Putinesque in the Cotswolds

Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre was celebrated at Daunts in Holland Park on Wednesday last week. It was joyful, there was joie de vivre, and I could post photos to illustrate that but not now. This is not the right week.

Among the poems Paul read was one from the Kurdish, starting: ‘When the first people were fleeing, I fled. / When the first fires were started, I was burnt.’ The Kurdish man he had the original from, not a poet at all, was there.

Another poem for the book, about the body of a migrant child washed up on a beach, didn’t make the cut. How to write that poem better? How to live better? ‘“There’s no one to say,” she said flatly.’ That’s the reply given by a woman in a novel I’m currently reading to a man who has just said, in the course of a desultory domestic argument, ‘I wish someone would tell me how I can live.’

There I go again, back into books. I’m bookish. Books are important but they are not that important. Instead of a photo of a book launch, here’s a picture of a Putinesque building designed ‘for an estate in the Cotswolds near the village of Chipping Norton, UK’. If the owners run out of milk, they can pop next door to David Cameron. I’m sure his fridge is well stocked. ‘Named St John's House, the 6,692-square-metre home has been drafted for a 60-acre site that is currently being sold by Sotheby’s International Realty.’ After 24 February there may be fewer shell companies owned by Russian oligarchs in the bidding queue but there are still plenty others this government of shopkeepers kowtows to. What's happening in Ukraine is happening not least because of the continued greed, corruption and complicity with Putin this country has consistently voted into power.

2007–2022

I’m getting the ducks in a row for 2022. Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre is already here and will be officially (by which I mean joyously) launched at Daunts, Holland Park, on 23 February. June: Stretto, a novel by David Wheatley, well-known as a poet but there are things you can do in prose you can’t do in poetry and here are some of them. Later in the year, say September, essays by the multi-tasking Patrick McGuinness (poet, novelist, translator, academic, critic; Tunisia, Belgium, Wales).

Also: a reissue of Agota Kristof’s trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), previously published by CBe in two volumes in 2014 and 2015, and her brief memoir, The Illiterate. And slim A-format books from Caroline Clark (after Sovetica last year) and me (after The Other Jack last year). Given the recent steep rise in printing costs, slim-and-small makes senses.

2022 is the fifteenth anniversary of the start date of CB editions, 2007. The photo above was taken outside the CBe pop-up shop in Portobello Road back in 2013. CBe has no Arts Council funding and relies entirely on sales to stay afloat. Huge thanks to those readers who have taken up the 10-books-for-£70 offer and welcome to new readers – see ‘Season Ticket’ on the website home page, from where a complete list of CBe publications, 2007–2022, can be downloaded.

CBe in 2022

As I come out of hibernation, CBe in 2022 is beginning to take shape.

First, a second poetry collection by Paul Bailey, who began publishing his distinguished fiction in 1967, has been Booker-Prize shortlisted twice, and has a new lease of life in poetry. Ali Smith on his first collection, Inheritance, from CBe in 2019: ‘Unsentimental, funny, affectionate, deeply moving, the poems read almost off-the-cuff but work at levels of exactness, kindness and observation that throw open a whole closed century of English class-shift and time-shift … A slim, calm volume whose resonance is huge.’ Joie de vivre, the new book, is here.

To follow … Stretto, a radical and audacious debut novel, as the blurbspeak has it, by the poet David Wheatley. It ‘takes its title from a musical term describing the effect when a fugue subject begins to duplicate and accompany itself before it has finished, causing a complex pile-up’. Later, essays by the polymath (poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, editor, translator) Patrick McGuinness. And maybe Andrew Elliott will resurface. And maybe the start of a new series of short A-format books (which I’d like to call ‘smalls’ but won’t).

And not least, a reissue of Agota Kristof’s trilogy: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie. The English translations were first published in 1986 and the early 1990s; CBe reissued them in 2014 and 2015; CBe’s license to publish lapsed but is now back in place. Possibly accompanied by a reissue of Kristof’s brief memoir The Illiterate, if only I can persuade the rights-holders that CBe can sell a serious number of copies.

