Willy Goldman’s ‘East End My Cradle’ at QMU

27/07/2011 Richard Kelly

A note is in order here concerning a quite splendid seminar that was held a fortnight ago at the Queen Mary, University of London, in honour of Willy Goldman’s East End My Cradle on the occasion of its return to print through Finds.
The afternoon’s discussion, convened and introduced by Dr Nadia Valman, provided a wealth of fascinating insights into the working class Jewish East End milieu from which Goldman and his writing emerged; and thanks to erudite contributions from (inter alia) Valentine Cunningham, Ian Haywood, and the author’s son Bill Goldman, one felt a stimulating sense of the larger social and aesthetic issues that attend the idea of ‘working class writing.’
Of course Finds is pleased to have other distinguished examples of same on its list, including James Hanley’s Furys sequence. But Ian Haywood made an intriguing point early in the session about the problems of ‘authenticity’ that are commonly (rightly or wrongly) thought to apply to writers of working class origin. Haywood cited the example of how Alan Sillitoe wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning while in the company of Robert Graves in Mallorca, and further amused the audience in noting that he had spoken to the Guardian for a piece on this very subject to be published the next day. Sure enough, said piece included a version of what Haywood told the QMU seminar: “the term ‘working-class’ writer has always been something of an oxymoron because at the point at which this writer gets published, they must have moved away from their original circumstances.”
There was a vaguely analogous experience to Sillitoe’s in Willy Goldman’s life, in that thanks to the fine patronage of John Lehmann (characterised with fondness by Willy’s son Bill as a certain type of ‘Etonian socialist’) Willy was able to draft a substantial part of East End My Cradle while resident in Vienna. But otherwise his material circumstances were generally straitened, and they certainly hampered his hopes for more ambitious writing projects; instead he was, like so many writers of proletarian background at that time, primarily an author of ‘vignettes, small things, bits’ (cf. Valentine Cunningham). But – and by common consent – what magnificent ‘bits’ they were! (If you’re in need of testimonials just look at some of the glowing tributes paid to East End My Cradle as are gathered here.)
In such good and learned company your correspondent learned many things over two hours, among them the story of Stephen Duck, the agricultural labourer who became a poet at the court of Queen Caroline; also the history of that declension whereby the ground-breaking demotic ‘wot?’ of Charles Dickens became the ‘vot?’ of Jewish dialect writers.
Probably my favourite contributions were those of Bill Goldman, obviously an unbeatable witness in respect of his father’s character, who spoke of being taken as a child to anti-fascist demos of the 1930s where he got the chance to shout at Oswald Mosley from three feet away; and who also related Willy’s hardly improvable verdict upon The Devils, Dostoyevsky’s great novel of a violent and fissiparous Russian nihilist ‘cell’ – namely that the book seemed to Willy a thoroughly accurate portrait of the Stepney Communist Party…
Thanks are due to Nadia Valman and QMU, to Bill Goldman and to all the speakers for making such a fine day happen. East End My Cradle is available to order here.

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A.L. Barker’s lighting of the dark

27/07/2011 Richard Kelly

In 2009 Finds had the special privilege of returning to print the entire fiction oeuvre of A.L. Barker. This appreciation of Barker at the Time’s Flow Stemmed book-site is just the sort of thing that sweetens the publishing endeavour, and inter alia it cites some discerning remarks about Barker’s work from Rebecca West in particular.

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‘Gazza Agonistes’ by Ian Hamilton: the godly talent, the bitter tears, the hard tackles

