the year I found philip larkin

an ordinary looking man. a great poet

This week I read a poem by Philip Larkin for The American Scholar  Read Me a Poem. And while I walked my dogs this morning, I found myself reflecting on the year I first encountered him - not in person, of course, but in his poetry.  I was on a semester abroad at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire.  And that does sound odd - since England has never been abroad for me. Rather, it was returning home.

I had finished high school in the United States and went to Emerson College in Boston through their early admissions program.  Two years later, attending Wroxton as a study abroad student was my chance to go back home, while still working on my American BA degree.  Wroxton Abbey was a Jacobean mansion with sweeping lawns and sprawling wooded acres, in a tiny village near Banbury.

When I first arrived, and seeing that I was British, one of the professors asked, "Are you one of us or are you one of them?" I explained that my family returned to England every year, but I'd been a resident of Massachusetts for seven years.  "Oh," he said, "then you're not one of us.  You're tainted."

 My bedroom at Wroxton was enormous. If you happen to see a photograph of the abbey, my room is the one on the second floor, the tall windowed one, on the right.  I shared it with one person.  We had a view across the lawns. Our desks looked over the drive and the pine trees. Every morning I woke to the sound of wood pigeons.

All our professors were Oxbridge types and the courses were run in the British tradition with seminars, tutorials and frequent guest lecturers, including Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells.  We were able to take in many productions at Stratford too. I saw the Henry plays - parts I and II and Henry V, as well as The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I was nineteen years old. Back in America I had just ended a disastrous love affair with a much older man. So I was wiser but also sadder.  This was my chance, not just to spread my wings, but to reconnect with my heritage, with grandparents and British friends.  I occasionally went to London to see my best friend Lucy and her circle in Earls Court. I shopped for clothes on Oxford Street and Portobello Road. I bought a pair of platform shoes in blue and green leather.  I went to the Hayward Gallery to see an exhibit of Sir Edward Burne Jones with a sculptor who used to live across the street from us in Surbiton.  We had lunch in her club.  This was the year the band Queen released their single Bohemian Rhapsody.  I bought the 45 and played it repeatedly in my grandparent's living room in Iver. 

During this era my blessing and my curse was to be pretty, intelligent and intellectually curious. And because I was nineteen and a sexual person, I longed for a man to take me on. The trouble was that the one who had recently taken me on spelled trouble. And this was why I had left the man in America - an Iranian who'd lived in England for many years.  His range of experience as well as his connection to England had all been part of the attraction.

My mother used to tell me about her girlhood cat Tinky- who gave birth to forty kittens. Mummy said she always mated with the roughest tomcats in the alley.  Well, that had been me.  Looking for experience - looking to be seduced and educated, looking for somebody to take me on.  I went for an older man since he  had experience, the intellectual and artistic chops to draw me.

But never mind all that, because I started out intending to write about Philip Larkin.  It's just that here I was - in a college where most of the students were female.  There were no boys I wanted to kiss.  No boys to flirt with.  For  recreation, I played the piano. There was a room in the abbey called the Gold Room with a beautiful grand piano.  Strangely, nobody went in there but me.  It was a massive concert sized room with tall ceilings and gilded chairs which matched the gilded rococo paneled walls.  I'd sit at the piano for hours and fumble my way through Beethoven's Pathetique.  It was quite extraordinary.  The room was so grand and I felt grand to be inside it, left to my own devices.  Once, my Shakespeare professor joined me there, and played a few improvisations of his own.  A romance was kindled - but not a very interesting one. 

So I took long walks by myself in the shrubbery. It was full of rhododendron bushes. One afternoon, I finished my shrubbery walk by peering through the library windows.  There I  saw my classmates with open books, cramming for exams. They looked up, perplexed.  Why was I outside when exams were next week?  Only, I was even more perplexed. What were they doing studying - on a beautiful day like this?  I couldn't understand it. 

I too spent time in the library - not cramming for exams, but reading poetry.  I should also add here that the abbey contained a private collection: The full library of C S Lewis.  I was in there only once. Why I didn't take the opportunity and visit that room again and again is beyond me. But I was young and foolish.  I should have been there for hours. But sadly, I wasn't. 

