Zoe Heller informs me that one of her next tasks will be to write an introduction to a new edition of Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which sends me to my copy of  The English Novel and this:

"It was to Diderot – and still more to Stendhal – that the Novel owes its next great step forward. That consisted in the discovery that words put into the mouth of a character need not be considered as having the personal backing of the author. At that point it became suddenly evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore a meduim of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into its own.

It is obvious of course that before the day of Diderot authors had put into the mouths of their characters sentiments with which they themselves could not be imagined to sympathize. But that was done only by characters having to utter sentiments which were either those of the author or those with which the author imagined the solid middle classes would agree.

…the Novel, if it was at all to express its day, must express itself through figures less amateurishly blacked than Uriah Heep and less sedulously whited than the Cherryble brothers."

Lovely, however, I can’t help but feel concern for the condition of all these books that just sit there in the windows baking in the sun

While I like what Ron Charles says here in the Washington Post about how silly it is to suggest that ‘social responsibility’ should in some way be used as a criteria to determine literary merit:

"Hillary Jordan’s first novel, Mudbound, arrives emblazoned with the Bellwether Prize, a biennial award established in 1999 by Barbara Kingsolver "to support a literature of social responsibility." That sounds like wearing a "Kick Me" sign on the literary playground, but sneer all you want, O Decadent Literati. These judges know that "social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion," and they’re determined "to address this deficiency" by giving $25,000 every two years to the author of a previously unpublished novel.

Even by the grandiose standards of award statements, the Bellwether Prize is something of a prizewinner. "Socially responsible literature," the Web site intones, "may describe categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices." But don’t go thinking that’s what all good literature does. "The mere description of an injustice, or of the personal predicament of an exploited person, without any clear position of social analysis invoked by the writer, does not in itself constitute socially responsible literature." Note that emphasis on clarity, comrades. Ambiguity, Subtlety and Wit, go wait outside; we’ll tell you when the meeting is over."

Novels which at least grapple with important, universal moral dilemmas do tend to end up in the Canon more frequently than those that don’t. And deservedly so. Authors who possess a certain moral seriousness, which is instilled in their writing ‘wittily, subtly and with ambiguity’, tend more often to produce work that lasts. I’m thinking here of Chris Cleave and Little Bee/The Other Hand and the plight of refugees. I like what he says here:

Readers are smart and I’m not in the business of lecturing them. I see my job as providing new information in an entertaining way. Readers will then use that information as the spirit moves them. I think the job is important because there’s something you can do in fiction that you don’t have the space to do in news media, which is to give back a measure of humanity to the subjects of an ongoing story. When I started to imagine the life of one asylum seeker in particular, rather than asylum seekers in general, the scales fell from my eyes in regard to any ideological position I might have held on the issue. It’s all about exploring the mystery and the wonder of an individual human life. Life is precious, whatever its country of origin.

And who he quotes here on why he writes:

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no new road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

- D.H. Lawrence
(opening lines of Lady Chatterley’s Lover)

Not a bad candidate for the Bellwether, Chris. I’d say. Clearly.

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Amateur Reader introduces me to Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri. This from Scene 1:

Salieri

By dint of stubborn steadfast perseverance upon the endless mountainside of art I reached at last a lofty level. Fame

smiled on me; and I found in others’ hearts responses to the sounds I had assembled. Came happy days; in quiet I enjoyed work and success and fame – enjoyed also the works and the successes of my friends, my comrades in the art divine we served. Oh, never did I envy know. Nay never! Not even when Piccini found a way to captivate the ears of savage Paris – not even when I heard for the first time the plangent opening strains of "Iphigenia" Is there a man alive who’ll say Salieri has ever stooped to envy – played the snake that, trampled underfoot, still writhes and bites the gravel and the dust in helpless spite? No one!…Yet now – I needs must say it- now I am an envious man. I envy – deeply, to agony, I envy. – Tell me, Heaven! where now is justice when the holiest gift,  when genius and its immortality, come not as a reward for fervent love, for abnegation, prayer and dogged labor – but light its radiance in the head of folly, of idle wantonness?…Oh Mozart, Mozart!