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

Boys don’t cry, as they say in general, and specifically when the matter in hand is sport. Thus, and sadly, former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes, a dashing batsman in his day, is remembered above all for the tears he shed on resigning aforementioned captaincy after a drubbing by the (invincible) West Indies side of 1984. Of course it’s a masculine thing: you’re meant to take it on the chin, above all in the arena of sports where, for the most part, nobody dies.
And yet one of a handful of possible exceptions to this rule is the case of Paul Gascoigne, whose desperate, blinking, red-eyed distress on getting a suspension-yielding yellow card in the semi-final of Italia 1990 was widely felt to articulate the clotted feelings of England football fans as they prepared for one more colossal disappointment.
The sadness of that evening speaks more broadly for Gascoigne’s career, too: how badly a lot of us have felt over his fate as a player and an individual, and the factors – money and fame, personal flaws and bad judgements – that contributed to it.
Born in Gateshead, son of a hod carrier, Gascoigne first came to my attention as an extravagant talent wearing the black and white stripes of my team, Newcastle United. (If you missed any part of this story, that talent is on extravagant display here.) Like most such talents he moved south from NE1 to make his fortune, so adding to a depressing statistic. Yet Dunston remained so much a part of him (and he so undiminished a presence in Dunston’s Excelsior Working Man’s Club) that Gascoigne was not disowned on Tyneside, even as he was now sporting a Tottenham shirt. There’s much I could say on this matter, but really it’s all said in the best and most direct manner by this recent article for the Sabotage Times site by the music writer and NUFC fan Len Brown.
The real upside of Gascoigne’s move to Tottenham – at least for football-following book-lovers – is that it allowed him to become officially beloved by the poet, biographer and Spurs fan Ian Hamilton, who had a feel for the North East from his upbringing partly spent in Darlington, was an incorrigible fan of ‘flair players’, and needed a successor in his affections to the departed Glenn Hoddle.
By 1990, after Gascoigne had become Gazza, national hero, Hamilton was moved (and perfectly placed) to write Gazza Agonistes, his very special inspection of and rumination on the sum of peculiar forces inside this mercurial player. In 1998, after none other than Hoddle, then England manager, delivered the death-blow to Gascoigne’s international career, Hamilton updated his study. And it gives me great personal pleasure to declare that Gazza Agonistes is now available to order as a Faber Find. “To be fair”, as the pundits say, you could not wish for a more eloquent and elegant book about football.
From 05:04 in the clip below you can relive (with commentary/analysis) the moment Gazza’s career took off – or, if you like, became insufferably burdened – as taken from the 2004 documentary That Game. The clip under that is, as with so much of Gazza, just for mischief, really…

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Dave Rimmer’s ‘Like Punk Never Happened’: such stuff as pop dreams are made on…

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

Rock & Pop are such relatively youthful art-forms that Your Correspondent still finds himself surprised by how swiftly the music of his adolescence (1983-1989) has begun to look a little sepia-toned round the edges. (Presumably one’s parents came to feel the same way about A Hard Day’s Night…) In referring to the ‘look’ over the sound, of course, one admits how important was the image-repertoire of 1980s pop to the appreciation of whatever actual music the bands came up with… Which is not for one minute to propose that the Sounds of the Eighties don’t stand up to airplay today, because a swathe of present-day heroes/heroines from Lady GaGa to Alison Goldfrapp might otherwise be struggling.
The BBC’s Top of the Pops, once an ineluctable presence in TV schedules, now feels like half a world away, but without doubt the musically-inclined youth of my generation were sure to study it on a Thursday evening. Thus in the autumn of 1982 I was only one of millions of kids who watched the debut appearance of Boy George and Culture Club performing ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ And, as would soon become clear, my dad was only one of millions of parents also watching to put the baffled question: ‘Is that a boy or a girl…?’
Pop in its profusion gives us a feel for generational shifts and even at the time it was clear that 1980s pop felt coloured by glamour, conspicuous consumption and a liberal dose of gender-bending. The spiked hair, bondage trousers and safety pins of punk (if you like) had been swapped for eyeliner, teased highlights, and parachute-like blouses and suits by Yohji Yamomoto.
The indispensable periodical that charted all of this pop-cultural foment was Smash Hits, which I bought loyally most every fortnight until I was 13 or 14; and its star reporter was Dave Rimmer, whose interviews I found increasingly fascinating – even more so those he contributed to The Face, the rather more grown-up and hollow-cheeked Defining Magazine of the 1980s, to which I duly graduated. Rimmer’s form in this field can be usefully studied here through the listings of the subscription site Rock’s Back Pages. (Many of these articles I remember in vivid detail, above all ‘Duran Duran: The Pop Dream Come True’ from the December 1985 issue of The Face.)
But Rimmer also committed his expert and access-fuelled insight to between-covers, with the book-length study Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop, first published by Faber in 1985 at the instigation of the publisher’s then pop culture editor Pete Townshend. In truth Rimmer’s de facto agent and editor on the book would be his Smash Hits colleague Neil Tennant, who first came up with the ironic expression that gave the book its title (and would in due course come up with a considerable contribution to the pop music that defined the era.)
Finds is thrilled to be returning Like Punk Never Happened to readers this month, including a brand new preface in which Dave Rimmer elaborates on the story adumbrated above of the book’s making. At its page on our ordering site you will see some of the tributes paid it at the time in the rock press. I would also cite this recent eloquent tribute from Rob Sheffield, contributing editor at Rolling Stone (and author of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran):