Nevertheless,  it was in the Wroxton library that I found a shelf of contemporary poetry - and discovered Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin.   I pored over their work - over Crow by Ted Hughes  in particular, but also over Philip Larkin's irreverent and beautifully structured poems.  It was the off hand tone of his work that drew me.  Wow.  You could write like this?  But how did he incorporate his command of language and form so effortlessly,  while maintaining such irreverence in his tone - such humor and ordinariness - questioning the standards and benchmarks of greatness.  As it turned out, he worked in a library in Hull.  He was an outsider who shunned the spotlight, but he was every bit as good as those in the spotlight.  In fact, he was one of the greats.  When I read Larkin, I entered a whole new world.

After my time at Wroxton, I returned to Emerson College feeling empowered, not just to study literature, but to try my hand at writing some stories of my own.   I published in The Emerson Review and later on in Ploughshares.  A few years after teaching creative writing at Emerson, I moved to New York City and worked for The New Yorker.

But I'll never forget that corner of the Wroxton College library - down near the front windows, overlooking the beautiful gardens in the back.  Church Going - the poem by Philip Larkin which I read for The American Scholar, will always be one of my favorites.

unrecovered moments that we know existed - on reading madeleine thien

This was one powerful book to read during Thanksgiving - a holiday where we heard that our president was grateful for himself, as troops were deployed to the border to keep away a caravan of asylum seekers and where the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade featured synchronized pom pom girls with plastic grins, a grotesque Sponge Bob hung suspended over laughing crowds.  How many tweaks would turn this into satire?  What have we turned ourselves into, I wondered, as my husband watched, and I turned away, to prepare with my son our thanksgiving meal. 

What is real?  What is true?  What is worth something and what is worth nothing? "Revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile," Madeleine Thien writes. "There's no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows."

What sorrows - the Macy's Parade seems to ask.  Everything is WONDERFUL!

But  "Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed."  These words are written at the top of a score by Sparrow, a gifted Chinese composer, and his daughter finds them when he is gone.  They come towards the end of  Madeleine Thien's epic novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing.  As I immersed myself in this incredible book over the holiday, it seemed to me the best I had read all year.

It's about the Cultural Revolution in China and the fallout across generations, including the 1989 student protests and massacre in Tienanmen Square.  It's also about music and the influence of Western composers on a circle of Chinese musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory.  It's a novel about friendship, love and loss, about the power of music written and practiced, but never heard.  Most significantly, it's about a secret Book Of Records, copied and recopied, each time newly encoded with Chinese characters holding hidden meanings, so as to record their stories.

Chinese characters figure strongly in the novel, right from its opening, when Ai-Ming, a young Chinese refugee, arrives at the home of Li-ling (Marie is her western name) in Vancouver, Canada.  Marie asks the meaning of Ai-Ming's name. "My parents wanted the idea of mi ming - she said - to cherish wisdom. But you're right, there's a misgiving in it.  An idea that is... mmm, not cherishing fate but not quite accepting it."

Later, Ai-Ming explains how her grandmother's stories, inscribed in the Book of Records, got longer and longer - and "I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, 'But that's how the world is, isn't it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?'"

As I read, I began to understand how the world could swallow you whole. Ai-Ming's father Sparrow is a composer and his gifted student Kai (Marie's father) is a pianist.  Their love and connection carries much of the narrative forward,  as does the narrative of Sparrow's cousin Khuli, a violinist.  Their stories are unseen and hidden from the world,  but they are powerful and true, and once you get caught up in the stories of Swirl, Sparrow, Kai and Khuli - you all but forget the narrator. Marie's ancestral stories are bigger than she is.

Another important character, Wen the Dreamer, is sent to labor camp and when he escapes he must keep his whereabouts secret.  He makes it his mission to keep track of those who died in the labor camps. He keeps a record of dates in the lining of his suitcase and records them in the Book of Records - subtly changing the Chinese characters so as to preserve their histories. "When he finished copying," Big Mother Knife wonders of her husband, "did he go back to being himself or were the very structures of his thoughts, their hue and rhythm subtly changed?"

