Writers – Page 5 – My Own RE:public

And the winner is…

…all the books listed and fiction and lovers of the same one could say, but (with the exception of last year!) there can only be one winner of The 2020 Booker Prize, and that is Shuggie Bain, written by Douglas Stuart.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

On the BBC Radio 4 “Front Row” page there is (for the moment at least) a video of last night’s event hosted by John Wilson, in that hybrid digital mix – in person, far away, on tape – that we have become more use to than we would like this year – nominees keeping their distance, and others likewise, and Wilson, Margaret Busby and Bernadine Evaristo at the “Round House” in Camden. But I must say all were stoical, and found a very fine tone.

Margaret Busby, reminds me that her work as a publisher over decades has been instrumental in the diversification of talent, especially Black talent, in the UK – it may be only now that she sees, we see, the fruits of her labour. Evaristo, as representative of this. And Ishiguro and Atwood, that a Booker is nice but a body of work is better. President Obama – he, presumably responsible for the rescheduling – prompts me to remember at least of one of the reasons I forgive him his shortcomings: his love of books, and belief in the power of fiction. The Duchess of Cornwall; that royal patronage is not without its virtues, and you can love horses and Charles and also words.

Forget the gripe about the transatlantic bias, what a “great looking” group it was zooming in from afar, what choice readings we heard; more than enough reasons to read their work. Given the difficulties of this year, the Booker has done a very good job, and their jury to be congratulated.

When the next time is now

“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.

A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.

Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?

But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)

Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.

(Hilary) Mantel pieces

I recall a piece about Hilary Mantel in The Guardian the other day, which mentioned a forthcoming collection of essays; and I was immediately taken by the title: “Mantel Pieces”. This I thought very clever indeed – a nice play with name in the first instance, and then there is the association to fireplace which extends to frame and flame, warmth and light, kindle and burn, etc., and extended then to the shelf above – a piece, a place of display and decoration. Many attributes that could well apply to a fine piece of writing. And certainly to most everything put to page by Hilary Mantel.

Maybe it was that I was just a little too interested in what Mantel had to say about not making the Booker shortlist (pragmatic and gracious, of course!), or maybe it was not said; for whatever reason I failed to get that the collection does in fact comprise her contributions to the London Review of Books over thirty odd years, and this I register only now on reading this blog entry at the LRB. (A delightfully informative blog entry by the way; fulfilling the requirements as stipulated by the marketing department!) Mantel Pieces, then, is a compilation of twenty essays or reviews and, even more tantalising, each is accompanied by fragments of correspondence (for instance, with the editor Mary-Kay Wilmers) or artwork relating to the piece.

Fact-checking my own recollection: in fact, the subject matter of the collection was NOT said in the abovementioned Guardian article – only the October publication date. What it did say and I should add, is that at the moment Hilary Mantel is busily at work adapting The Mirror and the Light for the stage (alas, there is no mention yet of a continuation to the BBC television effort), and so, even if inclined to, she has little time to cry in her teacups, and obviously maintains an air of optimism in terms of a return to normality in the theatrical landscape in London.

And, diverting slightly, more generally speaking on the politics of book awards, I note the following:

As I predicted, there does appear again to be murmurings about the probity of opening up of the Booker to US authors (coming mostly from the conservative media in the UK granted), but Hilary Mantel is otherwise inclined and accepts the diversification argument and encourages British and Commonwealth authors to accept the challenge of greater competition. As I said: gracious. I was actually quite peeved, specifically about the Mantel omission and more generally am sceptical of conflating powerful US book market interests with good literature !
And then, this just read in the NYT, which is illustrative of the above said, and is some affirmation of my argument:

…another major literary event threatens to make an already overcrowded fall publishing season even more chaotic: the release of former President Barack Obama’s memoir, “A Promised Land.”
On Tuesday, the Booker Prize said it was moving its award ceremony, previously scheduled for Nov. 17, to Nov. 19 to avoid overlapping with the publication of Mr. Obama’s book…
…[this]could also fuel new criticism that the prize, originally established in 1969 to honor writers from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland, has become too Americanized and increasingly focused on the U.S. book market. American authors have dominated the Booker nominees in recent years, following a 2014 rule change that made any novel written in English and published in the U.K. eligible…

It is clear, the book business (and when all’s said and done awards are after all just another element of merchandising) operates on a global scale as with most everything else these days – for good or ill, and that is unlikely to change.

Yes, yes…I get it that the Booker people fear their winner will go under in the Barack Obama hype, it is just that I consider their argument somewhat specious – many, many people will read Obama and a lot, lot less people will read a fine contemporary novel, and some will read both, and maybe I am the latter, but they are hardly works in competition to each other. More honest would have been to admit to kowtowing to the pressure of monolithic publishing companies.

