Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She [Elizabeth Barrett Browning] had decide that poetry, whatever language it was written in, was most certainly work. To write poetry was the most worthwhile work in the world because poetry was truth and there could be nothing more noble than trying to express universal truths. She did not feel shy about calling herself a poet - even when she recognised that she had only managed to produce 'sickly poetry,' She had absolute confidence that with time she would do better and that the struggle to do so was worthy in itself. A good poet was always 'one of God's singers.' Trying to become one of this select band was an ambition she was proud of and did not conceal. It had nothing to do with what she called 'versifying,' that scribbling in commonplace books so beloved of young ladies at this time. This she found contemptible and not to be confused with real poetry which was dignified, serious, sacred and pure. Her family accepted her interpretation of her vocation reverentially. Only her father was tempted to make the occasional facetious comment and he quickly came to appreciate that his daughter's poetry was no laughing matter.

Nobody at Hope End [the family home] sneered at or ridiculed the role of poet itself - in the first quarter of the nineteenth century poets were the most admired of all creative writers. The end of the eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of the Romantic Revival, marked by the publication, in 1798, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. In the decade of Elizabeth's birth Byron published his first collection of poems (Hours of Idleness,1807) and when as a nine-year-old she was starting to write poetry herself, Queen Mab. Playwrights no longer dominated the literary scene though Drury Lane and Covent Garden were still enormously popular theatres, and novelists, in spite of Jane Austen, Richardson and Fielding, had not yet begun to do so. To be a 'real' poet was judged a most suitable occupation by Elizabeth's parents who had no objections just so long as this did not tax Elizabeth's health.
Shelley had just finished

...public acknowledgement was important: she was honest enough to admit that it was not sufficient to write poetry but that having it read was part of the process. It was more than that. Seeing her work in print excited her and she did not underestimate the significance.  Her excitement had nothing to do with feeling she was successful - she rated popular success as shallow - but was more a feeling of intense joy here was tangible proof that she was communicating through her poetry.

Pages 34/5 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Margaret Foster. 

Exit Lines

Reginald Hill was a prolific writer (he died last year) who not only produced some 24 very popular titles featuring the policemen, Dalziel (pronounced, roughly, De-el) and Pascoe, but more than 30 other books, some of them under the pseudonyms Patrick Ruel and Charles Underhill.  He wrote mysteries and adventure stories and historical pieces and sci-fi.  He also used varying structural conceits - one of the later Dalziel and Pascoe titles is written with a kind of Jane Austen language and thought - and the books are full of wit, literary references, words that no one in normal life uses, but seem apt for the occasion ('a reboant cantillation of obscene abuse', 'a usefully cunctatory bout of coughing'), crafty plotting, and superbly humorous insights into his characters. These are all mixed with ordinary everyday language, and the books shouldn't be thought of as inaccessible to the average reader.  It doesn't matter if you don't know what a reboant cantillation is - you'll get the idea from the context.  Hill once said: "When I get up in the morning, I ask my wife whether I should write a Booker prize-winning novel, or another bestselling crime book. We always come down on the side of the crime book."

I hadn't read anything of his until this year - there are always more authors around than you can manage to keep up with, even in a dozen lifetimes - and I started off with his book of short stories,  There are no ghosts in the Soviet Union, which we'd picked up secondhand somewhere.  The long title story is superbly written - a ghost story that works down to the last detail.  Some of the other stories are odd - one of them takes a Dalziel and Pascoe novel (one that's been filmed as part of the television series), takes us behind the scenes of the fictional television filming of the book, and makes the actor playing Pascoe a pompous self-centred ass, who, with some hasty rewriting of the script, gradually pushes Dalziel into a very minor role. Hill turns up as a character as well, the increasingly angry author who sees his popular story being turned into nonsense.