Because they are from the intellectual and educated classes, these characters are oppressed and tortured during Chairman Mao's regime. Each must make a different and very painful choice. One escapes to the west.  Most do not. As Kai tells Zhuli, "one day soon we'll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked."

As you read, you see how a whole generation is destroyed. The characters watch as fellow musicians and faculty members at the conservatory are mocked, tortured and killed. Sparrow must burn his glorious symphony, so that it survives just in memory - before he becomes a factory worker in a labor camp.  Much later, when Marie listens to his music  she wonders if music could record a time that otherwise left no trace.

Then there's the story of Swirl, Zhuli's mother,  taken to prison camp to be reeducated. When Sparrow finally finds her, after years of looking, he tells her he's been thinking about the quality of sunshine.    Let me just say that I read this part while I was at work, on my lunch break, and it moved me so much that I had to read it aloud for one of my colleagues.

"Daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes.  If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? if so what was silence?"

 For me, Zhuli is the most tragic and noble of all the characters in this novel.  As a young and gifted violinist, her love and understanding of Prokofiev and Bach carries her through the troubled times, even as she writes essays on discarded newspaper and butcher paper: "'Are we gifted?' the essays asked.  'If so, who cares? What good is this music, these empty enchantments that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?'"

At the end of her life, Zhuli asks her cousin Sparrow, "Haven't you understood yet Sparrow?.... the only life that matters is in your mind.  The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book.  Silence too, is a kind of music.  Silence will last."

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is extraordinary beautiful, painful and complex.  If you want to know what it was like in Tienanmen Square during the 1989 massacre, you will find no more heartbreaking account than in the final pages of this book.

"The present is all we have," writes Madeleine Thien, "yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands."  Or as Marie, a mathematician observes at the end of the novel

  "... to put it another way, dividing by zero equals infinity: you can take nothing out of something an infinite number of times."

#madeleinethien #donotsaywehavenothing

your story my story

My mother Judy, walking on the headlands with her dog Gerty in Sausalito.

Who am I? And how may I become myself? Paul Beatty poses these questions in his novel The Sellout,  a biting satire on 'post-racial' America. The narrator, raised by his father on a farm as a kind of racial/social experiment, decides to reinstate  the boundaries of a disappeared black township called Dickens, and later enslaves Hominy Jenkins, the last remaining survivor of the Little Rascals television series. Hominy is a national embarrassment, who belongs in the category of things to be eradicated -  "stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos n Andy, Dave Chappelle's meltdown and people who say 'Valentimes Day.'"

I read the first third of The Sellout on the plane from Sydney to San Francisco.  The acerbic commentary just pours out in an endless stream. "The difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American Blacks," Beatty writes, "is that they vow never to forget and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity."  As I read, I felt there was much I wasn't fully getting. So I couldn't stop jotting down notes.

My sister  Stephanie and I arrived in San Francisco several hours before we had left Sydney.  Also, it was spring in Sydney, summer in San Francisco, and soon I'd be back in autumnal Virginia.  But for the next several nights, I slept in my nephew Emmett's room.  He has a suit of medieval armor displayed on a mannequin in front of the window.  It was the first thing impinging on my consciousness when I woke up in the middle of the night.  That, and Noel Coward, Stephanie's  mangy old cat who had decided to sleep on my bed.   Jet lagged, I read a bit more of The Sellout  and when I got up to pee, mangy Noel escorted me down to the bathroom, waited, and followed me back to bed.

Stephanie's home is lively and colorful and not a corner of space there is wasted. It's decorated with masks and plumes, shawls, lanterns, cushions. Her husband Dylan and sons Oliver and Emmett all share the space, along with several animals.

