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| Poem of the week: Our Be'thplace by William Barnes This pastoral vision of a country childhood shows how dialect can imbue language with fresh vitalityAny "literary" poet who chooses to write in dialect must have what we would call today "a political agenda". William Barnes (1801-1886), poet and philologist, certainly had. His efforts to formalise the grammar of the dialect spoken by the "land-folk" of his native Blackmore Vale were aimed at their political inclusion. In an otherwise scholarly Grammar of Dorset Dialect, he illustrates his claim that "homely speech" is perfectly adequate to the grandest occasion with what he claims to be a translation of "Her Majesty's Speech to the Houses on the Opening of Parliament, 1863". It begins: "My Lords an' Gentlemen! We be a-bid to tell you, that, vor-all the hwome war in North America is a-holdèn on, the common treäde o' the land, vor the last year, don't seem to be a-vell off." Surprisingly, for a man who was a schoolmaster and priest as well as a poet, he opposed the use of Latin, Greek and French vocabulary. Just as he wanted an Anglo-Saxon-based dialect to be at home in the most formal company, he wanted his poems to be enjoyed by ordinary working men and women. And, in his devoted regionalism, he was undoubtedly motivated by the wider concern of preserving the social and agricultural traditions which were already under threat from such developments as the enclosure of common land.The very word, "enclosure", invokes John Clare for most readers, and I wonder why Barnes is so much less-regarded in England today. The English like their poets tragic, of course: mental breakdown is recommended for anyone in search of a reputation. Perhaps his work is perceived as difficult, but in fact the Dorset dialect is easy to understand. And Barnes was always kind and campaigning enough to include a glossary in his collections.Thomas Hardy, a greater poet, but, I would guess, one deeply indebted to Barnes, edited a fine selection of the older writer's work, and makes a salient point in his introduction. "For some reason, or none, many persons suppose that when anything is penned in the tongue of the country-side, the primary intent is burlesque or ridicule." Hardy knew what he was talking about. Even today, the spoof west country accent is found comic and thought inoffensive to those who speak it. But you need only read a little way into Barnes to forget all the bad parodies of The Archers and find freshness and colour, and an emotional range that is far from limited to the comic or sentimental.The poetic gains of Barnes's dialect-writing are clear: it's as if the English language had been dipped in fresh paint. Even when the spelling simply indicates a different pronunciation, the effect can be magical. He writes "zun" instead of "sun" and that perfectly comprehensible word seems to gain a heightened meaning and produce a different sort of sun: brassier, harder, hotter. The "worold" is earthier than the mere "world", the "woak" tree is more gnarled, somehow, than a simple oak tree, and the "elem" broader and shadier than the elm. This week's poem, "Our Be'thplace", is interesting in its use of characteristic Dorset structures – the frequent use of the verbal affix, "a", for example. Numerous elisions create a softer and more fluid effect than found in the usual iambic tetrameter written in Standard English. But there is conscious, even self-conscious, craft in it. That beautifully easy folk-melody is stippled with the internal rhymes whose potential Barnes had discovered in studying Welsh poetry.It is one of the most accessible of the dialect poems: any moments of puzzlement are easily resolved by saying it aloud. You don't need the Dorset glossary – except perhaps for "hatch" in the second line – meaning "a little gate".Our Be'thplaceHow dear's the door a latch do shut,An' geärden that a hatch do shut,Where vu'st our bloomèn cheaks ha' prestThe pillor ov our childhood's rest;Or where, wi' little tooes, we woreThe paths our fathers trod avore,Or climb'd the timber's bark aloft,Below the singèn lark aloft,The while we heard the echo soundDrough all the ringèn valley round.A lwonsome grove o' woak did riseTo screen our house, where smoke did riseA-twistèn blue, while yeet the zunDid langthen on our childhood's fun;An' there, wi' all the sheäpes an' soundsO' life, among the timbered grounds,The birds upon their boughs did zing,An' milkmaids by their cows did zing,Wi' merry sounds that softly diedA-ringèn down the valley zide. By river banks wi' reeds a-bound,An' sheenèn pools wi' weeds a-bound,The long-necked gander's ruddy billTo snow-white geese did cackle sh'illAn' stridèn peewits heästen'd byO' tiptoes wi' their screamèn cry;An' stalkèn cows a-lowèn loud,An' struttèn cocks a-crowèn loud,Did rouse the echoes up to mockTheir mingled sounds by hill an' rock. The stars that climb'd our skies all dark,Above our sleepèn eyes all dark,An' zuns a-rollèn round to bringThe seasons on from spring to spring,Ha' vled, wi' never-restèn flight,Drough green-boughed day, an' dark-tree'd night;Till now our childhood's pleäces thereBe gay wi' other feäces there,An' we ourselves do follow onOur own vorelivers dead an' gone.PoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested classic '"Sorry I'm a bit late," Newland said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was that he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress.'When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the box, the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. "Darn it," he thought. "I have arrived 10 seconds unfashionably early. All New York knows you are not supposed to make your entrance until Marguerite is two bars into her aria." Newland's annoyance dissipated when he realised that no one who was anyone in New York society had witnessed his