“The early 1980s were a golden age for British new wave scam artists with fire-hazard hair, as Adam Ant, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Kajagoogoo, etc. made some of the most brilliant pop records ever devised. Rimmer tells the story, and it’s the funniest, smartest book I know about the connections between pop glitter and real-life human passion, the erotics of fandom, or the dirty details of the Boy George vs. Frankie Goes to Hollywood feud.”

Below you can, like me, beckon in the past by the madeleine of that first Culture Club performance on TOTP. And under that is the great Dave Rimmer himself, in conversation with your correspondent (recorded in the Faber and Faber archive) about the origins of Like Punk, the crises that consumed Boy George’s career in the course of its writing, and the vida loca of covering the pop game in an era when record companies still thought it wise to pay for journalists to accompany their acts on the road and stand at close quarters by them…

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“That rare being, a born writer”: Denton Welch and his Maiden Voyage

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

It was none other than Edith Sitwell who pronounced the glowing verdict in the heading above upon Denton Welch (1915-1948). Taking this quote as the header for a 2005 appreciation in Time magazine, Stefan Kanfer very ably sings of a writer who was for most of the twentieth century ‘a literary footnote’ but whose achievement has far exceeded the seeming limits of his life. At the age of 20 Welch was very badly injured when, riding his bicycle down a country lane, he was struck by a car. The rest of his short life was painfully afflicted. But his writing had the power to go round the world. As Kanfer puts it, ‘[Welch's] tales were produced with a combination of will, eidetic memory and emotional immaturity. His skills were those of a polished ironist, but his obsessions seldom progressed beyond puberty.’
It has always been tempting to see Welch as a rare and delicate flower, but Alan Bennett, one of his most prominent admirers, directs us in a Guardian appreciation to consider the obvious fortitude of this prodigy:

“To a boy brought up in the provinces this ailing ex-art student seemed to have moved effortlessly into a charmed circle, with letters from EM Forster, lunch with Edith Sitwell and tea at Sissinghurst with Harold and Vita. It was probably only her suicide that stopped Virginia Woolf from figuring here.
What I didn’t appreciate then was the guts Welch must have had and needed to have. At 18 I thought that to be “sensitive” was a writer’s first requirement – with discipline and persistence nowhere – whereas he never allowed himself to languish. His spinal injuries no more kept him off his bike than sickness and high temperatures did from the typewriter, and it was this no-nonsense approach both to his disability and to his work that made him impatient of those occasional fans who sought him out expecting a wilting aesthete.”

Born in Shanghai in 1915, son of a wealthy rubber merchant, Welch was dispatched to an English boarding school after his mother’s death. There he suffered, and soon absconded, forcing his father to bring him back to Shanghai. This time Welch got a book out of it. As Ian Irvine wrote in the Independent in 2005:

“In 1940, inspired by reading J R Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday, his account of going to India as the private secretary of an eccentric maharajah, Welch began a travel narrative of his own which eventually became his first novel, Maiden Voyage, about an adolescent adventure… Its publication in 1943 was a sensation, not least for its frank account of public school life. Though nothing explicitly homoerotic occurs in the book, as with much of his work there is a charged possibility of sex which never actually appears. He seemed a permanent adolescent, a mixture of sophistication and naivety with an undeluded precision about his own feelings and motives and of those around him…”

Maiden Voyage is now returned to print by Faber Finds, I’m happy to announce. Welch’s Journals will follow in September.

