Eva Trout

So, being (as I was) at the seaside, and thinking about doing some rereading of Elizabeth Bowen, and happening to read a piece by Tessa Hadley in the Guardian about Eva Trout, her last novel (1969), in which she says that for Bowen ‘English seaside towns are carnival, unsound, stimulating places, where anything crazy might happen’, Eva Trout it was.

Eva is big, ungainly, awkward, solitary, wealthy, ungovernable, and she creates havoc: friendships splinter, marriages break up, estate agents are bewildered. Not least because of the misfit between, on the one hand, love and sex and desire, and on the other, the social codes. Eva is on the back foot from the start: family ties, after her father’s affair with the man who, until she comes into her inheritance, is her guardian, are nil.

Eva remembering another girl at the ‘experimental’ school she was sent to: ‘The hand on the blanket, the beseeching answering beating heart. The dark: the unseen distance, the known nearness. Love: the here and the now and the nothing-but. The step on the stairs. Don’t take her away, DON’T take her away. She is all I am. We are all there is.’ Against such, the whole awkwardness and comic absurdity of frustrated desire in action – here is Eric responding impulsively to Eva’s bland indifference to why he has left his wife to come to her: ‘Eric got hold of Eva by the pouchy front of her anorak and shook her. The easy articulation of her joints made this rewarding – her head rolled on her shoulders, her arms swung from them. Her teeth did not rattle, being firm in their gums, but coins and keys all over her clinked and jingled. Her hair flumped all ways like a fiddled-about-with mop. The crisis became an experiment: he ended by keeping her rocking, at slowing tempo, left-right, left-right, off one heel and onto the other, meanwhile pursing his lips and frowning speculatively. The experiment interested Eva too. Did it gratify her too much? – he let go abruptly.’

Like Eva herself, the novel is preposterous. A child is acquired by criminal means; the child turns out to be deaf and dumb; a chapter is given over to a letter from a character never met, and which is never received by its addressee; a mock marriage verges on becoming a real one; a gun is introduced, and you know that at some point it will be fired, and it is. Many of the sentences too (‘those prickly sentences,’ says Tessa Hadley of Bowen’s habitual style; my italics): ‘As though the train had started and started swaying, they swayed slightly.’ But it’s one of those late works in which an author has earned the right to go off the rails (TH: ‘There’s something of a lordly, deliberate carelessness in how Eva’s story’s emphasis is on accidentals, random swerves’), and in this case the ride is exhilarating.

For Tessa Hadley on Eva Trout, see here; or buy the new Vintage edition, which has Hadley’s piece as an introduction.

(I'd've prefaced this with a photo of my 1971 Panther paperback edition, whose cover is more true to the book than than the new Vintage edition, which suggests 1920s/30s and is altogether too slick, if the connecting cable hadn't vanished.)

A century ago

Matthew Hollis’s Now All Roads Lead to France, winner of the Costa biography prize and so very nearly overall winner, is a lovely book. Today’s lesson is taken from one of the early chapters:

‘Rupert Brooke was a frequent guest at Edward Marsh’s apartment in Gray’s Inn, London, and one night in September 1912 he and Marsh sat up late, discussing how best to shake the public of their ignorance of contemporary poetry. There and then, they counted a dozen poets worth publishing, and put the idea of an anthology to [Harold] Munro. Five hundred copies were printed: half received on 16 December 1912, the remainder on Christmas Eve; all were sold by Christmas Day. A reprint was hurried through, then another and another. By the end of its first year, the book was in its ninth printing and was on its way to 15,000 sales. The name of this remarkable anthology was Georgian Poetry.’

15,000 copies of a book of poems by writers unknown to the general reading public, from a publisher equally unknown. Of poems of a kind – ‘Georgian’ – that, even as the book was being printed, was being put out to grass by Pound and Imagism and then Eliot and all that followed.

The first (and in most cases last) print run of a poetry book put out now by, say, Faber, is – an educated guess – perhaps 3,000. Sales of many poetry books, good poetry books, put out by small presses struggle to reach 100. And the UK population, by the way, is now 50 per cent bigger than it was in 1912.

Given that books do not now occupy as central a position in the culture as they once did (and that even within books, poetry is marginal), does that leave those of us who still engage with the stuff – as writers, as readers, as publishers – like a soon-to-be-extinct tribe on the Andaman Islands, whose language will cease when they do? No, because there was poetry before books and there will be after. But meanwhile, it’s damn hard to sell the things.

