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| Why writers define the first world war As well as its other horrific innovations, this was the first occasion when those in the firing line could record their experiencesThe links between the first world war and literature are enshrined in our culture: the war poets are taught in schools, and their descriptions of the horrors of the trenches have entered – and to an extent informed – our national consciousness. But why was it this war, above all others, that found its way into words? The reasons are various. First, and possibly foremost, was the arrival of a new sort of soldier to chronicle the battlefield. Historian John Terraine puts it eloquently: "There was a very large, highly-motivated middle-class element. By definition, that element was reasonably, sometimes very well, educated. Its sensitivities were recognisably cultivated. It was, generally speaking, highly articulate. And in the shock of the experience that it was about to undergo we may find, in my opinion, the true seat of the British trauma." Before 1914, of those who described war, painted it and wrote poetry about it, very few had seen battle themselves. Now a generation of the literary middle class had, and found it by turns mundane, draining and horrific. But while the most famous war poets – Sassoon, Owen and Graves – were all middle-class officers, there were also, crucially, many other voices. Kitchener's drive for volunteers had been abundantly successful: by the end of 1914 more than a million men had signed up to fight the Kaiser. Two-and-a-half years later Britain introduced, for the first time in its history, conscription. A generation went to war, with the ability to do something that few men on the ground had been capable of before: write. Since the Victorian education reforms, mass literacy meant historians would have the letters and diaries of regular men to work with. Men from the ranks were moved to describe their experiences: Ivor Gurney, for example, a private and a poet whose bipolar disorder was profoundly exacerbated by his experiences of the war, and whose work stands alongside Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune which writes the details of army life at war from the bottom up. Published in the late 1920s as the public's disgust with the loss of life in the first world war grew, Manning portrayed the experiences of ordinary soldiers between two battles during the Somme campaign. They sat around drinking and swearing and confiding: not heroes but ordinary men in an extraordinary situation waiting for something awful to happen to them. Elsewhere, meanwhile, women such as Vera Brittain were giving voice to the experiences of field nurses with "no more beds available for prisoners, stretchers holding angry-eyed men in filthy brown blankets occupied an inconvenient proportion of the floor."Nor was it just Britain that had an army as comfortable with a pen as a bayonet. In France in 1916, Henri Barbusse published Under Fire, one of the few accounts to come out while the war still raged. Barbusse had become a pacifist because of his experiences and the publication of his book, which introduced the reading public to the horrors of trench warfare for the first time, proved controversial with the French leaders trying to convince their countrymen to keep fighting. Less aggravating for his superiors was a book by a German soldier who had already won the highest accolade of the Pour le Mérite as a young lieutenant. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is still highly regarded by those with little time for weedy poets moaning about a bit of shrapnel. Jünger loved the war, thought it was a grand time, and really couldn't believe his good luck in being involved in such an escapade. As he said in the preface to a 1929 English edition: "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."Manly stuff. Needless to state, Mr Hitler and his chums found it a real page turner. Less popular with the goose-steppers was another German's fictionalised account of the war. Despite eventually being banned and burned by the Nazis, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant bestseller around the world. It is the one book that provided a continuing market for the others mentioned here. It spawned a new literary movement in books condemning the war, making the style suddenly fashionable in the late 20s, just as books about teenage vampires are today. It also inspired the first great war film which set the tone for what would follow. Future conflicts – the second world war, Vietnam, Iraq – would all inspire more great celluloid than pages. The first world war was the first time war was seen and understood by writers, by a whole generation of them, who didn't see it remotely, through chivalrously tinted lenses but in the mud and the blood and the shrapnel. Before the real dawn of cinema and after the birth of literacy, the first world war is the only war that must be read to be understood. Perhaps that's why modern authors such as Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker are still inspired by it today. The legacy of those writing men that fought is clear; after what they suffered, observed and published, nobody could believe the old lie again.PoetryFictionHistoryAlastair Harperguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Alice Munro’s Object Lessons Alice Munro’s new stories take on pulp fiction’s sensational subjects, and episodes of murder, suicide and adultery turn out to have far-reaching thematic reverberations. feeds.nytimes.com |