horrendous faux pas. During the interval he turned his gaze towards his beloved, the divine May Welland, seated in the Mingott box opposite, and frowned when he saw that her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, was in her party. How very awkward! What would New York think of the reintroduction of the scarlet woman into society? Yet how typical of the Mingotts to be so brazenly protective of their own! No matter! He would rise above New York's pettiness and his reputation would be unstained!Archer made his way to the Mingott box and sat down next to May. They looked into one another's eyes and felt no need to speak. Their thoughts were as one. Newland knew that May had understood he wished their betrothal to be announced that very night at the Beauforts' party.The engagement would normally have been quite the talk of New York, yet it was the return of Mrs Mingott's other grand-daughter, the Countess Ellen, that dominated the conversation of the finest salons."I hear she left her husband and hid with his secretary for a year before returning to New York," said Mr Sillerton Jackson. "Quelle scandale! How racy these Europeans are!""How dare you, sir!" Newland exclaimed. "You will find she left her husband to escape his beatings.""No matter," replied Mr Sillerton Jackson. "A New York wife would take a beating in private. I find myself most compromised by our acquaintance as you are to be married into the Mingott family."Mr Sillerton Jackson's sentiments were echoed throughout New York society and for several weeks it appeared as if no one would attend the Mingott ball, until Mrs Archer, sensing the shame that might accrue to her own family by her son's impending engagement to a Mingott, persuaded her cousins, the van der Luydens, New York's most powerful family, to invite the Countess to tea."Thank goodness for that," New York society sighed. "We can go to the Mingotts' party after all." Sitting in his office some months later, Newland was irritated to be summoned to see his employer, Mr Letterblair. Although nominally engaged as a lawyer, Newland had far better things to occupy his mind than the grubbiness of commerce; there was the compelling question whether New York was wearing its waistcoats with one or two buttons undone this season. "Mrs Mingott has requested your assistance," said Mr Letterblair. "It appears that the Countess Olenska is seeking a divorce. The family find that most embarrassing."Archer understood the gravity and delicacy of the situation and took a carriage to the Countess's residence. "You must realise that New York will expel the Mingotts from society if you pursue this action," he said, "and that my engagement to May will also make me an outcast."The Countess looked down, a maelstrom of emotion racing through her bosom. "Very well," she said. Newland sensed the passion beating in his own breast. "I must see you again soon," he implored."Come and see me for 10 minutes in a few months' time when I am staying in Skuytercliff," she whispered, overwhelmed by feelings that could not be expressed in New York society. "And now I have a party to attend."Newland urged his horses on as the carriage raced along the coast road. "Sorry I'm a bit late," he said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was that he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress."I've got to go now," Ellen replied, "I have to fend off Beaufort's unwanted attentions", though both she and Newland knew that what she was really saying was that she loved him deeply, yet did not want to compromise him by becoming his mistress.Rocked by the intolerability of the situation, Newland took a few more weeks off work to go to Florida to see May. "We must get married this year," he begged her. "You only want to do that because you are frightened you may go off me," May replied. "Don't think I am unaware that you once had feelings for a Mrs Rushworth. If you have any outstanding obligations to her, then I am happy to release you from your promise to me."Newland felt a surge of love for May. Particularly as she didn't seem to have guessed the true nature of his feelings for the Countess. "No, my darling," he declared. "It is you whom I adore.""Why do we have to honeymoon in Europe?" May enquired, as they docked in London. "Because it is our Henry James moment," Newland replied. "Well, I shall be quite glad when we are back in America".Locked in the loveless marriage decreed by New York, Newland was tormented by his passion for Ellen, a passion made still more tormented by New York having turned its back on her once more for refusing her husband's offer of a reconciliation. "We should not see quite so much of Ellen now," said May. Had she sensed his true feelings for Ellen, Newland wondered. How strange that the emancipation he admired so much in Ellen he should seek to deny to May!Newland hurried to Boston. "It's been two years since I last saw you and I wanted us to spend another five minutes together," he cried, touching Ellen's hand. They kissed, a kiss that announced both of them accepted they might have intercourse some time in the next few years."I will throw off the shackles of New York and elope with Ellen," Newland boldly wondered. "I'm pregnant," said May, having secretly been aware of her husband's feelings for Ellen all along. "Maybe I won't be going anywhere after all," Newland muttered."I am returning to Europe," Ellen announced, and all New York breathed a sigh of relief at such a satisfactory conclusion to the affair.Twenty-six years later, Newland stood outside Ellen's Paris apartment with his son, Dallas. May had died some years earlier and Dallas had suggested they make the visit now that New York society was so much more casual in its mores."Come on up," said Dallas."I don't think I will, after all," said Newland. "The imagined love is so much more real. And besides she's probably a right minger