Fifteen in Fifteen: George Herbert

9. George Herbert

I have been struggling for most of the previous month to work out what on earth I can say about George Herbert. Why, of all the poets I could have chosen, was he the one who ended up on my list of fifteen? Hasn’t any influence he may have had on me been superseded by my rediscovery of John Donne? If I was writing again, would I even pick him, or would I swap him for Liza Picard, Wendy Cope, Tony Harrison, Jostein Gaarder?

There is a certain amount of sheer blind chance when it comes to which poets I become most familiar with. I buy almost all of my poetry books cheap, in charity bookshops or clearance sales, and I’m sure there are many poets whose work I don’t know at all (Yeats) or very patchily (Tennyson), simply because I haven’t found a dog-eared, annotated selection of their work going for two or three pounds. In the case of George Herbert, I was introduced to him (or rather, his work, Herbert being from the same era as John Donne) via Girton Chapel in my first year at Cambridge , spent quite a lot of time reading a borrowed copy of his work on train journeys, and was fortunate enough to stumble across a selection of his poems in a second-hand bookshop a couple of months later. This volume, by virtue of being small, light, paperback and sufficiently battered that a bit more won’t harm, has been my companion to places as diverse as a monastery in North Yorkshire and an island fishing town in Adriatic Croatia. I’ve not always opened it, but it has been there.

But there is a reason to why I like George Herbert which goes beyond mere chance and portability. The influence he has had is subtle enough that it’s hard to recognise, but important enough for me to consider him a valid and valuable part of my list. George Herbert is a Christian poet, a man from the 1600s who devoted his poetry to trying to work out something of what God was and who we are in relation to Him. It’s a task that joins him with poets, hymn-writers, musicians and psalmists through the ages – people who believed and doubted and questioned and wrote down their beliefs and doubts and questions in the best words they could, for those of us who followed. I’m fairly sure that reading George Herbert did not inspire me to use my poetry to explore my faith. Nor can I pin down any particular teachings from Herbert’s work which have altered or improved my understanding of God. Poetry isn’t a sermon, or a book by Philip Yancey – it doesn’t work in that way. What I find in George Herbert is what I find in the Anglican liturgy, the hymnals, sacred choral music, contemporary worship songs, albums by U2, the poetry of Donne and Coleridge, and the sight of a church spire when you’re a long way from home. It is a rooting in the past and a connection in the present, a reminder of just how far our communion spreads. It’s something you don’t even notice until it isn’t there. It is a message I find both in good poetry and at the base of Christian faith – and the message is simply, “You are not alone.”       

Fifteen in Fifteen: Charlotte Bronte

8. Charlotte Bronte 

A classic, according to Mark Twain, is something everyone wants to have read but that nobody wants to read. I have a certain degree of sympathy with this view. There is very little “classic literature” dating from the 18^th century onwards which counts as an “easy read” – Hardy is depressing, Austen upper-class and subtle, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald deeply alien. Even the authors I appreciate – Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gaskell – can all be a bit of a slog. Foreign classics are scarcely better – if it’s Russian, it’s long; if it’s French, it’s longer (unless it’s Maupassant, in which case the least said the better); and if it’s Spanish it’s very very weird. “Modern” classics are, if possible, even worse – I have not come across a single person who has enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. That’s not to say that some tough classics aren’t worth reading, but it does go some way towards explaining why, when my brother presented me with a copy of Jane Eyre whilst we were on holiday in Austria, I was less than thrilled. He told me it was “a damn good read” – I thought it was more likely to be “a damn good cure for insomnia”. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Guys, bear with me. Jane Eyre is one of those rare books which appears to have a universal appeal to women, matched only in its extent by Dirty Dancing. Part of its appeal may lie in the fact that it is a typical rags-to-riches narrative, and a rags-to-riches story twice over, as Jane goes from orphan to governess to runaway to heiress. Part of it could be to do with the fact that it is such an unusual love story. Unlike Gaskell or Austen, which end with the perfect relationship established between Margaret and Mr Thornton, Lizzie and Mr Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley, the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester is never entirely equal. From the outset it needs to be worked at and managed – just like a real relationship. For me, however, the appeal of the story is mostly to do with the character of Jane herself. Most heroines are beautiful, intelligent and outspoken. Jane is poor, plain, modest, somewhat unusual, and yet indomitable. Her first person narrative lets us in to all of her flaws and failings. Most of us, most of the time, do not feel as intellectually-superior as Elizabeth Bennett or as charitable as Margaret Hale. We don’t think of ourselves as particularly attractive or as having anything all that much going for us, and most of us are acutely aware that we might be considered a little bit weird. Which of us cannot sympathise with Jane when she decides that as a poor, plain governess, Mr Rochester cannot possibly love her in preference to the beautiful, wealthy Blanche Ingram? And which of us cannot celebrate the fact that, poor, plain and unusual as she is, he does – and more, that these are the very qualities he loves her for?

Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, wrote the nineteenth-century love story par excellence. Elizabeth Gaskell, in North and South (the TV adaptation of which also appears to be oddly popular with us girls), gave it teeth and social unrest. Jane Eyre follows a similar pattern, but manages to be a very different story, with quite a remarkable protagonist. Following that holiday in Austria, where I read Jane Eyre with more avidity than I had ever read a classic novel with before, I have read good classics, bad classics and indifferent classics. I made the mistake of thinking all Brontes were the same – a mistake which was only rectified by a tough few weeks with Wuthering Heights. I could not get on terms with Austen’s Emma, but completely fell for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was thoroughly enjoyable, whereas I’ve never got beyond the first chapter of The Three Musketeers; and Victor Hugo… well, he’s a story all of his own. But Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Eyre, stand to me as a reader as proof of two essential points. Firstly, a novel written before the twentieth century can still be enjoyed by a reader today - a belief which has sustained me through thin (A Christmas Carol) and thick (Les Mis). And secondly, whatever Mark Twain might say, some “classics” can be a damn good read.        

For those who are still Sussex-bound...

A very happy new year to everyone reading! New years bring many excellent things: resolutions, the end of Christmas, slightly longer evenings, and, in my case, the awful realisation that my railcard has just expired. Not being a natural driver, I spend a lot of time travelling around Sussex on the train. I hope the following "litany of names" poem is recognisable for all of us who grew up on the weald and the downland, and the London to Brighton line.

Weald and Downland 

The next train to depart across the ancient Weald

Keeping sunrise on the left as it arrows down south

calls at Three Bridges, Balcombe, Haywards Heath…

Set the capital behind you and dare to breathe

Deep. Into the oak woods and the drifted leaves,

The dead in their barrows on the silvered Downs.

Plumpton, Cooksbridge – the castle keep.

Some kind of homecoming, to stand again

in the land of your ancestry, the resonating names

full of the history stretching deep below your feet,

steeped in the silence of those who loved this land before.

Lewes, this is Lewes. Please change

for services along the riverside and past the ditched hillfort.

East to Polegate, Pevensey, Hastings and Ore,

Into the dawn. Or swing southeast: Southease;

Newhaven; Bishopstone; Seaford. The sea.      

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.