44. E.M. Forster - 'Ansell' (1903)

'We were feeding on the past, and I knew that we could not live by that alone.'
(E.M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975, p.29)

Subtle links with the Bates story, with literature the focus instead of music; the unnamed 'I' in the Forster being analogous to Bates's gifted, yet unhappy, main protagonist, Clara.

Forster has a succinct, emphatic way of expressing the difference between having a traditional, presumably Oxbridge, education, and not. He explores this in the relationship between the verbally articulate 'I' and the manual worker and title character, Ansell. They were relatively on the level when introduced at age 14, Ansell proving a playmate, albeit one distracting 'I' from what his parents see as his serious destination: 'The sound of our whoops and shrieks as we jumped with abandon on one another's hats penetrated even into the smoking-room, where my father was arguing with my cousin as to the respective merits of Eton and Winchester as a school for me.' (p.28)

A future mapped out, and bound to lead away towards the sort of conveyor belt identified by one of the three posh-schooled boys in Granada's Seven Up series (the one who broke out of it by going to Durham, and then became a BBC producer, pointedly not taking part in the series beyond age 21).

He returns to the Hall where Ansell works when now are both 18 and have taken drastically divergent paths in life, and then again at 23, where the main action takes place; Ansell is now a type who anticipates Ted Burgess in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), presumably many in D.H. Lawrence and even Tom Seaton in When the Boat Comes In. A man defined by work, practical and taciturn, who often comes into contact with the 'higher orders' by virtue of his work.

The narrator identifies the distinctions; physically he himself is inept, out of shape in comparison: 'But I had forgotten how to rest, and preferred reading to outdoor amusements.' (p.28) But he consoles himself with his presumption of higher intelligence, which are represented not by himself but by his books: 'After six years of a student's life I was perfectly inured to attacks on my implements.' Forster undermines this by the way in which it is revealed that he does not contain the requisite knowledge to complete his dissertation in his noggin, but has to rely overly on his notes and annotations (admittedly something I can sympathise with to some extent!). Also, in a key passage, his greater learning is revealed to be more of an insecurity; his reflex is simply to speak to cover any awkward silence, even making quotations that are not strictly relevant to deflect the idea that he might be wrong in any way.

Forster speaks volumes about what university means, socially: 'But to educated people silence matters: it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention. I racked my brains for some remark that would serve to keep my self-respect, but could find none.' (p.29) This expresses how people are judged socially, and have to adapt to survive, within the sophisticated world of academia. The academy develops the ability to fill gaps in conversation, but not necessarily to communicate meaning; talk may be superfluous, redolent of an untrustworthy verbosity. Forster is clearly ambivalent about this, being of this world himself, not necessarily trusting it and grasping for something more. 'unless I speak I cannot go on thinking' - amply expressing the way thoughts come through a constant articulation in the intellectually self-confident.

The picture at the top of this entry is one of my own, taken from the room at Jesus College I stayed in during the first of my two return visits to Cambridge last year - one in a professional capacity, the other to receive the absurdly difficult to explain (or justify!) Cantab MA. These visits, within the space of three months, brought back the Oxbridge experience in all its ambivalence; there was the space and context to 'get on', as Jack Ford would have it, almost too much to handle. It is a truth that Oxbridge gets better results due to fundamental factors such as the student : lecturer ratio, as well as that expectations, from parents, society and background are greater than they are for someone going to Sunderland or Northumbria University, say. It is a foreign country, compared with up north; a confident, increasingly secular and well-read middle-class enclave, in which the average record shop customer in Fopp was buying distinctly non-mainstream music and cinema. Of course, there's a great potential for smugness there, that you may not get in the more mixed areas of bigger cities like London or Newcastle. Yet, revisiting Galloway and Porters, for example, Clowns cafe, conversing with old faces at the MA reunion, it seemed, once again, an attractive world, if not quite mine, all the way. Part of me will always be there, part will always be at the old Roker Park (with perhaps the modern analogue of the Raich Carter Centre, Sunderland and the 5-a-side team I play in); part to Newcastle, though obviously never to its football. Owen Hatherley captures the city's contradictions well in these pieces:
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3143599
http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/06/tyneside-addenda.html

