Links to recent essays & reviews:
Essay: America’s Last High Modernist
Essay: Poetry in Widnes Fragmented Voices, Feb 2021
Book Review: Seán Hewitt’s ‘Tongues of Fire’
Book Review: Maria Isakova Bennett’s ‘…an ache in each welcoming kiss’
Book Review: Alice Hiller’s ‘Bird of Winter’
Book Review: Jane Lovell’s ‘This Tilting Earth’
The Book As We Have Known It
In the early 1970s my family moved to a new house. On the low, built-in bookcases in the front room we found a number of volumes, books left by the previous occupant; it was as though to leave the shelves empty would have been inhospitable. The books were a welcome, of sorts. The bookcases offered an ideal location for our Childcraft How and Why Library (in 15 shiny grey volumes) from volume 1 – Poems and Rhymes to volume 15 – Guide and Index. These American books could tell you everything you needed to know about the world, from The World and Space to How Things Change, from What People Do to Pioneers and Patriots – full of the kinds of information children can now access quickly through digital technology. Our new found books, our gifts, included Thomas B. Costain’s Below the Salt, soon to become the first book of fiction my Dad read in full. Ivanhoe and The Cricket on the Hearth in their blue and salmon jackets stayed unread on the shelves (we would not have entertained the idea of throwing them away) but soon made room for Jonathon Livingston Seagull, numerous novels and anthologies, The Female Eunuch and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. It never occurred to me, as a child, that the books we found were perhaps the unwanted relics of the previous owner’s old life. Perhaps she was very pleased to leave them behind?
Those well-painted built-in bookcases demanded to be filled and my mother obliged; as she gained qualifications at night school she continued to add to the collection, books on Economics, Social History and Religion. As the books increased so did the antipathy between my parents. Books can herald domestic division as well as knowledge; in Tony Harrison’s poem Book Ends, he is as helpless and alone as his Dad, on his mother’s death:
….Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
Social mobility through learning for selected clever working-class children of Harrison’s generation did cause divisions between young people ambitious to study and their Dads who, like the poet’s, were often “worn out on poor pay.” The divide now between parents and children is not about books but about an all-pervading digital technology that not only seems to give instant answers but may, as Susan Greenfield has argued, also have a profound effect on neurological development and the wiring of young brains.
In my analogue childhood I visited my local library every week. The red brick Victorian building had a fine mahogany and glass revolving door that hissed like a stopping bus. Once through to the other side I discovered a sense of my own enquiry, through eclectic and untutored decision-making. To be oneself in a high windowed room of books, any one of which may be taken home, offers a memorable experience of freedom and joy. I selected books by name and colour, at first, drawn to their sounds and illustrations – Smith of Wootton Major by Tolkien, The Whispering Knights by Penelope Lively. I borrowed books on beetles and birds, pond life and ghost stories, everything I could find by Paul Gallico and Leon Garfield, books on pollution, curious books about saints, Olga da Polga by Michael Bond and later, in my teens, poetry by poets with mysterious names; I am grateful to the unknown municipal benefactor who ordered the works of Wallace Stevens and Lawrence Ferlinghetti for Widnes Library as this set me on my lifelong search for new poems and collections.
The book as a physical artefact is the embodiment of the human spirit, an object mysteriously inanimate yet human at once with its spine and body, weight and language, history and character and its potential for decay. Its contents may be high-minded or frivolous, deeply engaged with philosophical thought or comedic. The book can be many and varied things. It also collects in its pages the evidence of individual human thinking and of a life that has gone into making the book, and reading it; with its bus tickets and pencil markings, turned down pages, coffee stains and precious post-cards it possesses a mind of its own. A book is a gift and a reckoning. When decanted into an electronic file and transformed into digital information it is disembodied and can only be found through a series of letters and codes typed into a machine. A book itself is never a machine. Although both electronic versions and physical books have a psychical reality it is the physical materiality of the book that makes it an object of human experience, memory and emotion. The precariousness of finding texts on-line carries no sense of deep sorrow when a link disappears; the nature of the internet is change and ephemerality denoted in the concept of the virtual (the almost, the nearly) and lost at the touch of a button or a failure in the national grid.
While the book can be a source of magic and enchantment that may turn us away from the world, as it does for Prospero in The Tempest when he declares “my library was dukedom large enough,” this turning away does not last. We must all return from the book to eat, sleep, love, forgive our brothers and reclaim our rightful places in our own worlds.
The book is an emblem of slow technology, of collaboration and research, of editorial labour and making, of proofing and publishing. It represents, encompasses and embodies the human search for knowledge.
