A horse in the street (1)

This incident happened when I was practising as an acupuncturist in the West End of London. It is the first of two blogs about horses in the street.

13 January 2004. An injured horse isn’t something you expect to see at 9.30 in the morning in the city, but it is why police have cordoned off the road linking Judd to Marchmont Street. A murmuring crowd, four deep, have gathered. I overhear someone say one police horse has kicked another. I am grateful I can see nothing because there is obviously something to see. Shaken, I hurry to work, hoping the wounded horse is only injured and can be saved. I pray, too, that if the animal does not recover, it will be gone after my last patient of the morning.

I am greeting the first of my clients when a white POLICE HORSE van flashes past the window of the clinic. Relief. Nothing too bad.

When I go to lunch three hours later, Hastings Street is still cordoned off, a policeman at either end. Pedestrians, but not traffic, are being let through. I hurry past, refusing to look, thinking of what the Crow chief, Plenty Coups, said: ‘My horse fights with me and fasts with me . . . if he is to carry me in battle he must know my heart and I must know his or we shall never become brothers. I have been told that the white man who is almost a god, and yet a great fool, does not believe that the horse has a spirit. This cannot be true. I have many times seen my horse’s soul in his eyes.’

All through lunch I pray that, by the time I return, the horse will be gone. I walk slowly back to the clinic. Then for the first time I see it. Lying on its side is a huge black horse wearing a blanket: front legs running, its head covered in a white bag. I am shocked to see that it is not some makeshift covering, but a custom-made horse-head shroud.

On the opposite side of the pavement I feel the hovering, frightened spirit of this fallen animal and want to help send it on its way to run with its ghost horse ancestors. It is important, so important I do not care if the policemen on duty think I am a lunatic. I walk up to the uniformed officers and ask if they know the horse’s name. I ask if I might pray for its soul. Their eyebrows raise, but they tell me his name, motion me forward. They lift the yellow tape cordoning its body that makes a rectangular coffin in the air.

I duck under the police tape, kneel, stroke Eno’s still-warm neck as tears run down my face. On the bricks near the kerb, a pile of cold manure and liquid the colour of a pillarbox. This animal who had no thought of dying when it set out for work this morning, now lies in Hastings Street in its own shit and blood.

Stay tuned . . .

A Farewell to Arms: 47 endings

All writers struggle over writing. Thomas Mann defined a good writer as “somebody for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” In a previous blog, I wrote about how I sensed that Hemingway had had difficulty with the beginning of For Whom the Bell Tolls. But until recently I did not realise the extent of the trouble he had in ending his first novel, A Farewell to Arms.

In a Paris Review interview with George Plimpton in 1958, Hemingway made the admission that he'd rewritten the ending of A Farewell to Arms “39 times before I was satisfied”. There are, in fact, 47 endings which have been preserved in the John F Kennedy Library in Boston.

In July 2012 the novel was re-released by Hemingway's longtime publisher, Scribner's, which includes all the alternate endings, as well as early drafts from other passages in the novel and the original Art Deco cover of 1929.

In an age when most authors create on a screen and any changes they make vanish into thin air, this edition offers the opportunity for readers (and writers) to see how the definitive ending of this book was arrived at.

Variations on the novel's conclusion range from a short sentence to several paragraphs: some dark, some more optimistic, even one suggested by his friend, F Scott Fitzgerald. For someone who is interested in process, this edition allows you to follow Hemingway's struggle to discover the ending which feels inevitable: satisfying, logical and unalterable.

In the Plimpton interview Hemingway was asked what had stumped him. His reply? “Getting the words right.” That's pretty succinct. As lean as the 6-word short story that Hemingway once wrote as a bet: For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

Stay tuned . . .

The Arrow of Time

The second law of thermodynamics is known as the arrow of time. In simple terms it means the past is different from the future. It is a closed system, an irreversible process.

But fiction is immune from natural laws and it was with an intake of breath I read the following excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Here he makes time flow backwards for Billy Pilgrim, a time traveller who is regularly picked up by a spaceship from the planet Tramalfadore. During one of Billy's many travels, he has been a soldier in World War II:

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. 

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed . . . 

Ironically, aerial bombardment was first "practised" on civilians in Morocco by the Spanish Air Force in the 20s, then by the Italians in Ethiopia and then more widely by the Italians and Germans during the Spanish Civil War. The most famous painting depicting bombing from the air is, of course, Guernica. Picasso rarely expounded on the symbolism in his work, but after the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, he explained two of his most important symbols to an American GI who interviewed him in his studio. "The bull is not fascism," he said, "but it is brutality and darkness . . . the horse represents the people."