Kristof was born Csikvánd, a village in Hungary, in 1935. ‘My father is the only schoolteacher in the village. He teaches all the grades, from the first to the sixth, in the same classroom …’ The above photo is how I imagine that classroom; for no apparent narrative reason, a falcon makes a brief appearance in The Proof. In 1956, aged 21, Kristof fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising with her husband and infant daughter and became a refugee in Switzerland. She wrote in French, a language ‘imposed on me by fate, by chance, by circumstance’, a language that ‘is killing my mother tongue’; her books are acts of resistance and their renewed presence on the CBe list is, to me, important.

For an interview with Kristof, see here. There’s a half-hour documentary on Kristof made in Switzerland in 2011 which I’d like to see but the app through which I need to pay to watch is unavailable in the UK. Any helpful suggestions will be welcome.

Parish notes: a gentle reminder that the Season Ticket available on the home page of the website – 10 books over 10 weeks for £70, post-free in the UK – has made all the difference over the Covid period. (Just 19 books were sold through the distributor this month. Neither paper costs nor heating costs are going down.)

Old year, new year

In 2021 CBe published eight books and paid its bills and made 215 trips to the post office. The financial adviser may differ but it was an excellent publishing year.

Also in 2021 I abandoned the pen-name Jack Robinson. The cover it originally served as (explained in The Other Jack) has long since been blown. But I’m still interested in the whole matter of Robinson (Good Morning, Mr Crusoe) and I’ve been reading and enjoying Peter Robinson’s learned, clever, funny, angry The Constitutionals – in which the narrator (nicknamed Crusoe in childhood) perambulates around the town of Reading, ‘hoping to trigger the end of neoliberalism by going for a walk’.

Among writers who died in 2021 was Michael Horovitz. He lived nearby and I was very fond of him. The photo above shows Michael arriving at Buckingham Palace for the poets’ jamboree a few years ago. Great jumper, but the pose is surely ironic: if he is proclaiming ‘To the barricades, citizens!’, he is also amused and even happy to be here, welcomed in to the heart of the establishment. He was invited, and he accepted. (As did I. I drove him there. There were checks under the car for bombs and checks under the car bonnet – which then refused to close, so we drove in through a very high archway with the bonnet clanging.) The contradiction here is often apparent in the national annual pantomime, the New Year’s ‘Honours List’.

As usual, getting the books into bookshops has been head-against-brick-wall. Roy Watkins’ Simple Annals was called ‘a masterpiece’ in the Literary Review and ‘an astonishing achievement’ in the TLS; on Leila Berg’s Flickerbook in the TLS, ‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within … This reissue is wholly welcome.’ Sales into bookshops: around 50 copies of each.

I liked the Republic of Consciousness tweet that said Carmel Doohan’s Seesaw was unlike even those other books that are unlike anything you’ve ever read. They meant it in a good way. And I liked the very recent review of Nuzhat Bukhari’s Brilliant Corners that had an informed argument and recognised the book’s context.

Small indie presses (and CBe is as small as they get) are often independent to the point of, when you dig down, loopiness. Titles that have sold in serious (to me) numbers – David Markson’s This Is not a Novel, Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, Will Eaves’ Murmur, May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break, Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch – are now not on the list because my license to publish ran out or someone with a faster car came along. That’s hardly a way to run a business. But publishing both is and isn’t a business, and it’s the isn’t bit that I enjoy more.

Looking back: click here to read a snapshot/bite-size history of CBe, 2007–2021. (If the link doesn’t work, you can download it as a pdf from the ‘About and News’ page of the website.) Despite the titles that have wandered off there are still around 70 in print and for the Season Ticket arrangement you can have 10 of these (you choose which) and usually a couple more for £70, post free. I am very, very grateful to everyone who has pressed that button – some of them three times, some four. CBe receives no Arts Council funding.

Looking forward: four or five new books in 2022. I can mention Paul Bailey’s Joie de vivre, which officially publishes in February, because finished copies are in, but I can’t spell out the others because I’m not that organised. Or I am organised but in a different way. Happy New Year.

Shopkeeping

This country is a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon may or may not have said, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Publishers whose rejections say ‘We think this is a wonderful book but sorry, no, we don’t think we can sell it’, politicians who decide what policies to adopt on the basis of how many people they think will vote for them … This is infantilising, and the attendant media embed this process.