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The ‘essential’ Correlli Barnett: Pride & Fall, and the price-tag of British power

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

This is only the most minor tribute imaginable to a very considerable author: nonetheless, Correlli Barnett (known to his friends, I understand, as ‘Bill’) may be responsible above all for this reader having formed a youthful impression of history as a vital and living discipline. For, back in the mid-1980s when your correspondent was a schoolboy, Barnett – Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and former Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre – was not only a must-read military historian for any O- or A-Level student in respect of his work (cf. The Swordbearers) on the First and Second World Wars; but also a media figure whose publishing had penetrated the op-ed pages of the broadsheet newspapers and sparked a great deal of hot contemporary debate. The Audit of War (1986) was the second title in what became known as Barnett’s ‘Pride and Fall’ sequence on Britain’s decline as an industrial and imperial power during the twentieth century.
Paul Addision sketched Barnett’s central thesis in a review of Audit of War for the London Review of Books in July 1986:

“Most of us assume that in a general way [Britain's decline] was inevitable, since the Empire was too big, and the economy too small, to sustain the role of a great power in the 20th century. Barnett, however, believes the decline could have been arrested or even reversed but for the peculiar decadence and irresponsibility of the British governing class… [who] were, in short, unfit to govern. Instead of organising the resources of the Empire in the national interest, they ran it as a branch of Toynbee Hall. Instead of adapting the educational system to fit the requirements of a nation competing for markets, they indulged in the fraudulent exercise, much trumpeted by Classics dons, of liberal humanism for the masses.”

The historian David Edgerton has also reviewed – one might say ‘engaged with’ – Barnett in the ‘LRB’, and it is of interest that Edgerton’s recent book Britain’s War Machine was reviewed by Ben Shephard in the Observer with a passing reference to the differences of opinion between the author and Barnett, Shephard not quite convinced that Barnett’s argument had been fully ‘taken on’.
Barnett, in any case, continues to speak and write most ably for himself, as in this newspaper article of recent vintage where, in response to the avowed policy concerns of the present Defence Secretary, Barnett reiterates his own argument that the UK is forever spending its military budget rashly and in the wrong places, for the folly of ‘projecting’ global-power status (‘[W]hy on earth should ­Britain, an island nation of only 60 million people, ranking ­seventh in the world as an economy, and currently ­suffering a financial crisis, want to ‘project power’?’)
The Audit of War is now available in Finds, I’m pleased to report, and the other entries in the ‘Pride and Fall’ sequence will follow in the months ahead. Should you need any further piquing of interest in Barnett and The Audit of War, I am pleased to offer the following endorsement from Simon Heffer (whose Like The Roman and Vaughan Williams have been among the most keenly received titles on the Finds list):

“THE AUDIT OF WAR is the perfect revisionist history – because it is superbly researched, well-written and cogently argued, and it gave radical new insights into a subject that some had wrongly thought well-trodden and over-explored. It is one of the truly essential texts of this area of studies and as gripping now as it was when first published.”
SIMON HEFFER

Worth a look, too, is this short but lively interview with Barnett (from 00:41 to 02:54) in relation to his 13-year tenure as chairman of the Western Front Association study/research group.

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Forrest Reid’s alternative Ulster, or The Marcel Proust of Ormiston Crescent

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

The twentieth century literature of northern Ireland was substantially and understandably dominated by one subject matter, namely the formal invention in 1922 of ‘Northern Ireland’, and the various forceful consequences of same. For that reason it has perhaps been too easy to hold a writer such as Forrest Reid (1875-1947) in a marginal regard. And yet this is a character to whom E.M. Forster once referred as ‘the most important man in Belfast.’ Reid’s published writing life straddled the partition of Ireland, and so to some extent he may have been rather overlooked in a melee; but more importantly he was a man out of time. Though in a sense he never left Belfast (other than for his studies at Cambridge) and made home for most his life at #13 Ormiston Crescent, his inner universe was intensely fired by the spirit and aesthetics of ancient Greece, and through his mind’s eye he transformed the landscape of Ulster into a sort of Arcadia.
Finds is proud to be returning a small selection of Reid’s finest writings to print: the autobiographical diptych Apostate (1926, out this week) and Private Road (1940), and Peter Waring (1937), one of 17 novels in the Reid oeuvre, a distinctly Grecian body of work focused purely (if not simply) on boyhood and adolescence, friendship and sentimental education.
Reid was homosexual, though he confined himself to an ideal of platonic love. But his emotional life obviously put him at odds with his society – would have done so even had he not been tied to a grey middle-class Presbyterian Belfast. After all even Forster, whom Reid called a friend, self-suppressed the one novel (Maurice) that spoke most plainly of his sexual self. Henry James, who championed early work of Reid’s, broke with him when he felt the younger man’s writings trespassed too far into the homoerotic.
But writing is too fine a register of the crucial inner feeling of sexuality to be able to mask it; and to dip into Apostate is to quickly gather the strength of that feeling in Reid, as in this Whitmanesque passage:

