The new Forward Prize requirement

For the Forward Prizes this year, submissions have to be accompanied by author photos. At the risk of sounding like UKIP, this is another pointless and wholly unnecessary little rule.

Most writers, I think, are perfectly happy to supply event and prize organisers, and newspapers too, with photos. A few are not. This is fine; there’s no problem here. A problem only arises when someone makes a rule requiring all writers to supply photos. For the Forward the organisers presumably want photos for publicity purposes (any other reasons?); but if, say, out of a shortlist of six writers one doesn’t want to supply a photo, why does this matter? Who does this hurt?

The reason that photos are required at submission stage, Susannah Herbert of the Forward Arts Foundation says, is to minimise ‘admin, aggro and to-and-fro at the shortlist stage’. How so? Most publishers will, I think, paste a photo into a Word document with the author’s mini-biography (also required), print out, and send this with the books. There’s no mention of sending electronic files. At the shortlist stage, the Forward will then have to ask publishers to re-send the photos as jpegs. Rather than minimising admin, this process increases it.

There happens to be a CBe author who is not keen to supply a photo. Susannah Herbert suggests that surely the author and I ‘are ingenious enough to figure out a way through this little challenge’. Maybe we are. But we are not in primary school.

CBe 2013 4/ Todd McEwen, The Five Simple Machines

The epigraph page of The Five Simple Machines offers a definition (‘Machine: any device or apparatus for the application or modification of force to a specific purpose’) and (for anyone who wasn't paying attention in class) a helpful piece of information: ‘The term “simple machines” is applied to the six so-called mechanical powers – the lever, wedge, wheel and axle, pulley, screw and inclined plane.’ Thus far, it could be an physics textbook (except I doubt many of those are dedicated ‘To the Champagne Girls’). Then comes the opening sentence: ‘As in Archimedes’ case, there was nowhere to stand – I was like those wooden statuettes you get in Africa, the little guys with the big diks. They’re always rearing back, the dik jutting out, waving their arms as if they’re thanking the moon for giving them such a braying donkey of a hard-on.’

So: it’s about sex. But I publish books for their writing, not for their subject matter, don’t I?, and here is the same headlong exuberance and wit with an undertow of time passing that won me in Todd McEwen’s Who Sleeps with Katz (2003), a storm of a book, both elegaic and celebratory, about New York. If anyone had told me, when I first read Katz, that I’d sometime be publishing this man myself, I’d have said sure, and pigs can fly and bankers will surrender their bonuses. I’m privileged. If it was by Todd McEwen, I’d publish a book on mechanical engineering. This is not that book.

The cover is miminalist, as per usual, but the picture below, Parade amoureuse (1917) by Picabia, is included as the book’s frontispiece.

CBe 2013 3 / Tony Lurcock, No Particular Hurry

Tony Lurcock, who lived for some years in Finland and has a deep affection for the country, and who over a decade or two or three has read widely in the travel literature of that country, sent me in 2010 the manuscript of Not So Barren or Uncultivated, an anthology of writing by British travellers in Finland between 1760 and 1830 – and though this seemed not, at first glance, a natural CBe title, it won me over. In the Preface Lurcock explained the method: extracts from ‘a score or more of accounts, with a short introduction to each writer’, with a commentary within each chapter linking the chosen passages from each writer and an Introduction in which ‘I have presented the writers against the background of their times, describing some of the cultural, social and literary ideas which they reflect’. He added: ‘It is by no means necessary to read the introduction to enjoy the contents of the book, nor need the book be read chronologically, in full, or indeed at all.’ And thereby hooked me.

Here is the second book: No Particular Hurry: British Travellers in Finland 1830–1917. Reading these compilations is like travelling through Finland in a coach with Mr Lurcock and assorted other passengers who enter and exit along the way; the scenery is stunning, the road bumpy, the food and accommodation variable, the conversation continuously engaging – not least because, as one of the reviews of the earlier books remarked, ‘Lurcock’s own commentary is often at least as worth reading as the texts themselves’. He manages to be both scholarly and entertaining, a rare feat that other reviews of the previous picked up on (‘a valuable work of scholarship and also very readable’; ‘a gem of a book which will delight the scholar and the general reader alike’). Of some of his writers he is clearly fond; with others, his comments on their writing style give the game away: ‘This mixture of sub-Wordsworthian and evangelical response to Finnish nature is not matched by any other British traveller, which is just as well, since her feelings seem to be beyond the reach of grammar’; ‘Reading the dull slabs of Hill’s prose (“The hills of Finland are not of any considerable elevation ...”) prompts some belated condonation of Atkinson’s verbal excesses.’ There is praise too: ‘Travers has the ability to describe the unspoiled countryside without either idealising or sentimentalising it.’

