Literary Encounters: David Meets Goliath

WATSONWORKS
Blog 30
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
March 2012

James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook


CONTENTS
Literary encounters (10) David meets Goliath
Notes in passing: Smothering heights?
Poems of place (7) Guernica
Correspondence Ned Baslow takes John Milton to task


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David meets Goliath

A selection from Pigs Might Fly a story set in the 1950s.

16-year old Clark Gable Stevens (nicknamed Curlew because one of his few talents is being able to imitate that wild bird of the moors) is suddenly faced with a crisis – having to give up his layabout existence and ‘grow up’. His father, proprietor of Fetterton’s Ritz Cinema, already in grave peril as the developers wish to flatten it in the name of commercial progress, has taken a fall. With a number of significant bones broken, he will be holed up in a hospital bed for days, weeks or even for ever. Who but his son Curlew can rescue the Ritz?

With his stalwart friends Curlew goes in to the window-cleaning business only to discover that Nigel Morgan, his rival in love for the fair Susan, has already set up his own window cleaning company. His assistants are the toughest muscle-men in the district.

Efficient as well oiled robots, the Amalgamated Federation of Underage Window Cleaners marches through the back doors of Edward Street, duck the washing lines and rap, at the exact same instant, on the council-house green doors.
And as if one voice serves for all of them, the good ladies of Edward Street give answer: 'Eeh, no luv, sorry...We've already called the window cleaners.'
Curlew is, as they say in books, 'taken aback'; or to be more exact, gobsmacked. To Mrs. Bolton at the end house, he protests, 'But there aren't any window cleaners in Fetterton, Mrs. Bolton. You were complaining about it in the chippy only the other day.'

Before Mrs. Bolton can explain, a voice from behind Curlew starts to make all things clear. 'Then you'd better do your 'omework proper, 'adn't you, Stevens?'
Curlew turns, feels a stab of terror – much as David must have felt faced by Goliath – at the sight and shadow of Frank 'Dumb-bell' Mason, the biggest, solidest muscle-man in town, known for his capacity to head bricks and not feel a thing. Two teachers are still off school for having warned Frank about ogling girls in the gym; and that was eighteen months ago…

Curlew's brain is struggling to work out just what is happening; or rather why, because what is happening is that he is being lifted off his feet by Dumb-bell Mason and carried out of Mrs. Bolton's backyard.
The why is soon evident. 'Feast yer eyes on that, Tadpole.' Dumb-bell points to a smart van drawn up at the street corner. In big letters are the words: MORGAN ENTERPRISES LIMITED: ALL THINGS OUR SPECIALITY. 'Geddit, Microbe? Us was first.'
Curlew does not need to guess that Dumb-bell has his assistants close by; but he asks anyway, 'I guess the Terrible Twins are also working this pitch, Frank.' He is referring to Kev the Crunch and Herb the Hangman. Together they comprise what Curlew calls them the Three Stodges.
'You guessed right.'

Dumb-bell Mason recites to Mrs. Bolton the window-cleaning charges as set by Morgan Enterprises. ''Front and back, will it be, Madam? That'll be three pound.'
'Three pounds?' Curlew hears himself exclaim. 'That's outrageous.'
'It does seem a bit steep,' says Mrs. Bolton.
Curlew forgets his personal safety: economics are now on his mind: 'We can do better than that, Mrs. Bolton,' he announces. Curlew is aware that his comrades, each at the same position in the backyard next door and next door but one two three four and five, are waiting for a sign.
He raises his voice to a shout. 'Three quid a house? That's a rip-off. It ought to be reported to the United Nations. We, in aid of the Save the Ritz Campaign, are offering a quid a house – ONE POUND A HOUSE, front and back. No quibbles, no hidden extras.'
Dumb-bell appeals, in an almost gentle, persuasive voice, to Mrs. Bolton:
'These are snotty-nosed kids, Mrs. They'll make a complete mess of the job.'
'Okay, Mrs. Bolton,' parleys Curlew, 'if we don't do the job to your satisfaction, we won't charge you a penny.'
'Two quid a house,' comes back Dumb-bell, looking black, and promising with a swift sideward glance at Curlew that his window-cleaning days are numbered.

But Curlew's character has always favoured words to personal safety. And the words are coming now. 'Don't you listen to that sort of business tactic, Mrs. Bolton. If he's having to cut his price, he's sure to skimp the job.'
…Mrs. Bolton makes her decision in favour of windows cleaned at a quid a house and all the other housewives in Edward Street opt for the same.
'Okay,' concedes Dumb-bell Mason, pride very damaged, 'once you're outside this backyard, Stevens, you'd better start prayin’.'
'Tell you what, Frank,' calls Curlew from the top of his ladder. Somehow he has to make an escape route for himself and his comrades. 'We can do a deal. After all, we businessmen must watch out for each other – right?'
Dumb-bell knows Curlew of old. He suspects him, and his sort: talkers. He despises his physical puniness, but fears his brains. 'Oh yeah?'
'Yeah. This street is long enough for both of us. There're fourteen houses, so we could finish our wack, that's seven –’
'I can count, block'ead!'
'Leaving seven for you to mop up the rest of Edward Street.'
'Bugger that,' calls Herb, 'not at a measly quid a shot.'
'Suit yourselves. But you could put your prices back up for George Street and Victoria Road.'

It is quite possible that, if an unexpected disaster had not struck, some sort of deal between the warring parties might have been arranged; and the physical survival of the Ritz Campaign Committee guaranteed.
Fate decided otherwise.
The first batch of windows has been duly cleaned, the jobs duly paid for. Curlew pockets Mrs. Bolton's pound but politely declines a glass of Vimto. It reminds him too much of blood.
Deep in gossip over her backyard wall with a neighbour, Mrs. Toliver at Number 11 has forgotten her husband's breakfast fry-up, which is about to become a fire-up.
Ronnie Whinnet is first to spot the smoke. 'Fire! Fire! – pan's on fire.'
Chippy Bulmer knows about frying-pan fires. His Dad's place once burned down completely, so his voice is the loudest, the most screeching:
'Fire! Fire! Call the Fire Brigade! The ambulance! The police!'
The good ladies of Edward Street go straight into a free-fall panic. 'My kitchen!' screams Mrs. Toliver. 'My new kitchen!'
Everybody rushes to her aid.
'Water – water!' yells Mrs. Toliver.
What a godsend, then, for the women of Edward Street to see salvation stacked beside the van of Morgan Enterprises: a row of full water buckets waiting as if already expecting this emergency.
One or two ladies get so enthusiastic about throwing the water through Mrs. Toliver's kitchen window that they let go the buckets as well. This brings out Mr. Toliver who's been reading the morning paper, unaware of what has been going on. Luckily he only gets a face full of the contents of a bucket rather than the bucket itself.

A 999 call brings out the Fetterton Fire Brigade. It arrives quicker than you could recite the Lord's Prayer. They must have smelt the smoke. The fire truck swings immediately into reverse; indeed so quickly that the driver misses seeing the Morgan Enterprises van parked in Edward Street back.
The crunch of metal can be heard three streets away, but not it seems by the driver of the fire truck. He continues to reverse, with Morgan Enterprises clanging on his tail, right up to Mr and Mrs Toliver's back door.
'It's okay, Officer,' says Mr. Toliver. 'Job's done.' He smiles as if disaster has been averted rather than multiplied. 'It'll have to be cornflakes for me this morning.'

Now could all this possibly be Curlew Stevens’ fault? Not the fire, not the Fire Brigade, not the damage to Morgan's wonderful new van – but the whole situation? His fault or not, he knows who is going to be blamed… He bellows, 'Comrades, this is a Red Alert. Repeat, Red Alert. To all points of the compass – run! Scarper! Get fled!'
It's as simple as that: surrender or scarper.
All but Chippy, Clem and the mastermind of the Save Ritz Campaign manage to duck the outstretched talons of the Three Stodges. Dumb-bell Mason has Curlew by the neck.
'YOU are goin' to pay dear for this little fiasco, 'orsefly. When I done wi'you, they'll not recognise you. Not even your mad Aunt. You'll be needin' more than plastic surgery – you'll be needin' a brush an’ shovel.'
Curlew is lifted off his feet and pinned over the bonnet of the damaged van. He reckons that unless he does some quick thinking, he'll be doing plenty of bleeding. He protests: 'You disappoint me, Frank.'
The comment, being unexpected, checks Dumb-bell's massive fist. 'You used to protect little-uns, underdogs.'
Now this is not strictly true. Dumb-bell did once warn off a big guy picking on a little guy, but it was for money. Still, he has his pride, and a principle or two. Curlew goes on talking. 'If you want to fight fair and square, Frank – okay, I'm up for it!'
Curlew does not believe that he has said this, but he understands why. He is playing for time And Dumb-bell knows it...

