Monthly Archives: December 2011

Made In Britain

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I recently interviewed the English writer Gavin James Bower for Her Royal Majesty, and asked him about his new book, Made in Britain, as well as the study of Claude Cahun he's working on for Zero Books.

An excerpt:

Can you tell me about your affinity for writing in the first person? What does it do for your work that the third person doesn’t?
There’s an obvious immediacy to it that appeals to me, because I want urgency and prejudice and paranoia and alienation to infuse the writing – and the character’s narrative to be taken as is. I don’t feel comfortable writing from the perspective of an omniscient character that’s only partially revealed to the reader, even though there are clear opportunities for landscaping denied, on one level, to a first person narrative. With the latter there’s a vulnerability available, but also the chance to get under the skin of characters – to become them. It’s draining and demanding, but rewarding too. Which is why I write that way.

Read the rest here.

Holiday Donkey Wishes

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Tis the season to read Jeanette Winterson's instant classic Christmas tale, "The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me": the birth of Jesus told from the point of view of a donkey:

Sometimes, when the sky is very cold and clear, and I have done my day’s journey, and stand half-asleep, half-awake in the warmth of my stall, I think I see the bowl of a trumpet, and its long funnel, and a foot, clean and white, dangling over the ridge-line of the stars, and I lift up my voice and I bray and I bray, for memory, for celebration, for warning, for chance, for everything that is here below and all that is hidden elsewhere. Hay and dung and another world.

Best wishes for the holiday season!

Christmas-Donkey

…where there never was a hat

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My day is getting off to a good start after reading this review of Look I Made a Hat, Volume 2 of Sondheim’s annotated collected lyrics at the New York Times Book Review:

…I can’t imagine how serious craftsmen in any field wouldn’t find both books inspiring. The quilt maker fussing over which shade of red to employ as a highlight; the cook experimenting on how most appetizingly to glaze a plate of scallops; the automobile designer sketching a streamlined new speedometer — all such people should experience a sense of kinship when reading Sondheim debating whether, when seeking a rhyme, he might fairly use “wood” rather than “woods”:

“What justification was there to use ‘wood’ here (and in the ‘Finale’) and ‘woods’ everywhere else? I finally hit on an explanation: ‘wood’ sounded statelier and therefore suited a lyric sung by someone outside the action.”

And there’s a truly excellent, revelatory interview with Sondheim at the Daily Beast:

You write in Look, I Made a Hat about how your teacher, composer Milton Babbitt, taught you about structure, about how whole works are made from tiny increments.

From Milton I learned about the structuring of themes, what he or someone called one-line composition, which is that there is a guiding principle to the whole arc of either a symphony or a song, which is itself reflected in many ways—just like the way King Lear’s themes are reflected in its characters and subplots. So, we’d analyze, say, the Jupiter Symphony to see what Mozart was doing with structure, what Milton called the architectonic of the piece, the larger structure, and how it’s reflected in the smaller structure so it all holds together and doesn’t sound like something made of bits and pieces.

The whole idea is, how do you organize something that lasts over a period of time, so it seems like one piece instead of 20 pieces? And that period of time can be three minutes or it can be an hour; the principle remains the same. And that—using leitmotifs that develop out of smaller motifs—is something I’ve been doing for a long time, because in writing a score, you have music interrupted by dialogue, so what is it that holds the evening together? If you want to hold the score together—Cole Porter wasn’t interested in holding a whole score together. He just wrote a lot of songs.

(…)

A lot of times when I listen to cast recordings of your shows, I’m struck by how Broadway singers don’t hear the structure that’s in your stuff.

It’s absolutely true. It’s also because they’re not used to it. They’re not trained in opera. They’re not trained to hear scores. They’re trained to hear songs, and that’s what they hear—self-encapsulated pieces. When Mandy Patinkin gave his last performance in Sunday in the Park, there was a little party for him in the basement of the theater, and I can’t remember how it came up, but I mentioned that “Putting It Together,” in the second act, was a variation on “The Day Off” sequence, which occurs in the middle of the first act. And his eyes widened. He’d been singing it for a year and a half, and it had never occurred to him that the two pieces were related. Most singers on Broadway are just not trained to hear that sort of thing. They hear songs, they don’t hear scores.

I’ve yet to write the Sondheim memoir-essay that’s been brewing for years, but I’ll get there. This was an early gesture at generating one.