In the period covered by No Particular Hurry, the transport and accommodation have improved, so that what is recorded here is, overall, ‘The mutation of explorers into travellers into tourists.’ But the travellers remain individuals, fussing about their tea-time or impatient for adventure. They include Bartholomew Sulivan, who sailed with Darwin on the Beagle; Arthur Evans, the Knossos man; and a much larger number of women writers than the previous book. They have difficulties with bedbugs and mosquitoes (‘we passed that night in a condition bordering on frenzy’) and with food: ‘With regard to that brown rye-cake of Lapland, I brought a piece home to England, which my dog saw and annexed. He is a fox-terrier of lusty appetite, and he tried to eat it. He tried for a whole afternoon, and finally left the cake alone on a lawn, very little the worse for the experience.’ And sometimes they have difficulty with the locals: ‘They were all able-bodied Finns, though one (and he was the strongest) had a hump like a Brahmin cow, another had a hare-lip, and the headman possessed a most virulent squint’; a guide had ‘about as much sense of humour as a crayfish’.

But many are also deeply impressed by what they see. The high level of literacy and education: ‘It is certainly not creditable to us as a nation that we should be so behind in education those we have previously considered half-barbarous Finns. They can hardly believe that numbers of people in England cannot read.’ The relaxed attitudes to nakedness, and not just in the saunas: ‘In the rural districts mixed bathing is frequently indulged in by the peasants. And yet there is practically none of that “Peeping-Tom”ism which the elaborate toilets of the fair bathers in more sophisticated lands seem to attract.’ The position of women (Finland was the first nation to allow women to vote, and the first in which they entered parliament): ‘In no other country was such equal opportunity for every kind of knowledge, livelihood, and work given to women.’

In the 1850s there was a war – part of what we now know as the Crimean War, but this was a significant part of that, as the British (and French) attempted to keep the Russian fleet blockaded in the Baltic and divert their resources – and it was complicated: the enemy was Russia, the overlords of Finland, not the Finnish people, and to get the Finns on board ship for parties and dancing the Brits had to pretend they were taking them prisoner, so that the Russians wouldn’t see them as collaborators. And because it wasn’t really so far away, aristocrats who fancied a bit of action cruised out for a spot of war-tourism.

Travel writing of the old school is a genre contemporary writers can play with: see, for example, Ellis Sharp’s Intolerable Tongues, in which Donald Ebenezer McCollum, PhD, a buttoned-up son of the manse, treks off to the Holy Land in 1939 with a pith helmet and a sun umbrella and a publisher’s commission to write ‘an uplifting tale of travel to a region both divine and colourful’ and becomes monstrous; or Lydia Davis’s ‘Lord Royston’s Tour’. But, skilfully presented, it needs no such tweaking. Lurcock is also the author of a history of an amateur cricket club, and somehow he manages to include six references to cricket in this book about Finland. In around 1881 ‘Rae arranged a cricket match against an all-Lapland XI, captained by “the Doctor”, and bowled out Lapland for 0 in their second innings’.

Shorts

I think they’re catching. Tomorrow eve I’ll be reading with Stephen Knight at the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney and the event is billed as ‘Poetry on Broadway’ but it won’t be poetry I’ll be reading but on the other hand what to call them, these pieces? In this case I mean the pieces, single prose paragraphs appended to black-&-white photos, that make up the Days and Nights in W12 book. Some are non-fiction, some are fiction, some are speculation/reflection. It a kind of writing that, after I’d given up on poetry (or vice versa), just bubbled up. Definitely not prose poems. Not flash fiction either.

(Stephen Knight’s own ‘novel’ Mr Schnitzel, by the way, is another example of the kind of betwixt-&-between form of writing that can surface when neither poetry (I’m guessing that it seemed to be coming slowly; or that there was material which Stephen wanted to get into his writing but the poetry door was closed) nor prose fiction (all those ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’, all that bother with beginnings and endings and ‘character development’ and so on) seems right. Mr Schnitzel: autobiography, memory, retellings of magical tales: try it.)

And then this week an artist sends me a series of short pieces he wrote – one or two paragraphs each – during a spell at the British School in Rome. And from someone else, both poet and novelist, two sequences of short prose pieces, one of them tentatively described as ‘Improvisations’. Which suggests something experimental, minimalist – but those words (and certainly their associations: formal concerns drowning out character and wit) are not the right ones. The pieces feel feel entirely natural; reading them is a pleasure.

This may be because the form chimes with the usual way in which I pay attention. TV: if I come in late, the last thing I want to be told is ‘the story so far’: I watch and am held (or not) by what happens to be on the screen at the moment, and rarely stick around for the ‘ending’. Some people read novels like this: Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg & The Little Flower Girl is among a friend’s favourite novels, but he’s never read it straight through.

