35. Hans Christian Andersen - 'The Snow Queen' (1845)

‘Though I was brought up on both, Norse mythology has always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek; Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen and George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin were my favourite fairy stories and years before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did those feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.’

(W.H. Auden, 'I Like it Cold', House and Garden, December 1947)

"As the modern Danish critic Villy Sorensen has observed, Andersen saw the snow queen's icy world as the proper home for someone whose heart has been replaced by chilly reason--a category in which Andersen certainly placed many of his contemporaries" (169).

(http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/snowqueen/index.html)

This is, according to Auden, a story with more sophistication than is perceived in mere folk tales - that 'mere' will be examined in a forthcoming week of 'founding texts', where I will be tackling religious and mythical stories.

It is profound, it is a beautiful piece of work - with a certain stark poetry in its symmetries. The message is simple and profound; HCA warns us of cleverness for its own sake, shown leading to a hardness of heart - shatteringly expressed in the studied desolation of that image of Kay: 'And away flew the Snow Queen, leaving little Kay quite alone in the great hall which was so many miles in length; so he sat and looked at his pieces of ice, and was thinking so deeply, and sat so still, that any one might have supposed he was frozen.'

Then there is the gender issue; as the annotations suggest, there are eight strong female characters and only the lost, adrift Kay representing the masculine - a masculine susceptible to corruption and coldness. When Gerda finally locates him after her epic journeying, his reaction to her joy at finding him is non-existent:

'But he sat quite still, stiff and cold.

Then little Gerda wept hot tears, which fell on his breast, and penetrated into his heart, and thawed the lump of ice, and washed away the little piece of glass which had stuck there.'

There is a Christianity at work; the song sung by Gerda refers to a 'Christ-child' and the story ends with their grandmother imparting a moral from the pages of the Bible. Yet, it is an approachable, welcoming Christianity ending symbolically with the scene of 'warm, beautiful summer'. Andersen conveys a warmth all the more potent for the delineation of what it is to be cold, with that stark image of Kay alone and unresponsive, locked in his pitiless games of logic. As with Blake, this is a consideration of Innocence and Experience, and an interpretation of Christianity more persuasive than found in the institutions or perhaps even the Bible itself. This is, intriguingly, fused with a rather pagan usage of shamanistic tropes and motifs throughout, clearly rooted in the northern culture.

There is an interesting, if inevitably partial, parallel to be drawn with Trollope and later British writers who opposed 'sophisticated' ways and cleverness: '“That boy will be very clever; he has a remarkable genius.” [...] His games, too, were quite different; they were not so childish. One winter’s day, when it snowed, he brought out a burning-glass, then he held out the tail of his blue coat, and let the snow-flakes fall upon it. “Look in this glass, Gerda,” said he; and she saw how every flake of snow was magnified, and looked like a beautiful flower or a glittering star. “Is it not clever?” said Kay, “and much more interesting than looking at real flowers. There is not a single fault in it, and the snow-flakes are quite perfect till they begin to melt.”'

Indeed, this can be said to anticipate the revulsion that traditionalists feel and have felt for the modern world, with mass production and easy reproduction of images and goods. The didactic message seems to be that such things distract us and divert us from our common humanity; Andersen indicts the scientific and rational: 'Kay’s fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of glass still sticking in his eye.' This is indeed the anti-Defoe in many ways; whilst HCA uses details to make symbolic, moral points, veracity does not become an issue. Such was the impression on Auden that the central image of Kay's pity and emotions locked

The values are traditional - for good or ill - and it can certainly be imagined what the arch-libertarian leftist Grant Allen, author of The British Barbarians (1895), would make of such moralising: Gerda throws away her red shoes, which denote sin, showing HCA's adherence to societal taboos. However, the William Morris view - not far from GA's - can be said to accord in its essential purism regarding landscape and work. It is on the question of the freedom of the enlightened individual where Allen / Morris / Chesterton place a greater emphasis - Andersen shows a traditional social order that is stable barring the threat from Reason. They define that term 'reason' slightly more stringently than Andersen, and Victorian etiquette and mores come under assault as well as industrialisation.

But then Andersen is not writing a 'Hill Top novel', but establishing a northern mythology - designed to influence and inspire the young. In the strict terms of what is communicated and the imagery used, this is presumably peerless in its field, and also bears comparison with 'adult'-targeted poetry and prose which asserts and contrasts pagan and Christian themes. It is indeed worthy of Auden - it formed him - and should concern and inform us all.