The condemned are marched to Market Square. On the way they pass St. Stephen's Church. The sight of its comforting stone portals gives Curlew the idea of making a sudden wrench and dart for it, and claiming … now what did they call it in the old days?
Ecclesiastical sanctuary.
…
'Right, Skunk!' The market place is deserted except for a few pigeons pecking among wood-framed stalls and windpools of litter. Truly, an ideal place for an execution.
'One last request, Gentlemen.'
Herb the Hangman grins through broken teeth. 'E wants a Christian burial, Frank.'
Kev the Crunch almost falls over laughing.
Dumb-bell Mason has stripped off his leather rallying jacket. 'You wanna make yer last will an' testerment, d' you, Lumpashit?'
Curlew is shaking. These guys really mean it. 'Er, if you don't mind, I'd like to…to request an adjournment pro tem.' He has not the slightest idea what an adjournment pro tem is, but then nor does any of the Three Stodges.
It sounds legal.
'Stuff yer big words, y'frozen funk. There won't be no jourment totem.’
‘What I mean, Frank, is – a delay.’
Now they all fall over laughing: 'A delay? 'E wants a delay!'
'Yes, just till I get my distance glasses back from the optician's.'
Dumb-bell never tires of showing his cannonball fist. 'You think y'll need specs to see this 'eadin' in yer direction, Foureyes?'
'You'd not fight a blind man, would you?'
'Blind? I serpose y' cleaned them winders usin' radar?'
Curlew pleads for life and liberty: 'A truce, that's all I'm asking for.' He is talking fast. 'What if I got our Campaign treasurer to hand over the money we made?' And faster: 'It'll take only seconds to get to his place and back.'
As if to prove this, Curlew tries a move in the right direction (for him, that is) only for his foot to encounter Kev the Crunch's ankle bone. As receipt, he is awarded an early birthday present in the form of Kev's unwrapped fist and a Christmas gift in the shape of brother Herb's kneecap.
The agony of it is one thing, but the worst of it is being shot up in the air as if he had no more substance than a bag of fleas. Curlew lands back on the market place cobbles and staggers straight into Dumb-bell who at this very same instant is pulling a huge pea-green sweater over his head.
'Oh no!' Curlew hears Clem and Chippy groan in unison.
Dumb-bell, head trapped in the sweater, loses balance. He emits a roar loud enough to awake the Ninth Legion from their slumbers in Our Annie's archeological trench; and in trying to respond to the blow, he tangles himself further, until the Growling Goliath is fighting himself.
To the casual observer, the shameful tumble of Fetterton's own Mister Invincible has been caused by none other than the Mighty Midget, Clark Gable Stevens, Pacifist Extraordinary.

On even ground, Dumb-bell would recover his balance in a second and end Curlew's triumph as instantly as it began. But even ground is not what Dumb-bell has fallen on: at this point, Market Square drops at a steep angle. With his arms still trapped in the pea-green sweater, Dumb-bell begins to roll in the direction of the Cenotaph.
There has been time during these events for a fair sized crowd of spectators to grow. It has witnessed, from afar, a youth incapable of knocking a hole through a pie-crust despatch Fetterton's answer to Rocky Marciano from here almost to eternity.
Could this be the beginning of a legend as long-lasting as Robin Hood and his Merry Men?
Probably not for, needless to say, raging bulls of Frank Mason's size, weight and muscle, are not to be obstructed long by lambswool, terylene, nylon or even polyester. Launched back on to his feet by Kev and Herb, Dumb-bell returns to the fray with the speed of a Blue Streak missile.
He is spitting flames.
Clem is calling: 'Curlew, the others are coming. Stand your ground!'
Despite Curlew's orders to his comrades to hasten home and barricade their front doors, they have turned downhill racers on his behalf.
This combat-to-the-death promises to improve on the battle scene in Henry V; it may even dim the glory of The Sands of Iwa Jima.
It is touching. Curlew promises himself never to forget the desire of his comrades – his commandos! – to sacrifice their all on his behalf. The first skirmish proves the right of might. Herb takes out Seth by shoving a flattened palm in his face. 'An' you can piss off back to Barbados, sniveller!'
He grabs him, flings him like a dead cat into Phil the Ghoul.
Curlew shouts, 'Orderly retreat!' But Dumb-bell is all over him, going for his best feature, his nose, and punching him in the stomach; which reminds him he's hardly eaten any breakfast.
Suddenly, into this mêlée, hotchpotch or hotpot of puffing, grunting strife, there sails a whistling handbag and the voice of Curlew’s Aunt Annie shrieking like a South American football commentator.
'Stand back! Stand back, you pig-livered villains! Leave that defenceless child alone or I'll call in the military!'

Our Annie stands tall as a house front in her drainpipe raincoat and hiking boots. Her handbag isn't one of those that petty thieves snatch in Woolworth's. No, it is a canvas sack containing lumps of limestone from Fossil Bank.
In her other hand, so far poised but not in action, is her geologist's hammer, specially forged to shatter the hardest rock.
She is, in short, an awesome sight: Thor, God of Destruction (or at least his sister) appearing twixt two claps of thunder.
'Release him at once, you lice-infested rabble, or I'll boil your scalps in dripping.' A speechless paralysis stills the warriors on both sides. She has stepped between Curlew and Dumb-bell. Her geologist's hammer hovers an inch beneath Frank's chin. 'And you, well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Nigel Morgan, a young man with your antecedents.'

Among her other shortcomings, Our Annie is shortsighted. Sometimes she does not even recognise Curlew, her own nephew. Dumb-bell Mason, confused at being mistaken for his Boss, only gets out the words, 'I'm not –’ before he has to suffer more abuse poured on the head of Nice Nigel:
'All your puny, conspiring, slippery, slimy life you've been a mean son-of-a-gun.'
'Miss, I'm Frank!’
'Yes, and I'm going to be frank with you, you mangy chip off the old block. When you weren't running a protection racket with kids with more pocket money than courage, you chased harmless foxes over the countryside in your silly red jacket, with your mad dogs foaming at the mouth – disgusting! Huh, so I'm amazed you're actually doing your own fighting for once, Nigel Morgan.'
'Not me, Miss,' Dumb-bell almost whimpers.
'Like your boneheaded Dad, making people's lives a misery. And what do you get up to when my back is turned?'
'Not me, Miss,' Dumb-bell actually whimpers.
'When I should be doing something important like digging up Pictish bones –’
'Sorry, Miss!’
'You pick on a poor, motherless waif like our Clark, whose only muscles are what he eats off Sawyer's Fish Stall once a fortnight.'
Herb the Hangman gets in a word edgeways. 'It were ’im as started it, Miss.'
'Rubbish! If you gave this nephew of mine a boxing glove he'd not have the slightest idea what to do with it, cage it or eat it with tomato ketchup.'
'That's true, Our Annie,' agrees Curlew.
'And you can shut up too. I'm ashamed of you, brawling in front of the Cenotaph. My Donald didn't lay down his life so you could go on repeating the mistakes of mankind.'
'Sorry, Our Annie. It was all a big misunderstanding.'
Clem offers support. 'Things kind of got out of hand.'
The Three Stodges retreat, eyes still warily fixed on Thor's hammer. Dumb-bell's courage is returning in small sips: 'There'll be another time, Madam.' He glares at Curlew.

There is to be no truce. Curlew knows that this fight to the death has only been postponed. He tries words of peace if not friendship: 'No hard feelings, Frank.' He's not sure whether he is asking a question or making a statement; but having said it, Curlew realises it is the understatement of the century.
No words can describe Frank Dumb-bell Mason's hard feelings. He picks up his peagreen sweater, grabs his rallying jacket. The answer he gives sends freezing shivers down the spines of Curlew and his team. He is brief. He is to the point; and he means every word:
'The Ritz is dead!'

This is the last in the current series of Literary Encounters which began in March 2011 (Blog 21). The 10 extracts will be posted as an entity on Scribd.com shortly. This blog is also published on Scribd.com.


NOTES IN PASSING: Smothering Heights?
The question is, which have you to be most faithful to, the novel or the film, because it’s nigh on impossible to be both. Do you take a novel like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, treat it is a script to be knocked about a bit for it to emerge commendable in its own right but a substantial alteration of the original for filmic purposes?

Which suggests a supplementary question, would someone unfamiliar with the novel consider Andrea Arnold’s version as a good film; and talking of supplementaries, would Arnold’s film lead the viewer back to the book?

The answer to the last question has to be Yes, at least in order to find out what all the fuss has been about down the decades since Emily penned what has generally been regarded as a masterpiece, rough-hewn and bursting with passion.

The temptation is to offer rationalities (some might call them excuses) for Arnold’s film version. First, the novel is long and involves three generations, covering in the words of Philip French ’30-odd years of pain, mystery and ecstasy’. It includes two Catherines, mother and daughter, Catherine 2 taking up a goodly portion of the novel. However, in Arnold’s film version Catherine 2 does not exist and except for a close-up of Catherine 1’s touching a modestly dilated stomach is not referred to.

Even so, Arnold takes 2.25 hours to tell her truncated story. The case of the two Catherines presents a genuine problem for the film maker, and Arnold makes a justifiable narrative choice: she focuses from the start on Heathcliff. We see the world of Wuthering Heights through his eyes and through his experience. As a youth he is cruelly treated, dismissively regarded, except by Catherine who comes swiftly to love him and be his stalwart friend.

Viewpoint
This eyeline is a major departure from the narrative structure of the novel where there are two highly articulate narrators, Mr. Lockwood (deleted) and the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who in the film is reduced to a shadowy existence; just another character of limited appearance and few words.

The film gains focus by this narrative choice, but it loses the richness of language so notable in the novel. In the film version Heathcliff is laconic (fair enough for the genre). What we see is what counts, but this is limiting in that Brontë provides so much more.

We begin to see things as more clear-cut than was Brontë’s intention: Heathcliff is a victim of bullying. Revenge is his motivation as he returns to Wuthering Heights a rich man. As French puts it in his review of the film for The Observer, Heathcliff is ‘no longer an enigma, merely a puzzle, a tornado of resentment’.

The novel keeps a tantalising distance between the reader and Heathcliff. He is a figure of mystery and complex behaviour that goes far beyond what the treatment of him by others would warrant. He possesses passion for his lost Cathy but throughout shows not an ounce of charity or compassion. We are left wondering – as we are not in the film – just how inhuman, and indeed evil, he can be.

Over the top
In the novel, Heathcliff ends a tragic figure, in the film, portrayed by James Howson, a hysteric. This is in part due to one of the hazards of a film that needs older actresses and actors to continue the parts played by characters in their childhood.