The only other Hill novel I'd had any contact with was Exit Lines, which I'd twice heard on CD while travelling to and from Christchurch.  When I say 'twice heard' I mean that the first time I heard about the first 60 pages, and then didn't hear any more, and then on a second trip, heard about 90 pages, and still didn't hear any more. So rather than trying to listen to the rest - I'm not good at just sitting listening to CDs unless I'm lying in bed sick - I bought a copy of the book, started it yesterday and finished it today. It's immensely readable, often very funny, and has a complex plot that Ian Rankin could easily have put together. The big difference is that Rankin's pervading gloom doesn't colour everything, and even though Dalziel may be on a par with Rebus when it comes to drinking too much for his own good, and may have a temper and sharp tongue to match his Scottish counterpart, there's such wit and humour from both the characters and the author, that you know you're in a different kind of world.

There's a strong theme of the difficulties of old age - people with Alzheimer's or trying to live on their own without family - and also the horror that many young people have for the idea of growing old. The story begins with the deaths of three old men, in fact; two of them may be accidents, the third appears to be the result of an attack. Nothing is quite like it seems, and the further the story goes, the more our original views about the deaths and their aftermaths are altered.  There are some wonderfully innocent people, and some surprisingly devious ones.  There are some that appear suspicious and aren't, and some that appear to be all above board - and aren't. Hill holds out attention right to the end, even though we think we've got to grips with what's going on at an earlier point. 

There are an endless number of lines that could be quoted (one character, Mrs Spillings, is almost Dickensian in her speeches), but Hill reserves some of his best lines for the taciturn, and ugly, policemen, Wield (a regular in the series of books). 

'Back door,' said Wield. 'Glass panel broken. Key in lock. Hand through. Open. Easy.'

Sergeant Wield was in fine telegraphic style.  He also seemed to have been practising not moving his lips, so that the words came out of his slant and ugly face like a ritual chant through a primitive devil-mask.

or

Wield looked at the new acquisition and raised his eyebrows, producing an effect not unlike the vernal shifting of some Arctic landscape as the sun sets an ice-bound river flowing once more through a waste of snows.

 

Sense and Sensibility

I was reading somewhere the other day that Jane Austen's book, Sense and Sensibility presents two contrasting characters, the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who exemplify the two words in the title of the book: Elinor seems to be all 'sense' - that is, sensible - Marianne is all sensibility - that is, she lets her emotions control her life, and can't see how Elinor can be so calm in the face of heartbreak.   But the sisters also exemplify two modes of philosophical thought: whether it's better to look at life sensibly, calmly, almost dispassionately, or whether one should be utterly aware, full of response to everything that happens.

In the book the sisters each learn to appreciate the other's point of view, in due course, but not before both of them have suffered considerable heartbreak and hurt.   I watched the 1995 film version of the book again last night (somehow it's free on You Tube - I suspect it shouldn't be) and the two actors in the movie, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, portray these two approaches to life admirably.  You feel for Marianne (Winslet) in her overwhelming pain when her lover ups and leaves, but equally you feel for Elinor who must not only harbour an unspoken love for Edward Ferrars, but find herself having to keep secret his longstanding engagement to another woman who takes her into her trust.  Marianne can't understand how Elinor can keep her pain to herself; only towards the end of the film does Elinor bitterly tell her what a quandary she's been put into, and only in the last scene is she finally able to give vent to her feelings when she discovers that her lover hasn't married the other woman after all, and that he's free to marry her.  This moment in the movie, when all the pent-up anguish bursts from Thompson in a moment she can't control, is one of the best acting scenes you'll find in the cinema - you see her wanting to weep for joy, and yet she has to deal with getting rid of all the accumulated anguish first.

I saw Ang Lee's movie of Sense and Sensibility back when it first came out in 1995, and I haven't forgotten how effective it was: the look of the movie is wonderful, with the weather playing an important part in connecting the characters' feelings, and the wonderful sense of the period.  The cast are uniformly good: Emma Thompson had written the script, so she knew the piece inside out and plays her role wonderfully; Winslet is the emotional Marianne and superbly delineates the quickly changing emotions that this character is subject to.  Alan Rickman is Colonel Brandon, a man with a gloomy past but also a man of considerable integrity who finds himself having to play second fiddle to a known libertine (played with great energy by Greg Wise).  Hugh Grant is a revelation in this movie: if you've ever thought he was a lightweight actor, check out his performance here.  It's not a large part - he appears early in the movie and then vanishes for a good deal of the time until he comes into his own at the end, but every scene and every gesture and expression count.