One of the poet's greatest poems is informed by Andersen's stark imagery; Kay's affliction mirrored in the state of Europe in 1939:

'In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.'

(W.H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', February 1939; The English Auden: Poems, Essays, & Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Faber and Faber, 1977)

10/10

20. Stan Barstow - 'A Lovely View of the Gasworks' (1961)

'no messing about with building societies. That's a stroke of luck.'

(Stan Barstow, The Desperadoes, Corgi Books, 1974, p.45)

Chosen as being brief, in contrast to the 71 pages or so that the previous two have comprised. Chosen also as Barstow was another author influential to my dad - particularly the novel, A Kind of Loving (1960), filmed with the redoubtable Alan Bates a few years later.

This is set in the same West Riding town as featured in that novel; presumably either Ossett, where Barstow has spent most of his life, or the larger Wakefield, which is nearby. This is consciously written in what is already an established northern stream of literature by 1961; Billy Liar, Braine, Sillitoe, Storey and Delaney, as well as this author's initial works. Barstow captures a world which consumerism doesn't really seem to intrude, although contemporary mores and laws certainly do.

It is fascinating to read of the couple here being offered the chance to buy a house for £600 outright or pay £150 and take on the burden of a £500 mortgage. UK house prices have risen from an average of £11,288 in 1975 to £156,828 at the end of 2008 (which had fallen 14.7% from the near 184k of a year before!). I would be interested to see whether mean household income has risen x 13 times in the last thirty-three years...

The absurdity of our present-day nation's 'dream' is made clear when one looks at the properties advertised in my area (SR2). The north-east is the poorest region in terms of household income (definitely less than £20000 per household) and yet property prices are exhorbitant; how the market works of course. The media onus on ownership has a lot to answer for, but also people for going along with it and growing excessively attached to sometimes exceedingly small spots of land and temporal bricks and mortar. And the least said about Newcastle city-centre 'studio apartments' (one bedroom boxes) advertised for £140,000 (probably being sold for more than double that a year or two ago)... this whole world is as divorced from reality as Noel Edmonds:

http://www.pattinson.co.uk/public/content/buy/Estate-Agents/property-for-sale-by-Postcode-page1.htm?minprice=0&maxprice=5000000&minbedrooms=1&includeUO=False&PropertyType=Any&postcodes=SR2
http://www.pattinson.co.uk/public/content/buy/Estate-Agents/property-for-sale-by-Postcode-page1.htm?minprice=0&maxprice=5000000&minbedrooms=1&includeUO=False&PropertyType=Any&postcodes=NE2
Barstow's prose can be judged as successful in capturing 'a recognisable society', as the back cover claims; the expectations of this couple - an older man having an affair with a young woman possibly even still a teenager, it is implited - are grounded in bathos. The man's age only becomes clear when he is described thus: 'this thin balding figure in the ill-fitting sports coat and creased flannel trousers'. (p.43) There are no illusions; the house is 'no palace', simply a functional base for 'living in sin'.

The moral dimension is ambiguous; Barstow is of course careful not to impose any definite judgement on the characters. It is made clear that the woman who they arrange the mortgage with - in effect, a landlady - will find out at some point. Her adherence to the conservative social views still dominant in a Britain still eight years away from the passing of the Divorce Act, is unclear: 'wondering what change there would be in the woman's brisk friendliness were she to tell her that he had left his wife and they wanted somewhere to live in sin.' (p.44)

'A Lovely View of the Gasworks' sets up a rather tortuous situation for its protagonists, with the unnamed man's wife also seen as likely to intrude. They are full of doubt, yet also a desperate form attachment, the girl displaying a possessiveness one could only form at such a formative age. Things are left tantalisingly up in the air at the end: 'Yes, all our troubles'll be over then' deployed and then echoed with notable irony.

7/10

6. Robert E. Howard - 'The Phoenix of the Sword' (1932)

'But this one is a different,

He knows the pinches of an older hunger,

A greater storm than yours

In his heart rages'

(Jake Thackray, 'The Rain on the Mountainside', 1976)

'the lack of any clear political direction - and who could expect that? - prevents the ballad-outlaw from being a revolutionary; he remains simply a champion of insubordination, and that is already much.'