Arnold’s characterisation is best when Cathy and Heathcliff are seen for the first time, children becoming teenagers, sharing a friendship and together relishing the adventure and the solitude offered by the Yorkshire hills. Unfortunately, as successfully as Solomon Glave underplays the young Heathcliff, Howson hams it. Apparently Howson had his voice dubbed: he was ill-served, but the greater problem is that he fails to ‘feel’ the nature of Heathcliff: had he actually read the novel? (Indeed, had Andrea Arnold more than cursorily?).

An absence
The director must have sensed that by ridding her narrative of the interpretative detail – the articulacy – offered by the novel’s narrators, and excising the second Cathy, something serious had gone missing, an absence requiring compensation.

Some critics have felt that the chief protagonist of Wuthering Heights the film is the weather and nature unrelentingly raw in tooth and claw. It could fairly be said that Arnold pays a shade more attention to the details of nature than the complexities of her characters and their situation.

She overdoes ‘look at nature, see how symbolic it can be’ to the point when the audience might be wondering how much worse the weather can get or just how often the camera is going to dwell on other manifestations of rotting and decay, or how many more shots they can tolerate of Cathy’s favourite bird, the lapwing.

Still film
In an online review for Motion [Captured] Drew McWeeny considers the film ‘more of a photo exhibition than a film’. He calls it a ‘still-life’: ‘As gorgeous as the film is frame by frame, it never comes to life and the result is a museum piece at best’.

Philip French remarks on ‘an uneasy turn when Cathy is absorbed into the civilising world of Thrushcross Grange’, though he has a few words of praise for the Kaya Scodelario as the married Cathy, but ‘the movie never recovers its early power and at times becomes confused, ponderous and risible’. True: and no moment is more risible than Heathcliff’s grand finale of screaming passion.

Arnold’s movie is a game of two halves, the first an interesting approximation to the original story (though the Wuthering Heights farmhouse is portrayed in the film as more squalid than it really ought to be, otherwise why would the Lintons be so accepting of Cathy as a bride-to-be?

Also, bearing in mind that Mr. Earnshaw is such a devout Christian it’s hardly likely he would have the young Cathy and Heathcliff bunk down together in the same room).

Perhaps whatever filmic approach you take, capturing the essence of the novel will always prove elusive. In which case credit should be given to a director of talent whose reach exceeded her grasp on this occasion. On the other hand, I’d need a great deal of cajoling to watch the film again. It stays with you, but largely for the wrong reasons.


POEMS OF PLACE (7)

GUERNICA

In the ashes of spent fires
On that bitter April night
They found embossed on incendiaries
Dropped by Heinkels, the Imperial Eagle.
Yet with instinctive villainy
The oppressors declared self-evident
That Guernica was destroyed by Reds.

Later, when the town’s orphans
Were evacuated under bombs
From the battered wharves of Bilbao
Each clutched a new-baked tart
And twelve cream caramels.

Then safe at Stoneham camp
Where the old air buses roared
They cast themselves down
Crying ‘Bombas! Bombas!’
Among Dorset’s peaceful hills.
Children of war learn fast or die.

Meanwhile Radio Salamanca
Reported that truth was shot
While escaping; and in Guernica
Market day would be held as usual.

Correspondence
Such has been the response to Ned Baslow’s letters to celebrities that his home in Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven has attracted so many curious visitors that he is becoming something of a celebrity in his own right.

There have even been a couple of stops at his front door by coaches on their way to Buxton, Ned’s wife Betty taking time out from her Open University studies to provide tea and homemade scones. Ned is taking this new-found fame in his stride.

The publicity is good news, he tells us, useful for highlighting the Grand Autumn Arts Festival, postponed from last year. This was as a result of the Festival Committee’s chairman, Councillor Gilbert Stokoe MBE (Lord Gilbert) having to have a hip operation following a tumble during rehearsals for The Spectacular Don Quixote light opera in which he was due to play the name part, Ned in the supporting role of Sancho Panza.

We are delighted and honoured to continue Ned’s correspondence with an address to one of the nation’s top poets.

Dear Mr. John Milton,
Joe, the captain of the quiz team at our local hostelry – named after one of your contemporaries, Lord Protector Cromwell – missed out on a £15 prize and free pints till the end of the month, on account of his failing to identify your very commendable contribution to the cause of Free Speech.
The fact that the rest of us knew about your Areopagitica (my wife Betty jokingly calls it Harry Opper Jessica after her aunt on her Dad’s side) was no help because this was a captains-only question. Joe was livid, not so much with us, or even the quizmaster who seems to have an uncanny sense of what questions will stump Joe, but with your good self; and on the grounds, he said, that if you’d at least made an effort to render Harry O.J. the least bit readable he’d have remembered the title of your treatise with no bother.

This set off a furious argument between Joe and my Betty who keeps a portrait of you hanging in our upstairs loo. She has written under the picture, THE FATHER OF BRITISH LIBERTY. In Joe’s opinion, after reading Harry O.J. in the dentist’s, it’s as painful to read as his root canal treatment. In fact he’s convinced it was written by a foreigner pretending to be you.

Joe plans to appeal to the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven with Hippenstall Pub Quiz League on the grounds that the poet who penned such masterpieces as Comus, Lycidas and the Sonnet to the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson could not have been guilty of such garbled English as he encountered in Harry O.J.

Now your tract has this to say on the subject of free speech: books ‘do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them…as good kill a man as kill a good book’. Which is coming on pretty strong in my opinion.

So if I chuck a book, burn it or shred it, I deserve a bullet through the head; is that what you’re getting at? Course, Betty interjects by saying, ‘Milton is talking metaphorically’. Ever since she started her Open University course what passes between us on the few occasions she’s at liberty for a bit of the physical, exists entirely on the plane of metaphor; in short, everything that ought to be standing for itself is actually standing for something else. And it’s not satisfaction, Mr. Milton, I can tell you that.

But to return to your text: I’ve no argument with your opinion that ‘who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature’, and I’ll go part-way in agreeing that ‘he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself’. Yet what am I to think when Joe hands me this print-out from the Internet concerning you as one of Protector Cromwell’s top-notch censors, Mister Bluepencil himself, relishing your role as executioner, metaphorical or otherwise?

In rushing to your defence, Betty informs me that according to her tutor free speech didn’t mean the same in your day as it does in ours. He reckons you’d have been shocked out of your pants if you thought ‘free speech’ extended to Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Atheists, Mormons, Communists, Socialists, Feminists, Soroptimists or Liberal Democrats not to mention the likes of me, Joe and the rest of the quiz team. In short, is Harry O.J. just another example of British hypocrisy as exemplified by our present Coalition government – say one thing, do another?

Before I sign off, a word from our vice-captain, Len, who swears he read for a half-crown bet both Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes between dawn and dusk on his 15th birthday: how did it go, he asks, with your head-to-head with old Galileo?

Confidentially,

Ned Baslow
‘Yer Tis’,
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven

Ned welcomes comments from Milton scholars on the points raised in his letter. Other correspondence has been held over till the next issue.

Watsonworks now available on Amazon Kindle:
Talking in Whispers £2.01
The Freedom Tree £1.03
Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa £5.15
Ticket to Prague £1.63

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WATSONWORKS
Blog 29
February 2012

James Watson
A Writer’s Notebook

Contents
*Literary encounters (9) Meeting with a foot-mine
*Notes in Passing: ‘What a terrible way of earning a living’. Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum
*Poems of Place (6) French Lines
*Correspondence: Dear Signore Giorgione


ENCOUNTERS (9) Meeting with a foot-mine

In No Surrender, set during the Angolan civil war, Malenga is a volunteer at a medical centre in the bush; and she has also begun to teach in the local school. She is surrounded by dangers, but the worst lie under foot.

Tomas possesses all the skills – trapping, dribbling, passing; and he can shoot with either foot. That is why Malenga has two extra players on her side. She calls, ‘Pass it, Salu!’ Her six-year old centre-back attempts to speed the ball on its way by using both feet at once. Ball and player crash into the sand at the half-way line – between a string of washing, sun-scrubbed and dazzling, and the New Medical Centre.

‘Okay, mine!’ The ball is with Malenga. She takes to the wing, overkicking a forward pass that threatens to run into the bush. The shadows are emerald dark here, and the sand green with oncoming dusk.
Tomas hurls out of his goal towards her. He collides with her outstretched palm. ‘Foul – free kick.’
‘For me, you mean?’
‘No, you fouled me, Sis.’
‘Tell that to the referee.’
‘We don’t have a referee.’

‘Well then…’ They stand six paces apart, she tall, wide-shouldered, long-armed, in jeans cut to knee length, wearing a loose shirt of scarlet; he in khaki trousers too big for him, taken from a dead bandit by the river: Tomas of the Nine Lives.
Tomas has no time for rules. ‘Okay, Sis – you try penalty.’ He takes up a crouching position between goalposts that also don’t conform to the rules – one is his backpack (which contains everything he owns), the other is his hunting rifle.
As Malenga wonders whether to slice her shot with the outstep or curl it across goal with her instep, she is suddenly called for. From the fields beyond the village edge – an explosion. The ground quivers. One blast, everybody running.
‘Bandits!’
Malenga runs, then halts, uncertain. ‘Doctor Garcia – we must fetch him.’ Brain and feet equally slow. Stupid. It’s shock. Tomas has retrieved his gun and back-pack. He comes towards Malenga Nakale, trainee medic and schoolmarm. In English now, ‘We not dilly dally, Sis’.

