The crackle of damaged wiring

Richard Barrett and Steve Hanson – The Acts (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018)

It was a Sunday and there was damage to the cables in Cornbrook. No-one knew what the damage was. All they could say was that there were replacement services available, although they didn’t know from where. Cornbrook is the central node connecting every tramline across East, North, and South Manchester. It was going to be a long day.

I tell you this to situate my review. When I tell you that The Acts, an experimental collaboration between Richard Barrett and Steve Hanson, is about stuckness, about the oppressiveness of bad space, about social shitness, then you know that’s because I felt it.

This is not a book about being stuck on public transport for five hours, although it might be its philosophical equivalent.

I say that not to put readers off. What Barrett and Hanson have accomplished is the kind of raw writing that is honest in the sense of honest sweat and honest toil. It is not a clean honesty. Not an honesty that shocks you with its confessions. It is simply two men talking about their daily grinds, heartaches and the kinds of suffering that don’t sell.

The narrative, if there is one, is the exchange of messages between two writers. Both are literary, both academic, and yet their writing is clearly as much a symptom of their lives as it is a record of society’s symptoms. There is no separation between personal confession, myth making and theorising. Instead we hear of friends, failed romances and visions like Manchester Area Psychogeographic levitating the Corn Exchange; all three overlapping.

As you read you get the sense of lives lived in constant dialogue with theory. Two voices attempting to understand themselves through the words of hundreds of other voices.

One voice, the self-styled Mendelssohn, plans to analyse every year of his life thus far, moving backwards. Starting at the age of 42 and planning to spend a year looking at each year from 2018 back, he soon realises completion of the task might take him into retirement. The weight of personal and theoretical pasts builds up.

The dialogue is then punctured by updates from a news website. The free-floating prose is suddenly nailed down to a specific time: Trump announces North Korea talks, Labour backs new EU customs union. These remind us that history is always moving on in the background as our writers struggle on with deadlines and the end of their 12 month contracts.

The writing is always clear, even when its grammar fragments and its images grow strange. It is writing like scar tissue, healing over the cuts and cracks of daily life, bits of newsprint sticking into it like gravel in a scab.

As the blurb says, The Acts is an attempt to “tell the self” without the glory of self-promotion. It is a fascinating project for a new press like Dostoyevsky Wannabe to take on. I feel like its combination of raw sentiment and closely observed mundanity might offer a new approach to what we take to be confessional writing.

I have never sold my body for drugs. I have never been implicated in a child’s death. I have been stuck on public transport for five hours, and I am ready for a book that speaks about my pain. This just might be it.

– Joe Darlington

The Boy From Hell

Rimbaud – Illuminations (Carcanet, 2018, trans., John Ashbery)

Seth Whidden – Arthur Rimbaud (Reaktion, 2018)

Rimbaud’s Illuminations crashes through the dead wood of its epoch as Baudelaire’s work did, a figure the young poet Rimbaud worshipped as the great seer of modern poetry.

And Rimbaud will only ever be young, he has become a cipher for the beautiful damned youth, too fast to live, too young to die, burning out before fulfilling.

But Seth Whidden’s biography of Rimbaud also impressively chops away some of the myths and clichés that have grown up around Rimbaud’s life like strangling ivy. Rimbaud, who wrote of new urban heavens and hells, sounds like an absolute bloody nightmare.

He was utterly brilliant too, of course, mastering the history of poetry as a schoolboy and then rejecting its slow, traditional and bourgeois forms.

Etienne Carjat destroyed the negatives and remaining prints of the now-iconic portrait of Rimbaud after an altercation with the maniacal youth one evening in Paris. Lucky for us, prints survived elsewhere. The Henri Fantin-Latour painting Un Coin de Table (A Corner of the Table) observes Rimbaud on the very same evening of the spat with Carjat and others.

I was fairly familiar with this painting, but after reading Whidden’s biography, I can now only see an evil brat where I once saw a slightly aloof cherub.