And there are a bunch of character roles: Tom Wilkinson for about a minute at the beginning; the twit of a son from The Vicar of Dibley in a wonderful role as his son, a henpecked husband; his fearsomely dominating wife who thinks she's doing the Family some good; Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton as a couple - he can't bear her constant prattle and makes sarcastic remarks about her at every point, and just when you think he's a hard-hearted man he turns out to be warm and sympathetic to those who are prepared to see through his hardness.  Staunton has a great moment when, after hearing there may be a threat to her baby's health, she turns in a moment from her constant prattling to a scream that pierces the heart as she races to move the baby from the house.  Imogen Stubbs plays Hugh Grant's supposed fiancée, a somewhat devious character who gets an awful comeuppance at one point from her future sister-in-law: one moment there's utter quiet on the screen in a close-up of the two women's heads, next moment the camera cuts to a wide shot and there's an explosion as the sister-in-law throws the work she's been doing in the air and simultaneously thrusts Stubbs to the floor with violent anger.  Then there are Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs as in-laws who apparently live in the same house, (they're presumably widower and widow) have the same interests, have the same all-encompassing generosity, fill the screen with boisterous energy (always accompanied by half a dozen dogs) and 'manage' other people.  Yes, they'd be annoying in real life, but they're a wonderful couple in the movie.

I had a copy of the script of this film and the diary that Thompson kept as she was writing it and then involved in the production.  It's as fascinating as the movie and Thompson plainly had a deep love for the book and wanted it translated to the screen in the best possible manner.  In this, I think, she's been completely successful.  I don't know how much the film deviates from the book - I suspect it's only in dramatic form but certainly not in spirit - and my suspicion is that Jane Austen herself would have been pleased with it.  It's a classic.

First sentences

While looking up the subject of cowboys in order to introduce the idea of Stetson Cowboy hats, I came across this quote by Larry McMurtry, the writer.  Several of his books were turned into films, and these stories are probably best known now by their movie titles: Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove. 

The quote from McMurtry below is one of several listed in my clipping, but this one particularly relates to writers and the art of writing...

"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and a verb and perhaps a wholesome, non-fattening adverb or two."

Many books on writing make an enormous fuss about the first sentence, and will quote famous first sentences as though the authors of them knew somehow that these same first sentences would become famous in their own right.  Some of them ignore McMurtry's advice and land us with a piece of philosophy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife [Pride and Prejudice] or, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. [Anna Karenina]

But without the rest of the book, these first sentences would never have survived.  Neither of these two sentences is so remarkable that it makes us necessarily want to read further.  What these two sentences tend to do is sum up the theme of the book that follows.  

That isn't the way most books begin.  Here's an example I've pinched from Ben Myer's blog.  (You can also find a quiz on first sentences out of children's books, here.)   This one engages the reader (which is what McMurtry had in mind) without telling the reader how it will all work out.   

‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’ [David Lodge: Changing Places]

Or another example from Ben Myer, this time Flannery O'Connor in full throttle: Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’

What that sentence does is tell you that you're about to enter a world that's pretty extraordinary and so hold onto your braces.  

I'm not going to repeat everything here that Ben Myers has included in his survey of first sentences, but, since I'm once again reading G K Chesterton (The Common Man, this time), I'm going to leave this topic with this wonderful opening sentence - and the one following.  It comes from Chesterton's Autobiography, which is, in some places, almost as much a book of fiction as fact.  

‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’

Northanger Abbey

There have been times when the BBC has made something of a hash of televising the classics (King Lear was one example), but rarely have they made such as hash as their version of Northanger Abbey, made in 1987 with Peter Firth and Katharine Schlesinger.  Robert Hardy and Googie Withers also appear; Withers is fine in a truncated role as Mrs Allen, but Hardy seems totally ill-at-ease, as though he's either not sure what the role is all about (he plays General Tilney) or he's found that the production wasn't living up to his expectations and he is trying in part to sink it.   That's probably unkind; most actors do their best not to assist productions to sink, and anyway this one is sinking from the opening scenes without any further help from the actors.

