Under which king?

[Stephen King: 11/22/63 (due out November 2011)]

Under which king, Bezonian?
Speak, or die ...

So the ranting, bombastic soldier Pistol to poor Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part Two. I don't want to put you on the spot to quite the same extent, but the other day, when I found myself pre-ordering various novels online, I began to wonder when and how it is that an author crosses over from a subject in which one takes a general interest to an indispensable, habit-forming drug.

I realised that had happened with Stephen King when I ceased to be able to wait for his books to appear in paperback (let alone in second-hand shops) before I bought and devoured them. I think that happened somewhere around the time of Needful Things (1991), a good twenty years ago. I have to say that the Master has seldom disappointed, though there have undoubtedly been some ups and downs along the way.

So it's not surprising that I would want to guarantee my copy of his latest tome well ahead of the crowds (and, given what appears to be the imminent demise of High Street bookselling as we know it, that I should end up doing so online).

What did surprise me was the discovery that there were some other writers who had imperceptibly slipped into the same status for me. I find him a bit frustrating at times, but there's just something so very congenial about the literary territory of kooky occultism and historical conspiracy theories Umberto Eco inhabits, that I found I couldn't resist the lure of his latest:

[Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery (due out November 2011)]

I mean, seriously: Prague? A cemetery in Prague? Nineteenth-century craziness instead of his usual medieval and renaissance craziness? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Umberto Eco? What's not to like?

That one went on the list, too. As did:

[Haruki Murakami: IQ84 (due out October 2011)]

Again, I have slightly mixed feelings about Haruki Murakami. The fact remains that I appear to have collected all of his books. I've seldom bought one new before, but the prospect of a 1,000-odd-page epic did rather attract me, I must confess. Even though I don't profess to understand him, I find myself compulsively reading and rereading him almost against my will. I do have my theories about what it's all about, mind you, but I seem to be happy to keep on reading in a state almost of suspended animation -- a little like the heroine of Sputnik Sweetheart, perhaps ...

An American, a European, and a Japanese: all novelists, each putting out another big fat tome later this year - more or less in time for my birthday and the beginning of summer vacation ... I can almost taste the suspense.

It did make me think, though. Who else is on my list? Well, just to continue the rollcall of global regions, there's my favourite Latin-American novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa:

[Mario Vargas Llosa: The Dream of the Celt (due out 2012)]

This latest novel of his hasn't been translated yet, and so it won't actually appear till next year. I did use to try and force myself through each of his new books in the original, but now I'm content to wait for the English version. This one is all about Roger Casement and his adventures in the Congo and on the Amazon, I gather, so I don't want to miss any of the niceties through my rough-and-ready Spanish.

I know that Mario has a lot of critics who find him a bit dubious politically, but I do think he thoroughly deserved that Nobel Prize they finally awarded him last year. The sheer scale of his achievement is pretty impressive, and it's hard to think of any of his contemporaries (Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Carlos Fuentes? certainly not Isabel Allende ...), who's still writing at the same level of intensity and commitment.

What about the Antipodes? Of course I have many favourite New Zealand authors whose work I follow. When it comes to snapping up each book the moment it appears, though, I guess the one who springs to mind is Martin Edmond. I talked in the previous post about his latest, Dark Night Walking with McCahon (2011). Here's one from last year, though. This is the second of two books of poetic prose he's put out (so far) through Dunedin's Kilmog Press:

[Martin Edmond: Hypnogeography (2010)]

Nor is it just novelists and prose-writers I follow. Here's the new book from one of my favourite poets, Canadian classical scholar (and all-around extremist) Anne Carson:

[Anne Carson: NOX (2010)]

The book's appearance - a long, corrugated, paper scroll in a hard cardboard case - is almost as eccentric as its contents. She's long since become an indispensable writer for me.

Who else? Here's another poet I find it impossible to ignore, British "laureate of grot" Peter Reading:

[Peter Reading: Vendage Tardive (2010)]

Reading has shifted his principal target somewhat from bourgeois complacency and greed to an even more extreme set of Philippics against environmental destruction. He's a very angry man. Long may he prosper.

Of course there are far more names I could mention, but I've tried to confine myself to those for whom there's no question that I'm going to get the latest book. I'm possibly even keener on Paul Muldoon than on Peter Reading, but I don't find myself rushing out to buy every one of the former's publications. An element of selectivity (as is only right!) enters into my relations with most authors, I'm happy to say.

Nor (while I'm on the subject) do I buy each new critical book of critical prose that appears by Umberto Eco or Mario Vargas Llosa. I do find I have to get each of their novels, though ... whether I like it or not.

Late Poetry Day Event at Titirangi

Lopdell House Gallery
[Photograph: The Woods B & B]

I guess the idea of these posts is more to advertise things in advance than to conduct subsequent post-mortems, but I can't help wanting to spread the word about the lovely little publications associated with these Lopdell House readings.

This is the third year in a row that Lesley Smith at the Gallery has been printing handmade covers for chapbooks of poems by the various readers at their Poetry Day celebrations (albeit a week late on this occasion). The contents are selected by her and MC Ila Selwyn, and sold at the bargain price of $10 each - $20 for a package of three at the reading on Friday (29th July).