Read the book and then get cooking From the exalted River Café to the still essential Delia Smith, via the best of Italy and France, William Skidelsky savours the best recent cookery booksWhat are cookbooks for? That may sound like a thunderingly stupid question (er, to cook from?), but in fact it's more complicated than that. Precisely because their ostensible function is so easily determined, there has long been an assumption that cookbooks (and recipes generally) must contain all manner of hidden agendas, which can only be unearthed by those who possess the right code-breaking tools.In a celebrated 1950s essay, for example, the structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes analysed the recipes in Elle magazine and concluded that, far from being of practical use, they were "totally magical", designed to present to working-class housewives a "dream of smartness". More recently, Adam Gopnik wrote a long essay about cookbooks in the New Yorker in which he claimed, among other things, that one of the functions of recipes is to accustom us to "the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved".Scanning the offerings of recent times, it's hard not to conclude that, far from being about "perpetual disappointment", cookbooks are more about perpetual self-congratulation. Having the "right" cookbooks on one's shelves has become a marker of a certain kind of sophistication, a surefire way of indicating that you are in the know about food. One of the changes that has helped make this possible is the growing tendency for cookbooks to be based on specific restaurants. It all began with the first River Café Cook Book, which came out in 1995 and quickly became the "must-have" book for clued-up foodies.A few years ago, an alternative came along – The Moro Cookbook. Last year, there was Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Volumes of this type are ideal for asserting one's culinary credentials because having them suggests two things. First, that you know enough about food (and have enough money) to be familiar with the restaurant in question; and second, that you are a good enough cook to attempt restaurant cooking (or at least a simulacra of it) in your own home.Has there been an Ottolenghi equivalent this year? I'm not sure there has, but in its absence status-conscious cooks could do a lot worse than buy the latest volume to fall off the River Café production line, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers's The River Café Classic Italian Cookbook (Penguin £30). This purports to be a work of "new recipes", although in fact there's some duplication from previous volumes – pappa al pomodoro, pork cooked in milk. Still, one shouldn't carp because for the most part it's a wide-ranging, elegant book that lives up to its "classic" billing: there are recipes here for bistecca alla Fiorentina and baccala mantecato (beaten dried cod), dishes which you feel would have been too obviously traditional to have appeared in earlier River Café books. As ever with Gray and Rogers, there's a splendid pudding section that includes a mouth-watering recipe for torta della nonna, or "Grandmother's tart from Tuscany", a sort of custard pie that one is advised, indulgently, to "serve for breakfast".It has been a good few months for Italian cookbooks generally and another impressive new volume, also "classic" in outlook, is The Silver Spoon Pasta (Phaidon £24.95). The Silver Spoon, or Il Cucchiaio d'Argento, is Italy's bestselling and most comprehensive cookbook and a few years ago Phaidon had a big success when it translated it into English.The Silver Spoon Pasta features not only the pasta dishes from that volume but also hundreds of other recipes from the Siver Spoon archive and it functions as a kind of pasta encyclopedia. But it's important to bear in mind that this is very much a recipe book, not a hands-on guide and, as such, there's a dismaying lack of technical information. There is no explanation of how to make different pasta shapes or the various types of filled pasta – things which anyone serious about pasta needs to know. Happily, such information (and much more besides) can be found in the excellent The Italian Cookery Course by Katie Caldesi (Kyle Cathie £30).Phaidon seems to be cornering the market in translations of other country's bestselling cookbooks and another of its new titles is Ginette Mathiot's I Know How to Cook (£24.95). First published in 1932, this is described as "the bible of French home cooking" and its author as "the Delia of France" (although Mrs Beeton might be more accurate). The book's 1,400 recipes have been revised and updated for the modern kitchen by the young food blogger Clotilde Dusoulier, although there's no getting away from the fact that many are pretty old-school (casseroled liver or meatballs in béchamel sauce, anyone?). For