‘Passed art’

I’ve been making space. (Which is what you do when you come home from time away and see what a tip you live in.) That is, carting off whole shelves of books to Oxfam. I shift into ruthless mode – but then, as the books come off the shelves, the letters fall out, the postcards, the yellowing reviews and interviews, and it takes a little longer than I’d expected.

The letters are for me to deal with. The clippings from newspapers remind me how repetitive newspapers are, of how much that is said now has been been said before. ‘I dislike the whole social context of the novel, and where it is, the conventional apparatus which has featured so largely for so long. The novel in England in this kind of society is passed art. The tradition wanders on in a desultory fashion . . . The novel is no longer a reliable metaphor for what’s going on.’ That’s 1970, forty-odd years ago. That’s David Storey.

David Storey’s first three novels – This Sporting Life (1960), Flight into Camden (1961), Radcliffe (1963) – didn’t so much speak to me as grab me by the goolies. Northern, father a miner, wrestling with the inner life and the social codes, he was, in a rough way, Lawrence, but alive and writing now (then). After those, plays, and other, cooler novels (he won the Booker in 1976), and long silences. Sometime while I was working at Faber they published a book by his daughter, the fashion designer Helen Storey; there was a party at some extravagant venue to which I didn’t go, and when someone told me there was an older man there, on his own, not mixing, wished I had.

AWOL

I’ve been AWOL for a couple of weeks, a bit longer. Some writing, some reading, at the out-of-season seaside. This may be a way of training CBe, and myself, to understand that, entangled though we are, occasionally varying the distance, or the perspective, may be no bad thing; that there is no reason why our needs should always coincide; that neither of us is indispensable.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Nick Lezard has featured BB Brahic’s translation of Apollinaire in his Guardian books column. (The above picture, showing a sequence of Apollinaire and a friend made at a photobooth in Paris in August 1914, is on the CBe page where you can order the book; other photos of Apollinaire have just gone up on Wayne Burrows’ fine Serendipity Project site.) And Beverley Bie Brahic’s own collection of poems, White Sheets, due from CBe in June, has been chosen as a PBS Recommendation for the Summer quarter. And planning for next September’s poetry book fair has been humming along. And it’s become important that a new CBe title, fiction this time, Dai Vaughan’s Sister of the artist, is published now rather than later. More on that next week.

When the Guardian asked me for the cover image of the Apollinaire book to go with the review, they addressed their email ‘Dear Charles and team’. As if. But it’s still possible to get in my own way, or have days or even longer when I’m not on speaking terms. Back now.

Alfred Hayes

1911–85; born in London, worked in the US and Italy. He was in the US army in Italy in WW2, and stayed on as a screenwriter for Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica. Later, scriptwriting in Hollywood, and for TV. Not much seems to be known about him. Three books of poetry and half a dozen short novels. If he’d happened to be female some of those would have been reissued by Persephone Books by now, though their decorative endpapers wouldn’t have sat comfortably with the contents.

In The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949; reissued a few years ago by Europa, a Brooklyn-based publisher) an American soldier in Rome near the end of the war takes a room with an Italian girl; the deal, he thinks, is straightforward – he gets sex, she gets chocolate and cigarettes and a roof over her head and sex too – but it isn’t, and when the woman running the house is denounced, the police issue the girl with an official prostitute’s license. It’s just possible, near the end, that the couple’s barely articulated feelings for each other will enable them to rise above this mess, but the book isn’t saying.

In Love (1954; in print with Peter Owen; my copy a 1961 Penguin, £1.99 from an Oxfam shop): a girl in a convenient (to them both) relationship with a man is offered a thousand dollars by a rich businessman for one night. (Familiar scenario? Frederic Raphael: ‘To measure the difference between a work of art and its degradation, compare In Love with Adrian Lyne’s 1993 film, Indecent Proposal, in which Robert Redford offers Demi Moore a million dollars to sleep with him and you don’t believe a word of it, or give a damn whether she does or not, because the whole thing is famous-people confectionery.’) The story is recounted by the boyfriend to another girl in a bar, the story of an affair in which the needs and capacities for love of himself and the girlfriend intersect and then don’t and then maybe do again and then maybe don’t, and in which neither behaves in ways that would would win them a medal of honour.

My Face for the World to See (1958; my copy a 1960 Arrow Books paperback, also courtesy Oxfam): a jobbing Hollywood screenwriter pulls a drunk girl out of the sea at a party and starts a desultory affair that ends in melodrama (‘Had I thought once there were acts of which I was incapable?’).

Elizabeth Bowen called In Love a masterpiece; John Lehman and Antonia White reckoned pretty much the same. Echoed by The Times and the Independent on its reissue in 2007. Paul Bailey, who wrote an introduction for the reissue of of The Girl on the Via Flaminia: ‘Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.’

