Unlikely bedfellows

– or at least, sharers of the same paragraph.

One likes – it isn’t just me, is it? – to hear of, speculate about, unlikely but possible encounters. Did Chaucer, while briefly in Florence, meet Boccaccio? (David Markson, in This Is Not a Novel, to be published by CBe early next year, wonders about that one. And in his next paragraph mentions that Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Marat in his bath, and read Plutarch on the morning she did this, was a great grand-niece of Corneille. And elsewhere mentions that Wallace Stevens, while working briefly as a newspaper reporter, covered the funeral of Stephen Crane. The book is full of such random but true links.)

Somewhere in Soho there’s a blue plaque commemorating the fact that Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong leader, worked briefly in his early twenties as a kitchen porter at the Carlton Hotel in London. Mae West (I’m No Angel: ‘When I'm good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better’) stayed at the Carlton while performing at the nearby Haymarket theatre and, decades later, told Gavin Young in an interview of an encounter there with ‘Ho . . . Ho . . . Ho something’: ‘There was this waiter, cook, I don’t know what he was. I know he had the slinkiest eyes though. We met in the corridor. We – well . . .’

So very nearly, a whole different history between America and Vietnam. Accidental encounters, coincidences: these may have more to do with the way history plays out, literature too (Robert Frost meeting Edward Thomas in a bookshop in 1913), than the interminable hindsight essays on the causes of the First World War etc allow for. Put them in a novel, though, and they’ll likely be criticised as implausible, not true to life.

‘A shower, a veritable downpour’

George Szirtes reviews J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical in the new issue of Poetry London. He brings in Wordsworth – The Prelude, and the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads (‘a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’) – and he attends to the prosody and he discusses ‘the empty opposition’ of poetry and prose. At this point I was reminded of my wife’s impatience with some of the reviews she reads in art magazines: she ponders, throws it to me, asks ‘But does he like it?’ He does:

‘Though the language is plain, almost rugged, the verse is rhythmically supple . . . None of this is dry-as-dust prosody. It is the very life of the poem: sure-footed, complete with transitions, the eye sharp, the poetry not in the description but in the noting of brute, luminous fact. Subtle verse and a feeling for precision of detail lie at the heart of the poem’s success . . . The remarkable thing about Natural Mechanical is that it is not in the slightest bit quaint or sentimental. It is a shower, a veritable downpour, of fine particulars in a single, robust life . . . It is one vivid gathering sensation in skilfully calibrated real language. It is itself natural-mechanical.’

Yes, I do know there’s a typo on the back cover. My eye wasn’t as sharp as the poem’s. But as soon as we sell out of the present print-run we can correct it, and those who have already bought will have something whose flaw only increases its value. In the words of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, ‘Whoever has two pairs of pants, sell one and buy this book.’

Three pieces of string

The culmination, last night, of the theatre thing (New Connections, commissioned new plays being performed by youth groups all over the country, an initiative I’ve said before that has me awestruck and I’ll say it again). The Things She Sees, adapted by Ben Power from a short novel I wrote some six years ago, was performed by a group from Lancaster at the Cottesloe at the NT. The play was chosen largely because it offered opportunities for audio-visual stuff and all kinds of hi-tec fandango, and the groups who chose the play were encouraged down that route. And the production at the Cottesloe was good, more than good, to my mind not least because it ignored all that: a few boxes, a couple of screens, three pieces of string, and actors who spoke and moved with feeling proved entirely sufficient for a play that involved staging, among other things, breaking into a house, a motorbike ride, a massacre of French soldiers in Morocco in 1924, a hut set on fire and, crucially, a series of drawings in a notebook. An overload of story, and back-story too, was what might have decided them to simplify the means of telling it. They were brilliant.

The Murray-Roddick match ended ten minutes before the performance started, one-on-one giving way to a team performance. For Murray to have prolonged the match into a fifth set would have been disrespectful.

PS: there’s a (short) piece about Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew with a (postage-stamp) preview of the cover in the new issue of The Bookseller. CBe is referred to as an ‘indie’.

Nothing to do with anything

A cricket? A critic? Taking advantage of the cats being too hot and flaked out this morning to bother, a moth called in at my desk. We discussed a dream I had at the weekend: I was writing a book, but the book I was writing in was printed on every page, and my writing was a continuous erasing, so that what I’d end up with would be a book of white pages. The moth mentioned Flaubert’s ambition to write a novel about nothing, composed of pure style. Or was this happiness writing, literally, white? The moth didn’t stay. But it was, I think, a learnèd moth.

Cricket balls

Next week, the first Ashes Test between England and Australia. You knew this already. Anticipation builds. The tennis is as nothing. And just in time . . .

Above left is Jennie in her new summer dress: the paperback of 24 for 3 (‘I loved it’ – Mick Jagger) is published next week, but seems to have arrived in shops already. Above right is Jennie’s new friend, Unplayable by Simon Rae (author of, among other books, the standard modern biog of W. G. Grace). Unplayable is a children’s book, the story of Tom Marlin and his (blurb) ‘dizzying rise through the cricketing ranks – a journey involving danger, controversy, heartbreak and heroics, and culminating in the chance to help win the Ashes for England’.