In the fields the women have been working the last hour of daylight. Now they converge upon a screaming. Until now there’s been singing, and the women’s voices have been answered by the tune of the cicadas and answered again deep in the bush by the frog battalions along the river banks.
‘Ma-lenga! Ma-lenga!’ The crowd of women opens for her. Tomas checks her progress for an instant. His face is screwed up, one hand half-covering his eyes.
‘It’s Dédo!’
Stood on a mine.
Salu’s sister; bright star of Malenga’s class.
Beside a cluster of cedars, in their lengthening shadow, Déodora had been hoeing rich, red earth. Everyone knows – mines are to be expected: the last of the war.
‘Tomas – go get the Doctor. Salu – black bag, please, from the Centre – hurry!’ Malenga kneels in hot soil; red soil soaked with red. ‘Don’t let her look! Hold her head, and her hands. Good. Soothe her. Cool her.’ The women obey, all eyes on Dédo’s face, averted from her terrible injury.
The girl’s left foot is a bloody pulp. ‘You stop bleeding, Sis,’ instructs Tomas.
‘I thought I told you…’
I fetch Garcia. Fast.’ She wishes she could do the racing away, the plunging into the bush. She looks down at the leg, writhing.
The foot’s severed. Stop the bleeding.

Malenga pictures Tomas go, sprinting down the slope from the village, down the burning yellow track which leads to the river, where Doctor Leon Garcia has gone – today of all days – to treat a sick worker on the bridge project.
She’s tugged off her shirt: red to red; places it over the leg, the stump. ‘Stretcher – we must get her to the centre. Dédo, listen. I’m doing what I can. You’ll be fine.’
Salu brings the medical case Garcia has been putting together for Malenga, of worn black leather, wide-based with a tough steel clasp.
Under the leg, fragments of mine. She scrapes them away. Treat for shock. In the past few weeks she’s watched over Garcia’s shoulder. ‘Your turn will come, Malenga.’
‘I’m not ready.’
‘You’ve the gift.’
But do I have the nerve? Dédo fights to sit up. Her face is stretched, swollen. Her scream is aimed at Malenga’s heart. ‘Keep her flat.’ From the medical case she takes a roll of cloth, stronger than a bandage. Old Maria has hobbled up from the village. The very breath of her is a comfort. ‘See, Maria’s arrived. That’s good news.’

As she has been taught to do by Dr. Garcia, Malenga applies a tourniquet.

Water has been brought. It is offered to Dédo, calm now, fading. ‘No drink. Doctor’s orders.’ Malenga works at the exploded leg, at the arteries. No to drink, no to antiseptic too. Not in a deep wound.
…The tourniquet will have to be removed shortly. She is tying off. The stretcher has arrived. In the corner of her eye, a metallic glint. Salu is holding the leftovers of the mine.
Malenga is up, stiff, swaying, steadied by Old Maria. For a moment in the turn of the light, the rectangle of steel held by Salu resembles one of those old catechisms hand-stitched and placed above the bed. Salu traces the lettering with his fingers. He has just begun to read.
His catechism for the day shines clear and bronze in the falling sun. In English, it says – FRONT TOWARD THE ENEMY.

In the story that follows, Malenga is taken captive by a squad of South African militia assisting Unita the rebel army of Angola. She meets Hamish, another captive, a young South African national serviceman, a deserter. Theirs becomes a journey of survival, friendship and love.

*


NOTES IN PASSING
‘What a terrible way of earning a living’

Shaped By War: Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum

Of all the top photographers of war and conflict, Don McCullin has a singular distinction: he was officially barred from covering the Falklands War of 1982; the reason, he’d have sent home images that would have done something similar to what the media did for Vietnam – turned the American public against the war.

The evidence is to be found multifold in the major show of his work down the decades (50s, 60s, 70s and 80s in particular) Shaped By War, running at the IWM till 15 April.

Forgotten wars
In the film that accompanies the exhibition, McCullin says that he doesn’t believe his photographs of war, of atrocities, starvation, horrific suffering in over a dozen countries, from Biafra to Northern Ireland, from Berlin to Beirut, from El Salvador to Bangladesh, changed anything; further, he admits that ‘I don’t particularly believe I can trust humanity’.

Perhaps he is right, but this much has to be said, his images provide an electrifying record of events that have all too swiftly passed out of public consciousness. After all, who but those involved directly remembers the suffering and carnage of Biafra, the horrors of dispossession that occurred as Turk fought Greek in Cyprus; indeed what does the Vietnam war mean to a new generation?

Yet here in amazing detail, these events are documented. We are borne every which way on a tide of disaster and anguish, prodded into either remembering or having to admit, ‘I didn’t know that…didn’t realise that’.

Courage and dedication
All this is salutary in the context of current public outrage at some media practices and the subsequent low esteem in which journalism is held. Here, though, is a different story: here are photo-brilliance, personal courage and dedication that amaze and inspire; timely reminders that we owe a debt of gratitude to a profession which at its best serves the public right to be informed.

It is also a reminder of how that profession has been sacrificed on the altar of profitability; how hard-gained news, serious comment, in-depth enquiry have been in retreat in face of contemporary media obsessions with celebrity. The work McCullin became famous for, which he risked limb and life for, has been eroded and seriously displaced, and with it a cosmopolite vision of the world.

McCullin highlights the dilemmas affecting him as a person. Of the humanitarian crisis in Biafra in 1969, McCullin told Life magazine, ‘I was devastated by the sight of 900 children living in one camp in utter squalor at the point of death. I lost all interest in photographing soldiers in action’.

Ambivalence
Of his time in Northern Ireland (1970-71), he acknowledged the uneasiness of his own position as an agent of record. In his book Unreasonable Behaviour (1990), he wrote, ‘For a journalist, one of the prevailing emotions in Ulster was feeling like a Judas to both sides’. He confesses, ‘What a terrible way of earning a living’, while at the same knowing this was what he was good at, the best, and that what he was doing served human awareness.

Don McCullin on assigment was deported from Uganda, strip-searched by Israeli officials during the Yom Kippur Arab Israeli War and badly injured in El Salvador. On display in the IWM exhibition is Don’s Nikon camera that had been struck by a bullet from an AK47 in Cambodia. It still works, ‘Or thereabouts’.

Beyond madness…
Eventually, Britain’s best war photographer, confessing to being ‘beyond madness’, turned away from earning his bread on the war fronts of the world. Visitors leave the show in a more tranquil mood having seen McCullin’s latterday landscape photography. Here is peace at last, though one cannot help sensing the brooding darkness that lies beneath. Even so, McCullin believes that the landscapes have ‘actually healed a lot of my pain’.

*
POEMS OF PLACE (6)

FRENCH LINES

At Gisors red lake
Coot duck among weeds
Wind in corn; at Auvers
Cemetery shadows
Poppies remembering
Vincent’s blood; towards
Talcy deep green speed of Loire
Sunflower clouds
Float on golden river
Of the wheat god.

At Blois brick patterns
Make music, Chambord reciprocates
With towers and prickly tunes
While Giverny, all style and medallions,
Flags us on to water-wed Chenonceaux
Where queens once counted
Monarchs in and out.

All quiet on the plane of Beauce:
Crimson twilight spilling
Over silent patter of cobbles
Towards black barn mouth
Where in wooden majesty
Sits cobwebbed winepress;
Not forgetting sky-perched
Côte of doves, once a city
Of birdly babel, century silent.

Squirrel horde,
For winter comes.


*

Correspondence
Popular demand from our readers has encouraged the editorial team to continue with Ed Baslow’s Letters to Celebrities in which he asks them some very searching questions. He informs us that to date Harold Goodwinson has not so far responded to Ed’s advice about not rushing in to things at the Battle of Hastings.

He has mailed a duplicate letter to Homer with regard to the poet’s lack of a Christian name, and praise for his Hanging Gardens in pre-invasion Babylon has so far not brought a reply from Lord Nebuchadnezar, though artist Billy Blake has, we are informed, agreed to the British Museum altering the title of his masterpiece from ‘Nebuchadnezar Grovelling on His Knees in Shame’ to ‘Nabonidas doing likewise’.

Ned tells us that for his last birthday he received from his wife Betty (who is studying hard for an Open University degree) Art Fund membership, since when he has been visiting museums and galleries at greatly reduced prices. His recent attendance at an art lecture prompted the following letter to one of Venice’s top-rated Renaissance artists.

Dear Signore Giorgione
I seem to be getting into the habit of writing to people of note, even of fame, who do not seem to have Christian names – at least in the reference books I’ve been sifting through.

Lately I’ve received, at the second time of prompting, a caustic missive from the Greek poet and raconteur, Homer; who is of the opinion that a man (presumably) of his historical stature has no need of first names.

However, his most stinging comment relates to the query I raised as to his existence other than as a legendary figure emerging out of the mists of antiquity etc. etc. I hasten to assure you, Signore, that there is nothing in what I am about say that casts the slightest doubt on your own existence between circa 1476 and 1510.

It is well known that you were a prodigious talent, working in Venice and very probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, expert in madonnas and blue skies. According to my Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists you were the first exponent in Venice of the small oil painting for private collectors; which, if I might be allowed to say, comes as a relief from the endless parade of holy altarpieces, gloomy crucifixions and Last Suppers that bung up so many Italian cathedrals, churches, chapels, cloisters and depressing refectories (the Dominicans’ are the worst).

The fact is, a Giorgione on your wall, and you’ve got all you need for a sense of alluring mystery – the magic of landscapes slipping in and out of light and shade; sir, a veritable feast of the senses; and an inspiration, of course, for the mighty Titian, expert in undressed women and overflowing cups of plenty, who some experts say learnt everything from your good self.

Wonderful – and congratulations. But to my purpose, Signore, in penning this letter to you. Such has been my admiration for your (admittedly few) surviving masterpieces that lately I attended a lecture on The Enigma of Giorgione.

The lecturer (whose name escapes me) explained that what was enigmatic about you was what he referred to as Attribution, meaning – Did you actually do it? As the lecture proceeded, I became aware of a slow chill passing through the packed audience, made up chiefly of over 70 year olds most of whom, like me, had Giorgione among their top-ten favourites.