‘It was hot and still. The breathless silence seemed unnatural; seemed, as I lay motionless in the tangled grass, like a bridge that reached back across into the heart of some dim antiquity. I had a feeling of uneasiness, of unrest, though I lay so still – of longing and excitement and expectation…I drew my breath quickly; there was a drumming in my ears; I knew that the green woodland before me was going to split asunder, to swing back on either side like two great painted doors…’

Interested readers are recommended to look at the text (by Dr Kris Brown) of this excellent brochure made by Queen’s University Belfast as a guide to an exhibition of their holdings in respect of Reid and his protégé Stephen Gilbert. Apostate is available to order here.

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Patrick Hamilton’s ‘Twopence Coloured’ + its “pretty clear knowledge of that class of people”

24/07/2011 Richard Kelly

The literary legend of Patrick Hamilton is dark and morose, vicious at times, tinged with violence, and most often perceived through the ambers of a bottle or a glass. Alcohol ended Hamilton’s life and it coloured his work, not least the novel that is perhaps his most famous, Hangover Square (1941). His gift for murder stories, expressed in his celebrated stage/film successes Rope and Gaslight, is probably only a sidebar to his true and enduring cult following.
The terrible road accident of 1932 that left him disfigured is perhaps a marker-post in a life that came to be plagued by depression: it’s possible Hamilton never really ‘recovered’. Until that point he had undoubtedly made something of himself from unpromising beginnings. As his biographer Sean French has noted, ‘Hamilton came from a family of failed writers’, a quite particuliar form of genteel underachievement. He was a 15-year-old school-leaver (though the school in question was Westminster), after which he knocked around for a fair bit. ‘I did all sorts of things’, he later wrote, ‘anything I could get hold of; working for the army and at the law. Had a sister who was on the stage and that led me into that sort of life. Took perfectly rotten jobs in the theatre, nothing that amounted to anything more than giving me barely enough money to live, but it did give me a pretty clear knowledge of that class of people…’
The theatre work consisting on provincial touring with the company of Andrew Melville, as an assistant stage manager and occasional actor. Hamilton didn’t stick it for long; stenography became his wage-labour thereafter. But he was already writing by then, and would succeed in publishing 3 novels before he was 25. The third of these, Twopence Coloured (1928), was his ‘theatre’ book, and it found him on the cusp of what would be his breakthrough, achieved the following year with The Midnight Bell (based on his relationship with Lily Connolly) and the stage premiere of Rope. Twopence Coloured, though, remains one of the rarest items in Hamilton’s bibliography, and Finds is thrilled to be returning it to print this month.
BTW: Hamilton fans who are gladdened by its reappearance may also be keen to see the return of his very first published novel Monday Morning (1925); if so, I would ask them to contact me through the Comments feature of this page…
The writer Joseph Ridgwell admires Hamilton so much that he recently convened the Inaugural Patrick Hamilton Literary Pub Crawl through Central London; its proceedings may be inspected below.

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Fred Vermorel’s ‘Starlust’ & its fans (inc. Pete Townshend, Simon Reynolds, Andrew O’Hagan)

22/07/2011 Richard Kelly

‘This book, at first glance full of the fantasies of maniacs, is really full of the wonderful dreams of people just like you and me.’ So writes Pete Townshend, with delightfully modest candour, in his introduction to Fred Vermorel’s Starlust, a book that seems to have been out of print ever since the days (the mid-1980s, to be precise) when it was passed keenly, nay hotly, around schoolyards by pop-loving kids in search of the red meat of sensation (kids such as your correspondent, for one…) But Faber Finds is thrilled to return Starlust to its horde of rightful fans this month.