Digital technology may offer access to new avenues of intellectual enquiry and research and big data that no personal library could offer especially liberating in undeveloped countries; however, this does not mean it democratises the written word simply because we can all now become citizen journalists etc., The writing that keeps thousands of young people behind their keyboards or glued to their smartphones has little to do with literature, knowledge or democracy, or indeed companionship. At its worst it endorses a deluded solipsism that keeps the phone-user alone and unfulfilled as he or she imagines the world to be at his or her fingertips, talking (writing) but unheard.
The book is changing but its physical form remains the key to communitarian thought and has been one of the most important social and psychological celebrations of human reason. It still accompanies us at sacramental moments and offers us a guide to the world. The book carries family dust and the taste of cigarettes, stains of tea and marginalia. It is an object of desire in which we can find our ancestors and the imaginary paths to unlived lives. It is precisely because of the social significance of the book as a democratic symbol as well as an object of intimate and familial encounter that we recoil at the prospect of its destruction.
The Empty Library Memorial by Israeli sculptor, Micha Ullman can be found in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, underground. It was commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of Nazi book-burning in the same square when more than 20,000 books were destroyed by students and Nazi party members in May 1933. The book-burners were keen to destroy the works of Marx, Freud, Einstein, Brecht, Proust, and many more; Joseph Goebbels characterized the students’ actions as clearing up the debris of the past, as he pronounced “Jewish intellectualism is dead.”
Ullman’s Memorial is marked by the words of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” – “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” Ullman says that the two important materials in this work are emptiness and silence: “The emptiness is an anti-fire substance. The library is not burning. Ideas and thoughts cannot be burned.” The unburning of books conceptually realized in these empty shelves is also a memorial to the countless dead.
In digital technology books are not being burned, but rather divorced from human touch and the senses.
What cannot be denied is that the book as we have known it, with its respected authors (and sometimes disrespected ones) with its weight and perfumes, its promises and memories, its rich buttermilk pages for cutting, its infinite forgiveness and welcome when we return to it and fail yet again to reach the end, its beautiful inscription written long ago in ink by someone beloved now dead; the book is one of the richest gifts of human encounter and expression. What is lost must itself become a subject of literary and intellectual engagement for we cannot quite know what we are doing if we bid the book (the analogue book) farewell; or perhaps it’s just adieu. The book will remain perhaps in small print- runs, in special editions in print-on-demand for those of us who long for its physical presence, while digital-readers can access the same texts in their own clean ways.
Pauline Rowe
The Book As We Have Known It was the overall winner of the AHRC Tenth Anniversary Essay Prize.
Going To Poetry
In 1978, above a wool shop in Widnes, a group of eccentric men (mostly called John) saved my life by reading poetry together every week. I’d just started studying for my O levels and on Wednesday evening I would leave “for Poetry” and no one at home questioned what I was doing or why. They were used to my pursuit of words and books, tolerating my weekly treks to the library; and my mother had used me growing up as a sounding board for her revision. When I was 5 her night-school subjects included English Literature and Language, History and Economics. I developed the impression William Blake’s Tyger was somehow connected to the Spinning Jenny. My imagination was never questioned or particularly admired. By the time I was 15 and doing O levels myself my mother was teaching English Literature at the school she had left, without any qualifications, at 14. The reading group I attended called itself a Poetry group and was organised by one of my mother’s colleagues, John W. I think she mentioned it to me in a moment of impatience. On these Wednesday evening poetry meetings in Widnes there was an occasional appearance by a woman called Sue (in her 20s) but mostly it was John W and John who worked in the Council’s Legal Department (and John J in the office with his constant cigarettes and passion for visual art and painting), Stephen, an occasional Dave and me. John W, in his mid to late 30s, was the heart of the group. He was nothing like Robin Williams and this was no Dead Poets Society.