a book whose value lies in its comprehensiveness, there are puzzling omissions: no recipe for boulangère potatoes, none for aligot.And the "updating" seems to consist chiefly in substituting creme fraiche for double cream in savoury recipes, which is irritating, and misguided too, because sometimes you need the full-fat stuff. That said, it's an attractive book and if it helps remind people that there is a venerable tradition of simple French home cooking, that must be good.Our own Delia has also just returned with Delia's Happy Christmas (Ebury £25), a reprise of her earlier Delia Smith's Christmas. This is Delia doing what she has always done, which is cajole and encourage us, in her ever-so-reassuring (and mildly patronising) way, to be that much braver and more sophisticated than we thought we could be. There are some oddities: why, for instance, has she taken to using the royal we ("Over the years, we have never found a match for this mincemeat recipe")? Still, Delia has an extraordinary knack for producing recipes that you actually feel like cooking, rather than gawping at, and everyone's Christmas will be improved by this book.Finally, a work that has already been praised to the skies, and while not based on a restaurant looks certain to become the year's must-have cookbook: Tender: Volume 1 (Fourth Estate £30) by the Observer's Nigel Slater. Much like his earlier The Kitchen Diaries, it's a cookbook with a personal narrative at its core: Slater's construction of a vegetable patch in his garden and his attempt to live mainly off its proceeds (all very of the moment). Arranged alphabetically, with a short chapter on each vegetable, this is more a food odyssey than a conventional cookbook, but it is full of wonderful recipes. A note at the end, in case you were wondering, suggests that volume two will mainly be about fruit.House and gardenDelia SmithRiver CafeWilliam Skidelskyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More Katherine Paterson, the children’s novelist and author of “Bridge to Terabithia,” will be appointed the national ambassador for young people’s literature on Tuesday. feeds.nytimes.com |
Ginsberg's Howl resounds on film In 1955, Allen Ginsberg performed a poem about sex, drugs and race that became a battlecry for the US counterculture. It also led to an obscenity trial. B Ruby Rich on a new film about the epic HowlOn 7 October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg brought the house down with a performance of his hallucinatory new poem, Howl. Among other things, this epic work in four parts dealt with drugs, mental illness, religion, homosexuality – the fears and preoccupations of a generation. Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were both in the audience. Ginsberg was 29 years old. Also present was the future choreographer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. A teenager at the time, Rainer still clearly remembers that night: "Ginsberg, quite drunk, clean-shaven, in black suit and tie-less white shirt, holding a jug of rot-gut red wine, intoning and chanting the poem." Back then, the beats were in thrall to the jazz world; Ginsberg himself explained his poem as akin to "bop refrains".Eight years ago, film-makers Rob ÂEpstein and Jeffrey Friedman received a call from Ginsberg's estate asking them to make a documentary about Howl. With the 50th anniversary of the poem's publication (and subsequent obscenity trial) approaching, the estate wanted the best. Epstein and Friedman have, between them, won Oscars and Emmys for a Âlifetime of work including The Times of Harvey Milk, about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California; and The Celluloid Closet, based on Vito Russo's book about screen depictions of homosexuality. Ginsberg's estate knew the pair could deliver an in-depth documentary on time and on budget; plus, they were queer enough to understand the social pressures that formed the poet.Had things gone as planned, the film would have been released in 2007, and it would have been a Âdocumentary. ÂInstead, the hybrid drama that is Howl has its world premiere Âtomorrow, on the opening night of the Sundance film festival. Epstein and Friedman ended up overshooting their deadline by three years, losing themselves completely in what turned out to be a mad project, struggling to create something worthy of Ginsberg's incantatory work.The day after that first reading, ÂFerlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram offering to publish Howl. It became the third Âvolume in the Pocket Poets series, Âdedicated to bringing out paperback first editions of serious literature. But in 1957, a copy was purchased by Âundercover police at Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, who then arrested Ferlinghetti and store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the grounds of obscenity (one line in particular seems to have inspired the arrest: "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy"). The charges against Murao were dropped, but Ferlinghetti was tried in what became a landmark case. (Ginsberg was never put in the dock; while Ferlinghetti fought the good fight, he took off for Tangiers.)An anarchist unlocks the pastEpstein