(A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1967, p.150)

'[...] to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and sanity.' (Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition, Gollancz, 2006, p.40)

As his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft states in the inner cover of the leatherbound hardback edition, Howard's stories are 'pure adventure yarns with a touch of weirdness'. This proves to be an intriguing combination, with Howard creating an engaging, semi-Dark Ages world, based around a Europe from time immemorial, establishing political intrigues and rival power centres - and injecting moments of much more inexplicable oddity. Where Atwood's elderly protagonist mirrors nature in his decay, Howard's Conan is instead akin to nature as life-force: 'He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands.' (p.27) He uncomfortable dealing with 'statecraft'.

There is an interesting reflection upon Conan being at ease battling to gain power, but being almost at a loss now that he has it, installed as King of Aquilonia; a theme that resonates with many leaders past and present in our reality. Conan is not cut out for the machinations and subtleties that go with wielding power, and is an easy target for enemy plotters, as the story relates; for example, the dissident minstrel, Rinaldo in 'jester's garb'. This motleyed japester may not be any different from Conan in being an idealist who dislikes the compromises of the present: 'Poets always hate those in power [...] They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.' (p.25) There is an astuteness also in how the dead King Namedides, defeated by Conan, hardly beloved during his actual reign, is now a rallying point for many on the fringes of Aquilonia.

The key passage which takes this tale into the realms of the Weird is on p.39 where, after the fairly prosaic dispatching of southern dissidents, Conan (and before him his rival Ascalante) is confronted by an unspeakable 'thing', a more physical manifestation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror - although it its form is flexible and hardly solid: 'he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world.' This thing is beyond the bestial, and leaves a much more unsettling undercurrent behind at the end of the story than I was expecting.

Conan is strongly drawn as a formidable 'primordial', his great reserves and limitations drawn from his barbarian background. He comes from 'reaver' stock, clearly drawn from the northern border country, along whose borders there was 'continual war' - Howard clearly making some associations with the lawless Northumbrian border reivers, as depicted in the Border Ballads. (p.28)* There is a hint of the Viking and a British northern kind in these decriptions of the northmen: 'They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.' Geographically, they are shaped: 'A gloomier land never was - all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys. / 'Little wonder men grow moody there'. (p.29)

'The Phoenix...' does not allow me to draw specific political links with 1932 , but, like a strong seventies Dr Who story (penned by Robert Holmes, say) the internal politics are concisely, entertainingly conceived and achieve a simplicity in their complexity, if such a thing can be envisaged. I cannot help but bring to mind Holmes's medieval robber baron Irongron (David Daker) and Bloodaxe (John J. Carney) from 1974's The Time Warrior - real blood and thunder types, melodramatic but played with real feeling and intensity. That sense is evoked by this story; some of the happenings and the descriptions ratchet things up to a nearly absurd level, but you are carried along by the conviction and verve of REH's style: 'The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.' (p.39)

There are no female characters who play any significant part in the Conan saga at this early stage; this story seems to share this gender imbalance with the M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft I have read - no sense of The New Woman, or indeed, women at all for the most part. It will be interesting to see how further tales in this lineage, from the nineteenth-century to the present-day project women. One certainly imagines the New Wave (Moorcock, Le Guin etc.) of Science Fiction will redress this.

Notwithstanding this, 'The Phoenix of the Sword' is a pleasing mix of what was old and new; from archaism - 'quoth Prospero' indeed - and Border Ballads to the Lovecraftian abyss, befitting its inclusion in the pages of the pulp magazine, Weird Tales.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_ballads

8/10

aXXo - Punk 5

Saturday 7 March 2009
Leeds

A strange city, impossible to feel entirely at ease, bearings difficult to grasp. The usual 'high street Britain' of the 2000s but pockets of oddity and certainly a sense of somewhere, musically in particular. Up the Briggate a secondhand record shop with a rightful emphasis on the vinyl downstairs with a compere willing to play anything you were interested in. Few if any secondhand bookshops (though admittedly I didn't investigate the university area, greater Headingley seemingly a variant on Newcastle's Sandyford / Jesmond / Heaton axis). A sense of being rushed, of a subdued malevolence, a city with recalcitrant tribes - a former and perhas current alcove for subcultures - and a stocky mainstream. "Victorian Leeds, Concrete Leeds", as Luke Haines posited, cannot be banished by the bland; the shopping arcades, lanes and Whitelocks clinging on bloodmindedly - and the Concrete Leeds of West Riding House... coexisting?