John W looked like a young Jim Broadbent and could do a perfect imitation of Dylan Thomas’s lilting barely Welsh English. John used to roar with laughter and talk about the decline of the nation in terms of the desperate state of poetry. He longed for John Berryman or Hart Crane and told me all about the disappearance of Weldon Kees many years before Simon Armitage made a film about him. No surprise then, this being in Widnes, and given John W’s favourite wordsmiths, that the rooms above the wool shop were called The Bridge. At The Bridge I was introduced to writers that have remained companions and even, on a few precious occasions, saved my life. If I read Wallace Stevens’ Snowman I hear John W’s voice
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
If I read Emily Dickinson I remember that John brought me a twig from her garden when he visited New England. If I think of Dylan Thomas’s thirtieth year to heaven I see that small whitewashed room with its few hopeful readers sitting uncomfortably on plastic chairs and celebrating life through the words of others.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
*
The Bridge was an arts centre with a compassionate heart. The first time I attended the meeting took me to a new world in which men loved each other’s company, conversation and ideas. As I ascended the wooden, uncarpeted stairs for the first time I could hear a distinctive voice enthusing and laughing. Though deeply self-conscious standing at the open door of the room where John and Stephen were talking I was welcomed with enthusiasm. John W knew me by sight and started telling me about Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River anthology – each poem a gravestone obituary from the dead of small town America. The room was newly painted and one wall held some framed and alarmingly ugly work by local painters. There were 2 large windows with plain nets facing Albert Road. The Bridge was a few doors away from Big Jim’s nightclub (the patron having been a local lad made good via rugby league) and overlooked a sweet-shop called The Dairy where I’d attended a birthday party when I was 6, and been shouted at for refusing to run round a set of wooden chairs to the tune of Run, Rabbit, Run. Widnes still felt like the clutch of the 50s held it by the scruff of its thick, industrial neck. I knew the place and hated it. Was continually annoyed by people asking how’s your Mum. I was never questioned about my Dad who just worked, cleaned up, sorted our food and didn’t seem to read anything ever.
We didn’t call ourselves a Reading group at the Bridge but that’s what we were. I sometimes wonder why those men were so tolerant of me. I was a confused, bright and deeply unhappy girl who spent many hours reading poetry. I read D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, re-read William Blake (my first love), Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Reading Keats for school remained a distinctly separate occupation. At school, which was a Liverpool all girls grammar school run by a French order of nuns, I learned most through singing; we performed Edward German’s Merrie England, Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, The Messiah, and were always preparing for concerts and prize evenings and special assemblies which required choral music. Music was the passion of the place. I recall one particular ditty we sang as part of choir rehearsal. I still sing it to cheer myself in moments of gloom
I left my pink parasol
On the upper deck
Of a Hammersmith bus
Oh bother! Oh Bother!
Exams were a necessity but not really seen as vital – exemplified by the fact that Oxbridge entrance was virtually unknown, in spite of the cleverness of many of our girls. It was a common exchange, still, amongst us that within living memory our school was advertised to the world as A School for the daughters of gentlemen. In 1978 Sister Sarah our eager, lisping, red-haired young literature teacher taught us by dictating pages and pages of pre-prepared notes about Keats. I learned To Autumn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by heart and struggled with The Eve of St Agnes. We read To Kill a Mocking Bird together and discussed Julius Caesar but my abiding memory is my aching hand taking dictation as I looked out at the rain on Princes Park. I didn’t find the deep human consolation in Keats at 15 that I find now as a middle-aged woman.
The consolation and support of reading was not found in the class-room but at The Bridge. For reasons too painful to elaborate here, connected with sexual discovery and domestic heartache, I drifted away from going to poetry on a Wednesday but never completely abandoned it as long as I lived in the town (I left when I was 18). That group of poetry-reading men even included me on visits to The Snig (a pub in West Bank) they frequented after the meeting. I took my place beside them, listening and learning and drinking a pint of bitter. There was never any word of censure or exclusion. No obvious discomfort about my adolescent struggles and confused sexuality
John W was a mentor and friend but I don’t know what became of him. I heard he was teaching in Chester and married to a doctor. But that news is over 20 years old. Unless he uses another name I haven’t seen his poetry in any of the magazines or journals I read. He is probably best as a lost hero perpetually laughing and reading and loving the humanity he found and conveyed through poetry. I spotted John J on Liverpool’s Church Street in the early 90s but didn’t speak to him. Stephen still teaches at a school in Runcorn. The rooms that served as a place for people to go if they painted or read or tried to write changed long ago into a taxi office or upstairs flat and Widnes is now part of Halton and Halton has its Brindley arts centre in Runcorn.
But I wonder what would happen if my 15 year old ghost wandered into the Brindley and asked to join a group of men in their 30s to read and share poetry. It wouldn’t be possible.
John W introduced me to John Clare and Anne Sexton, Rimbaud and Christina Rossetti, Robert Lowell and Stevie Smith. His voice was the first I heard reading the work of Tony Harrison and he was the first person to listen with patience to my strange adolescent poems without laughing. He gave me permission to love poetry and to write without being afraid. He made me write the words of others in my heart so that, in deep crisis, they come back to save me.
Pauline Rowe
First published in The Reader No 33 Spring 2009, pp.74 – 76.
Burning Bright 