The Last Station

I highly recommend this dramatisation of Tolstoy's last days, directed by Michael Hoffman and based on the book by Jay Parini. Unlike other bio-pics, this one is rich and substantial, with lovely performances by the leads, and an engaging complexity at its heart. Helen Mirren is wonderful as the warm, stormy Sofya, thoroughly likable even as she smashes plates and shouts “I hate you!” at her husband. Tolstoy's wife is one of the most sympathetic figures in literary history - a victim of the licence granted her creative husband by himself and his sycophants. The film raises quite insoluble questions about the tension between art and life, and particularly between art and love. Sofya seems to represent the wreckage of ordinary happiness in the wake of extraordinary talent. Her antagonists seem to suggest that his expending love, energy, creativity, and intellect in marriage would mean he had nothing left for writing, and hence for posterity, for the world at large. (James MacAvoy has a great line: “I have never met mankind.”) The film makes of this tension a compelling and subtle drama, but I couldn't help thinking that balance must be possible, that life and literature must be compatible. Yet of how many great writers has this been true?

A Moving Feast

Another apology for prolonged silence. This time my excuse is moving house, which has caused me to reflect on the sheer volume of my volumes - most of my luggage was books, and they took some lugging by a couple of burly blokes. The appeal of ereaders was apparent to them as to me.  A library that fits in your handbag is surely preferable to one that fills two cars and a trailer.

However, now that I've unpacked and reshelved, I have to conclude that an ereader would not do justice to what I've actually spent the last decade and more collecting. Where would I find an electronic version of my beautifully bound set of Poets of the English Language, edited by Auden, picked up at a market for a song? Or of oddities like my Dictionary of Common Fallacies, or my Book of Facts from the 1930s? Or the edition of George Herbert that I hunted for for years and finally found in Archives in Charlotte St, Brisbane, with a price tag that miraculously corresponded with the amount in my bank account - $17.95? Or the edition of John Donne from which I worked while doing my PhD, that I picked up in a charity shop in Reading for £2? These and many others are irreplaceable. Or perhaps I should say undigitisable.

Not to mention their presence in my new home - comforting, inspiring, familiar. Voluminous.

Desert Island Books

Jerry: You're on a desert island; which five books do you take?
George: I gotta read five books??

Among the books you like, which ones transcend mere enjoyment to become enduringly enjoyable, instructive, refreshing, edifying, necessary?  The question needn't prompt an actual list, but it ought to prompt thinking about what we read and why. Apart from the obvious ones like the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer,  I would want some poetry, probably an anthology; a loved children's story; a work of philosophy (Pascal? Augustine?); and the rest fiction.

I've met people for whom fiction would be the first thing they'd jettison when the boat starts to go down. They'd consider it supremely unnecessary. I think that's why we need it so much. It's the sublimely unnecessary grace of ordinary life; the magic lantern that makes long sunscorched days endurable; the mirror that shows us at once what is and is not there. If you're stuck on a desert island, a mirror is a terrifically handy thing to have.

The age of metrics

I heard Anand Giridharadas talking about the age of metrics, in which our increasing use of computers is gradually digitising our minds. He makes the very good point that in this age, where anything can be proved with metrics, everything must be justified metrically, so things that have not traditionally been quantifiable, such as the arts and humanities, have now to come up with numbers to justify continued support. In his own research field of politics, the influence of metrics brings greater rigour but at the price of having less to say about the world's big questions. The biggest losers in this intellectual economy are the most intuitive or unquantifiable disciplines, into which category literature neatly falls. 

This misplaced emphasis on numbers has been evident in English departments for some time, especially in the ludicrous exercise of measuring viability by numbers of publications, which every teacher and scholar of literature knows is bunk but none is in a position to defy. What I find most interesting is that not only the mode but the message of much literature is opposed to quantification. The whole idea of recording human experience in words rather than in numbers has bypassed the funders, managers and assessors of research excellence, who have no clue and no interest in the content of the research they fund, manage and assess. (Incidentally, in the 1980s with the early ascendency of computers, a trend emerged in which literature was analysed numerically, using new technology to measure the use of images and rhymes and so establish meaning. It wasn't long before everybody realised how silly this was, and went back to the more intuitive and intellectually supple methods of analysis, what Monica Fludernik has called “the creative endowment of significance.”)

An article in this weekend's Canberra Times made the same point in discussing Gordon Brown's proposal to slash hundreds of millions from universities in the UK. I find this decision, undoubtedly based on metrics, short-sighted in the extreme.  Apart from beggaring belief, it raises the basic question, do we want to have a civilisation or don't we? In a civilisation, like the one we're in the process of digitising, the most civilised and civilising things are often the least measurable.

Meditations on work

I have to apologise for not having posted for a couple of weeks. I've been reflecting on the many benefits of voluntary unemployment (note: these do not include so-called unemployment benefits, as it seems the G-men don't take kindly to the 'voluntary' part). More broadly I've been thinking about work and whether this temporary hiatus could be used to realise some of my creative ambitions. I've always suspected that real creativity might be a convenient way out of work; though of course I realise that realising it involves a lot of work. Nevertheless a lot of writers see themselves at odds with the world and values of conventional employment. Not least Philip Larkin (again), whose poem 'Toads' articulates my latent suspicions:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Why can't I? Lots of other people seem to. Indeed corporate gurus argue that creativity is the capital of the twenty-first century (like it wasn't in every other one.)

Then there's Thomas Hardy, Larkin's antecedent, whose philosophical approach I used to justify  frequent bouts of inertia when studying:

"It is no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the active, the rapid, the people of such splendid momentum that before they can see where they are they have got elsewhere,  have been surprised to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for discharging their active labours has been that of postponing them indefinitely."

Although the older I get the more I have to admit that indefinite postponement might yield profundities, but rarely results.

Then there's Hilaire Belloc, who said he "never put pen to paper without wishing that I had inherited an enormous fortune, in which case you may be very certain that I should never have put pen to paper."

So is writing a way of working, or of not working? If I didn't have to work (a euphemistic way of describing my current status), would I want to write? Or is the dream of writing only one of the humours I indulge while reluctantly pursuing my more active labours?

I'll keep you posted.