Verlaine too, Rimbaud’s lover, gripped by absinthe mania, is rumoured to have thrown his child against the wall and attacked his wife, eventually imploding into piousness. Before seeking redemption, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist during a heated argument.

Eventually, nobody would speak to Rimbaud. He kept leaving his stuffy rural home for Paris, only to fly back there as it spat him out yet again.

The account of Rimbaud and Verlaine in London is fascinating, drinking in Soho, followed by the secret police, getting to know the routes and leylines of London we still experience: ‘Monstrous city, endless night!’

Rimbaud stopped writing poetry and headed off to sell in the European Imperial adventure. This may or may not have included guns, and if you want the picture under the clichés – ‘gun runner’ flashes up elsewhere as though it’s a solid fact – Whidden’s biography is the place to go. It’s an impressive piece of work, it manages to be scholarly, thrilling and sober in one. Not easy.

The late great poet John Ashbery learned French precisely to read Rimbaud’s Illuminations after reading it first in English in the 1940s. He then translated it again and Carcanet have put his edition out for some time, only now they have re-issued it with a smart new cover as part of their brilliant classics range.

It takes a little immersion to really get Illuminations, you need some context to understand just how radical the work is. What is explained as utterly modern, can in fact seem very old to us now, particularly if you are new to nineteenth century modernism. The same goes for Manet’s painting and Baudelaire himself.

Certainly, there would be no Bob Dylan without Rimbaud, that bizarre burlesque of an environment where reality seems to have been turned off – the first full experience of the modern city – is originally present in Illuminations.

But this little volume is the best way to take it on, and paired with Whidden’s biography, also released this year, it’s possible to really feel the spirit of the Rimbaud carnival. The alienation and togetherness of the city, its pleasures and hells, are one for the first time in a dreamlike scalding of the senses.

Ashbery’s translation comes in the French with the English translation opposite, to allow us to shuttle between the two. MRB recommends a double purchase here: Read these books simultaneously, but stay off the Absinthe, eh?

– Steve Hanson

Ode to Sussex

Shirley Collins – All in the Downs: Reflections on Life, Landscape and Song (Strange Attractor Press, 2018)

The 2017 documentary the Ballad of Shirley Collins followed the cult English folk singer as she recorded Lodestar, her first album in nearly four decades. Filmed largely around her home in Lewes in East Sussex, and the surrounding area, the film told the remarkable and poignant story of how Collins lost her voice – leading from her withdrawing both from performance and recording for many years – and unexpectedly found it again.

All in the Downs acts as a thoughtful companion piece to the film, with Collins drawing out her experiences in greater depth, writing from her own, opinionated perspective. It follows a previous volume of autobiography, America Over the Water, published in 2004, which told the story of Collins’ travels across United States with the musicologist (and her then partner) Alan Lomax. All in the Downs, by contrast, remains closer to home to focus on Collins’ career in her own right, and the way in which it was informed by her early years in the working-class seaside town of Hastings, East Sussex and later in her retreat from the town and city back to a rediscovery of the rolling countryside of the Sussex downs.

All in the Downs shares with the film a strong sense of loss and absence; it begins with a chapter on the breakdown of Collins’ second marriage, as a major contributory factor in the loss of her voice, before detailing her relationship with her father, who returned from the Second World War only to leave again, and the premature death of her sister and artistic collaborator, Dolly.

As well as sharing her personal and professional memories, All in the Downs offers a rich glimpse into the shared experiences of mid-twentieth century Britain, from the freedom of a semi-rural childhood, to post-war culture and politics, to the sometimes difficult personalities of the British folk scene, to work and motherhood. Looking back, Collins can’t help but reflect, sometimes caustically, on how places, lifestyles and entertainment have changed (not to mention what passes as ‘folk music’ these days!).

Above all, All in the Downs is an ode to the south eastern English landscape, showing what we can learn and pass on about the places around us by paying attention to working people’s voices. It’s written with the passion and in-depth expertise of someone who has dedicated her life and career to understanding, interpreting and transmitting traditional song, the words of which run through the book entwined with her own.

