day and half of the same flat open space, it is hard not to fall asleep. Also, it is difficult even when you are a local resident to know when and where the next petrol (gas) station is. The signs in rural Canada are non existent. If they were ever put up in the first place, a snow plow probably knocked them down. That said, have an amazing time. The country is beautiful, the bears are not nearly so mean, the people will welcome you with open arms, and there is lots to do. Do please visit BC. Everyone goes to Toronto, but don't by pass Vancouver, or better still go to Victoria! (Perhaps my west coast roots are showing.) I've lived in five different provinces, and each have something worth seeing. I am sure you will be happy to be home, as I am, when I return to the UK. There is so much unsung about the wonderfulness that is living here! Canadians love breakfast, it's a thing, so make sure to hit an IHOP, or TimHorton's while you are out there. There is many quick, but tasty breakfasts that I do miss. I could ramble all day, but if you want any local info, just email me. Places like Cultus lake, Whistler, or Harrison rarely get a mention in travel books, but are well wroth the journey.