Brighton. Roedean pitch and putt. We are buying tickets.
The girl looks at us. "Are any of you over 65?" she says.
True.
The girl looks at us. "Are any of you over 65?" she says.
True.
|
Tall tales, songs and nursery rhymes – they all gave me a love for words, for the story, and for the joy of rhythm and pleasing word combinations. And so it was, I became a lover of books and a student of literature and a wannabe poet and a sometime writer and eventually even a published novelist.
And I do like a novel. A grand story. But on the whole, I like them clean. Not too grandiose. Genre novels, and yes, by that I mainly mean crime novels, which have rules and parameters and the joy of the great ones is how they find the space to thrive within their limits. Raymond Chandler, Lawrence Block, Patricia Highsmith, James Crumley, Gillian Flynn. Most literary novels, in contrast, aren’t my bag. Oh sure, there’s plenty of exceptions, but that’s not for now – just to say I’ve never found them the apotheosis of writing, certainly not in the way our culture generally tends towards. Great novels – meh. Poetry, on the other hand. No-one likes poetry. It’s unfathomable. Or terrible. Maybe, but poetry comes closest to answering the big stuff, for me anyway. At its best, and this is how I like my literature, it’s a glimpse of something out of the corner of one’s eye, which hints at something huge and otherwise unfathomable and, just for a moment of two, tames it, brings it into focus, suggests that the world as we know it, mundane and mediocre, is actually something else. You don’t have to be a poet, of course, to do this as a writer, but you do need to have something of that sensibility, but with an originality most of us would-be poets lack. So, who does that include, for me, in the pantheon of great writers, as a suggestion for those who sometimes like something more than a good story, well told? Well, obviously, there’s the eponymous heroine of this piece who, in her first two novels, subsumed the vastness of mother earth in the most unrelenting poetic terms that I’ve ever read. Plus… TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, ee cummings, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson all fairly obvious, but no less rewarding for all that. Dylan, Dylan also does this. But then, also, John Cheever in his journals, DH Lawrence in his travel jottings, Annie Dillard in her short pieces, Dostoevsky in his madder moments, Nietzsche in his saner ones, and Camus, whose teachings one is supposed to grow out of, but who has remained my philosophical touchstone all my life – I should definitely sue Penguin books. I doubt it’s an accident that most of these, apart from, or because of, their talent, were essentially troubled to the verge of insanity, and often beyond... |
Writing LuluCurrent state of play: 
2. One Dog and His Man. Out now in paperback.
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4. Silly Verse for Grown Ups
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