– Natalie Bradbury

Childhood on the Prairies

Keith Erwin Brower – Chronicles of the Glen: Childhood Anecdotes at Poplar Glen Farms (Friesen Press, 2017)

There is a long tradition, in both fiction and non-fiction, of writing about childhood on the Canadian Prairies. Perhaps most notable are William Kurelek’s A Prairie Boy’s Winter and A Prairie Boy’s Summer. Keith Erwin Brower’s Chronicles of the Glen is a welcome addition to this tradition. The book is a series of recollections about Brower’s early childhood on Poplar Glen Farms – a small family farm in eastern Alberta. There’s a natural ease to the writing and, no doubt, these stories were told and retold to children and grandchildren long before they were committed to paper. Each story carries a youthful fascination with the world. It’s infectious and as readers we share in the unfolding sense of discovery that each chapter brings.

The Canadian Prairies are defined by their seasons. There are blazing hot summers and prolonged, freezing winters. The depth of each season and their transition into one another provides a current that runs throughout the book: from the vulnerability of a small farm during a winter blizzard to picking wild mushrooms in the fertile soil of the barnyard following a summer rainstorm. Spring was a time to witness new life, whether among the livestock or in the wild. And weekly family walks through the surrounding pastures and forests were a key part of learning about nature as a child. To grow up on a farm is to grow up alongside animals and some become recurring characters in Brower’s book. There are the workhorses Lexi and Flicka, Teko the bull and Mona the mischievous dairy cow who nonetheless has a fondness for children.

Chronicles of the Glen depicts life in rural Alberta in the early 1950s. An important aspect of this book is the sweeping social and technological changes that Brower witnesses in the mid-twentieth century. The workhorses are eventually replaced with tractors, herd sires with artificial insemination and static threshing machines with combine harvesters. Yet, within all these changes Brower also describes the continuing ‘fine art’ of farming – from laying fences and building construction to rigging machinery for multiple uses. There’s a craft and ingenuity to it all. And as Brower illustrates each story these everyday practices (as well as everything else) are brought to life in his unique visual style.

Poplar Glen Farms is about 5km northwest of Wainwright, Alberta. I know the place well. My mother was born there and – full disclosure – Keith Erwin Brower is my uncle. I have many fond memories of the farm: rolling down the grassy slope in front of my grandparents’ house as a child, hockey games on the frozen pond in the sheep pen and playing in the fields and forests with my cousins. The crunch of snow underfoot while walking between houses on a crisp and starry winter night will be an abiding memory of Christmas on the farm. Throughout my childhood I had an ongoing internal debate over whether pasteurised milk or unpasteurised milk tasted better. I called them ‘town milk’ and ‘farm milk’. I’d think over the merits of each whenever I sat for breakfast around my grandparents’ table with a glass of ‘farm milk’ in hand. There’s no debate now. ‘Farm milk’ is the clear winner . . . I’m retreating into my own memories here. . . Reading this book by Uncle Keith is a reminder of the indelible link between place and memory in shaping who we are.

The town of Wainwright, Alberta was once home to Buffalo National Park which operated between 1909 and 1939. It was a state-backed attempt to preserve the plains bison (or buffalo) which were facing extinction at the opening of the 20^th century. An initial herd of around 700 was brought in from Montana and within three decades the park had produced over 40,000 buffalo. However, Buffalo National Park became a victim of its own success as disease and starvation spread among the expanding herd within the bounded Park area. As Europe lurched into another war the Park was wound down and the site converted into a military base. The preservation of the plains bison speaks to a wider history of the Prairies. It’s a history wrapped up in colonialism and the devastation of peoples and cultures and wildlife. While the seasons continue to pass with seemingly eternal regularity, the Prairies have also witnessed three centuries of irrevocable change. The plains bison, for instance, will never migrate across the North American continent again. The literature on this history is as expansive as the Prairies themselves. My own reading is limited – a drop in the ancient ocean that once covered the area. Irene Ternier Gordon’s A People on the Move: The Métis of the Western Plains offers insight into the everyday life of the Métis Peoples over the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries – including the practical, cultural and eventual political significance of the plains bison. And Grant McKewan’s biography of John Ware details the life of one of Alberta’s most famous cowboys. John Ware was an African-American slave who, following the American Civil War, herded cattle across North America and eventually took up residence in what is now Alberta. Both these books depict a key period of transition in the history of the Prairies: after colonisation but before the expansion of the railway and wider settlement. Significantly, both books are also primarily based on oral history and testimony passed down through generations. Such shared stories form part of the connective tissue of the cultural history of the Prairies, whether as the living memory of pre-colonial Canada or as witness to lives lived in changing times. Brower’s book is another thread in this social fabric.

