25K

Another prize? Here is a new prize of £25,000 for a single short story. You could pay a nurse’s annual salary with that, or a couple of ‘clinical support workers nursing’, or publish several books or keep an independent bookstore alive or set up a whole new publishing company. The prize has six judges, all with fine mainstream credentials; there’ll be some excellent writers looking at that list of names and wondering whether it’s really worth their entering.

The short story is not, despite the received wisdom to the contrary, neglected. There are writing courses galore; far more mainstream publishers have story collections on their lists than, say, poetry; there are more opportunities for short-story publication in magazines, both printed and online, than ever before (probably more opportunities than good stories); and there are many prizes too, the biggest of these (until now) being the BBC National Short Story Award, which declares itself ‘the largest award in the world for a single short story’ – now trumped by the new Sunday Times one, offering ‘the largest prize for a single short story in the world’.

This is a mine-is-bigger-than-yours shoot-out between heavyweight sponsors eager to show off their cultural credentials. Money from banks and other wealthy institutions, yes please, but there are more interesting and imaginative ways in which they could be doling it out.

PS: Another example of non-neglect: the display stand at Foyles in Charing X Road that’s currently showcasing the recent Harper Perennial books of classic short fiction: Melville, Wilde, Stephen Crane, Dostoyevsky, Willa Cather, Tolstoy. Each book includes stories that are not in the standard Penguin collections. And the covers are lovely and so is the text design. And each book contains a ‘bonus’ story by a contemporary writer from a collection of stories newly published – slightly corny, perhaps, but as a way of promoting new short stories, and of getting them into the hands of readers, this is a far more imaginative and practical idea than another thumping prize. Has the Sunday Times even noticed this series? I think not.

26

More praise for J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical:

‘A single, book-length poem telling the story of Rocky, a dyslexic boy who grows up on the Isle of Skye, dropping out of school and learning his lessons from the land. Sounds old-fashioned and Wordsworthian when you sum it up like that, but it’s an amazingly fresh, assured piece of work, full of memorable episodes, all beautifully told. On a first reading, you can enjoy it purely as a great story (perfect for film adaptation). But then you can revisit it time and again just to savour the music of the language. Best thing I’ve read in a long while.’ – Nick Asbury

This is from the website of 26 – which seems to be a kind of networking site for marketing copywriters, brand consultants and the like, founded ‘to inspire a greater love of words, in business and in life’. There’s a page on which members recommend ‘anything that hits the spot’ (Nat Mech falls between the Museum of London and a Jonathan Meades DVD set). I’m thinking it all looks a bit too mission-statementy for me but then, oh, look, Elise V is a member and Simon Armitage too and they do some odd and interesting things.

Nobel Prize for Embarrassment

Annually, both funny and shameful, and I think we win it every year – none of the literary eds knows what to say about the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature (unless they’re Brit or American). Robert McCrum, ex-Observer lit ed and still general panjandrum, admits on a Guardian podcast that he’s ‘never read a word she’s written’, and has been ‘frantically searching the web to find out things’. He says this from the comfort of knowing that he’s not alone.

Which is no excuse. For starters, Michael Hofmann’s translation of Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums (‘currently unavailable’ on amazon, hah) won the 1998 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which is arguably the major literary award in these English-speaking isles.

Being lazy by habit and temperament myself, I’m in no position to opinionate on Herta Muller. But I do think that the EU Lisbon Treaty, another trans-national thing which seems to embarrass anyone in a position of authority, should include a clause to this basic effect: that if you have no idea what’s going on in writing and publishing in the nearby European countries at the very least, that if you have no contacts or indeed any interest out there, you should be disqualified from any position of national literary influence (e.g., lit ed of a national newspaper, or senior editor at a mainstream publisher).

My friend Alan D shames me: if you are seriously interested in any writer writing in one of the major European languages, he tells me, then read them in the language they write in. It’s not difficult. He sends me obscure works of Stendhal in French editions. Recently he was learning Chinese; his hallway was decorated with gorgeous Chinese script. Sack McCrum and give Alan a decent wage.

(I’m writing this after visiting this afternoon West End Lane Books, 277 West End Lane, London NW6. They stock, their website claims, ‘over 1,000 imported titles’, and their poetry shelves in particular are brilliant. Liberating.)

Fear

So I was in Borders, deciding whether to spend £7.95 on the new Poetry Review so I could report here on a brief review of Christopher Reid’s A Song of Lunch – which because of the author’s story-telling skills is, according to the reviewer, not so much like Frank O’Hara’s lunch poems, which she was initially put in mind of, but more like a Philip Roth novel; and she likes it – but there, I can remember that, so did they have a copy of the TLS? No, not stocked.