It is set up better than most to be a European city (YES, indeed, regarding the metro system, and its fine architectrual mix), but is held back by too many living up to the Viz-documented Biggmarket lairiness and unpleasantness. This has definitely been corroborated by several friends who live there, who tend to agree with me that Ouseburn, east of the city centre, is where to go. Civilised, and yet far from smug; as beautiful in its distinct way, as Cambridge, so long as they don't spoil it with over-development - the seemingly eternal, and depressing, fantasy of yuppie flats and their implied end of history. The Cumberland Arms forever. http://www.thecumberlandarms.co.uk/

(Anyway - barely related digression over!)

The two young men's past escapades - making birdlime from a Boy's Own Paper recipe - cannot sustain an easy conversation in the present. An inter-dependence only comes apart through the jeopardy they are thrown into - and indeed, 'Them Books' quizzically referred to by Ansell, end up saving his life. The cart carrying both of them and the narrator's books pertaining to his dissertation becomes overturned and the weight of the box of books saves them - going into the river before they do.

In this situation they literally save lives, but they ruin, or at least drastically alter, the narrator's assumed passage in life: he is looking to become an academic and requires successful completion of his prized dissertation to achieve that end. With Ansell's and others' help, he recovers several books, including the 'cover of an Artistotle', but his in-progress dissertation and annotated notes are lost forever - effectively ending his career before it had even truly begun. (p.34)

Intriguingly, Forster's The Longest Journey (1907) - made much of by Michael Bracewell in his England is Mine exploration of English cultural trends - also contains a character named Ansell. It will definitely be the next Forster I read; I regret to say that I have read no further than A Passage to India (1924) - and that was as a requirement as part of my BA course. 'Ansell' is a well crafted tale, especially impressive considering EMF's youth at the time; he is indeed remarkably adept at conveying what it is like to be 23 and 'educated'.

'Well, there's other things but books', Ansell reflects.

'If I met with one sign of sympathy I should break down'.

9/10

42. Muriel Spark - 'The Leaf-Sweeper' (1952)

'But it was still misty, and really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves.'
(Muriel Spark, The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 2001, p.190)

I had little or no idea what this was going to be about, or like; a good way to finish this extended week of stories from favoured writers. If a week is a long time in politics, I am not sure what Harold Wilson would make of my progress with this. I only got around to completing this story on Thursday 16th of July - as you will see the post has lain dormant for quite some time. ASSAD will reconvene shortly, on a week by week basis, perhaps without a theme to begin with - let's just get things started again!

In truth, I shifted to novel reading: Grant Allen, John Verney, Sjowall and Wahloo, E. Nesbit, Donald Barthelme... and only on Thursday managed to get around to reading this piece. One recent novel read spurred the choice of Spark, a new favourite: her Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), 64 years on, a distinct, droller bedfellow of Allen's The British Barbarians. This is a strain of literature probing the English in particular, their foibles, hypocrisies and absurdities. Dougal Douglas, like Bertram Ingledew, a stranger in a foreign land, is regarded with a mixture of fascination, admiration, horror and incomprehension - and like Ingledew, his role is freelance agent provocateur, sprite-at-large, observing . He is, however, more devious and machiavellian in his means of exposing folly and involving himself in these people's lives. He also takes on paid employment, given the brief of almost a 'blue skies thinker' in the modern parlance; he is given the task of taking the pulse of the workplace and approaches it in an idiosyncratic manner the bosses accept due to their perception of this Scot as an 'Arts Man'.