It would seem that Picasso is implying that the bull is the demon, yet some art critics have suggested that the toro is as guiltless as the victims and no less bewildered than the frantic women and terrified horse. And if the bull is not the aggressor, then the "enemy" is not present on the canvas. An omission that has a chilling message: to victims of modern warfare, the enemy remains impersonal, unknown. This is something the innocents know only too well.

Stay tuned . . . 

The water lilies of Claude Monet

The Canadian painter, Robert Genn, visited the Musée de L’Orangerie in Paris where Monet’s famous water lily paintings, Les Nymphéas, are on display. There are eight of these huge, magnificent canvases which the artist painted when he was nearly blind with cataracts. The two paragraphs below are excerpts from Genn's blog of 15 December 2006, "The other eye". The unabridged blog you can read here:

I've been in these two rooms for so long that my stomach is concerned. A guard has already determined that I’m planning a heist. I’m sure she has alerted her supervisors. And then there's a man who has been in here almost as long as I. He moves from bench to bench. He has a round, friendly face and an honest smile. I find relief in pretending we have met. We talk in hushed, religious tones. He is Monsieur LeClerc, an actuary from Poitiers, in Paris for four days . . .

"I know nothing about art," he tells me, "But every time I come to Paris I enter these rooms. The collection was closed for some six years and Paris was very dull. These are sublime things. They are beyond words or expressions. They cannot be categorized or listed. In winter they take you to spring. They bring my boyhood and my home. Maybe God is in these things. What do I see? I see sadness and I see beauty. What else do we need? What else do we have?" His face is flushed, his eyes moist. "But then, who am I to say?" he asks. "I know nothing about art."  

May we all be blessed with those "other eyes" of Monsieur LeClerc.

Stay tuned . . .

Slaughterhouse 5

I recently purchased a book, 50 Photo Icons: The Story Behind the Pictures. This collection of images is published by Taschen and is arranged in chronological order, covering a span of 170 years.

This photograph was taken by Richard Peter and is titled "View from Dresden City Hall Tower". It does not include the date, 1945, when it was made. It does not need to.

Dresden, which prior to the war had been called the "Florence on the Elbe", was fire-bombed, although it was strategically unimportant as a military target. The number of victims is still a matter of dispute today. Estimates begin at more than 30,000. The true figure will never be known because many of those who died were instantly incinerated.

I read Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut's book about the destruction of Dresden, over two decades ago. Seeing this picture made me want to return to it. I had forgotten what a truly astonishing book it is. Vonnegut was able to capture the insane business of war, not only because he was there, but because he found a highly original way of relating his horrific experiences: using the device of an alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, who is a time traveller.

Vonnegut survived the firestorm in Dresden only because he was a prisoner of war who'd been held in a basement slaughterhouse. It is hard to choose an excerpt from this landmark book, but I will try. Two days after the bombing, guards gathered the POWs and marched them to the place where they would begin their grisly, and monumental, task.

Prisoners of war from many lands came together that morning at such and such a place in Dresden. It had been decreed that here was where the digging for bodies was to begin. So the digging began. Billy found himself paired as a digger with a Maori, who had been captured at Tobruk. The Maori was chocolate brown. He had whirlpools tattooed on his forehead and his cheeks. Billy and the Maori dug into the inert, unpromising gravel of the moon.

Even 43 years after publication, this book is considered subversive and controversial. It has been banned from US schools, removed from libraries and struck off literary curriculums. In August 2011 Slaughterhouse 5 was banned at a high school in Missouri. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library met this stupidity by offering 150 free copies of the novel to Republic High School students on a first come, first served basis. I hope those kids took them up on the offer.

Stay tuned . . .

Internal monologue

In the British Musuem is a letter from James Joyce to his one of his most loyal patrons, Harriet Shaw Weaver. It is dated 23 November 1923. In it he mentions that, six months earlier, Valery Larbaud, the most influential French critic of his era, had invented the phrase "interior monologue" as a way of describing the revolutionary last chapter of Ulysses.

Joyce wrote this eighteenth, and final, chapter in the first person from the point of view of Molly Bloom, the unfaithful wife of Leopold Bloom, one of the novel's main characters. Her soliloquy is a masterpiece, a tour de force that attempts to capture the thoughts leaping through Molly's mind.

Her "Penelope" chapter consists of eight brobdignagian "sentences" that total 4,391 words. The concluding full stop following the final words of her internal monologue is one of only two punctuation marks in the entire chapter.