The sentences are what win me, of course. Plain but exact, one after another. Hayes has become one of the writers I’m liable to bore people about. The story-lines above are hardly original, and each time there’s something a little dated in their setting-up, as if you’re watching a black-and-white film, but once he gets the he and the she together he’s electric. The restaurant/nightclub scene in My Face for the World to See, after he’s told her he’ll be meeting his wife off a plane the following Monday, is not only lacerating, hilarious, drunken (‘She was very articulate when she was drunk; hadn’t I noticed? Martinis improved her vocabulary’), but done with a control – direct speech (you can see why he was a screenwriter), a kind of indirect reported speech I don’t know the technical term for, observation – that amounts to wizardry.

For Christmas, please can someone find me a cheap copy of Hayes’ The End of Me.

Whitman & Co.

Mortality kicks in. My mum once told me she’d been to three funerals in a week, and I’m starting to know how she was feeling. In the past weeks, and limiting this to the Anglo bookworld, Peter Reading, Christopher Logue, Gilbert Adair, Russell Hoban, George Whitman – have died. It’s bloody.

Logue and Adair I’ve mentioned. Russell Hoban I first met in the 80s; I was living round the corner, and asked if I could show him some stories for children I’d written, which were crap, and he said so in the kindest possible way, by praising the illustrations done by my wife. George Whitman I met in November of last year, when three of the CBe writers read at the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris. It was a little late for me to have done so. The NY Times obituary quotes his own estimate of 40,000 writerly wanderers having been put up – been given bed and pancakes, in return for a few hours work and talk and a promise to read – in that shop over the years. Jeanette Winterson in the Guardian: ‘The shop was open from midday till midnight and, if you needed a place to stay, you could sleep in one of the beds hidden under the bookshelves . . . I found a second home at Shakespeare and Company. George always gave special privileges to writers – he lent me his dog to keep me company. He was an affront to modern capitalism, because he ran a successful business that put people, culture and books before money. He made his own world, and that is the best that anyone can do.’

Founded in 1951, a port in a storm for Durrell & Burroughs & Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti and countless others since, Shakespeare & Co has become ‘heritage’, a place to tick off on the tourist map. It can’t help but. Is it just that? Because of George Whitman, and because of Sylvia his daughter, no. They still take in the tumbleweeds. They still have a whole floor of books that are there not for selling but for reading, that’s a library from which you can borrow for free. Saara Marchadour, ex the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, now works there. If not exactly your own home, it’s like your best friend’s home: a place more interesting, more exciting, than your own, and you wish it was yours, and though you’ll leave or it will kick you out, because that’s the other thing homes are for, it will still be there.

For the record

I was asked today for a photo of my mum, so I went into the albums, and here is not my mum but the first school I went to, in a village in Yorkshire. ‘Village’ romanticises it, it was really a dormitory suburb of Leeds, but it wasn’t big and this was the complete local school. That’s Miss Williams at the back, who taught everything: reading, writing, maths up to long division. The school was not a building, it was this gathering of children that took up space where space was offered. The church was welcoming, offering its adjacent hall, outside which the second picture is posed. Circa 1960. Have you ever seen so many little white cotton socks in a row? My brother is in there, on Miss W’s left, peeking from behind the girl in front. The punishment for badness was this: to have to stand in the corner, facing the wall, with a blackboard duster on your head.

I don’t remember much. Maths: a number on the doorstep, to be carried over and knock on the next door. I do remember that I wasn’t good at bowing my head at the name of Jesus, during prayers. I think (all this thinking) I was thinking about it too much, and came in a bit early or late. I had to have private lessons in the cloakroom, where everyone hung up their wet coats. (Did Miss W speak some random speech, with the name of Jesus thrown in at random?) I did try. The whole thing was not about trouble-making but about being over-conscientious, which made me physically inhibited. I was the older brother. (Later, at an appalling minor public school, I was hopeless at marching, at getting the left arm forward at the same time as the right foot, and I had to have private lessons in that too. In the end they gave up and made me a lance-corporal, so I could stand to the side and shout.)

I had left the village school by the time of the second photo, but I’m in the top one, taken a year or two earlier, when the children were fewer and Miss W is looking a little less weary. For the record: back row, left to right: Stephen Nettle, Jeremy Willis, me, Jane Kirby, Keith Wallace, Howard Cliff, Michael Yeadon. Front row: Diana Macintosh, Alastair Cliff, Richard Ginever(?), Marta Watson, Philip Sinclair.