'The Leaf-Sweeper' is an even earlier work from Spark's career of over fifty years, published originally in The Observer - and will be far from the last I will read (there is an allegory of Watergate in a nunnery, a fictionalised account of Lord Lucan's later life and, of course, a certain novel that was filmed about a schoolmistress with fascist fixations... plz feel free to recommend any more, anyone!). She seems to me to be one of the key post-WW2 writers, along with Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis &c.

The first thing to state about this story is that, like TBOPR, this is bloody funny - Spark has an understated way with insinuation and absurdity. The premise itself rings true in its absurdity - the leaf-sweeper turns out to be an author and fanatic recently released from a mental institution. Johnnie Geddes's fanaticism revolves around his unshakeable opposition to Christmas and all its works. He has some success with pamphlets on the subject and then full-length books (including Abolish Christmas or We Die) outlining his apocalyptic vision, captured amusingly by Spark: 'He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless Churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years.' The effect is all the stronger because he rather has a point!

Spark introduces the concept succinctly and without ceremony - with something of the matter-of-fact quality that I observed in Dahl; after establishing the rather wistful, grounded scene of a man sweeping leaves in the mist for the local council, she throws in this: 'He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas.' (p.185) It gets one intrigued, right from the off, and Spark goes on to cover a lot of ground in a mere six pages. We get to know very little about the narrator who encounters Johnnie, and it simply does not matter in a vignette such as this is.

Quite how Spark turns it into a ghost-story is ingenious; amusing and melancholy at the same time: 'But perhaps you don't know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man. The ghosts of the dead may be all right, but the ghost of mad Johnnie gave me the creeps.' (p.189)

8/10

40. Franz Kafka - 'The Judgment' (1923)

'So Georg confined himself to giving his friend unimportant items of gossip such as rise at random in the memory when one is idly thinking things over on a quietSunday. All he desired was to leave undisturbed the idea of the home town which his friend must have built up to his own content during the long interval.'

(Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories, Minerva, p.79)

The Trial (1925) was a key novel in developing my literary tastes; reading it at age 15/16 was a definite portal to Beckett, Pinter, The Prisoner, Orson Welles and so much else that informs and excites. There is black humour, hopelessness, and the modern world writ large: no one is driving, no megalomaniac running the show; merely systems, ways of thought or customs running automatically and inflecting how we live. Arbitrary, never random.

Aside from 'Metamorphosis', this is the first short story of Kafka's I have read, and a comforting old piece of bedsitter fiction it is!

'The Judgment' concerns one Georg Bendelmann, a merchant; in probing, third-person prose, it is described how he has corresponded by letter with an old friend for three years since the friend left for St. Petersburg. He selectively portrays the world that his friend left behind, omitting the major news of his forthcoming marriage to a Fraulein Frieda Brandenfeld, having earlier neglected to mention his progress in business.

He is considerate in an unusual way with his friend's presumed feelings; considering, whilst conversing with his upper-crust fiance, how he might feel if invited to the wedding: "Alone - do you know what that means?" (pp.79-80) His exaggerated, speculative concern for his friend's feelings - "a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is not without importance to a bachelor" - is subtly undermined by the fact of his friend never writing back. (p.80)

The story shifts from the reflective to the melodramatic; Georg's perceptions of reality finally being challenged by the external world and leading to something of a mock-tragic, bathetic ending. There are plenty of exclamation marks, and unexpected bursts of action, puncturing the stillness engendered by the epistolary motif which characterises the early section. Georg's relationship with his father comes to the fore, and completely alters our view of things - initially, influenced by a third-person narrative looking at the world as G. sees it. The affair assumes Steptoe and Son dimensions, with the anguished bitterness of 'Loathe Story' resolved. The resolution, while rooted in Ibsenite naturalism, carries a melodramatic charge leavened by absurdism - how far have we travelled since the sedate - even complacent - opening 'Sunday morning in the very height of spring'? The letters being sent turn out to have been of a rather different nature, but I shall not divulge the full details...

8/10