In last week’s Saturday Guardian, there’s a profile of Aleksandar Hemon in which at one point he says: ‘I went back to things I had written, many of the things I had written in the 90s, and there was only one paragraph that I really liked.’ Nods and grins of recognition. But there was at least that one good paragraph. Which might prompt another one, not necessarily in a narrative way, and another. And then how they relate to one another itself becomes interesting. And then the word collage may become applicable, and we’re into territory written about by David Shields – there are precedents and parallels and more to come.

On being turned down (again) by ACE

At least, if you haven’t got any funding, you can’t have your funding cut. But this turning-down is getting tedious.

I’ve made three applications to ACE for funding support for the CBe publishing programme and all have been turned down. For the last two, the reason given was simply ‘competition for funds’: ‘your application met the criteria’ – I’ve seen the assessment report for the most recent one, and it’s wholly positive – but ‘we had to make difficult choices’.

The application which ACE responded to last week was for money to pay a part-time freelance marketing/sales person for one year. The plan was to use the expertise of this person to set up new patterns of selling which could be largely self-sustaining – that could be carried forward by someone keen but less experienced, or even just me, and not require further external funding. Amount applied for: £12,580. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea. A year and a half ago I took consultancy (and paid for this myself): look at CBe, I said to the publishing consultants, and tell me how I could operate better, and in particular sell more books. They gave me a report and recommendations, the first of which was: ‘Recruit a part-time marketer.’

The chief difficulties for all small presses are: getting the books known about and getting them out into the world. I’ve tried, I still do. Amazon: they’ll list the books, but unless I join their so-called Advantage scheme for small presses (which involves them buying from me at 60% per cent discount, and me paying an annual fee to be a member of this scheme) they’ll usually list the books as ‘temporarily out of stock’. Waterstones, an example: months before publication, their Independent Publisher Co-ordinator approved proofs of a book I sent him and said he had ‘alerted the relevant buyers’; after publication, no copies in the shops, and when a customer inquired she was told that the book hadn’t been printed.

To bridge the gap between small presses and the retail outlets there is Inpress, which represents around thirty small presses to the book trade and has regular meetings with Waterstones. The presses pay an annual membership fee, and also a cut to Inpress on every book going out of the distributor’s warehouse to the shops (irrespective of whether Inpress has actually had anything to do with the sales). Inpress is ACE-funded, and in theory is a fine idea. CBe has been a member of Inpress since January 2012. But the figures for April 2012 to January 2013 show that the number of CBe books going out of the warehouse was 20% down on the previous year, when CBe had no trade representation at all.

So, the application to ACE. I did have, stupidly, some confidence that it would go through. Marketing and sales are considered important by ACE: back in 2011, when I queried the continued ACE funding to Faber of £40,000 a year (at a time when they were cutting funding to the PBS, the Poetry Trust and a number of publishers), Antonia Byatt of ACE replied that the funding was to enable new talent to benefit from Faber sales/marketing expertise. (Which is a reasonable argument; though the sales figures she gave me were hardly impressive.)

(As for the books the marketing help would be for, forgive a brief rehearsal – for the benefit of newcomers to CBe – of the track record. Start-up costs for CBe in 2007: £2,000. No external funding. For best first novel by a writer over 40, McKitterick Prize 2008. The two first collections of poetry were both PBS Recommendations, were both shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize and both won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; there’ll be a third first collection later this year. Other shortlistings include two other Forwards and the Popescu translation prize. [I’m wary of the whole prize culture; it’s a lottery; but for a publisher without publicity or marketing resources this kind of public recognition can make a big difference.] Alongside new writers, Gabriel Josipovici, David Markson, Christopher Reid. And Apollinaire, Gert Hofmann, Francis Ponge, others, in translation. Reviews, yes. A TV film adaptation, a Glyndebourne youth opera adaptation.)

Of course I don’t have a right to funding for CBe. And if I do apply, what I really want to ask for is money for a Party, a big and lavish one, because generosity and goodwill and well-lubricated social interaction are certainly more fun and may in the end be more effective than any tick-box marketing initiatives. But right now I’m thinking there’s simply no point in applying to ACE again. (Or possibly anyone else; to an initial inquiry to another funding body last year I received no reply at all.)

Meanwhile, some plans to get more books out there will probably go ahead: a partnership scheme with selected independent bookshops, whereby they commit to ordering CBe titles on a regular basis in return for a healthy discount; the circulating library notion; a pop-up shop for a week in July. But there’s only so much that one part-time person (for a liveable income, I spend most of my time doing non-CBe work) can do, and I certainly can’t carry forward this year’s level of activity into next year without help. Last year a friend sent me a postcard of the cave in Scotland where Bonnie Prince Charlie hid out – I’m tempted. I’m even in training. On the same day the ACE letter came the boiler broke down, and there’s still no heating or hot water in the house. I am in, according to the automated menu I get each time I phone the insurance company, an ‘ongoing home emergency event’.