And here they are, in reverse order of publication:

• Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. the winding stair: Poems by Rosetta Allan, Murray Edmond, Siobhan Harvey, Alice Hooton, Michele Leggott, Judith McNeil, Bob Orr, Alistair Paterson, John Pule, Jack Ross, Ila Selwyn, Penny Somervaille, Robert Sullivan & Denys Trussell. Limited edition of 80 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2011.






•






• Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. Red Tendrils: Poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh, Kevin Ireland, Janet Charman, Courtney Meredith, Daniel Larsen, Mark Pirie, Ross Brighton, Raewyn Alexander, Doug Poole & Ila Selwyn. Limited edition of 110 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2010.






•






• Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. elusive but daring and strong: Poems by C. K. Stead, Glenn Colquhoun, Michael Stevens, Gus Simonovic, Tim Heath, Riemke Ensing, Karlo Mila, Genevieve Maclean, Renee Liang & Ila Selwyn. Limited edition of 150 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2009.

•

Bronwyn and I drove out there with Michele Leggott, who was also billed to read, and we spent a most pleasant late afternoon in a nice little restaurant called Takahe across the street, until it was time to climb the winding stair to the venue for the kick-off at 7 pm. My brother Ken, who is visiting from Edinburgh, also came along to sample this strange thing called a "Poetry Reading," and professed himself much pleased with the experience.

I can't speak for myself, of course, but everyone else seemed to be in fine form. Michele has a new way of reading which involves recording her poems in advance and then playing them back to herself through an earpiece as she performs them, as she can no longer make out the largest type on even the best illuminated page. She recited her poem peri poietikes (which you can find here), and there was something absolutely magical - I thought - about the effect she produced: something Mediterranean, classical almost.

Much of our talk, earlier in the evening, had been about Martin Edmond's latest book, Dark Night Walking with McCahon, which we'd both been reading. It was a dark night, and a rainy one, and the fact that we were actually in one of Colin McCahon's old stamping grounds out west somehow added to the atmosphere of the whole event.

Edmond, Martin. Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011.

For the record, I think it's a wonderful book, constructed out of St John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" poem in much the same way as Michele's essay is constructed out of her meditations on those criss-crossing Cretan bees in her own poem.

We had to leave early, unfortunately, after only ten of the fourteen poets had read. Apologies for that, but one isn't always a free agent when acting as chauffeur as well. I would happily have stayed to the end, but it wasn't to be.

I had been anticipating it as a bit of an ordeal, I must confess: so many different tasks to fulfil, agendas to anticipate, all in the one evening. As it is, though, it seemed to fall into place in the most natural and harmonious way. Thanks once more to Ila (and Lesley) for organising the reading - and the chapbook, too.

Having some experience with such matters myself, I can imagine just how much invisible work had to go on behind the scenes for the whole thing to come off. Thanks, too, to the friendly and enthusiastic Titirangi audience who make driving out there to read such a pleasure.

•

Finds: Thoroughly Munted

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. 1913. Trans. Anne Hyde Greet.
Foreword by Warren Ramsey. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

It's funny when you go snooping around in the ripped old paperbacks in the back of a bookshop (in this case, Jason Books on High Street, long before it came up in the world and went boutique). You see something there which hardly even seems to merit picking up - in this case a backless wodge of papers with a pasted spine and no title-page - which turns out to be one of the finds of your life.

I see from the inscription above that it was on the 5th September, 1979, some 30-odd years ago, and the book in question was Apollinaire's Alcools - or, rather, a complete dual-text translation of the same, which some iconoclast had ripped apart and then deposited among the other trash to be pulped. A price of 15 cents hardly seemed exorbitant even at the time, especially when I think of the amount of time I've spent leafing through those pages, reading and rereading those amazing poems: "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" - above all, "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé":

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

More than a half-century has passed since the manuscript beginning with these lines was fished out of limbo, read and read again, and a dazzled magazine editor called across the room that here, at last, was a first-rate poem. A reader of the sixties might find other terms in which to express his approval, though some of Paul Léautaud's are still serviceable: "I read, read twice, three times, was carried away, dazed, delighted, deeply moved. Such melancholy, such evocative tone, such bohemianism, such rangings of the mind, and that faintly gypsy air and the total absence of that abomination of ordinary verse, la rime riche ... "

- Warren Ramsay, "Foreword"

I'm glad that that front page of the foreword hadn't gone the way of the title-page and all the other prelims (including the copyright page). That idea of an editor picking up the poem for the first time, reading it, and immediately recognising genius was, I suspect, the main reason I persevered through all the strange pages of Apollinaire's book. I'd never read poetry like this, had no frame of reference to set it in - for a while, it seemed to me as if I'd never read poetry at all before this, my discovery of the Modern.

Even as first published in that distant spring of 1909 (when it lacked two stanzas of the Zaparogian Cossacks' horrendous letter and, unlike the more characteristic final version, was punctuated), "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" has the authority of the more mature Apollinaire, the vibrancy of a modern poet speaking in his own voice ...