Alas our professor, who seemed to know what he was talking about, cast doubt one by one upon the authenticity of your masterpieces. It seems that the stripling Titian had begun to muscle in on your brooding landscapes, your style – the chi-as-ros-curo, as I think the professor described it – along with a troop of imitators recruited from the less prestigious night schools in downtown Venice.

By the end of the lecture a terrible silence reigned. A chasm of bottomless doubt had opened at our feet. The professor had whittled down your Complete Works first from twenty-five paintings, then to fifteen, then a creditworthy dozen, then six and counting.

Suddenly we were faced with a last, fleeting but penetrating gaze that almost literally turned us all to stone. By the time our distinguished professor had stepped off his dais and disappeared without a backward glance, the sum total of your ’ouevre’ as he referred to it, had been reduced to zero. At least three members of the audience took ill, one fainted, and the rest of us exited with a pallor that haunts me still.

Such has been my uneasiness at the prof’s failure to authenticate a single one of your masterpieces, I feel I might be forgiven for harbouring the dreaded thought that you never actually existed, or that you were an invention by a very clever bunch of dealers convinced that what makes a hot property is a touch of ‘was he, or wasn’t he?’

If you are reading this – my fourth letter of enquiry in as many months – you will appreciate the importance to your reputation of at least a one-line reply. For me, it really is a personal matter: your famous masterpiece, The Tempest, has hung over the damp patch in our parlour ever since we moved in to the house. Time and time again my wife Betty (who is more in to literature than art), has been on at me to replace the work with her Uncle Ivor’s Christmas gift, a gilt-framed rendition of The Stampede of African Elephants.

This would not only cover up the damp patch, but also my son Benjie’s infantile scribbles in the style of Picasso (who, by the way, has a Christian name and, unlike yourself, Signore, signed his work with such a clear and memorable hand that they named a car after him).

Rest assured, Sir, that I have your best interests at heart in this matter, but as a believer in a thing being exactly what it’s claimed to be (in common parlance, what it says on the tin), I would appreciate some indication that you aren’t and have never been, as our learned professor implied, a figment of the imagination.

Yours confidentially,
Ned Baslow, Art Fund Membership (300197)
‘Yer Tis’, Old Roman Road,
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven.

*Subject to legal advice, we will be publishing next month Ned’s somewhat controversial letter to John Milton, in part questioning his literary style as well as his ethics.

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
Website: www.Watsonworks.co.uk
* Read them on Kindle: Talking in Whispers (£2.01), The Freedom Tree (£1.03) and Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (£5.15).

***

ENCOUNTER WITH GHOSTS

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.co
January 2012

Blog 28
James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

CONTENTS
*Literary Encounters (8): GIRL MEETS GHOSTS
*Notes in Passing: No Great Novels, Just Great Passages
*Poems of Place (7) Lakeland: the Children’s Part
* Correspondence

GIRL MEETS GHOSTS
Bored with her French village holiday, Elsa fails to befriend a young local boy. Curiously, he seems to know her and her attempt to start up a conversation makes him nervous. Wondering why he seems so scared, so desperate to get away, she wanders alone into the church.

She is at a loss, rather more upset than she really ought to be. Also, despite the heat of this April morning, she is shivering.This whole place gives me the creeps. In to the church. It is cool, and, as shafts of sunlight penetrate the gloom, mysterious. Churches can also be creepy, so full of dark shadows. The slightest sound is amplified, rises to the vaulted roof and seems to return as a reproach.

She sits down. There is a potent odour of incense mixed with damp. This holiday is becoming a disaster. Dad’s on edge, Carol’s on edge and so am I. Three’s a crowd: I’m beginning to understand what that means. I’m the odd one out. I resent Carol and I can’t disguise it; and I’m mad at Dad. He thinks everything can be normal. She’s not my mum and never will be. I told him in Carol’s hearing. She probably won’t ever forgive me…

As for the boy out there, that I don’t understand; why his startled look, especially as he seemed to recognise me; and what or who was he staring at over my shoulder? He’s a loner, that’s my guess; stuck all day on a farm out there, herding cattle, picking grapes or whatever; probably with only rabbits and crows to talk to. I liked his eyes and his dark hair, though…

Elise wanders towards the east end of the church, and the high altar. Sunbeams project the colours of the stained glass window, blue and red across the tiles of the choir and the altar steps. She closes her eyes, inhales the scent of spring flowers, though, look as she might, she cannot see any.
The cool has become cold. That’s it, then: five minutes and I’ve run out of the tourist attractions of Izieu. Elise quickens her pace towards a door on the north side of the church. She pauses beside a tray of unlit votive candles. She picks up a box of matches. This’ll be for my Gran. The matches are too damp to light.
Sorry, Gran. I’ll bring Dad’s lighter next time.

Beside the north door is an oak table. There is a large leather-bound Visitors’ Book and beside it the stub of a pencil. I suppose people pinch the biros. Elise opens the book. Its yellowed pages give off a pungent, musty smell: wet tobacco and rotting cabbage. What shall I write? ‘Had the most exciting holiday of my life. Back again next year!’ Better not or Dad might take me at my word and rent the cottage for every year till I’m an old maid.

That’s strange, I could have sworn…Must be the poor light in here. She looks closer at the pages of the Visitors’ Book. Odd – very: could be some joker. She runs her finger down the list of names. Astonishment makes her voice ring through the church: ‘It can’t be! The last date is 1943!’ Not a very good joke. She turns back the pages: 1942, 1941, 1940. Could be that the priest’s put out an old visitors’ book by mistake. This is ridiculous. All at once, the silence of the church provokes her. She pronounces the word out loud:‘Ridiculous!’

1943: that’s the war – Dad’s war. She addresses her words to the back of the church: ‘Hitler, Nazis, Goebbels, the concentration camps – Auschwitz, the gas chambers…Huh!’
Not funny. Elise has been studying both world wars in History. She turns, as if imagining the church full of parishioners. ‘The war’s over, folks!’

Suddenly, from the West door, a voice: ‘Eloise! You must come now.’ The woman wears a shawl around her shoulders and a patterned scarf around her head. In the poor light she looks ancient but she is coming towards Elise with the speed of someone strong and determined.
She says in a loud, harsh voice, ‘So Stefan didn’t manage to persuade you.’
‘I’m sorry, I…’
Stefan? Warn me?’
‘You will bring disaster on us all with your wilfulness.’
‘Disaster?’ She called me Eloise.

Stay calm, stay polite. In this gloom she’s mistaken me for somebody else. Elise tries a smile, yet steps briskly towards the North door: your turn, she tells herself, to leg it.
The woman advances on her, clasps her arm. ‘Why do you do these things – and risk everything?’
This is weird. ‘Risk everything? Every what?’ Elise is pulled towards the North door. ‘You’re hurting me. Please let go my arm.’
‘You will remember the rules, Eloise, whatever your natural desires. And you will obey them, like everyone else has to do.’

Elise guesses it’s to do with talking out loud in church. Sure, for most of us, the war’s long over, but for some it’s never over; and that means they take offence easily if you don’t show proper respect. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I was alone. The words just slipped out.’ She is wondering, will a Hail Mary or two get me off the hook and away from this crazy lady?

‘You will not be slipping out in future, I can assure you of that.’ The woman thrusts Elise out of the church door, then prods her in the back when she hesitates, dazzled by the sun in her eyes.
They have emerged on to a side street, unfamiliar to Elise, running at an angle from the village square. Everything looks different from here. Elise can’t make out the war memorial, but her concern is for the hand that bites into her forearm.

‘Please, I’m not…’ In broad daylight surely the woman will recognise her mistake. She’ll apologise. Elise can think of nothing to say but, ‘I think I’ll be all right now. Sorry about that.’
But the misunderstanding is not to be resolved. ‘You wish to be independent, my child, yet –’
‘Yes I do.’ All at once Elise is keen to assert that independence. This is not a joke; indeed it’s scary. She had been shivering in the church and now she is trembling in the morning heat. ‘I’m not a child, and if you don’t mind…Madame.’
‘I do mind. Don’t you understand? – your actions put us all of us in peril. All of us!’
‘My actions? I was just…’
She is not to be heeded. ‘Come now! This is your last chance.’ When Elise tries to reply, the woman clamps her hand across her mouth. ‘Move – and not a single word!’

From The Ghosts of Izieu (Penguin Readers).

Previous encounters:
Boy Meets Girl (Besieged! The Coils of the Viper; Blog 21, 17 March 2011). Girl Meets Girl (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa; Blog 22, 14 April). Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet (Ticket to Prague; Blog 23, 11 May). Enemies Meet Face to Face (The Freedom Tree; Blog 24, 6 September). Encounter with Bombs (The Freedom Tree; Blog 25, 13 October). Athlete Meets Bull (The Bull Leapers; Blog 26, 19 November). Mother Forest Meets Brother Business (Justice of the Dagger; Blog 27, 15 December).


NOTES IN PASSING: No great novels, just great passages
Re-reading classic novels imported for next-to-nothing on Kindle, I’ve reached the hesitant conclusion that ‘masterpieces’ scale the heights but also include some very low-level passages. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina possess a kernel of passages which reach the heavens of literary achievement; yet they are complemented by acres of text working at a lower, more pedestrian or even irrelevant level that prompts the reader to question the literary judgment of the writers as storytellers.

The centrepiece of Crime & Punishment is the existential life of Raskolnikov, the penniless student who murders the wickedly mean moneylender and the subtle reeling in and entrapment of the ‘hero’ by the investigator, Ily Petrovych. In good Russian tradition we are treated to an almost uncountable host of characters and situations, many directly relevant to the emerging story, but also many existing in a parallel universe, a galaxy of red herrings.