The script adds and subtracts, seldom adding to any advantage and often subtracting to great disadvantage.  It loses the point that Catherine Morland (Schlesinger, all googly-eyed as though her eyelids were permanently stuck wide-open) is so enamoured of the Gothic romance novels of the period that she views everything about her as though it was coloured in the same way.  Instead, we have crazy inserts of the Gothic stuff she sees as though it was some kind of reality, and these are never really explained.  She never actually grows from being obsessed with the romances to seeing real life.

Firth isn't too bad as Henry Tilney, one of Jane Austen's regular older and wiser men whose role it is to bring a young woman into a place where she's not so self-obsessed and flighty.  He's charming, though not particularly handsome.  Why Catherine would fall in love with him at first sight is a bit difficult to understand (or he with her, if it comes to that).  His worst moment however is when he's required to sing some Italian duet with a woman who's role in the film is never clarified.  Firth isn't dubbed by someone who can sing; instead we have to endure a couple of minutes of him singing with a voice that has little vocal quality whatsoever.  Its main blessing is that it's in tune.

The Thorpe brother and sister are presented as plain awful: Jonathan Coy plays John Thorpe as one of those brusque characters out to win a bride to fund his ongoing living.  He at least knows the style of the thing.  Cassie Stuart, however, has no idea of the style or period.  Her speech has no quality to it, she's forever giggling and gushing, and her only moment of truth is when she's dumped by Catherine's brother because she's been giggling and gushing at Henry's brother.  On top of this she's dressed like someone who has no sense about her clothing at all.  Not that she's alone in this; this TV play must be one of the worst dressed on record for both men and women.

And then there's the music: for a start there's too much of it, blowing its way into scenes where it isn't needed, and at other times so anachronistic that it breaks any mood it's trying to convey.  The user reviews on IMDb.com, which seldom agree with each other, here universally decry the music, especially the use of a saxophone and some wailing woman that occurs on more than one occasion.  The reviewers in this instance dislike the play almost entirely, in fact, which again must be unusual both for IMDb and for the BBC.

For some reason this particular film doesn't show up in IMDb's search engine.  You can find it via Google, where the additional tag, 'Screen Two' is added; this appears to have been some series that the BBC produced around that time that were intended both for TV broadcast and theatrical release.

Two interesting lists

I happened upon Kindle's list of Most highlighted passages of all time today. What this refers to is the way in which you can highlight (like the old idea of using a highlighter in a book with real pages) a section of a book you're reading because you think it's important, or it struck you as of interest, or whatever.  These highlighted sections can be tracked later, if you want.

Considering that this list has the most highlighted passages of all time, they're a strange bunch. (All time being somewhat hyperbolic, I think.) Passages from the various books in The Hunger Games prevail, which presumably means that a huge number of people are not only reading these books on Kindle, but are highlighting more than ever.  Initially it's almost hard to find anything else in the list, but wait! Jane Austen is there, third in line with It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Let's hope they read further than the first paragraph.)  She manages to sneak in at eighth place as well.   Sherlock Holmes makes an appearance in the top 25 along with a book entitled: Heaven is for real: a little boy's astounding story of his trip to heaven and back.  Hmm.  


Dorian Grey gets in at around number 27, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People makes more than one appearance in numbers 26-50.  After that it becomes open slather, with a real mix of books turning up.   The interesting thing about this list is that, unlike those lists produced by retailers and other places, where the greatest books of all time will include Harry Potter and suchlike, this list is actually related to what people are reading and highlighting.  The highlighting is the relevant factor.  It will be worth checking out this list again when The Hunger Games has run its course.


The second list is related to Twitter, and appears in the NZ Herald, where a list of NZ's Twitter top 50 appears today.  Taika Waititi, who made the film, Boy, appears first on this list, with 11,520 followers, though he's actually the second most followed tweeter.  Comedian Rhys Darby has over 79,000 followers, Cory Jane (the All Black) has around 53,000, nearly twice as many as TV3's John Campbell, who almost ties with another commentator, John Lai.  Except that Lai is a social media commentator.  


The interesting thing about this second list, for me, is that I don't follow a single person on it, although a few of the names turn up in retweets now and then, notably Hamish Keith.  There are quite a few New Zealanders I do follow, but none of them appear on this list.  Maybe they'll turn up on the Herald's second list, which is due out soon.