Friday, September 27, 2013

A reading and belated launch in Oxford

OPEN DAY for Oxford Continuing Education Dept, 26th September.

I was one of three reading from their new novels at an event in Oxford, in connection with the Creative Writing School at the University, which I attended some years ago, and on which I first began writing A Conscious Englishman.
The Continuing Education Dept holds an Open Day and we were part of that.

Rewley House, Continuing Education Centre, Oxford.

16.00-16.45 - Reading: three authors, new fiction
Creative Writing - Newly published work from our Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing

Three authors will read from their newly published work at this book launch and wine reception.

Course alumni Elisabeth Gifford and Margaret Keeping will read from their novels Secrets of the Sea House and A Conscious Englishman, both published this year; and Diploma fiction tutor Jeremy Hughes will read from his upcoming second novel...more Wingspan, which will be released this November.

Please join us to celebrate their achievements. (Please note: the readings will fit into a 45 minute time frame to allow those who have booked into a session at 5pm to leave; the overall reception will last 90 minutes to allow those who remain time to socialise with the authors and ask questions about their work.)

I met beforehand with my publisher Frank Egerton and after discussion decided to focus on Edward's interiority rather than include all the main characters. Helen had only a brief appearance in her memoir.

Liz Gifford and I were of the same year and have kept in touch, as have quite a few of us, with at least an annual reunion and sometimes our own 'workshops'.. Her novel, set in the present and Victorian times, with the Hebridean belief in seal-people a core theme, sounds very intriguing.

A friend and I went to two sessions with Jeremy Hughes during the day. He is an excellent, often very amusing, teacher.
Questions to me were:
How did you find it writing in a man's voice? Actually I was only writing Edward through interior monologue other than in dialogue passages, unlike Helen for whom I used the first person. I answered that I was so steeped in the poetry, prose and letters of Edward that it came unconsciously. I didn't add that I found Helen more difficult - how to convey her rather effusive nature without alienating the reader from her.
Another question was around the necessity of knowing thoroughly and in detail the subject of your writing- I certainly endorse that.
Other questions were chiefly about the Creative Writing Diploma course at Oxford and Liz and I spoke enthusiastically about it - it really was an excellent two years and I rather wish I could do it all over again.

Here is the section I opened with :
*

That afternoon Edward wanted to walk again and he decided to take Myfanwy. She rode on his shoulders, excited by the privilege of time alone with her father. She sang what she could remember of ‘D’ye ken John Peel’, jigging up and down and working her chubby little legs to make him go faster. He listened, fascinated, as she kept the music and cadences true but completely jumbled the words or invented her own.

‘D’ye ken John Peel from far far away

Do’ye ken John Peel every single day

D’ye ken John Peeeeeeel in his coat so gay

and his hounds that get up every morn-ing’

And so on, with variations ever more numerous and inventive. But always the cadences were true to the original. Better than the original in fact, Edward thought. He tried joining in but was told firmly,

‘No Daddy. My song.’ And so it was, her song that was rooted in something else, in sound, pure sound.

They travelled so speedily that they reached a place they’d never visited, where a stony track forded the Preston Brook. Myfanwy paddled. Edward sat still on the bank by the glinting, murmuring stream. A dragonfly suddenly landed on a large stone by the water’s edge and warmed itself, taking heat from the stone and sun together. There it stayed motionless and timeless, as he felt himself to be, sitting still in the sun.

A trickle from a smaller stream entered Preston Brook. White chickens pecked among the roots of an ash tree; they squeezed through the hedge from a farmhouse he could just see through the elms. The hedge was blackthorn skilfully laid, the clean scars of the labourer’s hook still visible. He listened. The only sounds were of the stream, the birds and the trees – their own pure and individual languages, never straining for effect, never false. He thought about the many languages, man’s one among many. Was it possible that a man’s words could have that kind of truthfulness?

He sat on the short turf of the stream bank listening and thinking..

What it would be to find those words, to try to express the thoughts that arose from what he was seeing, whether in prose or verse! To write what it meant to feel a oneness with nature, with the kind of quiet ecstasy moments like these could bring. He knew there was so much that could never be fully expressed, or could only be expressed through absences and negatives. But perhaps the goal was to try, and at least not to betray the language in trying.