Distracting incursions
One becomes bogged down in freshly imported lives that distract from rather than adding to the unity of the novel. They slow its pace, disperse its tension: in short, keep running away with the story. It’s as if Dostoevsky were being paid lineage and was thus reluctant to impoverish himself by judicious editing.

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy creates one of the greatest love-stories in literature. His portrayal of the passionate, tragedy-marked Anna and her well-matched hero, Prince Vronsky, is stunning, the depth and turbulence of their relationship magnificently examined.

In parallel, and connected throughout, we encounter the life of Levin, his love for Kitty, his marriage, his fatherhood: in fascinating contrast, the honest, deep-feeling ‘good’ person intriguingly documented, his feelings sensitively recorded and divined with great perception.

Doldrums
However, Levin has another side, reflecting the interests of the author himself, and it is one that borders on the mundane, is treated at such length and becomes tedious – Levin’s obsessive interest in Russian estates, agriculture, the character and attitude of the stuck-in-their-ways peasantry. Much text is also given over to hunting, for partridge, ducks and snipe, leaving the story in a sort of instruction-manual doldrums. At other times, the novel risks becoming a dry social tract.

Acknowledgment has to be made that at the time of writing these interests might well have been seen by contemporary readers as important uses of the novel, addressing issues of the time. Even so, the chapters on this issue are endless, as are those detailing the minutae of provincial elections. Only when Anna reappears does the novel spring back to life; then for a few chapters she has to step entirely aside for a narrative that seems to occupy the more mundane side of Tolstoy as writer, sinking into social discourse.

Life goes n, but should the story?
Both novels bore as much as they inspire, leaving one to wonder whether, at the time of writing, the authors reflected on the erratic levels of their achievement (or just carried on with their 2000 word a day regardless). Even when Anna Karenina reaches its grand finale with the suicide of Anna, suggesting that nothing could reach beyond this devastating event, Tolsoy ploughs on for several chapters with the doggedness of life itself which rarely judges a decent climax.

In contrast, very little of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights deserves to be left on the cutting-room floor. It is dramatically tighter than the Dostoevsky or the Tolstoy, but it takes a greater narrative risk with ensuing hazards.

The Russians are god the creator. We get inside the thoughts of characters through the direct agency of the author. In Brontë’s case we have two narrators, Mr. Lockwood and housekeeper Nelly Dean. Nelly in particular is a great raconteur; she is author Emily in scarcely concealed disguise. We gain from the narrative emerging directly from events though at the same time the device prevents us from knowing the thoughts of the hero/villain of the story, Heathcliff.

...but who speaks for Heathcliff?
We are given much on his behavour, his wild love for Catherine, his depthless bitterness, the way he destroys two families and makes the lives of so many he has power over miserable; but what is lacking is the author’s own explanation and analysis until, towards the end of the story Heathcliff opens his thoughts to Nelly.

There’s reason to commend this, for it leaves the characters subject to fate. It also allows the author to hold back from giving explanations, especially with regard to Heathcliff’s life between leaving Wuthering Heights and returning to it a rich man. We are permitted no revelation of his inner self or made aware of any transition to self-knowledge. As far as the old servant Joseph is concerned Heathcliff lies in death as damned as he lived: ‘Th’divil’s harried off his soul…and he may hev’ his carcass into t’bargin, for ought I care! Ech! What a wicked ‘un he looks, girning at death!’

Shades of epiphany
And yet ‘poor Hareton, the most wronged’ by Heathcliff sees something beyond common judgment: he ‘kissed the sarcastic, savage face that everyone else shrank from contemplating’. By this time of course the young Catherine has employed the magic of reading and affectionate compassion to bring Hareton Earnshaw into the radiant glow of love, the kind that might have rescued Heathcliff from himself had circumstances been different.

By limiting herself to narrators within the text Brontë resists the controlling power of the author-as-god. But the story is more concentrated and more consistently intense as a result, leaving readers to make their own judgments about Heathcliff. After all, towards the end, he concedes defeat. Referring to Catherine and Hareton, he says to Nelly, ‘I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing’; and there are shades of hope, for he acknowledges ‘there is a strange change approaching’, an epiphany in which love does not defeat death but comes to terms with it.

We are offered confirmation of this when Mr. Lockwood recounts meeting a little boy on the moor, ‘crying terribly’. The lad ‘blubbered “There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’nab…un’I darnut pass ‘em.’ With such an ending, one is left thinking that the ultimate dream is possible, love overcoming death.

*
Final paragraph, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Lockwood speaking: ‘I lingered round them [the headstones], under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heather and the harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

A quote from Anna Karenina: ‘And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.’


***

POEMS OF PLACE (6)

LAKELAND: THE CHILDREN’S PART

Coniston: the lakewaves glitter, glad
To host kids’ feet slow-stepping
Over pebbles and the risk of glass;
Around their heads a haunting
Of flies like shrunken bats – a coven
Of night witches envious of childhearts
And of mornings crystal bright.

Later Tarn Hows’ fernclad slopes
Were their splashing picnic ground;
Farmsteads sprinkling white
Up Langdale’s blue-green crags
Made a backcloth worthy of Claude Lorraine
Only to be quite ignored.

We alone, disengaged from their games,
Drew together the cobweb strands of vision –
The light, the landscape, the figures,
The streamsong of their voices; hoarding
Them as solace for a winter’s day.


CORRESPONDENCE

Dear Editor,
As Director of Homer Studies at the Institute of Greek Literature, I wish to query the assertion of your correspondent Ned Baslow that our nation’s greatest poet was probably a member of a scriptwriting team called Anon, and whose reluctance to put pen to paper can be explained by his suffering from dyslexia. The suggestion is preposterous. Further, we object to the doubts he casts on the intelligence of the Trojans in welcoming the Greek gift of the famous Wooden Horse and not suspecting that it was packed to the tail with warriors.

After all, weren’t the Germans successfully deceived by the escape pit dug beneath the wooden horse and out of the prison camp in the popular movie The Wooden Horse starring Leo Genn and Ian Dalrymple? If the Germans of all people could be taken in by such a ruse it’s obvious that a people shell-shocked after ten years of war might as easily be deceived.

Should Mr. Baslow care to visit the Institute, or provide us with a stamped addressed envelope, we will be happy to supply him with ample data that proves beyond doubt that Homer was neither dislexic nor a figure of the Greek imagination: after all, if he were, how would the Institute justify its own existence?
Yours etc.
Prof. Milos Kanzankstasis
Institute of Greek Literature,
1, Mount Parnassus Drive,
Athens.

We are happy to publish letters on all matters included in or referred to in Watsonworks Blogs. As promised in Blog 27, we reproduce here another letter from Ned Baslow in his Celebrity Letters series. This month Ned turns his attention to a historical misunderstanding involving Nebuchadnezzar and the famous London artist, poet and visionary, Mr.William Blake.

Dear King Nebuchadnezzar,
I am writing to you to convey rather delayed apologies on behalf of the well-known London artist, Mr. William (Billy) Blake. You may or may not be aware that one of Mr. Blake’s finest works of art concerns your good self; alas, I doubt whether you would consider it the sort of portrait you could display in front of your children or your subjects.

It is no portrait in the flattering style of Raphael or Van Dyck, dignified, in elegant profile and adorned with suitably magnificent garments, lace cuffs and jewellery up to the elbows. Rather, Mr. Blake portrays you on your knees and in hairy nakedness, best described as grovelling. The theme of his painting is, my wife Betty informs me (she is studying for her Open University degree and knows about such things) is one of Shame and Mortification, but, and this is the reason for my writing to you – it’s based on a simple misunderstanding.

The Him in the painting is not You, meaning that generation after generation of gallery-goers, including vulnerable school parties, have mistakenly been turning up their noses at you and making inappropriate comments.

Some, of course, would say you deserve it considering what you did to Jerusalem or the citizens of Tyre, but what is essential in an honest world is to get the facts right once and for all. Instead of thinking good thoughts about your Hanging Gardens in downtown Babylon (don’t ask me what’s happened to Babylon since your day!) visitors to galleries and especially those queuing for entry into the British Museum (and paying good money for the privilege) have been confronted by your ‘portrait’ when in truth the squalid creature before them was one of your lesser successors, one Nabonidas.

In Mr. Blake’s days there was no Google to summon up in order to get one’s facts straight. The painter was either drunk, quarrelling with his printers or in a haze of dreams and fantasies trying to summon up positive things to say about the British nation, when he happened upon your utterly worthless successor, painted his masterpiece (Betty admits it is of high quality) in the hope that sensation would score over truth (it usually does, but that’s another matter).
From what my Betty tells me, this Nabonidos got into hot water for trying to mess about with the state religion (like the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten who incurred similar bother). Nab switched his support from the Moon God, your own particularly favourite according Betty, to Marduk who by all accounts was a thoroughly bad influence.

I’ve long held it to be true that tampering with people’s gods is one of the quickest ways for a ruler to end up on his knees in a sea of shards, or as we would term it these days, shrapnel. Art that misrepresents the past plays some nasty tricks with people’s attitudes as I pointed out in my letter to the Director of the British Museum demanding that your denomination (ie name) be immediately replaced in all future posters, captions, indexes, postcards; in short, Nab for Neb. I have the Director’s email assurance that Mr. Blake is equally willing to make amends so long as nobody attempts to render Nab upstanding as grovelling has been one of Mr. Blake’s chief selling-points over the years.

With every best wish for an eventually successful makeover of your public and historical image, I am, My Lord King, Yours Truly (incidentally a great admirer of hanging baskets),

Ned Baslow,
‘Yer Tis’
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven


Readers may be interested in learning what Ned Baslow had to say in previous Blogs: to King Harold (Blog 26) and Homer the Greek (Blog 27). The editorial team wishes it to be known that they do not necessarily share Ned’s opinion of the god Marduk.


