Fifteen in Fifteen: John Donne

7. John Donne

I’m afraid I have a confession to make, which may come as a shock to those of you who have been following this blog. The last time I studied English Literature was at GCSE. And – I’m sorry, Edexcel, AQA, whoever you were – but it nearly put me off poetry for life. Having to study that damn anthology with THE worst collection of poetry and short stories imaginable – well, it took my literary tastebuds a long time to recover from being force-fed Maupassant and Isabel Allende (both of whom I still detest) at age 16. However, top-set English, taught with aplomb by the formidable and wonderful Mrs Price, did leave me with an abiding fondness for several of our coursework subjects: Pride and Prejudice; Shakespeare’s Richard III; and John Donne.

Donne, in English Literature GCSE, kept company in a collection of poems about love or death by “The Metaphysical Poets”. These “Metaphysical Poets” was clearly intended to refer to any Early Modern, around-about-sixteenth-century poet, and included appearances from Herbert and Marvell - although reading the section on love poetry you would be excused for considering The Metaphysical Poets to be a synonym for Donne. Donne is not an easy poet to understand at sixteen. It’s a problem with all poetry written much before the Victorian era – it comes from a context of which we may know very little. Try reading Dante without a guide to thirteenth century Italian politics. Donne’s work may not be so rooted in the power politics of his time, but it is full of allusions to scientific, cosmological and religious views which are completely alien. I still have my annotated poems from GCSE, with their explanatory notes regarding topics as diverse as “the music of the spheares”, how vision was thought to work, and what people really thought happened during sex (this was Donne, after all). Reading Donne’s poetry is, in the first instance, an unparalleled education in the social and intellectual background of sixteenth century Europe.

But there’s more to Donne than just a history lesson. A great deal of Donne’s poetry, particularly his love poetry, is recognisable and immediate and poignant, even without an understanding of his sixteenth century context. There’s a joie de vivre about Donne’s work, and something endearing in the fact that it is so emotionally overblown. Read The Sunne Rising. Read The Good Morrow. Read The Broken Heart and Love’s Alchymie and The Apparition. Read Holy Sonnet XIV. Donne seems in his poetry to wander through life as a perpetual teenage Romeo. When he’s in love, he and his lover are the entire world. When she doesn’t love him back, his heart is broken and he will die. When they’ve fallen out, all women are stupid and empty-headed (and worse – Love’s Alchymie is one for all feminists to avoid). When he feels he has sinned, he begs for forgiveness from God in the strongest possible terms. You can’t quite take Donne seriously, and one wonders quite how seriously he took himself.

And yet out of this rises some of the greatest poetry I know. Read Holy Sonnet X, “Death be not proud”. An impassioned defiance in the face of mortality, it is one of the best expressions of the Christian hope of eternal life. If there is one thing I am grateful to English 11.1A for leaving me with, it is the ability to understand and recall some of Donne’s best poetry – although the tendency still to refer to one of the Holy Sonnets as “Fred” is one I could live without. It took the discovery of a cheap edition of Donne’s poetry in a secondhand bookshop for his work to appear on my shelves, but it had never really been absent from my life. The final image from A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning simply cannot be forgotten. Like much of Donne’s work, it has stayed with me, tacitly, in my life and my poetry for the past six years. As a legacy of English GCSE, there are a lot worse.

If [our souls] are two, they are two so

As stiffe twin compasses are two,

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the’other doe.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth rome,

It leanes, and hearkens after it,

And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must

Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;

Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,

And makes me end, where I begunne.

Fifteen in Fifteen: Philip Larkin

6. Philip Larkin

I spent much of last year living on a 1960s former council estate in York. For a southern girl from rural Sussex, the unremitting urban bleakness of the view from my window was something I never quite got used to. No trees, no greenery, no omnipresent magpies or startled ducks, no visiting fox – not when you look out onto the backyards of the Victorian terrace opposite. Sure, it was convenient for town, but nothing quite compensated for my first sight in the morning being the flock of mangy pigeons converging on the roof of number 26, or the chap from number 27 climbing over his back gate on his way to work.

I’ve always liked Larkin’s poetry - his direct, accessible style and his very subtle use of rhyme and meter do endear him to the novice poetry-reader. But in the shock of finding myself treeless and penned in by houses, his poetry started to become important. Poets have a tendency to celebrate beauty – Coleridge certainly spends a significant amount of time grumbling about a childhood spent “pent” in cities, unable to spend time in the countryside which was his source of inspiration. Larkin is one of the few poets who dares instead to find inspiration in bog-standard urban landscapes. Read Sunny Prestatyn. How anyone can possibly write a poem about a billboard holiday advertisement getting graffiti drawn on it is beyond me, but Larkin proves it possible. Adverts also feature in Essential Beauty, while the sense of urbanism runs more subtly through poems such as Afternoons, Sad Steps, Here. Even in poems such as Going, Going – which mourns the rapid spread of the towns, and which goes straight to my heart every time I remember the fields at the back of us are due to be built on shortly - the countryside is for Larkin a place to be visited, not lived in. For me, it was a comfort to realise that, however devoid of nature my new environs seemed, they were not therefore by necessity devoid of poetry.

It’s not just Larkin’s settings which are challenging. I own two books of his poetry – The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Of the two, I’ve long preferred The Whitsun Weddings – not least because it contains An Arundel Tomb – but I find now that I’ve started to grow into High Windows. The reason, I think, is as follows. Larkin is a cynic, who through his poetry chooses to express decided opinions which run contrary to the received moral wisdom of our time. The most famous instance is This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”), which is a serious shock to the system in a society where parents are always right – but for further, more subtle critique of parenthood try Reference Back, in Whitsun Weddings. The Hollywood version of love doesn’t escape – read High Windows, Love Songs in Age, The Whitsun Weddings, even An Arundel Tomb. If you’re fed up respecting the elderly, read The Old Fools; or of having to feel homesick, read Home Is So Sad – and any bookworms will be profoundly shocked by A Study of Reading Habits. Despite the occasional exception, Larkin tends to be rather more tempered in The Whitsun Weddings, and thus more easily palatable for those of us who are made uncomfortable by having all our fundamental values called into question. But it is – and becoming more so as I grow up - hugely liberating to, for example, be able to come home from a desperately dull birthday party spent making conversation with people you don’t know (“asking that ass about his fool research”) to read Vers de Société in High Windows. When the pressure is on to be sociable, popular and well-liked, having Larkin to tell you that being anti-social can be ok is immensely valuable.

Good poetry describes the world in a different way, and in so doing gets close to the heart of our own experience. It is a delight and a relief and a comfort to find written down somewhere some lines which describe your own feelings, particularly if you suspect you are somehow held guilty for feeling this way. In describing his world so differently, so cynically, so contentiously, Larkin appeals to that bit of me which stands somewhat aslant to what society calls “normal”. In his landscapes, his subjects and his opinions, Larkin celebrates the uncelebrateable and says the unthinkable. No wonder he recognised, on his return from Ireland in The Importance of Elsewhere:

Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Fifteen in Fifteen: Gillian Cross

5. Gillian Cross

Oh sure, you know exactly what happened in the very beginning. You know and I know and the vicarandthepostmanandthewindowcleaner and the whole WORLD know the story…

The first time I read Chartbreak, I can have been no more than thirteen or fourteen. My other favourite books were King of Shadows by Susan Cooper, Mirror Dreams by Catherine Webb, the Magicians House quartet by William Corlett. I read the books which accompanied the series Charmed to give my brain a rest and seized on every Tamora Pierce with great delight. Eight years and two universities on, Chartbreak is still on my shelves. For anyone worrying, Tamora Pierce is not.

Why Chartbreak? Gillian Cross, of course, is a talented and prolific children’s author, better known for the Demon Headmaster series (which I dimly recall reading, way back in the mists of primary school). Chartbreak is a very different book. It’s one of the few, if not the only, book I’ve read which has been based around the story of a rock band. It has always surprised me that there are so few, as there are some huge advantages in it for an author. The story of a girl running away from home and becoming a lead singer in a rock band, which then goes on to hit the big time, is an instant and obvious rags-to-riches formula, with plenty of real-life precedent. It’s an interesting situation to put characters into, enabling discussion of how their emotions are reflected in their music and vice versa. It allows, even begs for the use of multiple voices and forms of writing, in the form of newspaper cuttings, interviews and letters, all of which can be used to help tell the story. Most importantly, it provides a very tight cast of characters. Chartbreak is based around a band of five, with supporting roles from a manager, a hairdresser, a karate teacher, and a couple of mothers. With an obvious plot and a defined cast, the author can then use her basic material to develop her characters, and introduce complex themes such depression, bereavement, divorce, manipulation, perfectionism, ambition, the difference between image and reality, and a very dark kind of love. And Gillian Cross does so magnificently. There’s very little which is admirable in any of the characters in Chartbreak, but it’s the ways in which they are flawed and broken which make the book what it is.

For anyone who knew me before I was eighteen, the foregoing will have made the effect Chartbreak has had on my life abundantly clear. Every writer has their own great unfinished novel, and mine is a story called 2, based confusingly around the stories of three rock bands, featuring an increasingly sprawling cast of characters, using multiple voices to tell the story, exploring the relationship between the characters and the music they write, and touching on themes such as the importance of honesty over image, grief, bereavement, choice… It says a great deal about the character-driven nature of band stories that 2 manages to be so entirely different to Chartbreak in my mind that I only very recently realised the influence Gillian Cross’s story must have had on it. It is also a sobering reminder of the extent to which what we read can unconsciously inform our ideas and writing styles, however much we believe they are our own. Fellow writers, beware.

When I first read Chartbreak, on a wet Sunday morning when I was still at Warden Park, it hit me like a bombshell. I’d never read anything so dark, so gripping, so full of complex and fascinating and deeply angry characters. Shortly afterwards, I even went as far to review it for a competition, and won a Blue Peter badge for my efforts. That review makes me cringe reading it now, seven years later, but the reasons I picked out for liking Chartbreak then are uncannily similar to the reasons I’d field today, and still none of them manage to quite define why this is a book I will return to again and again. Maybe the answer is that I still can’t find the words to justify my feeling that this is a brilliantly-crafted piece of writing, and a cracking read.

Addendum: The following quote comes when Christie smiles at Finch, in a rehearsal shortly after she joins the band. Her internal response is as follows:

“Oh, I know you’ve read it a million times in tatty paperbacks. He smiled at me and my knees turned to water and I… Well, for God’s sake, how do you describe that feeling?”

Best escape from a cliche I've ever come across.

Fifteen in Fifteen: Scarlett Thomas

4. Scarlett Thomas, or The Importance of Stories

I’m not expecting anyone to have heard of Scarlett Thomas. If you’re reading this and you have, it’s most likely because I’ve enthused about her novels to you already. I have probably spent more time over the past six months recommending Thomas’s books to my friends than I have for any other author on my list – the only other book I’ve spent an equivalent amount of time talking about recently is Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger” (which I would recommend only on the understanding that you will get the life scared out of you). I would advise everyone to give Scarlett Thomas a go, not least because it’s terribly difficult to do her work justice in the space of one short blog post. She’s something like an English Jostein Gaarder, but perhaps slightly less pretentious – an author who isn’t afraid of writing challenging philosophical ideas into a well-woven plot. It’s not every novel which draws inspiration from Heidegger, Chekov and Aristotle, and not every novelist who can make the result readable.

There are two books by Scarlett Thomas of which I am familiar. The first, “The End of Mr Y”, can almost be described as a thought experiment about thought experiments – an adventure involving academics, parallel dimensions made of thoughts, and a lot of philosophy. (Don’t let that put you off- it’s a very enjoyable read). The second is called “Our Tragic Universe”, and it might just be the most important book I’ve read all year. It contains even more of the meta than “The End of Mr Y” – a novel about a novelist, a storyless story about storyless stories, or stories which defy the conventional narrative arc. (Incidentally, if anyone in Sussex is looking for this, I’m terribly sorry and I will give it back to the library eventually). It’s a classic example of a book where nothing happens – for other, more unintended, examples, try the fourth book of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, or even the final book of the Twilight quartet. The protagonist comes into money and splits up with her boyfriend, but doesn’t end up with the guy she probably loves. It starts with an argument and ends with a reconciliation, although both are downplayed. There are hints of otherworldly happenings, prophecy, miraculous healing, magic, but nothing is ever certain and nothing is resolved beyond the doubts of the protagonist. Hollywood would hate it. It’s complicated and messy and uncertain – just like real life. And that’s the point.

More than anything, Scarlett Thomas is an author who understands the power of the stories we tell to shape our perception of the universe. Our Tragic Universe is a profound critique of genre fiction, both in style and in content. Thomas and the characters she uses to tell the story point out that there are standard formulas behind the stories we tell in the West – rags-to-riches, the underdog triumphing, hero kills dragon – and that these stories are told over and over again in everything we do. Personal makeover shows are set to a rags-to-riches formula, a Cinderella narrative. Self-help books are just another example of hero kills dragon. Genre fiction inculcates and naturalises modern Western values – as Vi accuses Meg, “You tell them what a happy ending consists of, which is always individual success… You tell them conflict exists only to be neatly resolved, and that everyone who is poor wants to be rich, and everyone who is ill wants to get better, and everyone who gets involved with crime comes to a bad end, and that love should be pure… that despite all this they are special, and the world revolves around them…” It’s a terrifying thought, but it’s the stories we read which make into us who we are. “When you publish fiction,” Meg comments later in the book, “everyone tries to see the truth in it.” Our Tragic Universe is an important reminder that not all stories around the world need tell us the same narratives, the same truths.

And this is why the government’s funding cuts for arts subjects frighten me. Subjects like philosophy, English literature, anthropology, history, even archaeology, all enable us to step beyond the stories of Western Europe today and to realise that there are different stories to tell. Doctor Who, Harry Potter, The Metro, Strictly Come Dancing and Ten Things I Hate About You have more influence on how we value life, understand achievement and ambition and perceive romantic love than we usually care to recognise. Susan Boyle’s success on X Factor – triumph of the underdog. The toppling of Saddam Hussein – hero kills dragon. Where is there room in this for the story of the non-hero, the hermit who dispenses remedies to both hero and dragon, and then goes to bed with a book? It is in the arts subjects that we discuss the stories we tell ourselves and learn that they are not absolute, but are culturally relative and as open to critique as any government policy. We cannot all be heroes, Cinderellas, Frodos or Harry Potters. Learning to get along with a dragon may have more value than sticking a sword through its heart. Our Tragic Universe is at heart a lesson in why we value what we value, and a reminder that this is not the only way we can choose to make sense of our lives. For those who like their narrative structures conventional and their heroes heroic, this might be a little disconcerting. But in a culture where the happy ending is always material wealth and individual success, and where the academic routes to other understandings are increasingly denigrated as navel-gazing, useless to modern society and an easy way out, maybe a little disconcerting is exactly what we need.