Here’s what Peter Shaffer did with Pushkin:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvRGAlbiv5g

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1. Penguin Porn (for mature audiences only)

2. Penguin Porn (for all audiences: best viewed with audio turned off) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljVg_weDbes

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These from Kruger National Park:

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I just discovered this stuff. OMG is it ever good.

As outlined in a post containing a selection of wicked quotes from Martin Amis’s London Fields, I read, in order of priority, to 1) find and revel in funny, beautiful, thought-provoking phrases, 2) dwell on profound paragraphs that contain useful truths about life and human nature, 3) lose myself in the lives of exceptional characters.

Of Amis, James Wood once said: "His style rocks and sways. It has vitamins, it has enhanced flavourings. It is intrusive and self-regarding: it knows it’s good."

I will be interviewing Zoe Heller next week.

Her style, at least in the first 56 pages of The Believers, shares some of the same powerful Amis nutrients. Witness:

…dark flowers of perspiration blossoming at the armholes of her dress

Up close, the three men were a small anthology of body odors

…the American trick of seeming to smile even as he was talking.

There was a brief silence as they registered the eagerness with which she had disowned Martin.

His penis was thick and long enough to bump companionably against his thigh as he strode out to the bathroom.

‘Small anthologies’, and use of the word ‘companionably’ puts Heller in the box seats. ‘Strode‘ is nice too.

Clarke’s Bookshop, the most famous in Cape Town, specializes in selling southern African books to universities and libraries that teach and have an interest in same. Established in 1956 by Anthony Clarke, the Long Street shop today remains much the same as it was 50 plus years ago:  filled with book-lined, wooden-floored rooms spread over two levels containing an eclectic mix of new and used, rare, out-of-print, academic and popular books sold to customers local and institutions foreign. Catalogues filled with books from among other countries Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and South Africa itself, go out to the likes of Yale University, the Smithsonian Institute and the African Studies Centre in Holland, twice a year.

I spoke recently with owner Henrietta Dax who for more than thirty years has ventured forth annually to Mozambique,  the US, the UK, and other more exotic locales buying, selling, bartering and stockpiling  books she thinks will appeal to her customers. Please listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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This from John Banville on The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 in The New Republic:

"…reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language "best used where it is most efficiently abused"? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?

The late Cyril Cusack, a wonderful actor but a rebarbative spirit, used to recount a meeting with Beckett about a possible production of Waiting for Godot in which Cusack told the author that the play is nothing more than a moan of Protestant angst. Beckett, according to Cusack, agreed immediately to this curt analysis. One does not doubt Beckett’s artistic probity–probity was what he said he admired most in Joyce–but the ferocity of his aesthetic gives one pause. Like all artists, Beckett sought impersonality but suffused his work with the squid ink of his own desires, fears, and prejudices. He professed to have veered from the "old, foul road" down which language must drag itself, but is it not possible that what he was turning from was precisely his love of language, a luxury that his ascetic soul felt obliged to spurn?

As Cusack saw clearly, Beckett was very much an Anglo-Irish Protestant, whose language resonates–"like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah," as his narrator Molloy has it–as if in a bleak homily mumbled from the pulpit of a bare three-quarters-empty church. He wrote in French, as he said, pour ecrire sans style, but Christopher Ricks has rightly pointed out that his French is as formal and correct as that of a scholarship boy, while his English lives and breathes vitality. Imagination Dead Imagine is the title of one of his late pieces, but the point is that the Beckettian imagination continued lively to the very end. In that letter to Axel Kaun he placed himself on "the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the non-word," but a few lines later he states his program with a contrary succinctness: "Word-storming in the name of beauty." The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 is a preliminary record of that storm."

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