I didn't after all use the poem, Beauty, but hope I conveyed its spirit with enough to show Edward Thomas's complex nature and the crucial role of the natural world in his life.

Beauty

WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there

Thursday, September 19, 2013

A reading and belated launch in Oxford

OPEN DAY for Oxford Continuing Education Dept, 26th September.

A week today I will be one of three reading from their new novels at an event in Oxford. It is in connection with the Creative Writing School at the University, which I attended some years ago, and on which I first began writing A Conscious Englishman.
The Continuing Education Dept holds an Open Day and we are 'on' as part of that.

Rewley House, Continuing Education Centre, Oxford.

16.00-16.45 - Reading: three authors, new fiction
Creative Writing - Newly published work from our Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing

Three authors will read from their newly published work at this book launch and wine reception.

I have rather put off thinking about it, but do need to turn my attention to it soon. My dilemma is - I would like to read something with a dialogue between Thomas and Frost perhaps - but there is no way I could attempt the accent. Maybe I could ask the Course Director, John Ballam, if he will be free that session. And my publisher, Frank, who will be there, has just the right gentlemanly tone - for he is indeed a gentleman - for Thomas.

But it will be a 15 minute slot only so maybe I'm getting over-ambitious.

I have made one decision. I want to read or distribute the poem 'Beauty'. It is the poem which set the tone for the novel, showing both Edward Thomas's negativity and irritability, his self-knowledge and his capacity to be healed by the natural world.

Liz Gifford and I were of the same year and have kept in touch, as have quite a few of us, with at least an annual reunion and sometimes our own 'workshops'..

I'm looking forward to hearing her and James - much more than I am to my own slot! But to keep my mind on the real focus and values of my novel here is:

Beauty

WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, hapily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Apple Day

Such a bumper crop of apples this year in our shared allotment orchard! Tomorrow we are having a barbecue and share-out of the fruit there.
This makes me think of the first part of my novel, set among fruit orchards in Leddington, and the September of 1914 when Edward needed to leave to pursue an article about the war and responses to it in the industrial Midlands.

They would miss seeing the September cider pressing, but there was no help for it.

In the Oldfields orchard the cider apples were showing rosy red stripes against the yellow. Mary had told him that they flourished because of the wassailing each New Year day. Well, perhaps, but the effect of such a perfect summer must have helped. He thought of Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow, those comical ramblings in a Gloucestershire orchard – that sense of an eternal rural England. Animated by cider, surely? Ah, a long drink of cool cider on a day like this; what could be more delicious?

Later Robert and Edward are in Dymock enjoying the previous autumn's cider in the Beauchamp Arms. They have been talking about the plan for Edward to come to America.

The cider has the effect of prompting each to show something of his values and the differences between them:

‘I sense from what you say that your people and ours – our country people anyway, are quite different,’ Edward said. ‘The people in your poems too; they seem to me to be rather without tradition and they don’t quite trust themselves or each other. They show a good deal of competition and suspicion, you must admit.’

‘Sure, of course – how else could it be? Each man for himself and his family.’

‘Well, up to a point. But in England I believe there’s a sort of native wisdom binding people together. My old Dad Uzzell from Wiltshire, who taught me about country life and started me off on Jefferies; no-one was more trusting and good to his neighbours than he, but no fool, far from it. Without the Dad Uzzells around me I think I’d find the country a sterile place to be.’

Robert was baffled. ‘You’re a strange man, Edward,’ he said. ‘I used to think you were a real solitary, thriving on being separate, like me. But maybe I was wrong. Even though it doesn’t come easily to you, you really want to be connected to other people in a way I just don’t understand.’

The talk took them through their cider-drinking at the Beauchamp Arms. They poured it from a height of a foot into their tankards to aerate the golden liquid with its faint tinge of green. It tasted of late summer and of ripeness, smelled of apples, grass and honey.

Edward leaned back in his chair and stretched happily,

‘Ah, cider apples – to think, the centuries it took to arrive at this perfection. Those iron-age men in the Malverns would only have had crabs. Then by the time of Robert of Gloucester they’d got as far as apple-jacks, the same as those Falstaff ordered, you know. And today, this. Perfection. Did you know you shouldn’t tap the new cider until you hear the first cuckoo of spring? ’

They both emptied and refilled their tankards.