A magazine they do stock is The Expatriate, and it’s frightening. (I'm sending my copy to Tracey Emin.) Not the travel articles (Bali, where ‘Heppy and Sudani helped us dress’; South Africa, where a guide is ‘prepared to leap from the truck to bring samples of elephant and rhino dung for comparison’); and not the tax advice for non-doms, which thankfully is so ill written that no one could possibly understand it. But the ‘security’ feature. ‘Polo shirts that can take the impact of a 9mm revolver’ – from £4,300. And ‘how about a bullet-proof handkerchief for your evening jacket? The Bullet-Proof Gentleman’s Pocket Square measures 270 by 270 mm and is made from military grade ballistic protective aramid to protect your heart.’

Heartbreak? Our servants can do that for us.

The Forward

The Forward Gold Cup was won by Rain, ridden by Don Paterson, owned by Faber; the Silver Cup for yearlings by The Striped World, ridden by Emma Jones, owned by Faber; best individual horse, Robin Robertson.

I was, obviously, favouring Christopher Reid for the Gold Cup and J. O. Morgan for the Silver, and though I’ve packed away certain emotions in a box and sealed it up, some sense of waste lingers.

The Forward defines its job thus: ‘to bring contemporary poetry to a wider audience’. Small-press books have little opportunity to reach a readership of any size. Some of the poetry magazines take note of them, but to reach beyond that tight circle the small presses need another platform. The books pages of the national newspapers are hardly going to provide that: the lit eds, busy folk, take short cuts, judging by covers – do they recognise the author’s name? Are they familiar with the imprint? No. Then it can’t be much good, can it, because if it was it would have been published by one of the big imprints. There was a chance last night that the Forward could have recognised the worth of small-press poetry, could have given it the platform it needs far more than the big publishers, and the chance went begging.

Nice to see J. O. Morgan’s name mentioned by one of the judges in the Guardian today as one of three of the also-rans ‘who would have graced the winners enclosure in another year’. Still, if I’m told again I should be proud to have published a book that got on the shortlist I shall hit someone.

Another race starts today: J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical is on a shortlist of five books, from an entry of 92, for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Also on that shortlist, books published by Salt, Yew Tree Press and Templar. No Faber, no Cape, no Picador.

I was steered home to West London last night, by the way, by Michael Horovitz, who has been in this game for decades longer than myself, and I salute him.

On second thoughts

Two pages of proof corrections from a book I worked on several years ago. (The book, the first of three volumes, was over a thousand pages long, and the corrections here were typical rather than exceptional. I quit before vols 2 & 3 arrived.)

Lawrence twice rewrote Lady Chatterley from scratch. Balzac famously rewrote at proof stage. Infuriating for the desk editors, but understandable: in life you generally get only one chance, but in writing you can revise endlessly (or until the publisher’s patience snaps) in the attempt to get it right. My mum once heard it said of a writer that she delivered her manuscripts letter-perfect and would allow not a comma to be changed – and for my mum, this showed what a wonderful writer she was. Me, I’m suspicious. Arrogance, just as much as indecisiveness, can be a sign of insecurity.

‘Getting it right’ suggests there’s a rightness to be had. I doubt there is, in any absolute sense. (Which are more right, the original, mostly unpublished versions of Raymond Carver’s early stories or those edited by his editor?) Still, it’s worth going for. Both writer and editor would agree on that, and it’s in their disagreements en route that a provisional rightness may emerge. This piece on editing by Barbara Epler of New Directions seems to me so wise there’s little more to be said (except that there always is): ‘Editing doesn’t seem to be a process of knowing but of asking. You just do the best you can. (And hope the book goes into a second printing to fix typos and add the right portrait to the frontispiece or turn the Japanese family crest upside up.)’

On size

A Close Look at: The Tall Windows of Mexico . . . Fire Hydrants . . . Rickshas of Bangladesh. (And a gratuitous pirate.) With the arrival of these books (each approx. 4 by 6 inches) yesterday, my desk became an altogether more colourful place.

The books (which follow last year’s books of Trinkets, Pebbles and Fallen Leaves) are the work of Ken Garland, legendary designer – books, posters, toys, games, many other things besides – and impresario of Ken Garland & Associates for forty years: ‘Those who worked with me between 1962 and 2002 have always been designers designing – no secretaries, no typists, no donkey-workers. There were never more than three of them at any one time. I intend no criticism of larger, probably more illustrious design groups when I say that, for me, an increase in size would have meant fruitless to-ing and fro-ing, more unexplained and unacceptable overheads, and less fun.’

Fun – is that why we do it? Producing small books, he his, I mine. Well, it helps. Serious fun, not fun-lite. Watch children at play: the absolute engagement, the surrender to the activity. And as any organisation (though obviously I’m thinking here of publishers and bookshops) increases in size, so too the to-ing & fro-ing and the overheads, and the joy diminishes.

Also yesterday, I went over to the Central Books warehouse, where the woman who’d packed a package of books I was collecting told me her boyfriend had four poetry books of mine and here they were and could I sign them, please. Golly. Usually when I go over I have coffee and gossip with Bill. Central aren’t one of the big distributors, but this feels right.

At some point I’d like to live by the sea, in a town where no building is higher than the trees.