It is a city resistant to the picture-postcard and the packaged tourism so often applied to another major city of the North, Newcastle; it resonates instead with an Anti-Heritage, with David Peace's vision required alongside John Betjeman's, as conveyed in this recently rediscovered 1968 film:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/england/realmedia/insideout/westyorkshire/090218_yorks_betjeman_internet?size=16x9&bgc=C0C0C0&nbram=1&bbram=1&nbwm=1&bbwm=1#

That late-'60s era clearly stands at a crossroads; the proud provincialism starting to fray - pre-Ripper but the cracks beginning to show, as in Reginald Hill's first Dalziel and Pascoe procedural, A Clubbable Woman, centred as it is on working v. middle class tensions, bonhomie and the sinister vying within the community as embodied in the secretive Rugby club...

Also, the unfairly obscure 1969 film about Halifax, This Town. The epochal Revie v. Clough rivalry just starting to simmer. One recalls the old couple's 'escape' (leading to that end of the world and civilisation that is Morecambe*) from Leeds in Alan Bennett's 1975 TV play, Sunset Across the Bay, despair, outright despair after the rueful mapping of averted Utopias in A Day Out three years earlier. One thinks also of the bluff northern humour of Alan Plater's Beiderbecke series; the first of which particularly captures recognisably eccentric Yorkshire types flying in the face of the times - it being pertinent to recall that it was being filmed during the Miner's Strike. Progressive schoolteachers like Barbara Flynn and character-types drawn almost from Tinniswood, who would brook neither Scargill nor Thatcher, to their cost. When did Jake Thackray leave Leeds?

"Dark voices... dark voices... dark voices..."

Chapeltown.

When should one fastforward to the future, only to find vestiges of the past? Tribe Records, by the Corn Exchange - a haunt of teenagers and the more unusual - tucked away in a gloomy alley. Up a low staircase vaulted with graffiti into a record shop you could not find in Newcastle, say (which is good for secondhand vinyl, but tends more towards the IDM / electronica in its vinyl shops); specialist dub, dubstep and all variants thereof. I pondered over purchasing Shackleton and others, but decided on a Zomby remix and a mysterious record selected purely on the basis that it was in the Dubstep category and its label read 'Made in Leeds' or something to that effect. All four pieces across the two sides of aXXo's Silvah Bullet (2008) are essential, but I would select B2: 'Punk 5' as my favourite - which simply will not leave the memory. Sinuous delay, a dubstep as bereft as all the best dub must be - life-support synth gurgles, terminal beach cascades - instrumentation an irrelevance. The voice gradually dehumanising into elliptical fragments, merging with the elastic, backalley and down-the-well percussion. A great counterpart to "I'm from Leeds", the reflective afterthought to that proclamation of intent. Here's A1 from aXXo; perhaps appropriately, B2 can retain some of its mystery within the context of Where Shingle Meets Raincoat:

There was also the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and a full house to see the excellent Northern Broadsides theatre company - ran by Barrie Rutter with the remit to stage the classics using northern actors and dialect - with their Othello. Much built up in the press due to Lenny Henry's appearance - he certainly did well - but of course Iago is the key and I thought Conrad Nelson was superb in that role, playing the arch-manipulator as a mean-spirit who would be at home in Peace or Hill. An excellent play - which I had only seen in terms of the Orson Welles version previously - accessibly staged and interpreted, with nothing shied away from, in terms of gender, politics or race.

I am not sure I could feel entirely at home in Leeds, but it demands to be seen as a major city, important in how this country has developed - having more in common with Bristol than anywhere else. There is an element of alternatre lives, of personal associations; my parents met in Leeds, a cousin (now based in Hackney) also went to Leeds University to study English - doing an amount of dub-related DJ-ing in Leeds in the late 1990s.

* Considering the cockle pickers' deaths and its being a favourite haunt of Peter Sutcliffe (the house of waxworks, as so memorably and distburbingly described by Gordon Burn), Morecambe stands as a rightfully maligned place, worthy of such treatment by Alan Bennett and in films such as The Entertainer (1960).