now."Edith WhartonClassicsFictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books for Christmas A trio of novels heads the Christmas wish list this year: one for the head, one for the heart and one for the hairs on the back of the neck. Hilary Mantel's brilliant Booker-winning reimagining of Tudor England, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, £18.99), Colm TóibÃn's tender study of emigration from smalltown Ireland, Brooklyn (Viking, £17.99), and Sarah Waters's enveloping haunted house story, The Little Stranger (Virago, £16.99), would each make Boxing Day complete.But 2009 also saw plenty of other writers on top form. In JM Coetzee's recent work he had almost refined himself out of fiction, but Summertime (Harvill Secker, £17.99), the last in his trilogy of fictionalised memoir, sees a vivid re-engagement with family, belonging and apartheid-era Cape Town refracted through a series of interviews with various baffled lovers and friends of "the late writer John Coetzee". It's fascinating, funny and perceptive. In The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) Margaret Atwood returns to the world of Oryx and Crake with a rollicking dystopia that combines gentle mockery of human foibles in its eco-religious sect, God's Gardeners, with an urgent warning of environmental apocalypse.On a more domestic scale, but no less nail-biting, Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations (Faber, £15.99) is a brilliant portrayal of family life, childhood's echoes and the isolating tug of personal ambition. She's a beautiful stylist, and this is her best novel yet. There's a mythic American family narrative in David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Penguin, £7.99), which spins off from his father's death and childhood misadventures in Alaska in ways that are moving and darkly funny: this is a book to press on all your friends.Armchair globetrotters should be delighted by Geoff Dyer's cunningly observed contrasting novellas, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Canongate, £12.99), which set hedonism at the Venice Biennale against a quest for enlightenment in India's holy city. One of my favourites of the year, meanwhile, was poet Tobias Hill's The Hidden (Faber, £12.99), which heads to an archeological dig in Sparta for a bravura exploration of classical mores, modern loneliness and the nature of terrorism. And last month Spanish writer Javier MarÃas completed his metaphysical trilogy of espionage and inference, Your Face Tomorrow (Poison, Shadow and Farewell, Chatto & Windus, £18.99), a baroque extravaganza which melds Tristram Shandy with James Bond and is surely one of the major achievements of the last decade.2009 has also been the year of the short story. Stand-out collections include the winner of our first book award, Pettina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly (Faber, £12.99), elegant, unflinching vignettes of lives razed by the Mugabe regime; Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Granta, £10.99), which reinvents the American South we thought we knew; AL Kennedy's weird, wise and wonderful What Becomes (Jonathan Cape, £16.99); and Sana Krasikov's acute tales of immigrants from the former Soviet bloc trying to make it in the US, One More Year (Portobello, £10.99). Divert the Twilight lover in your life, meanwhile, with Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters (Canongate, £12.99), quirky fantastical fables which put a new spin on teenage alienation.There are more youthful hi-jinks in Richard Milward's Ten Storey Love Song (Faber, £10.99), a Day-Glo paean to art, drugs and highrise living in Middlesbrough, and Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal (Granta, £12.99), the first novel from 2009's most exciting new voice, which examines teenage poses and performance in a fresh way.Three for the fans: Eoin Colfer does an almost uncanny job of channelling Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's instalment, And Another Thing . . . (Michael Joseph, £18.99), while Italo Calvino's similarly space-trotting science-fantasy fables, The Complete Cosmicomics, are handsomely presented by Penguin Modern Classics (£20). Meanwhile, with its luxuriously heavy pages and perforated file index card facsimiles to be popped out and rearranged, Vladimir Nabokov's notes towards his unfinished novel The Original of Laura (Penguin Modern Classics, £25) is more gift than book.Thriller-lovers will discover a superior satisfaction in William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury, £11.99), in which a brush with a stranger leaves his hero homeless and hunted through the fringes of London, yet finding new versions of himself as he pursues the Big Pharma conspiracy that cost him his middle-class identity. Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, £10.99) is a very different rollercoaster of assumed identities: a female Cuban detective sneaks into the US to solve a family mystery.Comics make great Christmas presents: a treat from the past updated for adulthood. One of the year's left-field triumphs was Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou (Bloomsbury, £16.99), the illustrated version of Bertrand Russell's life, love and friendships as he searches for a logical foundation for maths. In jaunty Tintin-esque panels the authors guide us through the problems and paradoxes of Russell's quest. But why in...comics?" asks one. "The form is perfect for stories of heroes in search of great goals!" comes the reply – and he's absolutely right. Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza (Jonathan Cape, £20), investigating a Palestinian tragedy of the 50s from the standpoint of today's conflict, is properly war reportage, but framed with a novelist's eye. Finally, sheer comic genius: Gilbert Shelton's cartoons about his stoned, hippy antiheroes the Furry Freak Brothers were footnoted with strips featuring their truculent pet, Fat Freddy's Cat. In this omnibus (Knockabout, £17.99), the least cute cat in cartoon history gets a starring role: clawing Fat Freddy's waterbed, crapping in headphones, using his tail fur to set fire to garbage bags, and generally running rings around his owners. It's a glorious blast from another era that also catches the eternal truths of cat-human relations.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks2. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham3. THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold4. CROSS COUNTRY, by James Patterson5. ARCTIC DRIFT, by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler feeds.nytimes.com |