*
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MOTHER FOREST MEETS BROTHER BUSINESS

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
December 2011

Blog 27
James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

Ned Baslow’s Letter to Harold Godwinson has caused a stir in the office at Watsonworks as readers will find in our CORRESPONDENCE section. His comparing the Normans to the Tories has not gone down well at the Conservative Party HQ in Tunbridge Wells. We expect a similar flurry of protest, at least among the Greeks, following Ned’s Letter to Homer which is included here uncensored.

Also in this December 2011 edition, the Literary Encounters series, which has varyingly touched down in Medieval Florence, contemporary Kyiv, post-Soviet Prague, the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, the streets of Guernica bombed by German Heinkels and the bull ring of ancient Crete, visits the whispering forests of East Timor.

Contents:
* Encounters 7: Mother Forest meets Brother Business
*Notes in Passing: Invasion of the Nordics
*Poems of Place: Jarrow Visited
*Correspondence

Mother Forest meets Brother Business

From Justice of the Dagger (Collins Cascades) in which the forest people of East Timor are presented with a business proposition.

At the village of Muyu Father a man called Marquez, escorted by two soldiers, came from the timber company. He held up sheets of paper to Muyu Father. ‘It is all agreed with your people. This is a signed document.’
Muyu Father took the paper, held it at arm’s length as if it were a poisonous insect. Marquez turned it round. ‘You’ve got it upside down, stupid.’ He knew a little of the language of the forest people. ‘It is an Order in Council. It requires you to vacate your village.’
‘Vacate?’
‘Move. Remove yourselves. Within seven days – you understand?’
‘How is this? Our people have lived here since Great Island rose from the sea.’
‘Not any longer,’ snapped. Marquez. ‘In any case, your people have no claim to the land. And it is not true you have occupied this village for a long time.
‘In fact you people are wanderers, you build a village and then when it gets stiff with shit, you move on, leaving a mass of litter in the forest.’
Muyu Father retorted, ‘All the forest is the Mother’s gift to us, so long as we cherish it. We move our villages to let the leaves grow once more. Mother Forest gathers back what belongs to it. Always.’
Marquez was not happy to be dealing with a tribesman who was also a philosopher. ‘The forest belongs to the government, Chief, and the government decides what to do with the forest.’
Lyana heard these words in torment. Hers was not the right to speak, but nothing could suppress her thoughts: it is you who have no rights. This island is not yours. You stole it from us, with your guns and your aeroplanes. It will never be yours even though you fill the valleys and the mountains with your battalions, even though you kill every one of us as you killed by family and all my clan.

Muyu Father rarely showed anger. Sometimes by his calmness he made Lyana angry. ‘And the forest, what has the forest decided?’
Marquez paused. ‘You talk as if the forest had a mind of its own.’
‘It has a mind. It has a soul. If you listen, you hear the heartbeat of the forest.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, friend, this forest is a goddam nuisance. It’s full of flies and lizards and snakes – and people like you who get in the way of progress.

‘When I look at this forest, Chief, I see timber. I see sawmills. And I see things being made for the good of humanity. Timber for homes, timber for furniture, timber for building boats.’
‘Oh yes,’ Muyu Father replied. ‘Some trees must fall. Some must be used, yes. We agree –’
‘Listen, I don’t want to be preached to on conservation by natives. This forest has fifty years of timbering in front of it. Anyway, the government has issued licences. And those licences mean one thing to your people – move on!’

All the villagers heard these words. As one voice, they asked, ‘Where do we move?’
‘Further into the forest. There are thousands of kilometres of it not yet turned to timber.’
Marquez hated the forest and thus he did not begin to understand it. Muyu Father said, ‘Sir, the forest is not like a long road. Everywhere is its centre, like the circles of the moon.’
Marquez was hot. The sweat made his feet squelch in his boots. His shirt was dripping into his trousers and his trousers stuck to his legs as if his body fluids had turned to glue. ‘The government knows what is best for you and your people, my friend.’

‘How can it know, when it is so distant, and when it does not listen?’
‘It’s you who should be doing the listening, Chief. Then you’ll see sense. You’ll go to the special villages built for you; send your children to school to be educated. To be frank, you people need civilizing. This is the twenty-first century –’
‘And your people, sir,’ interrupted Muyu Father, ‘’you talk with guns. Yours is the justice of the dagger. You have brought massacre. Our people lie dead in the forest –’
‘Because your people rose up against the government,’ stormed back Marquez. ‘Attacked the camps of the soldiers. And because you listened to the Resistance who would stir you up in hatred against the government.’
‘We do not listen to the Resistance,’ returned Muyu Father.
‘That is what you say. Soldiers who stray in the bush, they die. Not because of the snakes, but because your people obey the rebels, do their dirty work while they vanish in the forest to start new troubles elsewhere.’

‘We do not listen to the Resistance,’ repeated Muyu Father, glancing at his son. Muyu nodded, though reluctantly; and his gaze met Lyana’s: her elder brother had joined the resistance movement. The soldiers of the government caught him. Tortured him. Gave him a ride in a helicopter; and over the sea, invited him to ‘take a walk’; as the soldiers put it, mundi laut – gone for a swim.

Marquez knew he was wasting his time and his breath. ‘No more arguments, Chief, the earth movers, the Yellow Giants as you people call them, come in seven days time, one hour after dawn. Take all your property with you.’
‘Property?’ The word has no parallels in any of the many tongues of the forest people.
‘Belongings – your pigs, man, and your bows and arrows, though if I had my way I’d have them confiscated.’

There was a waiting as the two men glared at each other. And the forest whispered in a new wind from the south.
‘Come on,’ said Marquez as Muyu Father stood still as a hunter aiming at his prey. ‘Give me your word. I don’t want any trouble…What I want, Chief, is empty huts. You will not yet have made the acquaintance of Captain Selim, but I imagine his reputation will have already reached you. Do not cross him. Obey him to the letter – quit this place without fuss – and you will survive.
‘Seven days, Chief. Very generous in the circumstances. Then we shall be coming in for a dawn start.’ Marquez fixed his gaze upon Muyu, sensing the youth’s hidden rage. ‘And with machine-guns ready for any hot-heads who protest.’

For a second the eyes of Lyana held Marquez’s stare. She is a beauty, he thought, but that look alone could cut a man’s throat. He was tempted to warn Muyu Father – keep the girl out of sight of Selim. Instead, he wagged his finger and repeated, ‘Empty huts, Chief!’

* Justice of the Dagger was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.

Previous encounters:
Boy Meets Girl (Besieged! The Coils of the Viper; Blog 21, 17 March 2011). Girl Meets Girl (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa; Blog 22, 14 April). Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet (Ticket to Prague; Blog 23, 11 May). Enemies Meet Face to Face (The Freedom Tree; Blog 24, 6 September). Encounter with Bombs (The Freedom Tree; Blog 25, 13 October). Athlete Meets Bull (The Bull Leapers; Blog 26, 19 November).

NOTES IN PASSING: Invasion of the Nordics
If a stroll through any Waterstone’s is anything to go by, the world of crime thrillers is under Nordic occupation. There is no avoiding the sons and daughters of Larsson, even though several of them were making a name for themselves long before the phenomenon of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In fact Larsson was a relative newcomer, better known as a journalist, in this country a regular contributor to Searchlight magazine.

In fact, Larsson’s Millenium trilogy almost never got off the ground. An interview on radio with the publisher of the English edition of the first volume revealed an almost barren take-up. His response was to do something the rest of us writers ought to consider: he took to the highways and byways (mainly tubes and trains) and gave the books away to anyone willing to take them.

Helping hands
It wasn’t critics, massive advertising, celebrity recommendations or high-profile marketing that scored for Stieg Larsson but reader recommendations. It helped, of course, that the Larsson trilogy (part 2, The Girl Who Played With Fire, part 3, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) proved compelling narratives, expertly orchestrated, and introducing a more than feisty heroine, Lisbeth Salander, in a story dealing with issues both specific to Sweden and of relevance and interest to contemporary readership everywhere.

It didn’t take long for publishers and bookshops to guide other Nordic writers, some already best sellers, into the wake of Larsson. For instance, the Vintage Books cover of Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, gives prominence to a quote from the Independent – ‘The Next Stieg Larsson’ though it might be equally correct to refer to Larsson as the next Jo Nesbo.

The difference, in my view, is that Larsson is better: he writes more fluently, is less narrowly obsessed with manic serial murder of young women scenario, not to mention Larsson’s superiority in terms of narrative pace. Nesbo crawls along. When the reader’s attention is engaged, as in The Snowman, that’s fine and welcome, but when the distant past burgeons in on the story, weighing it with coil upon coil of detail and complication, as in his earlier book, The Redbreast, this reader had to ask, ‘Do I really care what happened next?’

The weight of stereotype
This does not occur with Larsson, even though the reader has to hold on to continuities over three volumes and well over a thousand pages. Another difference is in the chief male protagonists. Mikael Blomkvist, the campaigning journalist in the Larsson trilogy, escapes the stereotype that often prevails when the ‘hero’ of a crime thriller is the detective.
Harry Hole in The Snowman has at least moved on in terms of interest from the (honestly) boring Harry featured in The Redbreast. He is as dull as the weather; indeed one feels that the wet and the cold (characteristics of Nordic fiction as a whole) have cooled him off as a person, often rendering him inert.
This problem with the detective protagonist recurs in other Nordic tales. In Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back we encounter Inspector Sejer. He is sharp, persistent, patient; but he is a plodder. He and his young assistant, Skarre, have a relationship distantly similar to that of Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis.