Hofmann, O’Brien, Knight, Robinson and ‘difficult choices’

It’s not easy to explain the appeal of a man whose whole manner and presence appear calculated make manifest the inherent awkwardness (‘I’m wriggling’) of a public event celebrating the written word. But it’s there. The event for The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann at the London Review Bookshop last night was sold out, standing room only. People travelled from Sheffield, Norfolk, France, for this one event on a cold night. Arturo Di Stefano brought along, for handing over to its subject, the original portrait painting that is reproduced as the book’s frontispiece. There were people who have known, worked with or read Hofmann for decades, many of whom hadn’t seen one another for a very long time. (There was no one from Faber.) After the official part, the mingling and talk continued for a long time. ‘I think I’m a bit in love with him,’ someone told me. I suggested she wasn’t the only one. She told me to get to the back of the queue.

In the US – which is Hofmann’s home country now, though it’s probably better to leave home out of it and just say the country where he lives – there is a new theatre prize: the Edward M. Kennedy Prize. A prize worth winning: $100,000. Today the joint winners were announced. One is Dan O’Brien, for The Body of an American, a play which, in the words of the announcement, ‘examines the challenges of war reporting, specifically the ethical and personal consequences of the publication of a famous photograph showing the body of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993’. War Reporter, Dan O’Brien’s book of poems exploring the same material, will be published by CBe in September.

Next Thursday, 28 February, there’ll be a CBe reading at the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney. Stephen Knight will read from The Prince of Wails and I’ll be reading myself, possibly as Jack Robinson. Space limited; £3, includes wine; more info here.

For CBe, this year is big. More new titles than in any previous year. A pop-up shop has been booked for the first week of July. Emails have gone out to a large number of independent bookshops inviting them to join a partnership scheme, whereby they commit to ordering CBe titles in return for a healthy discount. A smaller initiative, the Circulating Library, was set in motion last week. To date, CBe comprises just myself, and most of my time I’m doing other work to bring in a liveable income. But the thing is now too big to be run by just me, and before Christmas I applied to ACE for money for a part-time freelance marketing/sales person. As I was writing this, the post arrived: the application has been turned down. (‘Although your application met the criteria, we had to make difficult choices …’). If I had time, I’d frame the letter and hang it somewhere.

ED

Copies of The Manet Girl, a book of short stories by Charles Boyle, arrived yesterday.* The last book under my own name was twelve years ago (The Age of Cardboard and String, 2001). In the meantime there has been 24 for 3 under the name Jennie Walker and Recessional and Days and Nights in W12 under the name Jack Robinson. I prefer those names.

Jennie and Jack released me from being me, who as far as writing (poems) was concerned had got stuck in certain routines, mannerisms, that I didn’t know how to, hadn’t the ability to, get out of. I was type-cast, and beginning to bore myself (and therefore, surely, the reader too). And now, in in a book with my own name on it, I worry that I’m reverting to type. In part this may have to with the form: the default mode of the short story – at least in the Anglo-American-Irish-perhaps-Russian-too tradition, which I feel to be almost my genetic inheritance – is Exquisite Doom. I mean, finely written and judged but life seen essentially as a vale of tears, in which little epiphanies of happiness or alternative possibility briefly flicker. Larkin has something of this in poetry; it’s there in many films too, good ones, photographed and paced and acted so beautifully, so persuasively, that you swallow the over-arching vale-of-tears view of life as the only one on offer.†

It is seductive. It chimes with perhaps most people’s experience of life. Religions collude (us miserable sinners). Statistically, politically, the world is a hell-hole. But there’s a part in me that, to the vale-of-tears view, doesn’t want to assent, and that’s the part I want to get into the writing. Not, obviously, in a cute happy-ending way; but not settling too easily for doominess. I don’t think I’ve done that in the stories, or not enough. (Though there are sentences, passages, that were worth the writing and I hope worth the reading. You decide.) But I’m a newcomer to the form, and I’m learning the ropes.


* After I’d seen the first copies in a bookshop, where the bookseller placed copies in front of me and suggested I sign. We looked at each other. I have never understood, I said, why anyone would want to buy or own a book with the biro-scribble of someone they’d never met defacing the title page. He nodded. The books went back on the shelf.

† Last week I watched, for the second time, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, a fine film with a deeply depressing ending. The plotting near the end was suspect, maybe manipulative. It didn’t have to end that way. In my head it has a different ending. There are both films and books that I should maybe stop watching/reading 20 minutes/pages before the end.