Spring - Hello Sunshine

At last, the long awaited hint of spring sunshine is here. I don’t care that it shows up how much my windows need cleaning or draws attention to dusty surfaces, I’m happy to have daylight into the early evening and I don’t mind the sacrifice of an hour’s sleep to get it. Spring. I can wake up, renewed as I begin to feel some energy.

 A few years ago, I recognised that I develop some symptoms of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) from November to March / April. It varies in severity, but nothing unmanageable, so far. Usually it is just the desire to hibernate brought about by fatigue and generally feeling a bit fed up. The change of scenery offered by a couple of breaks in Dumfries & Galloway works wonders and on this occasion, took my mind off other health issues that are being investigated. The SAD is lifting now.

There is cheerful new growth in the garden as plants come back to life. Spring flowers have been bursting through the borders and filling my patio pots with bright colours. I’m particularly proud of a tub of orangey tulips. It all gives a feeling of well-being after months of darkness.

Spring cleaning and sorting out is on the agenda. I’m aiming for retirement and I want to organise belongings in preparation for a possible future move. It will be a slow, meticulous process because I’m easily distracted and have to look at everything. I spent ages this afternoon going through personal memorabilia and deciding what to keep. It was good, singing along to Jack Savoretti and reading old newspaper cuttings, but it didn’t really make much of an impression on the task. There’s no rush, luckily. Tomorrow, if I feel like it, I might attempt to clean some windows and dust round. Oh and there’s a couple of cobwebs that must have been manufactured during last night and need sweeping away before one grandson in particular goes on a spider hunt.

The poem I’ve chosen is Home Thoughts from Abroad by Robert Browning. It is one of my favourites and I’ve probably featured it before but it’s worth another airing. I’m so fortunate that my secondary education included poetry and learning whole poems off by heart, this is one such poem. It's a discipline that seems to be missing now. I had wonderful, enthusiastic English teachers that introduced a world of poetry and literature of which I’m still firmly placed in.

 

Home Thoughts From Abroad

 

Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England—now!

 

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower

—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

 

Robert Browning  1812 - 1889

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

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Palliser's Theory

by Ian Marchant


My friend Charles Palliser, a fine literary novelist who has sold books on a commercial scale (notably his masterful ‘Quincunx’) once told me his theory about a sliding scale of writers, with fame at one end, and riches at the other.

‘Think of the most famous writers in the world, those that everyone has heard of; Joyce, Beckett, Yeats etc. Never earned a penny in their lifetimes, not really. Contrast them with the writers you’ve never heard of who sell millions. The trick is to be about halfway in-between.’

I was reminded of the force of Palliser’s Theory last weekend when James Patterson was the subject of the Q&A feature in the Guardian Weekend mag. Who he? He the world’s best selling novelist. I’ve never read a word, but I doubt very much that he’s a great writer. In fact, I bet you that I’m a ‘better’ writer than him.

On what evidence do I base this bold claim? Because I have ‘literary’pretentions, by which I mean I’m attempting to justify every word I write. This ‘and’ is here, that semi-colon is there for a reason. It doesn’t, it can’t, always work. Perfectionism is the enemy of art, and although poets might come closer, a prose writer is pretty much always going to miss the target. But a ‘literary’ writer is at least having a go at getting it right. Patterson, I strongly suspect, isn’t even trying because he doesn’t have enough time, but I don’t think that matters, because his stuff has narrative vim. He is spinning yarns, very profitably, and bloody good luck to him. Trust me, if I could knock out a unit shifting thriller, I’d start today.

For the giants of literature, there never was a split between literary and commercial. Truly great writers like Austen or Dickens or Orwell sweated to get their manuscripts ‘right’; and then sold high numbers because they were also wonderful story-tellers. This artificial distinction grew as a consequence of high Modernism. Virginia Woolf hated the idea of writing for money, just as much as she hated the idea of universal education. She and her circle objected to a literate hoi polloi, because that meant that the ‘white slugs’ (as Mrs Woolf called the working class) might feel that they could understand minds as refined as those of the Bloomsburies, which was not on. Universal education was levelling, and for Mrs Woolf, that was an unbearable thought. Her especial ire was reserved for Arnold Bennett, because he sold so many books that he could afford a steam yacht. She saw what she did as ‘art’, as ‘literature’, and that was something that could only be achieved by the very best quality people.

‘Literature’ is a genre, a sub-set of writing, and admission to the genre is controlled by a small self-selected coterie of critics. The study of English Literature in universities is roughly coterminous with the rise of Modernism. Only critics and academics hold the keys to the doors of ‘literature’. Despite my fretting about getting my books ‘right’, I doubt that I’ll be admitted to the canon, because working class people still aren’t really expected to write. My concerns are not theirs; my voice is common, vulgar, no matter how much I might work on my texts so that I can bear them to be read. Patterson and Brown, however much people might like reading their books in the bath, on holiday, at the end of a long day, could never get through the gates of literature in a billion years. Only time can decide if a writer is truly great, but I suspect that those who make it will be loved by the critics, and sell shed loads of books too. Getting that particular double is just as hard now as it has ever been.


Literature by Ian Marchant:
Something of the Night
The Longest Crawl
Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams

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