Starlust is an oral history of pop music fandom, collected from interviews, diaries, letters and ‘confessions.’ It tells you how boys and girls really feel about their pop idols, both when the lights are on and when the lights are off. It is, to say the least, highly sexual. But that’s only one of the wonderful things about it. For another, as Andrew Hagan opined wisely in the London Review of Books, it is a work ‘which has no trouble persuading you that the desires and preoccupations of fans are the most beautiful and worrying things about modern pop.’ And Starlust is timeless in that sense. The testimonies in the book come to be organised around the particular cults of Nick Heyward (teen-bopping girls in the main), David Bowie (slightly older teens/20s with more offbeat tastes), and Barry Manilow (beloved of the housewife/mature woman.) But couldn’t the same study be conducted today with an eye to how fans feel about Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Michael Buble…?

I am delighted to say that Simon Reynolds, acclaimed Faber author and rightly admired sage on all matters pop-musical, has given this ringing endorsement of our Finds reissue of Starlust.

“In this fascinating and groundbreaking expose, Fred Vermorel lifts the lid on fan culture to reveal – and revel in—its literally idolatrous delirium. Yet, far from manipulated dupes of a cynical record industry, fans are show to be subversive fantasists who use the objects of their worship as a means to access the bliss and glory they cannot find in their everyday lives and social surroundings. A lost classic of pop-culture critique that’s woven almost entirely out of the testimonials and confessions of the fans themselves, Starlust is above all a celebration of the power of human imagination”
SIMON REYNOLDS, author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.

Shall we remind ourselves, then, of the pop heroes who form the basis of Starlust’s fan sociology? Yes, I think we shall…

 

 

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Emma Tennant’s neo-gothic myth-making: ‘Faustine’ & ‘Two Women of London’

22/07/2011 Richard Kelly

Emma Tennant was a novelist to watch even before 1975, the year she co-founded the literary magazine Bananas, its editorial policy influenced (in Emma’s words) by ‘Borges and Marquez and [Bulgakov’s] The Master and Margarita’, its notable coups including new work by Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’. Nonetheless, the ‘house style’ of Bananas pointed a way toward the fruitful re-imagining of myth and fable which would become Emma’s own forte.
In the late 1970s she re-established herself in fiction with what Gary Indiana has described as ‘a startling procession of novels unlike anything else being written in England: wildly imaginative, risk-taking books inspired by dreams, fairy tales, fables, science fiction and detective stories, informed by a wicked Swiftian vision of the U.K. in decline.’
Two such gems are Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989) and Faustine (1992), both newly reissued by Faber Finds. In the former – styled, of course, after R.L. Stevenson – an impoverished single mother at the end of her tether finds dark pharmaceutical means to revive her looks and career ambitions. Tennant has said that her purpose was to show ‘how the frequently intolerable pressures for one woman today—single parenthood, need to compete in the marketplace, a Manichean split between ambition and ‘caring’—can lead to disintegration and murder.’ In Faustine, which derives very clearly from Goethe and others, a 48-year-old woman who has expended her best years in the raising of her daughter’s child enters a diabolical pact by which she returns to the age of 24, with beauty and all the powers that attend it.
You will find a marvellous TV interview with Emma (recorded while Faustine was still being written, in which she discusses inter alia her passions for the Gothic and the Scottish) by following this link. Those same subjects are discussed by Emma and myself in an interview that forms a preface to both of the Finds reissues, and the marvellous Gothic Imagination website is running a preview extract from that interview here.
Meantime readers should be advised that an opera based on Faustine is currently in the works: a tantalising and exciting prospect that testifies to the power of Emma’s possession of the Faust legend. Arlene Sierra is the composer, Lucy Thurber the librettist, and they discuss the piece in the clip below, related to a recent presentation of four scenes from the work performed with orchestra at New York City Opera (and rapturously reviewed in Musical America – scroll down to see.)

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