 

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

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George
George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop (in its current incarnation), has died. He was 98 years old. For those close to the shop, it was no surprise, as George had suffered a stroke two months ago. Even for those not close to the shop, to die at 98 is no surprise. But none of that mitigates how heartbreaking it is to see him go.

I will skip the personal reminiscences because they’re not that interesting, and other people will do that better; I met first met George in 1999 and met him again over the years, but my more profound relationship was with his shop, and with the literary legacy he carried out. I’ve used different words at different stages to describe my interest in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company: first I was seduced by the myth of the Lost Generation; later, as a scholar of transatlantic modernism, I came to see the shop in sociological terms as an important nexus in the sustaining of an epoch-defining literary hub. The present-day shop borrows from both categories: it gestures at this illustrious history and extends it through the 1950s and the Beat Generation on to the present moment, when it has once again, under the guidance of George’s daughter Sylvia Whitman, assisted by Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, Hilary Drummond, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, and Linda Fallon (my apologies to the others I’m probably leaving out, not to mention the volunteers, interns, and Tumbleweeds), become a meeting-point for a group of expatriate writers, as well as an impressive array of Anglophone literary luminaries as they pass through town.

Though– let’s be honest– none of us who hang around it can claim to be a Stein or a Hemingway, our Shakespeare and Company does play a similar role in the Anglophone community. No, they don’t lend out their books, you must buy them, but they will buy your old ones, or let you trade them in for something of equal value. You can attend readings, and have a glass of wine on the house; and you can sit in the upstairs library (The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library) and treat it as your own reading room. On a recent visit to the shop for a reading, I sat, antisocially, in the upstairs room, where the speakers’ voices are piped in via the sound system. My mind wandering from the reading, I made a catalog of the books on the wall next to me. Here they are:

The Pig in the Barber Shop
The Bishop’s Jaegers
I Capture the Castle
Herrold’s Leap
Topper Takes a Trip
Rain in the Doorway
Shelter Bay
The Stray Lamb
Peregrine Pickle (volume 1)
Humphrey Clinker
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
The Conscience of the Rich
The Mandelbaum Gate
These Lovers Fled Away
Wolf Solnet

This list, for me, testifies to George Whitman’s most salient qualities: he was a generous and eccentric hoarder. Judging from the contents of the library, no books are turned away (expect, perhaps, for books about the shop, of which I can think of at least one that was banned when it first came out). George’s Shakespeare and Company goes beyond the standards of a “good bookshop,” the defining aspects of which, for me, include being well-curated, able to surprise me with the right book at the right moment; reliable, with a solid backlist; and not outrageously expensive. George’s vision for Shakespeare and Company was to make all of this readily available in his "rag and bone shop of the heart." But because of his particular genius, he created a space that was so much more than just a shop: it was an experience. Many people today are quoting the lines that are prominently displayed in the shop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” A self-proclaimed “tramp,” George Whitman welcomed all those who tramped through his doorway. He presided over a community, and we are sad to see him go.

And what has gone with him is another connection to our literary heritage.  It is not through nostalgia or sentimentality that I say that I sometimes have a difficult time moving forward, leaving people trapped in the fabric of the past. This is as much an intellectual difficulty as a personal one.  George is said to have met Sylvia Beach after the war, to procure her blessing on borrowing the name of her shop, and is even said to have taken some of her stock with him to the new shop. (I have never really tried to verify this. NB: I have been told in the comments that apparently George was too shy to actually ask for permission to use the name, in case Sylvia Beach said no. And then Jeanette Winterson claims that Sylvia Beach came to the shop with Lawrence Durrell in 1958 and formally bequeathed George the name. Who knows what's true? George would often embellish for effect.) By virtue of having met Beach, and Anais Nin, and Henry Miller, and many others, he symbolized a link with this storied past, when even if the plumbing was sketchy, the exchange rate was favorable, you couldn’t cross the Boulevard Montparnasse without tripping over a Russian painter, and the Left Bank was cheap enough for artists. It was meaningful to have, upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, the living link to that period. The literary modernist era is said to have ended in 1941, with the deaths of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in fact, it ends today, with the passing of George Whitman. I'm sure I speak for all of us when I wish Sylvia and David and everyone at the shop my deepest sympathies.