Oh, didn't I mention the guinea pig in Emmett's bedroom, the cat with paralyzed back legs named Clara, or Nessa the pit bull? Jazz plays in the background while Stephanie, dressed in a gorgeous Sarah Bernhardt outfit  - usually hand dyed and adorned with fringe, produces an amazing meal out of her tiny kitchen. There's no counter space. Dishes pile in the sink.  

 Our friend Walter flew in the night we arrived, having just finished a production of Shakespeare in Love at the Fugard Theater in Capetown.  His partner Anthony, a violinist, was arriving a few days after us, to play a concert series.  Meeting them here had all been part of the plan.  I could write more - and probably will at some stage - about my mother's Shakespeare group and all the other animals and family members I have in San Francisco.  But for now let's stay in Stephanie's living room where Walter and my mother are talking about theater with Stephie and me chiming in.  (Actually, I'm combining things here, to make the writing more interesting.  In real life,  some of this conversation took place at a harborside restaurant in Sausalito.)

The topic was interracial and cross-gender casting, now standard practice in the British theater. But does it make sense for Laertes to be black when Ophelia is white? Does it  really matter?  Will a white actor ever get to play a part in A Raisin in the Sun?  Should not actors of all races and genders get a crack at the greatest roles in the literary canon? What about suspension of disbelief? What about consistency?

In The Sellout. Beatty does this hilarious write up of Hominy Jenkins' theatrical bio - listing his uncredited roles as busboy, shoeshine boy, toy boy,  and so forth.  I laughed out loud when I read it, but at the same time, felt a bit like the white characters towards the end of the novel, at a black comedy show. They are finally shooed from the theater : "Get out. This is our thing!"

The overarching question here seems to be what is my story and what is your story?

Walter sits on the sofa and mangy Noel Coward jumps onto his lap. At some stage Noel became so matted that Steph decided she was going to trim his fur– but unfortunately it never grew back so his coat now has these huge bald spots.  His thin pink body is visible in places, underneath the oily coat. Also, he scratches people. Walter pushes him back to the floor. "Sorry darling, but I loathe you."

I'm interested in the question of appropriation. A year ago, I finished writing a novel which features an important transgender character.  I did a lot of research - gleaning a lot of wonderful material from generous transgender people which informed my character.  The novel has done the rounds but has now been shelved by one agent and rejected by several others.  I doubt it will see the light of day, any time soon, not because it isn't good, but because I, the author, am not transgender.  There's the notion of "own story" afoot in the literary world these days.  If publishers are going to publish, let's say, one novel with a transgender main character, it will probably be a book written by a transgender author.

Then Stephanie told us about Scarlett Johansson, cast to play a trans male. She ultimately withdrew from the production after public outcry.  Why had not a trans male been cast instead of a cis female?

It all gets so complicated. And as a culture,  I believe we are working our way as sincerely as we can through thickets of identity.  In the end, we need to express empathy in our work- because that is what writing and performing is all about.  And we need as performers and writers to have the opportunity of range.  There again, aren't some of the most memorable female characters in classic literature written by white men?  Rosalind, Isabel Archer,  Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina. We cannot now dismiss them.

While I've been writing this, I've realized that the most enjoyable part was writing about my family and their animals.  I'm going to keep doing that.  In fact, while I was in San Francisco my daughter Rozzie called from Paris: "When are you going to start your memoir, Mama," she asked.  "My Animals and other Family?"

So yes, I've been writing it.  That is what I've been writing, apart from this blog.

I'm back on the east coast now.  We've had our book club discussion on Paul Beatty and touched on  many issues I raised here.  Bottom line: we recommend you read it.

Also I'm now back at work. Last night, at Politics and Prose, Lisa Halliday read from her novel Asymmetry - a book whose first half I thoroughly enjoyed. Second half, not so much.  It was interesting to hear her thoughts on cultural appropriation, though.  Readers have assumed the first part of Asymmetry is purely autobiographical, she said, while the second part, concerning an Iraqi American family, they assume to be fictional.  In fact, both story lines in the novel have truths as well as fiction woven through them.  If not for the ability to put ourselves as writers and creative artists into the shoes of others,  Halliday pointed out, the only available material would be autobiography. And surely that's far too limiting.