I don't quite know why anyone would take what must have been a fairly new book (Anne Hyde Greet's version of Alcools was published in 1966, a mere ten years before I found it in those back shelves in Auckland) and dismember it like that. Had the poet displeased them somehow? Perhaps that word scrawled on the back cover holds some clue, like the "CROATOAN" found carved on a tree by the lost settlers of Roanoke Island: "scenarios", it appears to read. But what scenarios, when and where?

I doubt I'll ever know.

•

Arthur Koestler. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937.
Abridged ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY ARTHUR KOESTLER
TRANSLATED BY TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

On February 8th, 1937, six months after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, the troops of General Franco entered Malaga. The author, then a war correspondent for an English Liberal newspaper, had remained in the besieged town after its evacuation by the Republican army. On the day after the entry of the conquering troops, he was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. For four months he was kept in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of his fellow prisoners and awaiting his own. He kept a diary in his cell, which he succeeded in smuggling out when released; this diary forms the main part of Dialogue with Death.

Under pressure of world-wide protests General Franco agreed that Koestler should be exchanged for a prisoner of the Republican Government. He was released in May 1937. Dialogue with Death was first published in January 1938, as the second part of Spanish Testament. The original edition, with an introduction by the Duchess of Atholl, contained a number of chapters dealing with political and military aspects of the Civil War, which was then still in progress. Since then it has become, in the words of the New Statesman and Nation, a book "which should rank among British classics."

This rather scruffy looking Penguin I found in the shelves of an old second-hand furniture shop which used to nestle in the heart of the Mairangi Bay CBD, between Max Paterson's stationers and the greengrocer's shop. It was run by a lady called Ruth Thorne, who maintained a couple of bays full of battered books at bargain prices.

This one probably set me back ten or twenty cents, in July 1979, a couple of months before I bought the Apollinaire. It had an almost equally great influence on me, though.

Those 1940s Penguins seem so strange and exotic to us now, but it's worth remembering that they just looked junky at the time. It was the content of the book that interested me, the strange intense account that Koestler gave of his experiences in a death-cell during the Spanish Civil War. I'd already read his classic novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, at the recommendation of our Russian teacher, Eddie Meijers, but it was this coverless paperback which had the stronger effect on me, I think. Something about the way he wrote was so vivid and immediate - I guess I've been trying to find something like it ever since.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Translated by
TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

PENGUIN BOOKS
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND
300 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A.

Published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Abridged edition published in Penguin Books Feb. 1942
Reprinted in Penguin Books March 1943

FOREWORD

NONE of the characters in this book is fictitious; most of them are dead by now.

To die - even in the service of an impersonal cause - is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was almost inevitable that these pages, written for the most part, in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character. There are, in the author's opinion, two reasons which justify their publication.

In the first place, the things which go on inside a condemned man's head have a certain psychological interest. Professional writers have rarely had an opportunity of studying these processes in the first person singular. I have tried to present them as frankly and concisely as I could. The main difficulty was the temptation to cut a good figure; I hope that the reader will agree that I have succeeded in overcoming this.

In the second place, I believe that wars, in particular civil wars, consist of only ten per cent action and of ninety per cent passive suffering. Thus this account of the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries may perhaps bring closer to the reader the nature of Civil War than descriptions of battles.

I dedicate it to my friend Nicolas, an obscure little soldier of the Spanish Republic, who on April 14th, 1937, on the sixth birthday of that Republic, was shot dead in the prison of Seville.

A.K.

THE AUTHOR

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, a Hungarian subject, and studied engineering and psychology respectively at the Technische Hoschschule and the University of Vienna. He became a journalist at the age of 21,lived as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Moscow, travelled in Soviet Central Asia and in the Arctic on board the Graf Zeppelin. While correspondent of the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by General Franco's troops and was imprisoned for having denounced, in the British Press, German and Italian intervention on the Nationalist side.

In 1938 he abandoned journalism to take up novel-writing. His works include The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon (fiction), Scum of the Earth, which relates the author's experiences during the French collapse, and Spanish Testament, of which Dialogue with Death is an improved version. Koestler is now serving as a private in the British Army.

Of course the word "abridged" always acts on me like a red rag on a bull. I always want the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

As I read more about Koestler, though, I began to understand the curious politics behind these various versions of his Spanish civil war memoir, the strange fusion of communists propaganda and personal testimony in the original version (which I found some years later in a pile of old Gollancz Left Book Club editions:

Koestler, Arthur. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.

Eventually I even discovered a third version of the book, from the "Danube Edition" of his collected works, which began to appear in the 1960s. There's something about that battered old Penguin that seems almost to embody history for me, though.

The fact that it had been printed a mere six years after the events described in it gave me a powerful sense of their reality, their tangible weight and gravity.

I've never been able to ignore those ripped and munted books at the backs of bookshops ever since. How can you know what treasures might be sitting there, glowing radioactive in the dark?

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed., 1942. Rev. Danube ed., 1966. London: Papermac, 1983.