and Friedman's bop-inflected film now mixes Ginsberg's original reading with a dramatisation of both the obscenity trial and a mercurial Âinterview Ginsberg gave to a Time Âreporter, as well as dreamy animation. "We interviewed everyone who was still around," explains Epstein, sitting in the San Francisco production office he shares with Friedman. They videotaped Ferlinghetti, now 90; Al Bendich, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped Âdefend the case; and Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong partner. But Âsomehow they couldn't make any progress. "I showed [the footage] to my students," says Epstein. "And they just didn't respond." Their goal was to reach a new generation, and they weren't even close. With scores of Âbeat-generation documentaries already in existence, the film-makers just couldn't get excited about their own growing archive.Then they interviewed Tuli Kupferberg. The poet and anarchist features in Howl: he's the man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and survives. Now 86 and still living in New York, Kupferberg proved to be the lynchpin that Âbegan to unlock the past. "It was there that I picked up a book with illustrations by Eric Drooker," says Friedman. Best known for his graphic novel Flood!, Drooker had collaborated with Ginsberg on a collection of illustrated poems in 1992. Suddenly, Friedman saw a new route into the past. "We Âfinally realised we had to make Allen young. This is all about his youth, but there was almost no footage of him then. Lots of photographs, but not film." So the film-makers decided to create an animation out of Drooker's Âillustrations. This would bring the poem to life, while actors would dramatise the reading, trial and interview.ÂHowl was a powerful affront to the bourgeois sensibilities of the late 1950s: as well as the illicit sex and drugs, its verses described a mingling of the races. Today, the big surprise is how explicit it remains. Howl wasn't just an anthem for the beats, nor an ode to drugs; it was primarily a celebration of homosexual love and lust. This, combined with Ginsberg's run-on sentences, peppered with slang, was too much for the conservative forces of the day. In court, Ferlinghetti was defended by attorney Jake Ehrlich (played in the film by Jon Hamm, Mad Men's Don Draper), while nine literary experts testified in his defence. The conservative judge decided the case in his favour; the poem, he said, was of "redeeming social importance".Friedman buried himself in the Âarchives of the 1957 trial, then did the same with all the interviews Ginsberg gave at the time; he edited these down into a script. To test it, Epstein and Friedman put on a staged reading of the trial at the ACT theatre. The crowd was transfixed: I was in the audience, and we couldn't believe how relevant this still was. Epstein and Friedman knew they were on the right track.Ginsberg's missing interviewAs there is no filmed record of the trial, its staging is the film-makers' own Âinvention. "We tried to find trial films of the time," says Epstein. "To Kill a Mockingbird was a big influence. We tried to think of what people in that circle were doing with film in the 1950s and 1960s. So we looked at Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. That was the only place we found the young Allen. It was a conscious effort on our part to make a film that would be more Âprimitive than, say, Avatar."They also used a fabled Time Âmagazine interview with Ginsberg. Time had flown Ginsberg from Tangiers to Rome, where its reporter conducted the interview in a hotel room. Never published, never even located, this Âinterview proved the perfect device to drive the film. To recreate it, Epstein and Friedman simply shoehorned together all their favourite excerpts from Ginsberg's interviews at the time, stitching his words into one long, eloquent Âdefence of himself, his poem, and his generation. Like their animation, it's a great trick, one that allows Ginsberg, on the brink of turning 30, to speak for himself – out of the past, directly to us.Today, locals and tourists still make the pilgrimage across San Francisco to City Lights, largely on the strength of Howl. "We've probably sold a million copies by now," says the publisher's poetry editor Garrett Caples. "It really did build the publishing business here."As yet, the movie does not have a distributor. But luck tends to shine on Epstein and Friedman. Their timing – seemingly disastrous, as they missed the 2005-2007 commemorations – has turned out to be perfect. As Howl makes its debut, another trial is transfixing San Francisco. In a federal courtroom, with a conservative judge presiding, the trial over Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, is unfolding.Opening night at Sundance used to be the province of big crossover movies that linked the independent world and Hollywood. But the new festival director, John Cooper, is shaking things up. "I was inspired by this film," he says. "It's time to talk about art in America again, not just healthcare – because art really can change everything. We owe so much to Ginsberg."Allen GinsbergPoetryB Ruby Richguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |