For most of us, writing is a messy and anxious business – I have never met anybody who can roll out sentences which are right first time. What we call writer’s block is really a form of stage-fright – the blank page awaiting our words of wisdom confounds our confidence, like the sight of an audience waiting for our performance to begin. For many years I have done annual talks for postgraduates on getting writing to flow. The first time I did it, I lost all confidence in what I had prepared, and skipped lunch to work out something sensible to say. I was sitting in a room called the Writing Room, and fifteen minutes before the talk was due to start, I had written nothing – it was complete white-out.
These wrong words are the only route there is to the right words. Beneath the castle mound is the writerly subconscious – a realm of nameless terror. Words are the only weapon we have against it. Put words on the page – almost any words will do – their quantity is more important than their quality. Once they exist, we have managed to start, as I have just done. This is the first of a short series on the emotions of writing.
Over the years, urban demolition, and the passing of generations, has supplied the ten rooms and thirty dealers that make up the Amorini Antiques Centre, at 1 Hamilton Street, Birkenhead, with bric-a-brac, pictures, books, maps, coins, medals, ornaments, postcards, and old furniture, turning it into a regional memory bank. When I went there with my brother, early in 2018, I spent a fiver on a postcard-sized folder, fronted with a sepia-toned photograph of a typical late 1940s British cargo-ship, and containing eight pages of on-board information.
It lists the officers and crew the passengers would encounter, and has information about meal times, bar times, opening times for the ship’s library (passengers were requested ‘not to leave their books on deck’), and information about the self-service washing machine provided. In that epoch, being ‘on first-name terms’ with someone implied an established friendship, or even intimacy, so passengers are listed by initials and surnames only. Yet this is not remote history - it’s the era of post-colonial, multicultural Britain, as indicated by the presence of Mr and Mrs H. S. Patel on the passenger list. And Mrs Hewitt, travelling with her two children, was not joining a Civil-Service husband in Karachi, but one who had probably taken up an overseas posting with a British company. It was also the period of the Beatles and of shifting attitudes to gender, and it is indicative that, as well as a ‘Purser & Chief Steward’ (W. S. Hine), the City of London carried a ‘Stewardess’ (Miss R. Robinson), an innovation on a cargo ship of this kind. Every item in the Amorini is the surviving ‘DNA’ of a specific moment, and is ‘readable’ in this way. The place is a local-history ‘library’ with a randomised acquisitions policy and no catalogue – all you can do is rummage about. Leaving the Amorini after a couple of hours that Saturday afternoon, I realised that it offered a working method for writing out of my own memory bank. Officially, the open-archive methodology is called ‘bio-ethnography’, which means weaving aspects of personal experience into the broader fabric of relevant cultural and social history. But let’s keep things simple: just open the door, go in, pick up something that catches your mind’s eye, and let it lead you on. It’s a labyrinth, as life is, and I’m no Theseus. But I am a writer, and one day, I hope, you’ll be able to pick up a dusty, second-hand copy of the book for 50p or so at the Amorini.
I usually re-read A Christmas Carol around this time of year, but this time I read The Chimes, the Christmas book of the following year, which Dickens thought his best, though not many readers have agreed with him. It is more overtly political than the Carol, aiming directly at the government policies which generate poverty and degradation, so it is perhaps a better tract for our times. It opens powerfully – ‘There are not many people ... who would care to sleep in a church’ – and continues with a vivid evocation of the moans and whimpers a gusty wind can make in a church at night. But there are too many characters and too many interwoven events, and the earlier story’s starkness of focus on the protagonist’s memories and regrets is lost in the dazzle of the author’s technical virtuosity. I also listen to compilations of carols. Our household favourite is a CD included in the BBC Music Magazine for December 1995, called Music for Christmas (A Concert of festive music from around Europe). The sleeve-note explains that all the material is ‘Taken from a 14-hour live radio broadcast by European Broadcasting Union members, transmitted to 25 countries on December 18th 1994’. There are choirs from Helsinki, from the St Thomas Church in Leipzig, from Seville and Jerez, from the Slovak Radio Folk Instrument Orchestra, and from the Tatra Mountains, on the Polish border. It is the Europe we are losing, and it ends with the great choir of King’s College, Cambridge. But I have never listened to that choir’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at 3.00pm on Christmas Eve, which is the moment when Christmas begins for so many. Somehow, the poised, high-art perfection of that event makes me prefer the last-minute scramble of ‘shopping and chopping’. On the 1995 carols CD, the folksy bits are sung with a certain gusto – you can hear feet being stamped on wooden boards in proper, not-quite unison. As in Dickens’s Chimes, the technical virtuosity displayed at King’s is just a touch too much, so that something of the simplicity of the Christmas spirit seems to be missing. Illustrations 1. The Old Church, Clarkson Stanfield, 1844, Wood engraving. Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: Third Quarter. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. Taken from the Victorian Web. 2. Cover of the 1995 BBC CD.
Broughton started the story in her early twenties, to ‘relieve the tedium of a wet Sunday afternoon in a religious household’, and found thereafter that she couldn’t stop writing. She became, it was said, the most successful woman novelist between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Her books gained notoriety for their ‘controversial and racy’ plot-lines, and for their ‘social mockery’ of her own class. In Oxford, for many years, she was admired and sought after for her wit, and feared for her outspoken ad hominem acerbity.
Illustrations The two photographs (respectively, outside and inside the shop) are courtesy of Martin Ashby of Ystwyth Books. The third image shows the Alan Sutton Publishing edition of the novel, 1993. The cover uses a detail from ‘The Garden of Eden’ by Hugh Goldwyn Riviere (1869-1956), Guildhall Art Gallery, London. I recently attended the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland), jointly organized with LAND2 (pronounced ‘land squared’), a network for creative artists engaged in projects on landscape, place, and environment.
Another useful panel, ‘Stone and Rock’, included a presentation describing a filmic project that tracked a maternal presence through The Burren’s ‘fields of stone’, reminding us that a beaten path is also called a trace. I came home with renewed impetus and eager to get to work again.
Like Belladonna’s bridegroom (aka Macbeth), I have, in the recent weeks of May and June, been ‘lapped in proof’(s) - that is, not clad in armour, but definitely under bombardment, as two sets of book proofs arrived simultaneously on my laptop.
Wales’s national academy of science and letters, the Learned Society of Wales, was established in 2010, and now has over 400 Fellows, who are based in Wales, the UK and beyond. I was delighted to be among the new batch of Fellows elected in April 2017. As its website indicates, the Society ‘provides public benefit, including expert scholarly advice on a variety of public policy issues related to science, engineering, medicine, arts, humanities and social sciences. Fellows . . . are entitled to use the initials FLSW after their names.’ The LSW is based at the University Registry on King Edward VII Avenue in Cardiff. The Society identifies and pursues a number of ‘Society Themes’, of which the first two are ‘Wales Studies’, which ‘provides opportunities to develop the knowledge and understanding of Wales, its people, language, society, culture, natural environment and heritage’, and ‘History of Science and Technology’, which provides ‘a programme of activities designed to stimulate and promote research and education on Wales’s scientific and technological history.’ (All images taken from the LSW website and used with LSW permission. Please follow image links to visit the relevant pages on the LSW website.)
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