There is a certain power to childhood stories. They bring a simplicity to otherwise complex situations. And they are often imbued with a sense of awe. The title of Brower’s book is a clear reference to The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. It’s a series of novels about children who discover an alternate, magical world. Narnia is full of adventure, excitement, danger and laughter. Yet, in Brower’s Chronicles of the Glen we’re reminded that such adventures don’t always need an imaginary realm. They are often right in front of us, in the here and now. Chronicles of the Glen is about the wonder of childhood and, ultimately, the joy of living.

References:

Kurelek, W., A Prairie Boy’s Winter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973)

_________, A Prairie Boy’s Summer (Toronto: Tundra Books, 1975)

Brower, J. Lost Tracks: Buffalo National Park, 1909-1939 (Athabasca University Press, 2008)

Gordon, IT, A People on the Move: The Métis of the Western Plains (Surrey: Heritage House Publishing, 2009)

McKewan, G. John Ware’s Cow Country (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1973)

Lewis, CS. The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Harper Collins, 1994)

– Mark Rainey

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Miranda Doyle – A Book of Untruths: A Memoir (Faber & Faber 2017)

Miranda Doyle’s ‘A Book of Untruths’ is subtitled ‘A Memoir’. In many ways, it shares key characteristics with this familiar genre – it begins in childhood and progresses through school and early adulthood (Doyle’s accounts of her miserable schooldays, by themselves, make a valuable contribution to a body of work on the privations of boarding school; one of the most notable comparisons it invites for me is Roald Dahl’s classic memoir ‘Boy’).

It explores fractious family relationships and issues such as adoption, infidelity, illness, grief and divorce, alongside bigger issues of gender, power, identity and class. It questions the role of institutions such as the church, schools and marriage in our lives, and the place of social mores and prejudices in perpetuating their more negative elements.

It takes skill to craft something new and relevant out of familiar and universal experiences such as these, but Doyle’s memoir had me hooked from start to finish.

Her family – like all families – is dysfunctional in its own unique way, but Doyle’s words place us there, in her memories and experiences. Powerful emotional responses to fear, indignity and injustice resonate through the pages, still as strongly felt as decades ago when they occurred. Richly observed period details of 1960s and 1970s Britain, together with family photographs, further serve to bring Doyle’s words to life.

Where ‘A Book of Untruths’ diverges from the conventional memoir is in recurrent sections analysing what it means to tell our life story, incorporating aspects of psychology, science, social research and history, which punctuate and illuminate the main narrative.

Doyle raises questions about what it means to tell the truth about ourselves, our past, and our relationships with those in it – truths which, we are reminded, often depend on who is doing the telling, and who is listening. In writing her perspective on these events, it seems like Doyle is seeking to understand the motivations of those people who surround and influence us from an early age, those relationships and experiences that shape us and turn us into who we are, and how our thoughts and actions live on through others’ perceptions and memoires of us once we are gone.

Of course, the book isn’t just a memoir of Doyle; it tells the stories of her parents and her siblings, too (or Doyle’s version of them) – how could it not?