Curiously the Morse novels also reflect some of the dry and dour atmosphere of the Nordics; it’s only when TV carries the viewer into the glories of Oxford and enriches characterisation with non-verbal communication and fresh new dialogue (by writers such as Alan Paton) that the stories take on colour and humour.

Gloves and mufflers
It could be, of course, that the ice and snow, the shivering winds which are so characteristic of stories written by the Nordics are inescapable and a necessary component. After all, the Wallander TV series (the two Swedish versions plus the British) are, not to put a too fine a point on it, no advertisement for holidaying in Sweden any more than the Danish The Killing series persuade us to rush to book a flight to Copenhagan. The opening line of Henning Mantell’s novel The Dogs of Riga neatly summarises the entire genre of Nordic crime fiction: ‘It started snowing shortly after 10am.’

What constitutes the ‘right pace’ in a story is a matter of reader judgment. Fossum’s Don’t Look Back works on a narrower, quieter terrain than do her male rivals. The body count in 400 pages is modest, but there is more scrutiny: the crime here allows the author to dissect a tiny Norwegian community with scalpel sharpness.

Talking of scalpels, a common factor of Nordic crime novels (and TV series) is the brutality of the killings. The horrors described in the Millennium trilogy were given dramatic emphasis in the films that followed. In Hakan Nesser’s Borkmann’s Point our murderer specialises in beheadings. Nesser is also characteristic in the way he spins things out, taking 321 pages to reveal what the reader has guessed since page 200; only the crime-busters themselves don’t get it.

The author almost confesses as much when he puts the following words into the mouth of the now-revealed axe-man: ‘I thought it took you a bit long, even so…’

In a similar way to Harry Hole’s entanglement with a distant past in The Redbreast, Inspector Erlander in Reykjavik author Arnaldur Indridason’s Hypothermia neglects the crime he is supposed to be solving for one that obsesses him from the past.

This reader spent most of the time wishing he’d just get on with the crime he was being paid to solve; either that or make the crime-past as interesting to the reader as Erlander seems to find it. The book drifts along, indulging in loads of aimless dialogue. It has none of the menace of Nesbo or the dynamic incident of Larsson. The problem seems to be to find original character traits in stock police stereotypes.

What the books do have is loads of atmosphere; it’s cold, it’s bleak, the territory is under constant snow or icy hail; the chilling factor of the murders is already anticipated, underscored and sharpened by the weather. One is left hankering for a little glow of Oxford in the night.

POEMS OF PLACE 5: Jarrow Visited

Below the grey gleam of the Slake,
Tide-abandoned, rustles the polluted Don –
Oily and sluggish, tin-canned,
Rubber-tyred and rusty-prammed
Beneath the ancient black stones
Of Bede’s golden kingdom.

Curlews share the rainy wind with ragged gulls
And one rapt pilgrim by the shore.
His eyes have scanned, fingers touched,
Mind encompassed everything in books –
Till now, when his senses faithfully portray
The real Jarrow, its illuminations shed:
This lunar fortress of Esso towers
And Shell Petroleum, of sad vessels
At lonely wharves turned to rusted stone;
Of gibbets in Slake mud where Vikings once
Broke open the dawn with blood and fire.

Then why the resonances, loud as a peal of bells
For this intruder on his cheap day-return;
Beyond the sight, what perception?
Hear the boots on cobbled streets –
Jarrow’s crusaders are on the march, banners high
While sounding brass bears them south
To gentler climes yet bastions deaf to reason.

Here, times without number, the battle for sensibility,
For civilisation, has been fought over but never won,
Between song of pen and whistle of sword,
Between the promised land and King Brass
Leaving loosestrife and charlock sole victors.

Only the dream remains, its vision blunted
On the cold sea wind: and this dreamer –
Straining in solitary vigil, to capture
The timeless canticles of Bede’s flock,
The furnace heat of Red Ellen’s oratory.

Nature eternal has the last word:
Once upon a time humans passed this way.

Correspondence
Our postbag has approached ‘Dear Father Christmas…’ proportions as a result of Ned Baslow’s first Letter to Celebrities. Clearly Ned is fast on the way to becoming a celebrity himself. See below for his latest contribution; but first, three items from the postbag.

Dear Blogmaster
It has clearly escaped your redacting eye that Ned Baslow, though neither an ox nor a moron is not above putting the two together as in ‘King Harold (nèe Godwinson)’. While acutely aware of the gravity of the statement, I am astonished that it has been left to Ned Baslow to reveal after all these years that Harold was born a woman. But in that case should it not be Godwinflaed?

If he had written ‘Harold née Godwinflaed or Godwinfleda’ then this would have been an indication that the Anglo Saxons had mastered gender realignment surgery some time before 1066. An opportunity lost to point out that yet again the Saxons led the werold.
Yours
TW, South Ealing.

Dear Editor
Mr. Ned Baslow is perfectly free to hand out advice to Harold Godwinson but comparing the Normans to present-day Tories is to do neither of them an ounce of credit. First, where would we be without the Normans? And don’t say ‘under the Tories’. They’ve given us castles and cathedrals that make Britain one of the chief tourist attractions of the world.

You only need to watch films about Saxons, with their unkempt beards and their late-night booze-ups to realise what the country would have turned out like if Harold had taken Mr. Baslow’s advice and considered his predicament rather than pitching in his boneheaded housecarls without a decent breakfast.

True, under the Tories very few of us have access any more to a decent breakfast, but in my book Harold Wilson was as much to blame as Billy Norman, not to mention Jack Straw, who at least answers your letters (which Harold Wilson never did).
MC, Rishton-Under-Lyme.

Dear Ed.,
Looks to me like King Harold never got Ned Baslow’s warning letter. The rest, as they say, has been history.
DAC, St. Leonard’s-on-Sea.

We have also had a number of emails, mainly from teenage readers, who want to know how you become a Housecarl. We have passed on their enquiries to Google Search.

See below for Ned’s 2nd letter to celebrities.


Ned Baslow: Letters to Celebrities 2
The editorial team has exercised its right to abridge Mr. Baslow’s contribution.

Dear Mr. Homer,
It is a lucky coincidence that the manager of our local post office is Greek, a Mr. Papandreou, though we call him Mr. P or Phil the Greek (not to be confused with Prince Philip, our Prince Consort). My wife Betty gets in to lots of conversations with Mr. P, especially since she joined an Open University course which seems to be really worked up about Greek civilisation.
Betty’s brain is now buzzing with questions about your good self, your authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey; and I have to admit I’ve taken a peek at your stories, my particular favourite being the one about the goddess who turned blokes into wild animals; oh, and the one about the Cyclops with one eye: a real no-brain.

Betty says all that is symbolic, but to be honest with you, she’s not altogether convinced you could have got away with stories that size and never thought to write them down. In short, what’s the secret? I mean, those books took our Betty three months to read, and she confesses she skipped a chunk here and there, particularly the battle scenes which, to be honest, Mr. H, get rather repetitive, that is until you get to the Wooden Horse.

I guess you’ll be pretty pleased, by the way, at the number of films and TV series that old horse has inspired. It takes a bit of believing, though – I mean, you wheel this flipping great nag through the city gates, the Trojans doing the pulling and pushing, and yet not one of them asks, ‘Is it hollow?’ Even my Benjie spotted that one, and he’s only nine.

Betty’s theory is that the Trojans were caught napping, literally, found the Greeks plundering them and their wives, so they cooked up the horse-story in order to illustrate, and give proof to, the old saying, ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’.

Which brings me to my query on Betty’s behalf: what real store can we put on your having anything whatever to do with these (in my humble view, overlong) masterpieces? Further, if the ancient Egyptians had been writing their hieroglyphics for thousands of years, how come you seem to have been unfamiliar with pen or paper, or should I say quill and parchment?

Now I can hear you saying, what about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? They weren’t around to check their facts about J.C., and yet by and large they get the same events more or less in the same order; but that is my point. Plainly M,M,L and J got together. It’s obvious – a case of what Betty’s tutor refers to as ‘collusion’ or (the Lord spare us) a ‘coalition’.

So I am putting it you, Mr. H, on behalf of Mrs. B, that The Iliad and The Odyssey were created by a team of scriptwriters who scrabbled around for a pseudonym to protect themselves against the wrath of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon and the like, in exactly the same way that scores if not hundreds of poets have adopted the name Anon to cover both their tracts and their tracks.

A single iota of proof of your authenticity would be welcome. For example, how is it that you had no Christian name; that there are no blue plaques put up by the Greeks in their towns and cities to celebrate the so-described greatest poet of the ancient world; why no statues, or a tomb full of your bits and pieces, your memoirs on tape?

Please regard this letter as a genuine academic enquiry. But more, there could be something in it for you of a positive – nay, profitable – nature. The Illy and the Oddy have sold a fair number of copies down the centuries. I reckon we’re talking millions. Betty says they’ve even been translated into Kazakstani and Sherpa.

So the royalties, in addition to film rights, might by this time equal the gross national product of a fair size country, and would certainly have a steadying effect on the economy of your alleged homeland, which has had more downs than ups in its history since your day.

I look forward with excited anticipation to receiving some clarification from you; or as my Betty has charmingly put it, ‘Mr. H – show me the evidence!’ If writing is a problem (some theorists, Betty says, believe dyslexia was your handicap), we would be happy to receive a phone-call, preferably between six pm and eight – but do please check whether Greece has finally decided whether it will be an hour ahead or an hour behind Greenwich Mean Time.

With many thanks for your patience in reading this letter (or having it translated) and in the hope that we can settle the question of your existence swiftly and to the satisfaction of all.

Sincerely and Confidentially,

Ned Baslow (for Mrs. B.Baslow)
‘Yer Tis’
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven

In Blog 28 Ned offers a few words of apology, on behalf of William Blake and the British Museum, to King Nebuchadnezzar.


Happy Christmas!