Larbaud gave his lecture praising Joyce's book to 250 people jammed into two rooms of Shakespeare and Company in Paris. He told the audience something that all readers now take for granted: that the key to Joyce's encyclopaedic work was Homer's Odyssey. Using a scheme that Joyce had given him, Larbaud talked about how the chapters were organized, presenting each one in the terms of an hour of the day, an organ of the body, a color, a symbol. He then read from the book. One of the two sections he chose to present was a portion of "Penelope".

Molly's episode begins and ends with "yes" which Joyce regarded as "the female word" which indicated "acquiescence and the end of all resistance". It is a chapter to be read aloud as it more readily gives up its beautiful logic. I use it as an example in one of my writing exercises to inspire my students so they don't come "cold" to their notebooks. Just hearing a fragment of "Penelope" always produces inspired work from them.

I was greatly influenced by Molly's soliloquy when I was writing my first book and decided to try some interior monologue myself. The passage below appears in Chapter 24 of No Angel Hotel. For the purposes of this post, I have removed the punctuation and capitals at the beginning of sentences in my own crude attempt at a Joycean "sentence":

Michael asks again about my "deflowering" sounds gentle wonder why they call it that like I say I've forgotten his face the one who came courting and then after a few visits pulled me into me da's shed and threw my skirts in the air virgin-tight I bit my lip seeing the inflated size of it we had been drinking and even so the pain was terrible I had only managed a carrot before with difficulty at nineteen I was beginning to despair of never being pierced but he did it for me gladly a soldier-boy just back from the Mediterranean he wooed me with a bottle of Marsala he hadn't even bothered to wash he said soldiers were forced to practise self-pleasure I was more concerned "with child with young big with consequences" et cetera hating him I couldn't wait for him to dismount he asked "Was I too big for ye" and I was crying to beat the band so I nodded so I wouldn't have to explain myself it was innocence that was gone

But if you want the real thing, buy Ulysses, if only for the last breathtaking chapter. It's worth it.

Stay tuned . . .

Sylvia Beach & the trials of Ulysses

The person pictured with James Joyce is the woman who gave Ulysses to the world. Sylvia was the founder of Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore that was the hub of literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. This plucky American from New Jersey had the courage to publish what was considered an obscene book when no one else would touch it.

In 1921 Ulysses was deemed to be pornographic in America after portions of it were published in the literary magazine, Little Review. The legal decision made in the New York Court of Special Sessions ruled the novel "unintelligible" and "obscene" which meant that major publishers in the United States and elsewhere would not touch the manuscript for fear of prosecution.

The judgment was a heavy blow for Joyce. He knew that all hope of publication in English-speaking countries would be impossible for decades. It occurred to Beach that she might help and asked Joyce if he would let Shakespeare and Company have the honour of bringing out Ulysses. Joyce accepted immediately, even though Beach had never published a book before.

The next eleven months proved to be a series of crises, the first of which was the typing of the manuscript. Seven typists refused to type "Circe", one of the bawdiest chapters; the eighth threatened to throw herself out the window.

The writer Robert McAlmon typed forty pages of "Penelope" when Beach could not find another typist. McAlmon had to decipher Joyce's "hen-scrawly" handwritten script with no less than four notebooks with insertions marked in blue, purple, red, yellow and green ink. For three pages McAlmon painstaking put the insertions in the right place. "After that," he wrote, "I thought Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all, and made the insertions where ever I happened to be typing. Years later I asked Joyce if he had noticed that I'd altered the mystic arrangement of Molly's thought, and he said that he had, but agreed with my viewpoint. Molly's thoughts were irregular in several ways at best."

Sylvia Beach chose to use as her printer, Maurice Darantière, who was based in Dijon. This was a conscious choice because her French printers did not understand English words or punctuation and had no idea what the manuscript contained.

Even though the project threatened to bankrupt her, Beach allowed Joyce to have as many proofs as he wanted. Time and time again, she persuaded Darantière to allow Joyce to alter his manuscript which then had to be painstakingly reset by hand. He added and added, with the final set of proofs containing more handwriting than print. And, even then, Darantière continued to receive endless telegrams with new lines to insert or delete. Sylvia said, "I would never have dreamed of controlling its great author so gave [Joyce] his head. It seemed natural to me that the effort and sacrifices on my part would be proportionate to the greatness of the work I was publishing."

The fascinating story of the publication of what Anthony Burgess called "the greatest novel of the 20th Century" is told in an excellent biography by Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. Highly recommended reading.

Ulysses is a novel that is over 900 pages long. Joyce once spent a whole day shuffling these 15 words in which he was attempting to show his wife's sensuality: 

Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.

He wasn't adding or subtracting words, only rearranging them to have the weight and the power he wanted in search of that ever elusive thing, perfection.

Stay tuned . . .