One of the aspects of the book that both gave me a jolt, and resonated with me the most, was Doyle’s matter-of-fact, unflinching descriptions of sexual assault, the positions of influence held by the men who perpetrated them, and the situations in which they came to take place.

I read ‘A Book of Untruths’ some months ago, yet in these times, when the population is only just beginning to wake up to the prevalence of harassment and abuse as part of women’s everyday lives, Doyle’s experiences, and the ways in which she has told, contextualised and reacted to them, have often returned to my thoughts.

‘A Book of Untruths’ shows that there is scope yet for the rediscovery and development of an old form, the memoir. For those whose interest is piqued as much as mine was, there is also a dedicated website (www.bookofuntruths.com) to further explore the series of ‘lies’ around which the book is structured.

– Natalie Bradbury

I’m the Doctor

A.J. Lees – Mentored by a Madman (Notting Hill Editions)

There have been some cracking books this year, but for the sheer unexpectedness of it I’d have to say that Mentored by a Madman is the one I’ve recommended the most.

It was at the European Beat Studies Network conference in Manchester’s Welcome Inn – a place dizzy with incense and laughing yoga – where I first met Professor Lees. He wore a pristine suit and spoke with a careful, measured and attentive voice. His eyes were very still. In the midst of the paranoid scholars and itchy artists he seemed unnervingly calm, standing out but very much at home. Oliver Harris, one of the world’s greatest living experts on Burroughs, introduced him as a colleague of the late Olivier Sacks, a renowned neurosurgeon and an ‘unexpected disciple of another man who made a habit of wearing suits in company like this’.

The book, which I picked up that day on the strength of Lees’ talk, is a memoir which – like all great memoirs – relegates the protagonist to a secondary character. Lees is shaped by early run-ins with Beat culture, the Dickensian stringency of elite medical schools, the humanity of the Parkinson’s sufferers he treated with L-Dopa and, alongside all of it, the ‘madman’ of the title: William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs crosses the text like a Buddhist Lama, appearing with unexpected insights from him texts in incongruous situations and proving – like all we Burroughs-lovers have always known – that what appears on first reading as mania or obscenity can become, in time, priceless and humanistic insights that span time.

Of particular interest is Lees’ own adventurous spirit when it comes to the limits of standard clinical procedure. A good physician, he believes, should be willing to try the medicines he or she prescribes in order to truly understand their effect upon the subjectively experienced organism.

How else, other than sharing their urges, could Lees have discovered the psychosomatic and potentially addictive qualities of his treatments which had been deemed safe under lab conditions?

Lees praises botany as another lost art of the physician. Some of the millions spent synthesising trademarkable drugs in labs could surely be spared to search the rainforests where evolution has very likely already provided cures in abundance. The Yage Letters are an influence here.

Lees points out that Burroughs was the first Western explorer to realise that yage was a product of two vines, not one; a secret which official medicine would take another half-century to uncover. Exotic botany and self-medication eventually combine towards the close of the text as Lees’ describes to us one hell of a retirement party.

The key message of the work, and one Lees’ appears to have embodied throughout his successful career, are the benefits of what academics now call ‘interdisciplinarity’ but are much better described as having varied interests.

Burroughs, though he dropped out of medical school after one semester, continued to hold a broadly scientific outlook. The knowledge he gained from a lifetime’s autodidactic medical reading allowed him to become a worthy proponent of the apomorphine cure for opiate addiction.

It was Lees’ openness to literary and aesthetic insights which introduced him, through Burroughs, to this same apomorphine. The dopamine-regulating qualities that Burroughs praised for reducing opiate need proved a great breakthrough when utilised alongside L-Dopa in the treatment of Parkinsons. Lees credits Burroughs with these insights, but it is clear to us who the truly great physician here is.

Most importantly, Mentored by a Madman is well written, compulsively readable, compact and balances sentiment and humour perfectly. It’s chock full of great anecdotes and carries a life-affirming message, especially but not exclusively for those interested either in Burroughs or the neurosciences. Buy that shit!

– Joe Darlington