The good news is: in former President Obama, we have an ardent reader, from whom we can expect each summer one of his cult reading lists, which is sure to include National Book Award and Booker nominees and unknown gems and certainly NOT a de rigeur presidential afterlife – granted he has no reason to read a thousand pages of politicking; he lived it to write it!

Reading Reviews – on “Jack”

That’s a thing with pre-sale reviews: does oneread, or does one not? And that question arises especially when applied to a work long awaited, and, for me, that is the case with Marilynne Robinson’s Jack; her fourth novel in a series that started with Gilead in 2004, which is in stores, on shelves (or coming via one of those ubiquitous “distribution centres” or appearing on a screen out of thin air; named for a mythical tribe of female warriors, or for the tributaries of some mighty waters) next week.

Alas, the temptation can not be resisted, and all my resistance must be directed instead against undue influence. But I usually do this well enough.

Here, then, a selection from the last couple of days:

Jordan Kisner’s reading is the one with the most intellectual depth. It is clear she knows the place from where Robinson comes, metaphorically if not in a real sense. It may, or may not, be called “Gilead”, but I would guess it has the essence of nonetheless. An excellent essay, I think. Should I wonder that they – Kisner and Robinson – share a publisher? Well I could but I won’t – and her piece is certainly not uncritical, but it is written with admiration and serious intent. She really makes some quite profound observations, not the least her identification of “predestination” as a leitmotif in Robinson’s work:

…Robinson is a Calvinist, and over the course of these novels, Jack has stood out among her characters—troublesome, seductive, full of pathos—because he most represents a central theological question raised by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: Can a person be damned to perdition? Or, to use non-Calvinist language: Can a person be irretrievably and miserably wrong, broken, no-good, unsalvageable? If he is, and he knows that he is, what is he then to do? Does he have anything he can hope for?
The Atlantic, October 2020 issue

A wonderful extension of this, is Kisner’s assertion that Robinson has “trapped Jack and Della in a kind of structural predestination….”. This can only really be understood having read the other novels of the Gilead series with their sometimes parallel and sometimes circular chronologies, being such that we do know how it ends for Jack and Della. (Though I could qualify that and say: well, up to a point – who knows!)

Now, Dwight Garner at the NYT approaches Robinson with a determinably non-religious attitude. Which is okay, because I did likewise (and in some ways still do). But her work – and I can’t imagine this new novel to be otherwise – can not be understood without reference to the inherent Calvinistic stance from which it comes. Don’t say it can’t be done – see James Wood’s 2004 NYT piece; and I shouldn’t have to tell anybody where Wood stands when it comes to religion! It is obvious Garner can’t see much beyond the obvious when it comes to Jack; a miscreant, a bum – slick, unsavoury. As true as the nouns may be, so the adjectives. It’s just that I would call him: the loneliest of men; a weary, tormented soul. And Della? Garner says: “…[she is] a fascinating character [who] should resonate far more than she does…”. How can she possibly fascinate if she does not resonate? He goes on to bemoan that neither character has an “independent life” because the author has placed them both in “halters” of her own making. All I can say here is – besides well, they are her (Robinson’s) characters after all – is that I will return to this after my own reading.

Am I wrong in thinking that Garner didn’t have much interest in reading this novel (he sort of admits as much, or at least his ambivelence!) let alone reviewing it? Did the NYT have nobody else doing books this week? Anything by Marilynne Robinson deserves more consideration than that granted in this review. Mr. Garner didn’t have to like it, but he could have accorded just a modicum of the effort granted by Ms. Kisner. (Should I be sounding peeved, may I say in my defence, I am a really fair in this regard. For example, earlier in the year Daniel Mendelsohn gave a rather unfavourable review of Hilary Mantel’s final Cromwell tome, a lot of which I was not in agreement, but it was so well written, original in thought, fair in criticism …and respectful! That’s important I think, and what I miss in Garner’s review.)

A “Booker” update

Well, Hilary Mantel will not be winning a third Booker prize; the short list confirms that my laws of probability held true, and the closest to home-grown, so to speak, in the all but final call of the United Kingdoms’s premier book award is a Glasgow-born American – Douglas Stuart. But it is a diverse and interesting group, with some new names, and I do declare if very few seem to have much appetite for scandal in this ‘stranger than fiction’ year!

An interesting additive: here is a really nice piece in The New York Times, giving a glimpse of a socially-distanced, long-distance literary judging process in days of Corona. By the way, my attention momentarily turned to the accompanying screen shot of the jury at work, and the caption: “Emily Wilson, she/her, judge” – and a memo to myself to seriously investigate pronouns!