But I happen to have a shop and it’s shopping season and I do want to sell more books. Not cupcakes. While thinking that four books a year might be about right for a one-person operation, CBe has published eight this year. I have failed better. In chronological order of publication: Roy Watkins, Simple Annals (‘an absorbing masterpiece’, Bernard O’Donoghue, The Literary Review; ‘an astonishing achievement’, Brian Morton, TLS); Dan O’Brien, A Story that Happens (‘a book for our times’, Alice Jolly, TLS); Nuzhat Bukhari, Brilliant Corners (‘Real-world violence juxtaposed against the page, the proximity of the singular self to the wider brutality of history’, Andrew McMillan, PBS Bulletin); Leila Berg, Flickerbook (‘Reading it is a joy; brutally honest depictions of childhood liberate the child within’, Norma Clarke, TLS); Charles Boyle, The Other Jack (‘Whatever a novel is, I feel this is what I want a novel now to be’, Jane Feaver); Tony Lurcock, Finish Off with Finland, the fourth book in his trilogy (‘entertaining, fascinating, astonishing’, Finland Forum); Carmel Doohan, Seesaw (‘an unexpected, novel challenge to binary thinking’, Laura Waddell, Scotsman); Caroline Clark, Sovetica (‘I was moved, in several directions: inwards, outwards, backwards in time and into my present’, Patrick McGuinness).

All orders from the website are welcome. Especially welcome are buyers who sign up to the Season Ticket, which works like a Book Token: 10 books of your choice for £70, post-free in the UK, for yourself or for Uncle Arthur. You’d pay the same for designer socks.

Below, the pop-up shop in Portobello Road run by CBe a few years ago:

CBe Season Ticket

When I was eight years old I wanted to be a bus driver. Since 2007 I’ve been driving a bus called CB editions and although when you get on you can never be completely sure where the bus is going – it doesn’t always stick to the same route, sometimes it goes a little off-piste – the views out the window are lovely.

You can buy tickets from the website. You can also buy a Season Ticket. This is the new name for the Lockdown Subscription, which was first offered at the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 – since when, a number of readers have come back for repeat subscriptions. New name but everything else stays the same: ‘For £70, you’ll receive one CBe book per week in the post for a period of 10 weeks. (£7 per book, free delivery, and sometimes I’ll throw in two books rather than one.) UK addresses only.’ All the books on the website are available, plus Will Eaves’s Murmur and Agota Kristof’s The Notebook. To tell me which books you want – or which you don’t want – just email info@cbeditions.com.

It works like a Book Token: you choose your own books. People have been known to buy subscriptions – sorry: Season Tickets – as presents for friends and family. Just saying.

Not cricket

Above, title page of a book sent to me last week by a CBe author who knows I like cricket. Bought in a charity shop, which feels right. First published 1936, ‘revised and reprinted’ 1946. There was a world war between those dates but you’d hardly notice, reading the book. 'The Author': buttoned-up.

It’s not cricket: ‘said to mean that someone's behaviour is unfair or unreasonable’ (Collins English Dictionary). ‘If behaviour is not cricket, it is not fair, honest or moral’ (Cambridge Dictionary). Yorkshire cricket’s defence against the testimony of Azeem Rafiq, Yorkshire cricketer, about racism in Yorkshire cricket was – for as long as they could hold the line, for as long as they and not Rafiq held the power to decide what is ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’ – that it wasn’t cricket.

I’m invested. I’m Leeds-born and I’ve watched not just Jonny Bairstow but his dad, David Bairstow (who played for Yorkshire and England and killed himself). I’ve even written a novel about cricket. And in football I follow Leeds, who signed one of the first black players to play top-flight English football, Albert Johanneson, I watched him too, who got monkey chants every game and who died alone in a Leeds council flat, his body not discovered until a week later, a quarter of a century ago, yesterday, today.

Yorkshire cricket is institutionally racist, clearly. (No sport has more obvious links to empire than cricket.) As is this country, as are dictionaries and Eng Lit and a whole lot of publishing and me, I grew up within these institutions. Stop arguing the toss; stop putting quote marks round that phrase. I’ve been trying to make this not about me, but I am implicated. Is Rafiq going to win Sports Personality of the Year in December (for lit readers, it’s kind of the sport Booker Prize)? I want that.