Unplayable, also published next week, is published by Top Edge Press (and typeset by CBe); it will be for sale at cricket grounds and from the Unplayable website (up in a few days, Alan and god both willing) and can be ordered from bookshops (ISBN 9780 9545495 4 1; distributed by Central Books). Sales of the book will support the Cricket Foundation, a charity whose Chance to shine programme operates in 3,000 state schools. It has a foreword by Mike Gatting, who captained an England team that actually did win the Ashes. All things are possible.

The number 11 bus route

Talking of buses, as yesterday I was, I set off in search of the number 11 in Elizabeth Bowen. I was sure it was in The Death of the Heart – but no, although there ‘a 153 bus did come lurching round the corner, but showed every sign of ignoring them, till Lilian, like a young offended goddess, stepped into its path, holding up a scarlet glove’, and Major Brutt ‘found that an excellent bus, the 74, took him from Cromwell Road the whole way to Regent’s Park’, it was the wrong book. I found it in To the North (1932), another Bowen novel in which an adolescent girl is placed temporarily in the care of bemused adults who have no idea what they’ve taken on (a Bowen staple).

Mrs Patrick advises the 14-year-old Pauline on bus routes, bearing in mind that ‘a young girl cannot be too careful’. ‘She would not, she said, have countenanced a No. 24, which goes down Charing Cross Road. Pauline blushed, she had heard about Charing Cross Road.’ However, ‘The number 11 is an entirely moral bus. Springing from Shepherd’s Bush, against which one has seldom heard anything, it enjoys some innocent bohemianism in Chelsea, pick up the shoppers at Peter Jones, swerves down the Pimlico Road – too busy to be lascivious – passes not too far from the royal stables, nods to Victoria Station, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, whirrs reverently up Whitehall, and from its only brush with vice, in the Strand, plunges to Liverpool Street through the noble and serious architecture of the City. Except for the Strand, the No. 11 route, Mrs Patrick considered, had the quality of Sunday afternoon literature; from it Pauline could derive nothing but edification.’

Though it no longer springs from Shepherd’s Bush, the number 11 still follows much of the same route. Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944) has an instructive example of ‘innocent bohemianism in Chelsea’ along the number 11 route. I can’t find my copy, but Gulley Jimson’s lesson, as I remember it, is this. You’re heading for Liverpool Street, you get on the bus and go to the back of the top deck, and by the time the conductor (remember them?) reaches you you’ve travelled a fair distance. You ask for a ticket to Fulham; the conductor says right bus but wrong direction, you need to get off and catch a bus on the opposite side of the road. You get off; you repeat the same procedure; after an hour you’ve reached Liverpool Street without paying the fare.

I’m applying to London Transport for a grant to complete my thesis: The Journey of Life: Morality and Subterfuge on London Buses.

Coming soon to a bookshop near you (1)

I hadn’t thought, a year back, that the CBe stable would include among its mares and stallions a pony, a children’s writer. Even though it’s been clear for a long time that some of the most ambitious writing around is to be found in the so-called children’s section. But it’s specialist, isn’t it, the children’s market? And a children’s book needs glitter and a dragon on the cover, not the CBe spartan livery, doesn’t it?

But a book that takes me by surprise, that shows me new things writing can do – and which, in this case, moves me to tears each time I read it – is welcome, whatever its category. (YFB/E3N79 according to the Book Industry Communication codes, which are apparently helpful to someone.)

Nicky Singer has written several adult novels and children’s novels (Feather Boy won the Blue Peter Book-of-the-Year Award, is published in 28 countries, and the TV adaptation won a BAFTA); she’s co-founded a charity to train film, theatre and opera writers; she’s chaired the Brighton Festival lit committee; etc. The new book, Knight Crew, will be staged as a opera at Glyndebourne next March with a cast much younger than me or you (I’m trying not to use the phrase ‘young adult’ in this post, and I’m doing OK), and a three-part documentary about the making of the opera will be screened on BBC2 later in the year. All that’s by the by.

Knight Crew retells the King Arthur legend (and I thought I knew what that was about, being an Eng Lit kind of guy, but I didn’t, until I read this book) as the story of Art, Quin and Lance, members of a teenage knife gang who experience violence, love and a revelation of how their lives may be changed. If it gets any attention the sub-eds will say it’s about knife crime. And it’s true there are knives, and deaths, and grit and deprivation. But really it’s about, as the Merlin-figure puts it, ‘what we do in our allotted time . . . It’s who and how we love.’

Despite the legend at the back of it all, it’s not programmatic; the conventions the book creates for itself (this isn’t straight naturalism) allow freedom and engagement. As well as love, it’s a book about narrative – about the stories we were told as children, and the ones we make of our own lives, and the ones bigger than us and that continue after us.

It’s not a pony at all. To be published in September, with, oh yes, a full-colour cover. If anyone wants advance reading proofs, especially anyone in a position to help this book along, email me.