Booker 2020

Literary awards stop not for this mean, increasingly unpredictable virus making lives miserable – and to various degrees, dependent upon circumstance. Here, then, providing a modicum of distraction, the just announced longlist for The Booker Prize 2020:

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4^th Estate, HarperCollins)
The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4^th Estate, HarperCollins)
Apeirogon by Colum McCan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)

I can only say that I have only read Mantel; and the daunting task of writing my thoughts on her remarkable work remains on my longlist (of things to do)! And, I can only say what I’ve said before, and that is: the United States has any number of major book awards (National, Pulitzer being foremost) why on earth the Brits allowed them in the Booker a few years ago I really don’t know. Well of course one does – $$$! In my opinion, it is becoming too top heavy stateside these days – no antipodean, only one resident (I think) of the African continent, none from southern Asia, or the Caribbean. In fact there are only three listed from the UK which means, the laws of probability being such as they are, one may very well end up with a shortlist without a British writer! I hear already the screams of “Scandal!” – but what would the Booker be without controversy? Rarely has there not been a loud gripe of some sort – in or out, sponsor, judge … What was it last year? Oh, I remember – against all the “unwritten” rules, it was awarded jointly to Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.

And I will also say that I haven’t read Anne Tyler for donkey’s years, and she was a constant companion of … let me see… the third decade of my life. Can I read Tyler again without bemoaning my lost youth?

The jury is diverse which is good, and I also note with delight that Margaret Busby leads it and Emily Wilson is another of the judges. Of the latter I need say nought (see my never ending Odyssey project!), but Busby reminds me of The Daughters of Africa, which I would like to read after all these years and then their is last year’s follow up anthology.

The Booker Prize longlist July 28th 2020

Black on Black

The New York Times delves deep into its archives for reciprocated reviews from Langston Hughes and James Baldwin – Hughes on Baldwin’s collection Notes of a Native Son in 1956 and Baldwin on Selected Poems of Langston Hughes in 1959.

“When James Baldwin and Langston Hughes Reviewed Each Other” NYT June 26, 2020

The Times is of course quick to point out that writers are no longer, for obvious reasons, allowed to review each other, but this was it seems once an accepted practice. Who knows how much of Baldwin’s response to Langston Hughes’ collection – no artist wants to be told of their wasted gifts, and in the opening sentence! – was influenced by the latter’s review of his work a few years prior, in which, whilst admiring of the young Baldwin’s talents and the provocations of his arguments, bemoans the lack of emotion and artistic imperative. Hughes ends by stating that Baldwin’s points of view are too often attenuated by the tension he creates between an “American” society and a separate “Afro-American” identity, and only when he “fuses” these into a coherent entity, would he be able “…[to write] about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better…”.

Perhaps, here we have more than anything else a generational conflict (Hughes was born in 1901 and Baldwin in 1924), about what exactly a “Negro” writer should and could be during those pivotal years at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and where the balance is to be laid between art and the often harsh circumstances of reality. Langston Hughes rejected the too virulent anger he discerned in the younger generation and remained committed to the integrative possibilities of art, but for Baldwin that is is not enough and concludes his review piece by saying, and with dismay, that Hughes is : “…not the first American negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”

Making connections

Connections these days seem to bombard one! Or maybe it is that they only ‘seem’ to do so, given time enough to contemplate, reflect and make connections that may otherwise pass unnoticed. This then in The New York Times today, criticising and giving an ultimatum of sorts to the renowned Poetry Foundation relate in some ways to my two previous posts; firstly, that in respect to my revisit in the last days to The 1619 Project, and secondly, one about a call from black and minority writers for equal consideration in publishing.

In a literary section of the Project, mentioned mostly for the point of mentioning Jesmyn Ward!, I did also enjoy very much a poem by Eve Ewing, probably because her subject, Phillis Wheatley, a most extraordinary woman, born in West Africa, sold into slavery as a child and transported as a young girl to Boston, was known to me (from a poetry course I did a few years ago), and Wheatley’s story is such that one tends not to forget, and Ewing’s verse honours her short, tragic life. Following is a poem by Phillis Wheatley; from the Poetry Foundation [sic].

On Being Brought from Africa to America

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

- BY PHILLIS WHEATLEY

Ms. Ewing is amongst the very many initiators of a letter to the Poetry Foundation criticising not only the Foundation’s tepid response to the current antiracism efforts, but more generally the lack of structural and financial support of marginalised groups. And they don’t pussy foot around with their demands!

Eve Ewing and Jesmyn Ward, poetry and prose; black and gifted and successful, but ready to fight this fight for writers of color, or those otherwise marginalised, who may not have a voice.

From the NYT article, one also learns of similar initiatives in the theatre. Could it be that there really is change afoot? Could this be the moment, the generation, to continue fulfilling dreams not dreamed out?