‘Does this Beauchamp guy own everything around here?’ Robert said. ‘Sure looks like it. I know he owns Abercrombie’s place. Abercrombie’s sister got it for him. She has that sort of pedigree, by marriage anyway.’

‘Well, the Beauchamps somehow managed to keep their land in spite of Cromwell. Truly landed gentry. They’re welcome to it, though, don’t you think. Don’t envy them, Robert. I know I’ll never own land and I don’t want to, always troubling yourself about it, putting up petty notices, do this, don’t do that.Keep out. The land is mine to enjoy without any of those troubles.’

They got up rather shakily and held on to each other laughing.

‘We’d better sit back on that seat by the church for a while. No hurry,’ Robert said. ‘There’s all the time there is.’

Apples appear chiefly in Edward Thomas's prose, but of course there are the Blenheim Oranges in the sad, late poem:

Gone, gone again

Gone, gone again

May, June, July,

And August gone,

Again gone by,

Not memorable

Save that I saw them go,

As past the empty quays

The rivers flow.

And now again,

In the harvest rain,

The Blenheim oranges

Fall grubby from the trees,

As when I was young—

And when the lost one was here—

And when the war began

To turn young men to dung.

Blenhein orange apples were named for Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, though discovered in the 18th century in Woodstock village.

j.parker

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Edward Thomas, Badgers and the Cull.

Four badger cull protesters arrested by Gloucestershire Police in Redmarley as part of Operation Themis

11:20am Tuesday 10th September 2013 in

Wiltshire and Gloucestershire News

Four badger cull protesters arrested in Redmarley

FOUR people were arrested in the early hours of Tuesday, September 10 as part of Operation Themis – Gloucestershire Constabulary’s response to the pilot badger cull.
A 46-year-old woman from Evesham, a 46-year-old woman from Cheltenham, a 34-year-old woman from Gloucester and a 23-year-old man from Mansfield in Nottinghamshire were all arrested at around 3.10am on suspicion of theft and aggravated trespass.
They were arrested in Redmarley.
The 34-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon.
All four currently remain in police custody. '

I was struck by the news that protestors against badger culling have been arrested at Redmarley, near Dymock and Ledbury, scene of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost's altercation with the gamekeeper.

Redmarley is to the right - following the lone 'R'!

'Those few miles distance from Ledington meant a surprising change in the landscape. The soil was an even deeper red – in fact it was known as Redmarley country. It was stony and the fields were rougher and steeper. Instead of orchards, sheep grazed on short-turfed hill-sides, while the valley slopes between were deeply covered with dense beech and oak. The paths through them were lined with the spent stalks of foxgloves and with brambles turning crimson. They turned into Ryton wood where larches waved overhead, murmuring like the sea and showering them with raindrops.' A.C.E.

Edward Thomas had, I believe, a fondness for and admiration for badgers, who he saw as ancient Britons, pre-dating the occupation and bespoiling of the land by human populations. Though he respected gamekeepers on the whole, the poem , 'The Gallows' perhaps shows that his sympathy lay with the persecuted ones. Then there is this:

The Combe by Edward Thomas

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

By beech and yew and perishing juniper

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots

And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,

The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds

Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,

Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark

The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,

Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,

That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

In his essay,'Chalk Pits', he wrote about the steep-sided hollows where chalk had been excavated centuries past:

'One of these dells is so broken up by the uneven diggings, the roots of trees and the riot of brambles that a badger is safe in it with a whole pack of children.'

From 'Save the Badger.'

Friday, September 6, 2013

Lucy Newlyn's new book (OUP) on William and Dorothy Wordsworth sounds fascinating. It traces the creativity that stemmed from their intense relationship and explores their background as separated, essentially fostered, siblings.

It reminded me of a blog I wrote last February - with his usual acuity Edward Thomas seems to have understood them well.

Edward Thomas and Dorothy Wordsworth

Dove Cottage, Grasmere

I have been rereading Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, for certain reasons, and decided to see what Edward Thomas had to say about her.