Memories from books: they come when they want to Why do some books completely slip from your mind and scenes from others stay with you as if they were real memories?I wonder about my active and passive memory of books: why do I remember scenes from some books so well, as if they were real-life experiences rather than sequences of symbols on a page, and why do I finish other books and forget them entirely? Sometimes real-life draws me back into a book: after the Hutton inquiry I felt a prejudice against jurisprudence. I thought about The Brothers Karamazov, and reminded myself that even when the evidence is overwhelming, a man can be innocent (although Hutton was no Dostoyevsky).Personal experiences often inspire memories of books. In my early 20s, Siddhartha was a wonderful book to remember if I was feeling glum, because it suggested that an irregular life of adventitious hedonism might be nothing more than another step on the pathway to salvation. Sometimes my memories of books are disturbingly random. While eating dinner recently I saw Machiavelli riding a horse in Tuscany: a scene from Maugham's Then and Now. Machiavelli seemed proud, happy and sure of his importance. He was whistling, smiling broadly, and his lungs were filled with potential. Firstly, it's not easy to whistle and smile. Secondly, I read Then and Now 10 years ago and haven't looked at it since. Thirdly, I was nowhere near Italy, or a horse and my mouth was full of chicken when this image made its impression. Finally, I don't feel proud or sure of my importance. I'm happy, but why Machiavelli, on a horse, over my dinner? I wondered what Freud would say. Was it a subliminal expression of a repressed desire to be a powerful statesmen? Was there some ironic juxtaposition with my desires? Machiavelli was a writer, but The Prince was published after his death and his statesmanship didn't survive the dissolution of the Florentine republic. Other books are reduced by my memory's accountants to a brief summary: "It's about an English girl whose parents are religious fanatics; they make her sing, or preach, or something. And she's gay." That's it for Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and I remember loving the book. Memory retention isn't about the size or quality of a book, nor whether it's been studied. I read Don Quixote at university and have one image now: the Spanish Don is attacking a cleanskin of wine in a bedroom at a roadside inn. The only other image I have is of Quixote charging windmills on his knuckle-kneed horse (Astérix in Spain). I also read USA at university and remain well-serviced with images and ideas from the Dos Passos door-stopper. I often consider USA in relation to contemporary society. The character of JW Moorehouse, an advertising guru who dreams of writing poetry, is a vivid example of how the commercial world can slowly chip away and corrupt the sensitive character of a man until only a commercial character remains.  Are our memories of books determined by how much we enjoy them? Not for me. I read Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late in the mid-90s. I thought it was fantastic, and I never thought of it again until someone mentioned it last year. Conversely, in 2002 I read John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I thought very little of it, and yet I often remember the little I thought. Maybe I forgot Kelman's novel because my life was removed from the main character's world. But I remember Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, and the world depicted in that book is equally removed from my experience. Perhaps McCabe's novel exposed the limits of my empathy. I pitied Francie, but I wouldn't have wanted to meet him. I remember the mood of this book more than actions or images, along with the sadness, Francie wanting love, and the way he expressed himself with violence. Often specific images offer vivid memories: mother's younger brother exploding from the cupboard in Doctorow's Ragtime, one hand clutching his penis in a paroxysm of ecstasy as Emma Goldman gives the beautiful Evelyn a massage. The image makes me smile on the inside. Then I see Coalhouse Walker's dying body flapping about on the street, as if it were trying to mop up its own blood. These two images have formed a numinous collocation in my mind – a comi-tragic, sex-and-death sequence. I'm sure memory is affected by unrelated personal events; events in real time that encroach upon one's reading life. Perhaps I read Don Quixote after a torrid affair with a girl I adored. Perhaps I'd just begun the relationship, and my senses were underwhelmed by a confusion of love and sex. Nietzsche once said that a thought comes when it wants, not when we want it to; when I think about my supper-time moment with a jolly Machiavelli on a Florentine horse, I wonder, how much control do we have over what we remember from books? Nobody can fully understand or explain the relationship between reading and memory. And that's a wonderful thing, because the mystery of how we remember a book is something that leads us deep inside the magic of storytelling.FictionEvan Maloneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |