What I’m reading #140

The complete short stories of CK Stead in book form, as pictured above. One of these contains some of the others, mysteriously altered: temperatures have changed, as has a character’s wife’s name. What is the author playing at? Some of this will be revealed soon in the Listener.  

Bereavement bling is a thing, reports Anne Jolis in the Spectator. Also, how to preserve your loved one’s tattoos when they die. Go on, you know you want to.

In the same issue Matthew Parris, on tour touting his new book Scorn about abuse and invective, makes a case for Twitter being the new Shakespeare and that we live in a golden age of swearing. He persuasively sets Shakespeare’s “whey-faced loon”, “obscene, greasy tallow-catch”, “You mad mustachio purple-hued maltworns!”, “you whoreson upright rabbit!” and more alongside responses to this tweet by Michael Gove, “We need to renegotiate a new relationship with Europe, based on free trade and friendly cooperation.”  A twitterstorm ensued:

you are one confused bag of mince.
you boil-in-the-bag rent-a-clown.
you reprehensible spam-faced tool bag!
you back-stabbing cockwomble.
you haunted pork mannequin.

Parris reports that when he read from the book on tour, “cockwomble” did not go down well in the rural Midlands, whereas the other c— word was fine in Chester. 

Mick Hartley has three great photos of the airship Hindenburg: one shows its construction in 1932, one shows it in flight over New York in 1937, and one shows it crashing later that day in New Jersey: 36 people died, and that was the end of airships.

So here are the Pretty Things in 1967 with “Balloon Burning”, which is about that disaster, from their masterpiece SF Sorrow, the first rock opera, recorded at Abbey Road at the same time the Beatles were making Sgt Pepper and Pink Floyd Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This rocks much harder than either:

Stephanie Johnson on Salman Rushdie

The 101st in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the February 1996 issue. The intro read:

Salman Rushdie talks to Stephanie Johnson about Michelle Pfeiffer, the invisible buildings of Bombay, the colour of his bedroom — and his new novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

INDIAN INK

QU: Do you have a favourite among the books you’ve written?

SR: No. Or to put it another way, it changes all the time. If I look at Midnight ’s Children now I still feel very proud of it, but it’s somebody else’s book, it’s a much younger chap’s book. When I started writing Midnight ’s Children I was about 29. Now I’m 48. The Moor ’s Last Sigh feels a lot closer to how I’m sounding now. I’m very proud of Harourz and the Sea Of Stories, I have to say. I think that was a difficult trick to pull off, to try and write a book that would have some interest for both grown-ups and children. It looks like it might be the first of my books to be made into a movie, an animated feature.

QU: Do you go to the movies a lot? There are a lot of references to movies in The Moor ’s Last Sigh.

SR: I’m very keen on movies. If you grow up in Bombay you’ve got movies being made on every street corner. You grow up with the movies in your blood.

QU: You were an actor yourself, weren’t you? .

SR: I never acted in a movie. When I was a student I certainly did more acting than writing. After I left university I was so anxious to be a writer, [yet] so desperately anxious that I might not be able to be a writer, that in a funny way it was easier not to start, so I acted for a couple of years after leaving university.

QU: Did you write plays?

SR: I have written one or two dramatic things, which mercifully are lost in the mists of time, they were so dreadful. But I discovered that I was not going to be a good actor, so I had no excuse not to write.

QU: Do you watch television?

SR: I watch television news and sports sometimes, but I don’t watch much television as television because it’s usually very boring. I watch the All Blacks, but who wouldn’t? Recently in England they did a serialisation of Pride and Prejudice. They’re always doing Jane Austen every six weeks. I watched this thing and it was quite well done, quite polished and so on, but I thought the loss of Jane Austen’s incredibly sharp, acid voice turned it all into a series of parties. That’s what her books are if you don’t have the voice.

QU: They’ve made a series of Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha Of Suburbia. Do you know him?

SR: Yes he’s a very old friend of mine. We go way back.

QU: Is there a kind of solidarity among writers from the subcontinent who live in England? Do you know Vikram Seth?

SR: I do, but he’s mostly in India. I’m not a close friend of his. Hanif I’ve known for many, many years. He’s much younger than me, he’s kind of my kid brother. He’s different to me in that first of all he’s half-English, which I’m not. Secondly he was born in England, in Bromley — he went to school with David Bowie and Billy Idol. Bromley Comprehensive is responsible for a lot of terrible people.

Hanif’s background is as a South London kid. Nine or ten years ago he decided to go to Pakistan. It was very difficult for him, because he doesn’t really speak Punjabi or Urdu or any of the other languages. He speaks South London. His mother tongue is English.

QU: How many languages do you speak?

SR: Well, I speak English and French, and I speak Indian languages, Urdu and Hindi. And I can understand large chunks of Punjabi and a couple of others.

QU: Do they all overlap, those languages?

SR: To an extent they do, but not that much. They overlap at the most colloquial level. The more complex they get, their vocabs diverge. Urdu and Hindi overlap more than the others. In fact there’s a kind of composite language called Hindustani, which officially doesn’t exist, but it’s what everyone speaks. So if you go to the movies, the language of the movies is this strange amalgam, which is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, but spoken with a Hindi accent. It’s in fact the lingua franca of North India, although you can’t find a newspaper in it. It’s a rather extraordinary fact that North India has this huge language that actually doesn’t exist.

QU: The language in The Moor ’s Last Sigh is something that’s fascinated me, especially the way that Aurora talks. The way she says “proceedofy” and “killofy”. Do people really talk like that?

SR: People don’t, no. I made it up because I’ve heard particular people in India speak like that. People in India play with language.

QU: You don’t think you might stand accused by a politically correct person of lampooning the Indian way of speaking English?

SR: Maybe. But that’s too bad. The fact is that the people in India use it a lot. This book has been in India since the beginning of September and people love the language, because everybody recognises it. It would be awful for the sake of political correctness to have to clean up one’s act and force everybody to speak in some terribly posh Fosterian English. It’s something I have tried all my life to get away from, Standard English.

QU: It’s really only in the dialogue.

SR: In some of my books that kind of, let’s say, “Indianised” English is also in the narrative voice. It’s there occasionally in this. The narrator does have the tendency to erupt into ladies-o and gents-o.

QU: How did you manage to concentrate during the fatwa, to be quiet enough to bring yourself down into that dreamlike state? Were you nervous about sitting in a quiet room on your own, to write?

SR: It wasn’t nervousness. It was a question of there being so much noise in my head that by the time I was able to clear that away in order to then think about what I’d sat down to think about, I was exhausted. There was too much static for a long time. It really was very difficult. I was very upset about what happened, in a literary sense. The way in which my book was reviled, the way it disappeared inside this cloud of shit that people threw at it. Well — it’s disappointing, isn’t it? You spend five years writing a book and then everybody throws shit at it. Fortunately it doesn’t feel like that now. The book showed itself to be resilient and has survived the mess quite well.

QU: How long did it take to write The Moor’s Last Sigh?

SR: On and off, I suppose five years. And some of it for very much longer than that. A friend of mine reminded me the other day that I’d first told him about my interest in the story of the fall of Granada 15 years ago. I’d said to him then that I was interested in having that involved in some way in a novel I’d write. The idea of a novel about a painter I’ve wanted to do for a long time, because I became friendly, again over the last 15 years or so, with a lot of the contemporary Indian painters.

QU: In your mind do Aurora’s paintings fit into a kind of informal school of painting?

SR: I do know what they look like. Some of them are a kind of combination of Magritte and Velazquez’s Las Meninas. There are tricks of sight-lines, impossible mirror reflections. In the sequence of the Moor paintings the way in which the figure of the Moor becomes more and more fantasised is similar to Ned Kelly in Nolan’s paintings. In that series Kelly becomes more and more abstract until he’s just a square with a slit in it.

So I pinched ideas from a lot of contemporary art in order to create something credible for her. But a lot of her pictures just came from somewhere, I don’t know where. I have absolutely sharp-edged, brilliant pictures in my mind of those paintings and it’s really frustrating that they don’t exist.

QU: Maybe you should try to paint them.

SR: I can draw quite well, but I’ve never tried oils or anything. There are one or two writers who are good painters or sculptors. One of the great examples is Gunter Grass. I went to visit him. He lived in a small village outside Hamburg. He had a house where he lived and worked and then he had another house down the road which was his art studio. It was full of the same stuff — little boys with tin drums, eels, flounders, rats. And I thought how wonderful it must be to put down your pen at the end of a day’s writing and fool around with the same ideas in bronze or dry-point etching, instead of with words. I envied him that.

QU: I think it’s possible to get weary of words, sometimes, isn’t it?

SR: Sure is.

QU: There was something I laughed at in the book — the famous model Ina, who refused to do interviews because they would ask her what colour her bedroom was. What colour is your bedroom?

SR: What colour is my bedroom? Well, it’s a rather simple, plain, whitish bedroom.

QU: Who’s your favourite movie hero?

SR: These are Ina’s questions, yes. How odd to be subjected to them! Who is my favourite movie hero? I don’t know. Michelle Pfeiffer.

QU: That’s a heroine.

SR: Let’ s not be sexist about this. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

QU: I won’t ask what song you hum when you take a bath, then. That was the other question. Did you do a lot of research for The Moor ’s Last Sigh?

SR: Some. I don’t have to do a lot, because India is carried around in my DNA. Research is probably too grand a word for what I did, but I did do some checking up. Particularly the first part of the novel, which is in South India, because I’m not from South India. I’ve been to Cochin many times, and to the synagogue. It does have those blue tiles and every one is different, although they’re not magic. The Jewish community is so small, there’s now under 40 people.

QU: You were saying that that community doesn’t have a rabbi. How on earth did they evolve not to have a rabbi?

SR: They never had one. The community has been there for so long. These people came from all over, some of them are Sephardic Jews, some of them came from Iraq, some of them came from Southern Spain, in successive waves of migration over a 2000-year period. Any member of the community can lead the prayers. It’s really tragic. Even 40 or 50 years ago there were hundreds of Jews there. But when the state of Israel was created all the young people left. So it’s all the old bachelors and spinsters sitting sunning themselves toothlessly in the lanes. It’s a very beautiful little bit, Jewtown, the part of Cochin where they live.

QU: So it’s not your own family portrayed in this book, at all?

SR: This one isn’t, no. I think it would be fair to say the family in Midnight ’s Children had more to do with my family. My mother is more the opposite of Aurora — a calm, peaceful serene lady, who would be horrified to be confused with this foul-mouthed dragon lady. My father was a reasonably successful Bombay businessman.

QU: But he never put heroin in baby powder.

SR: No, that’s true. Nor was he getting involved in the sale of nuclear technology to countries that shouldn’t have it. Almost all the business corruption in the novel has not exactly happened, but it is derived from stuff that has happened in the subcontinent over the last 20 years. So Abraham is a kind of encyclopedia of all the crooks in India rolled into one. A lot of the stuff that may seem to a reader who doesn’t know India to be fantastical is actually true. Baby Softo isn’t. I made it up. I rather like it, don’t you? Baby Sofio is all my own work.

There’s a passage in the book which deals with invisible people building invisible buildings. In Bombay in the 80s the city authorities decided they didn’t want to be bothered with all these people sleeping on the pavements. They won a court case against various activists, who sued them, and as a result they were able to declare that anyone who had been resident in Bombay at the time of the last census then would have claims on the city and rights to education and welfare, and so on. So if you had not been counted in the census then legally you didn’t exist. The poor often fall through the net and don’t get counted in the census anyway. So they were declared not there, literally hundreds of thousands of people, they didn’t exist as far as the city was concerned.

With the building boom in the 1980s they needed lots of unskilled labour to work on these

building sites, so these invisible people got hired. Then of course the buildings were breaking the law as well. Bombay being like Manhattan and built on a peninsula, there were laws preventing the building of skyscrapers. The city authorities wanted to prevent overcrowding in that downtown area. But this was valuable real estate, so people were bribed in the city hall to sign documents stating that these 45-storey buildings were actually only 15 storeys high. Suddenly these buildings were invisible too.

So you’ve got people who weren’t there, building buildings that weren’t there. This is literally true. If the reality of a country is like this, you just write it down as reportage and then you’re accused of writing magic realism. I don’t think there’s anything magic about my realism, I think it’s just there.

SJ : They have these expressions now like “dirty realism”.

SR: Yes, that was invented by my friend Bill Buford when he was editing Granta. He invented it to describe a particular group of young American writers. It fitted some of them, the kind of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Jane Anne Phillips kind of writing.

QU: Have you read Will Self? .

SR: I have, yes. Dirty, but not realism.

QU: So who do you read and enjoy?

SR: Like most of us, I read a lot. The writers who I admired most when I was learning to be a writer were writers like Joyce, Sterne, Gogol, Cervantes, Beckett and Dickens. They would still be among the writers I think of as the best.

I go through reading jags. There was a point where I got very keen on North American fiction. I’m still a great admirer of Saul Bellow. I think he’s a great writer. I’m fond of Thomas Pynchon and some of Philip Roth.

QU: What about women writers? Do you not read women writers much?

SR: I think I do. Didn’t I mention any?

QU: Not a one!

SR: I said Jane Austen, didn’t I? I like Toni Morrison a lot. She’s a friend as well. I really thought Song Of Solomon was an extraordinary book. In a way I still prefer it of her books. I’ve read quite a lot of Atwood, and when she’s good, she’s very good. The writer whom I really admired, who was probably my closest friend among British writers, was Angela Carter.

QU: Angela Carter was a seminal writer for me. I always read and loved her, through my late teens and twenties.

SR: I think she’s getting her due now that she’s dead. And I think it’s sad because she would have loved it. But she had great confidence in her work and she had plenty of people telling her how much they admired it. It wasn’t as if she had no recognition, because she always did. I once had to introduce Angie to a reading in London. It was in winter and a huge snowstorm developed, which is not very common in London. I arrived at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith and there was Angie at the bar and nobody came. Eventually six people arrived. She was determined to go on, so instead of stupidly doing it in this big theatre we went to a smaller room and drew six chairs around in a circle. She did her reading flat-out as if it were a thousand people and it was completely brilliant.

She loved to read her stories. She had a story-reading voice, which wasn’t like her real voice. A

strange artificial voice, much more sing-song and rather fey. A curious, witchy voice.

Doris Lessing is someone I’ve admired for years and years. I’ve got travelling round with me in my suitcase a proof of her new novel, which I’m told is about to scandalise people yet again. It’s a novel about an old lady who has an affair with a much younger man and is quite explicit, I gather, on the subject. So Doris has got it, she’s still able to churn people up.

QU: That’s what we hope, isn’t it, that we can go on writing. Like John Cheever, who wrote well into his 80s. One last question: is it odd, now, to find yourself more famous among non-readers as a celebrity rather than a writer?

SR: If one of the few advantages of this situation is that people will be drawn to my work out of curiosity, then fair enough. If I can get that small benefit out of seven dreadful years, then I’m happy to accept it. Actually, mostly I don’t think about it. Fame, who needs it?

Coming attractions

Stephanie Johnson interviews Salman Rushdie (QUQ Feb 96), Mark Amery on Barbara Else’s fantasy (QUQ March 97), Nigel Cox interviews Kinky Friedman (QUQ Jun 94), something about Laura Solomon (cover girl, QUQ Jun 97) and my report on Rachel Stewart at the Wintec Press Club earlier this month.

And don’t call me Honey

Every time I drive along Racecourse Road to the secret café we don’t tell outsiders about and pass this sign, just after the equine hospital, I think of this scene from Airplane!:

What I’m reading #139

Dinah Birch reviews Brendan King’s biography Beryl Bainbridge: love by all sorts of means. I suggest to many writing clients that they read Bainbridge’s later novels, which are miracles of concision. I don’t suggest they emulate the smoking, drinking and shagging. Quote unquote:

Before the troubled attachment to Colin took over, she started “going out proper” with a married friend (“So there we were at one in the morning with a bottle of scotch with Clive running after me – begging me to put me clothes on … the exact desperation in his voice floating up Hampstead Heath – ‘Do please pull yourself together, I’m a respectable solicitor’”). […] Among the thought-provoking connections to emerge from this rewarding biography is the association between Bainbridge’s self‑dramatisation and the steady discipline of her creativity. Her wilful eccentricity would sometimes disrupt her writing, but it was also central to its distinction.

John Freeman is grilled by Poets & Writers about his new journal Freeman’s. Which is kind of like Granta was for the four years John edited it, but better. If ever you see a copy, grab it. Preferably pay for it. Quote unquote:

With the release of the second issue, have your aims for Freeman’s changed?I guess a little bit. I’m teaching a class on the journal at the New School and doing more about the history of the journal. In the United States in particular, the journal was attached to the growth of modernism. A lot of little journals published writers like H. D. and Hemingway first—Ezra Pound was basically everyone’s contributing editor—but they had a lot more power than they had readership. All of them were attached to salons, which were run by, or funded by, wealthy individuals. And I realized that by publishing Freeman’s this way [with each issue accompanied by many events and readings] I’m trying to invert that scenario. I want the journal to feel like a salon, but I also want to it also feel like an accessible salon for readers. That if they live in Sacramento, or Minneapolis, or Miami, or Barnes, Kansas, they can go and participate in an event. That the pieces in the journal rise up through their storytelling. And I think that’s an important step for literary journals—if not mine, then someone else’s—to take forward, because I think for too long they’ve been an elitist institution. Obviously they have small acceptance rates because they get lots of submissions, but I’m talking more about their interaction with culture at large and their readers and their assessment of who their readers are and can be.

The scandal about 1MDB has not been widely reported in the New Zealand media. Or in the Malaysian media, for rather different reasons. It was and continues to be appalling for those of us who love Malaysia and despair at its government. This tiny detail is trivial in the scale of the scandal, but is typical:

The funding for The Wolf of Wall Street, the US complaint alleges, can be directly traced to the billion dollars diverted from the PetroSaudi joint venture.

Here, via Open Culture, is 30 minutes of JRR Tolkien reading from The Hobbit, recorded in 1952. I had to read some of Lord of the Rings for work earlier this year – fact-checking questions for Mastermind. I loved the books when I was a kid but OMG the writing is terrible:

And here, also via Open Culture, is four minutes of James Joyce reading from Ulysses. If ever a novel was meant to be heard rather than read, etc. Not quite the accent I expected:

Tanya Gold on the Queen:

You cannot lick a woman’s head every time you mail a letter without believing that, in some small way, she cares for you.

A friend of mine works for her. The Queen, that is, not Tanya Gold. He reports that she is very nice, very funny, knows her stuff. I am not sure how he will get on with her eventual successor.

Neil Hannon, who trades as The Divine Comedy and is one of the cleverest lyricists in pop music and possibly the only son of a bishop in that industry, talks to the BBC about his excellent new album Foreverland. Quote unquote:

“I think when you put literary figures in pop songs it’s mostly because it’s fun. You get to use odd phraseology, to talk about Voltaire and Diderot. If you’re allowed to do it in novels, to talk about other figures in the arts, or even in politics or history, why not in songs? It’s not so much why do I do it, it’s more why can’t I? I think an awful lot of people who write pop songs do unnecessarily censor themselves.”

The Angry Chef is pro potatoes and anti fad diets:

Fad diets will proliferate if they have simple rules and pseudoscience justifications to help them stick in people’s minds, but examine them in detail and the logic falls apart. Take Paleo for instance, based on the premise that we are not ‘designed’ to eat certain foods. Newsflash genius, not sure if you missed the memo about Darwin and Wallace, but we are not ‘designed’ to do anything and neither is any part of the natural world. We evolved from a random sequence of evolutionary accidents, existing only because certain characteristics keep us marginally ahead in the arms race of existence. Nature is not pure and benign, it has no wisdom and it does not exist to nourish us and help us thrive. Nature is vicious, harmful and for thousands of years has been trying to fucking kill us. In the Palaeolithic period it was far better at doing this, with survival beyond thirty being extremely unlikely. Our ability to control the natural world, to process and store foods and to adapt our environment to meet our requirements is the one thing that has kept our head above the evolutionary waters and saved us from the miserable fate that befell every other hominid species in history.

Rob Hosking reflects on events of the week: let’s pass over Donald Trump to get to Paul Kelly on Leonard Cohen. Quote unquote:

I watched him and thought, that’s a way to be, that’s a way to act, there is a road to travel. To walk in gravity and lightness, to be serious but not take yourself seriously, to pay attention, to know that you shall reap what you sow.

Sartorial advice from Thomas Seal, who advises that brown shoes can ruin your career in London banking. Quote unquote:

“Bright working-class kids” lose out because they don’t know “arcane culture rules,” Alan Milburn, the commission chair and a former Labour lawmaker, said in an e-mailed statement. “Some investment bank managers still judge candidates on whether they wear brown shoes with a suit, rather than on their skills and potential.”

So here are Frank Zappa and the Mothers in 1967 with “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”:

Waikato Times letter of the week #74

From the edition of Saturday 5 November. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Food for thought

Well! It looks like the “gold old days” for tenancy-managers and their “black”  ways of removing unwanted tenants, are being revisited these days.

One well known local firm has reverted to the use of centuries-old methods, consisting of the blackening of tenants’ personal character, using food supposedly given in friendship, but surprisingly, found to be containing fatal does of high toxic material, and now their latest “song and dance” item of illegally entering the rented premises with examples of dead or dying small animals (cats usually) and salting these hapless corpses into boxes of rubbish placed at strategic positions throughout the house!

(Larger animals – elephants – would be somewhat counter-productive for the manager’s ends, although the subtleness may give them away). Food for thought, eh?

Glwyn McInnes

Hamilton

Elizabeth Smither on Brian Turner

The 100th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the March 1995 issue: the cover featured a portrait of poet Jenny Bornholdt by Annelies van der Poel. From the first issue we had a monthly column by Bill Manhire called “The Poetry File”, in which he would discuss a particular poem: 24 of these columns were reprinted in his 2000 non-fiction collection Doubtful Sounds. For some reason Bill couldn’t do a column for this issue, but Elizabeth Smither stepped in with this radio talk about “The Pebble Population” from Brian Turner’s first collection, Ladders of Rain, which was published in 1978 and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

“The Pebble Population” by Brian Turner

The Auckland poet CK Stead has said that the poet needs to work on himself, not the poem, and I take this to mean that to write good poetry a poet needs to attend to his own character which will then affect the poem in a way that mere considerations of technique cannot. And sometimes, and perhaps this is a continuation of this idea, unspoken qualities of restraint, scrupulous observation, scepticism — the things that are said behind and between the lines — can be as effective as the words themselves.

This has always seemed to me a characteristic of the poetry of Brian Turner. It is a poetry of restraint but humour, open-mindedness and rigour, pessimism (sometimes) and warmth. It is certainly poetry that never fools itself; the opposite of high-flown; though not without passion, it seems to scorn vagueness.

Brian Turner often chooses subjects that resemble his own poetic character and in “The Pebble Population” there seems a perfect blending of poet and subject. It’s also a perfect example of his manner of working. Listen to it as a very gentle but soundly-researched theory. Each word as it appears on the page keeps its distance from the neighbouring word, each pebble is separate.

It begins conversationally and casually. There have always been pebbles. Presumably they have had a long history. And if you’ve had a long history, pebble or human, it probably means you’ve been peaceable. Think of those empires that collapsed by not being like pebbles. If there were wars and sacrifice for pebbles, and music and revelry, they would surely have different attitudes to it. Attitudes of not burning themselves out. A bit like Mother Courage.

Pebbles don’t move about much, a bit like inhabitants of a sleepy English village who think travelling 20 miles is too far. They have a philosophy. They must mate because there are so many of them, but it’s outside our ken. The passion of it isn’t. They suffer like us.

You can see the poem running through all these thoughts and conclusions and discarding them one at a time. Man simply cannot be a pebble. Then at the end there is a surprise, an O Henry twist, and pebbles and man fall off the universe together, almost hand in hand. This is roughly what the poem is about.

Notice how the humans in the poem appear as inferior: “we saccharine humans” or “meeker than a brow-beaten son-in-law”. Or if we share pebble characteristics, ours are of a more diluted kind: we are meek in this brow-beaten way whereas the pebbles’ meekness has the virtue of stoicism.

As the poem progresses, the pebbles become heroic. This happens after the word “philosophy”, as though something has hardened in the pebbles themselves. Suddenly you almost see a Buddhist temple with bare bending heads. And when the pebbles “grate together” there is a sense of the strangeness of Eastern music.

But if this flavour is there, Brian Turner always writes from the viewpoint of Western man. You feel he wishes he didn’t have this Western romanticism which is always threatening to break out and which needs to be kept in control if we are to have any proper or useful understanding of nature. How do pebbles love compared to us? Do they have a better chance of success? It seems they may, for they take “one hell of a long time to get to know one another”. You may notice here how the colloquial follows a summit of emotion. In a lesser poet it might be a purple patch followed by a piece of gruffness. Sometimes when a poem has cut loose in one place it is necessary to bring it back to ground again. This is a feature of English itself; emotion followed by withdrawal, a re-defining, and then it can begin all over again. After this rather gruff stanza:

You can’t hurry

                        a pebble.

                                    Pebbles

take one hell

            of a long time

to get to know

            one another

the lyric bursts out again just like the “unpredictable madness of river travel” mentioned earlier in the poem, one of two methods of pebble travel.

As the poem goes towards its end, the pebbles have become more than pebbles. They have added human qualities, they have the faces we would have — “stubborn expressionless faces” — if we were pebbles. At this point the poet seems to have given in, after some resistance, the attempt to keep his distance. He thinks how awful it is for them to be rained on:

The irony of it,

                        all this grief

pouring down on them.

It reminds me of the Edith Sitwell poem “Still Falls The Rain”: “Still falls the rain/ With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat.” How still and stoical they are in this “mushrooming century’? — surely a reference not just to the mushroom clouds of atomic fallout but also to the mushroom speed of this century’s implacable change and stress.

If this is the case, what can we learn from pebbles? The instability of the century we live in separates poet and pebble at the end and a detachment returns. What could we have in common? And here’s the answer: we can all crack. For all their stillness, silence, inwardness, pebbles can be cracked and shatter as easily as heads or hearts. Just the blow of another stone will do it. So they are like us. So the poem that starts on an observation ends on a similarity, which is sympathy.

Listen to the careful choice of words, the way a stone would choose them if it spoke, but most of all to the mood — elation, identification working against the desire for detachment, so by the time the poem ends there has been a small revolution and something gained. .

The Pebble Population

You would agree,

                        wouldn’t you?

that from

            the beginning of time

there have always

                        been pebbles.

To be a pebble,

                        therefore,

is to have

            a long,

                        respectable,

worthy,

            peacable history —

a mother

            could safely

                        and proudly

send one off to war —

                        which,

to state

            the obvious,

                        is more

than we saccharine

                        humans

can claim

            for our goodselves.

A pebble’s music

                        is not

plink plink

            but

                        plunk plonk.

Pebbles

            don’t move

too far

            from home

                        of their own accord,

preferring,

            instead,

                        the unpredictable

madness

            of river travel

                        or the slow

constriction

            of glaciers.

                        If

pebbles

            seem bland

                        and stolid

and meeker

            than a brow-beaten

son-in-law

            then they’ve good reason,

don’t you think?

                        The pebble philosophy

is

   might as well keep your mouth shut

   you’re going to get hurt anyway —

the classic

            ‘grin-and-bear-it’ syndrome.

Reluctantly,

            pebbles sometimes shift,

move in the wind,

            roll over,

                        grate together.

Theirs is a painfully shy

                        brand of lovemaking,

almost an unseen cringing.

                        Oh,

                                    if this

is love

            it must be the most

                        agonisingly

passive copulation

                        of all.

You can’t hurry

            a pebble.

                        Pebbles

take one hell

            of a long time

to get to know

            one another.

When the heavens cry

                        tears stream down

their stubborn,

                        expressionless faces.

The irony of it,

                        all this grief

pouring down on them.

                                    But

how can you be unfair

                                    to a pebble?

Wrapped

            in their own terrible embrace

theirs is the pity

            of silence,

the pitiless cry

            out of the heart

of this mushrooming

                        century.

Pebbles

            won’t talk, can’t talk:

they just stare

            and stare,

but I shall go on

                        watching them

in case

            someone

                        or something

prises open

            their mouths,

                                    ends

their muteness.

                        Pebbles

are really like humans,

                                    one crack 

and they’re gone.