Be More Book

I love books, have done ever since I can remember - which stretches back to a time before I was able to read for myself. I can still remember (aged 3+) looking at books with pictures (of tigers probably) and rows of black symbols and being intrigued by the latter, for they meant something to people who could decipher them and the ability to read them would unlock a whole world of information and intrigue. It was fun to be read to, but how much more convenient to be able to do it for oneself without having to ensnare a grown-up or wait until bedtime! Pretty soon I was devouring Janet And John; (if you don't know what I mean, don't worry, it's nothing perverse). They were smug little beggars but it was not their fault. They were the victims of their creators and at least they imparted the gift of reading to me.

Although I regularly borrowed books from the local library, as a kid and up until my early teens I also spent most of my pocket-money on books (and plastic aircraft kits).  This was before I discovered girls, football and rock & roll. I treasured my little library, often re-reading favourite titles several times over. When I was about ten and on holiday with my parents, they realised they hadn't brought enough holiday reading with them - and I assume the place we were staying didn't have a bookshop - so when my father was partway through a lengthy thriller, he tore it in half down the spine and gave my mother the first half to read while he powered through the second. You know there's a time when you first want to disown your parents? That was the moment for me - I thought ripping a book in two was a sacrilegious act!

I studied English A-level at school, read English at University and became an English teacher (for a few years, anyway). Reading is a life skill and literature is lifeblood. I always have two or three books on the go (a mixture of fact and fiction) and a long list of titles waiting to be read. One day I may even finish writing a novel of my own. It's a debt of honour I owe to the kids I taught.

However, I must come to the point: literary merit is the theme of this week's blog. Hmm. I didn't choose the subject and I don't want to get bogged down in some dry rhetorical debate about what constitutes literary merit; it's a critical exercise with limited appeal, so I'll tackle it this way, with a mountaineering analogy. At a minimum, a piece of writing has some literary merit if it makes people want to read it in the first place and commend it to other people. Enid Blyton in a former age and J.K. Rowling in this one have both performed the magic act of making children want to read. That at least gets them to base camp and eager to explore higher slopes, where fantasies, thrillers and crime-fiction abound - many of them well-written and vastly entertaining (more literary merit). Somewhere, of course, there is the slippery scree of Mills & Boon and Fifty Shades - best skirted around. Up above the pulp fiction there is a wealth of truly wonderful life-enhancing and world-changing literature on the upper reaches of the literary mountain just waiting to be discovered. It's best arrived at by personal recommendation, word-of-mouth and general acclaim. It is not a hard climb and the rewards are incalculable.

So can literary merit be defined and bestowed by consensus? Probably yes: defined as something that shows us aspects of the world and ourselves in new or more completely realised ways; bestowed in reviews and awards such as the Carnegie Medal, Pulitzer Prize, Mann-Booker et cetera.

Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize for Literature (bestowed yearly with the occasional hiatus since 1901) is probably the pinnacle of literary awards and differs from the afore-mentioned in that it is for an author's impact or a body of writing rather than a specific work. Of course, there are many more authors of undoubted literary merit than can ever hope to claim the Nobel Prize - and many deserving giants of the literary world who have never won it. Kipling, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Golding, Pinter have all been honoured down the decades but the likes of Zola, Lawrence, Joyce, Auden, Orwell, Greene and Nabokov have been overlooked. It's a bit of a lottery.

Given that this is the season of lists and callow fickleness, I'll conclude by recommending my own current all-time 20 favourite novels (in chronological order). Five of them are by Nobel Prize winning authors. Some years ago, a colleague, knowing I'd both read and taught English, asked me for a list of 50 great books he should read. (You can have the other 30 on request!)

Emma - Jane Austen (1815)
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (1861)
Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
L'Assomoir - Emile Zola (1877)
The Return Of The Native - Thomas Hardy (1878)
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (1904)
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell (1914)
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence (1915)
The Waves - Virginia Woolf (1931)
Tender Is The Night - F Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)
The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse (1943)
Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann (1947)
The Town And The City - Jack Kerouac (1950)
Riders In The Chariot - Patrick White (1961)
One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Ada: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov (1969)
October Ferry To Gabriola - Malcolm Lowry (1970)
Stone Junction - Jim Dodge (1990)
Kensington Gardens - Rodrigo Fresan (2003)

Thanks for reading. Wishing you a very Happy New Year, S ;-)

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Wine - a poetic tasting.

According to Persian mythology, wine was discovered by a woman. She drank the fermented juice from grapes stored in a jar, went to sleep, and surprisingly woke up cured of a headache, instead of suffering from the world's first hangover as one might have expected. The classical period of Arab civilisation spawned a rich corpus of Bacchic poetry, which had its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia.  

(Last night I could not sleep) so give me to drink of the

maiden wine who has donned the grey locks of old age

whilst still in the womb;

A wine which (when poured) is replenished with youth…

One preserved for a day when its seal is pierced, though

             It is the confidant of Time itself;

It has been aged, such that if it were possessed of an

            eloquent tongue,

It would sit proudly amongst people and tell a tale of an a

             ancient time.  
                                                            P.K.