I looked into a prose book of Thomas's that up till now I haven't read: 'Feminine Influence on the Poets'. It's good to remember that Thomas was a major, respected and prolific writer of literary criticism as well as travel literature.

The title has never appealed - it seems to imply that all poets are men, for one thing, and that women will only be muses to Great Men at best. But I knew that Thomas had likened Frost's approach to the 'people' in his poems to Dorothy's - more directly sympathetic rather than lengthy and reflective like Wordsworth..

I was pleasantly surprised by the book - everything he says about Dorothy Wordsworth seems to be really insightful, and on other 'feminine influences ' he's surprisingly modern. The message that men have written history and determine the literary canon is there. An interesting comment is that there can be no love poetry unless women have freedom of choice and can reject.

But my interest is in Dorothy. He has of course read the journal carefully and made links with Wordsworth's poems which were clearly borrowed from Dorothy - as Coleridge did too, more than once.

Dorothy was appreciated by them above all for her extraordinary receptivity. She saw clearly and vividly. But I'll just let Edward Thomas say it all much better in one of his so-called 'hack' works.

From the chapter, the Poets and Friendly Women

Dorothy Wordsworth in middle age

'Wordsworth responded to her affection with
a wish that each of her pleasant and painful
emotions '' should excite a similar pleasure or
a similar pain " in himself. She said that he
had no pleasure apart from her, and she dis-
covered in him a ' violence of affection," a
'^tenderness that never sleeps," and 'a delicacy
of manner such as I have observed in few men."

Coleridge said of her that she was 'a
woman indeed — in mind, I mean, and heart ";
of various information, watchful in observa-
tion, and her taste a perfect electrometer" ;
and as early as 1792 she had shown herself a
candid and original critic of her brother's
poetry. His " Evening Walk " of that year
was addressed to her.

The brother and sister lived together first
at Racedown in 1795. They moved together
to Alfoxden. They toured together to Tin-
tern and Chepstow in 1798, when Wordsworth
composed the *' Lines written above Tintern
Abbey," and then in Germany.

Grasmere Lake

Their lives in the Lake Country were never separate and seldom divided until her last years of decay in mind and body; when he was away a little while she lingered out of doors late in the moonlight in the hope of hearing his tread.
She wrote little herself except her journals.....

Wordsworth refers to her again and again,
as, for example, in —

She who dwells with me, whom I have loved
With such communion that no place on earth
Can ever be a solitude for me.

They shared their books ; she read ' Para-
dise Lost " aloud to him and both were '' much
impressed, and also melted into tears." They
sat together talking till dawn. She was
always ready to put on her ' woodland dress "
to go with him. When they were not out
together he could always share her observa-
tion and experience through her journal.

The poem beginning '' She had a tall man's
height or more ' is apparently founded upon
an entry in Dorothy s journal beginning
'' A very tall woman, tall much beyond the
measure of tall women, called at the door,"
and dated nearly a year earlier than the poem.

Her words by themselves, though brief and
unarranged notes, are here, as in so many
other places, quietly graphic and effective, and
it is quite possible to prefer them to the poem.
Even her notes of the scene which inspired
Wordsworth's '' I wandered lonely as a
cloud " may still be read for the delicacy and
simplicity and a touch of rough earthliness,
not inharmonious but not in the poem.

She had a particular curious liking for the
beggars, men out of work, gipsies, and home-
going sailors who passed her in the wild roads
or knocked at her door for help, and she re-
garded them with perhaps more charity than
the poet by himself could have commanded.
She has a most charming page on the wild
' road lass " accompanying a passing carter —
''her business seemed to be all pleasure —
pleasure in her own motions." She wrote out
some of his poems for him. She made his
fires, laid his untidy clothes by, filed his news-
papers, and then — '' got my dinner, two boiled
eggs and two apple tarts." They read over
his poems together, or he repeated them after
composition, and sometimes, no doubt, as in
"The Robin and the Butterfly" she says they
did, ' We left out some lines."
The observations in her journals were often beautiful and often
very close, and they reappear in his poems.
Professor Knight, e.g., compares her entry:

Then we sate by the fire, and were happy, only
our tender thoughts became painful —
with Wordsworth's lines :

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

Their minds probably worked much to-
gether and from a mutual stimulus, and even
if a thought had originally been his the record
of it in her journal was valuable. It is im- (my emphasis)
possible to assign priority to any of their
common ideas and phrases.
For example, on October ii, 1802, Dorothy says:
' We walked to the Easedale hills to hunt water-falls."
Wordsworth's poem ''Louisa," where
the phrase, ''To hunt the waterfalls" occurs,
is attributed to either 1803 or 1805.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Edward Thomas, Helen and Port Meadow, Oxford

If you live in Oxford you will be aware of the utter 'planning' catastrophe that has befallen Port Meadow, the ancient common adjoining the Thames through Oxford. If you don't, you will be very surprised to learn that it is the University of Oxford which has perpetrated the disaster and the City Council which allowed it against the advice of their Heritage Officer. Ironically, an extract from the City Council's website extolling Oxford's beauty, writes that Port Meadow with views of the '"Dreaming Spires", is Oxford's oldest monument that has changed little since prehistoric times.

Here is an extract from 'A Conscious Englishman', a flash-back where Helen recalls meeting Edward in Oxford when they knew she was pregnant. It is close to Helen's account in 'Under Storm's Wing'.

'I thought of that blissful spring day fifteen years earlier, when I rejoiced to find that I was to have a child.

Edward was so doubtful and afraid; I’d had to comfort him. He could not believe that I was simply happy and unconcerned about the future. A baby coming, our baby, who would be born in 1900 – a new life for a new century. I thought of the day, the moment, when he must have been conceived and felt nothing but a surge of physical excitement and deep joy.

Edward had wanted to see me, but it was the summer term of his second year and he had to work, so I must come to Oxford. As the train drew in I knew he wouldn’t wait for me to come through the barrier. He would buy a platform ticket and be ready to hold me. Yes, there he was, his lovely face, his fair hair longer than before, that slight troubled stoop to his shoulders. I was sorry that he looked so anxious and unhappy, so I ran to him and my look and my kiss calmed him. That’s how it often was between us.

We wanted to be alone to talk, so he didn’t take me into the city or to Lincoln College – instead we turned along a canal towpath. We watched narrowboats squeezing through the Isis lock, their rough horses waiting for them on the towpath, and followed them as far as the river and a great meadow.

‘Helen, you are certain about this?’ he asked me.

‘Of course I am – somehow I almost knew what had happened even that day, but now there’s no doubt about it.’

‘And I know you write that you’re happy. But really, isn’t there the least trouble in your mind, or some reproach to me?’

‘No Edwy, not at all. I’m so happy I could burst with happiness. We love each other and out of this love a child is coming. How can I not be happy?’

We rambled on by the river to where the ruins of an old abbey made a perfect place to eat the picnic he’d brought for us. Cowslips grew in the meadow and I picked some and buried my face in their freshness. Then we lay in each other’s arms and he told me that he’d never loved me as much as he did at that moment. All our anxieties were gone and we talked happily about our baby. We knew we must be more together, though we could not really see how it was to be managed, or quite how we would live. I cared nothing for such things then. I had everything I wanted.

At the end of the afternoon we ambled slowly back and this time, across the Thames and a further strip of meadow, I could see the spires and domes of Edward’s Oxford.

My way lay back through the streets to the station and London, waiting eagerly for what was to come.'

It is set in Port Meadow, and like her it was only when I turned for home that I saw the full horror of the blocks of flats - I'd heard there was a problem but had had no idea how awful it was. I was with two of my grand-daughters and photographed them with that back-drop - pain overwhelming pleasure !

Any donations to CPRE (Council for the Protection of Rural England)

Unit 1, London Road, Wheatley, OX33 1JH

From Thomas's 'OXFORD', OUP, edited by Lucy Newlyn

The Oxford Country

I turn and look east.
Almost at once, all these things are happily composed
into one pleasant sense, and are but a frame to a tower
and three spires of Oxford, like clouds but the sky is
suddenly cloudless.

I suppose that ivy has the same graceful ways on all
old masonry, yet I have caught myself remembering, as
if it were unique, that perfect ancient ivy that makes an
arcade of green along the wall of Godstow nunnery.

* * *