‘Khamriyya’, The Encylopedia of Islam (new edn.) vol.iv (Leiden, 1978). 998 -1009  

My father kept a copy of The Rubayat of Omar Kyam with him,  throughout his five years of service with the Royal Corps of Signals during WW2.  After visiting the following verses, I am not surprised that he became a publican, he liked a drink but never before 9 in the evening and never to excess.  

And David’s lips are locket; but in divine

High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!

Red Wine!” the Nightingale cries to the Rose

That sallow cheek of hers t’ incarnadine. 

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring

Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing. 

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn

I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn:

And Lip to Lip it murmur’d–“While you live

Drink!–for, once dead, you never shall return.” 

Perplext no more with Human or Divine,

To-morrow’s tangle to the winds resign,

And lose your fingers in the tresses of

The Cypress–slender Minister of Wine. 

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press

End in what All begins and ends in–Yes;

Think then you are To-day what Yesterday

You were–To-morrow You shall not be less. 

So when that Angel of the darker

Drink At last shall find you by the river-brink,

And, offering his Cup, invite your

Soul Forth to your Lips to quaff–you shall not shrink. 

For “Is” and “Is-not” though with Rule and Line

And “Up” and “Down” by Logic I define,

Of all that one should care to fathom,

Was never deep in anything but–Wine. 

And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,

Came shining through the Dusk an Angel Shape

Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it; and ’twas–the Grape! 

The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:

The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice

Life’s leaden metal into Gold transmute. 

 

 

 

 

Wine became the drink of the gods, whether they were Egyptian, Sumerian, or Greek: The early eities of wine were often women, since they were also associated with fertility. The symbolism of wine, as well as its effect, became potent as it was adopted into religious ritual. Another source of potent images, the sea, which was crucial to early transport and communication, was given the feminine gender by the Greeks. When the ancient Greek poet Homer sang of "the wine-dark sea" he was linking two forces central in Mediterranean life to create an image which continues to have great emotive power.

 Li Qingzhao was a Chinese poet of the Song dynasty. Born in Zhangqiu into a family of scholars, Qingzhao was unusually outgoing and knowledgeable of a woman of noble birth. Before she got married, her poetry was already well known within elite circles. Marrying Zhao Mingcheng in 1811, his absences for work fuelled a lot of her poetry, which is often imbued with yearning and explores the effects of wine on her thoughts and feelings.

Light mists and heavy clouds,

melancholy the long dreay day,

In the golden censer

the burning incense is dying away.

It is again time

for the lovely Double-Nith Festival;

The coolness of midnight

penetrates my screen of sheer silk

and chills my pillow of jade.

After drinking wine at twilight

under the chrysanthemum hedge,

My sleeves are perfumed

by the faint fragrance of the plants.

Oh, I cannot say it is not enchanting,

Only, when the west wind stirs the curtain,

I see that I am more graceful

than the yellow flowers.

  

And by all accounts, the Victorian romantic poets drank a surfeit of wine on their tours of Europe.  This extract from John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale. 

O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim. 
 

I am not going to attempt to compete with any of the aforementioned poets but will end with a newly acquired poem, by Chilean poet and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Pablo Neruda. It is a deep, rich poem with subtle hints of plum and Autumn fruits... 

Ode to Wine

Wine color of day

wine color of night

wine with your feet of purple

or topaz blood,

wine,

starry child of the earth,

wine, smooth as a golden sword,

soft as ruffled velvet,

wine spiral-shelled and suspended,

loving, of the sea,

you’ve never been contained in one glass,

in one song, in one man,

choral, you are gregarious

and, at least, mutual

memories;
on your wave

we go from tomb to tomb,

stonecutter of icy graves,

and we weep transitory tears,

but your beautiful spring suit is different,

the heart climbs to the branches,

the wind moves the day,

nothing remains in your motionless soul.

Wine stirs the spring,

joy grows like a plant,

walls, large rocks fall,

abysses close up, song is born.

Oh thou, jug of wine, in the desert

with the woman I love,

said the old poet.

Let the pitcher of wine and its kiss to the kiss of love.
 

My love, suddenly,

your hip

is the curve of the wineglass

filled to the brim,

your breast is the cluster,

your hair the light of alcohol

your nipples, the grapes

your navel pure seal stamped on your belly of a barrel,

and your love the cascade of unquenchable wine,

the brightness that falls on my sense

the earthen splendour of life. 
 

But you are more than love,

burning kiss

of ignited heart-

vino de vida, you are also

fellowship, transparency,

chorus of discipline abundance of flowers.

I love the light of a bottle of intelligent wine

upon a table

when people are talking,

that they drink it,

that in each drop of gold

or ladle of purple,

they remember that autumn worked

until the barrels were filled with wine

and let the obscure man learn,

in the ceremony of his business,

to remember the soil and his duties,

to propagate the canticle of the fruit. 

Pablo Neruda. 1954

 

Raise your glasses, lads and lasses.  Thanks for reading - Adele

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