Hello, and, are there any other aspiring writers amongst us?!

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 2 of x)

What is more, about Prousts*s *Days of reading*, written, obviously but importantly, before *In search of lost time*, it has been said ‘Marcel Proust conceived *Journées de Lecture*, as an introduction to his translation of John Ruskin’s* Sesame and Lilies*.’ In a youtube video Jeanette Winterson—- author of the almost Proustian ‘erotics of the mind’ embodying, dealing with non heterosexual romance and sexual themes as it does, *Oranges are not the only fruit*----says, as a cautionary prerequisite to becoming a writer, “However,...you must *invent* . And yet surely when making sketches, notebook entries on other books, there *is* invention of a sort that comes in the form, as it were, of ‘translating from English into English’; in other words, translating from the authors grasp of English(!), and your own, usually much firmer, grasp of it? And yet, Winterson is still correct, I think; if you want to write, in the final analysis, ‘you must *invent*.’

In Steve Lukes’s *Emile Durkheim: his life and work*, he argues about that other Belle Epoque and Fin de siecle period straddling figure, the Sociologist Emile Durkheim—he, like Proust, was intimately involved with the Dreyfus affair, for example—- had a ‘lack of certain inventive faculties’, on the one hand, but luckily for him, and for perhaps many of us, on the other hand was adamant and articulate about the notion that human beings needed what he termed a ‘limited task’ in order to achieve happiness, and avoid ‘anomie’, the latter which, in it’s most extreme manifestations, could lead to nothing less than suicide.

Indeed, G. K. Chesterton says of the young Dickens both “the prospects for the boy were growing drearier and drearier, he nearly fell down and died at his work’, and yet “The young Dickens was forever throwing himself back upon the pleasures of the imagination”. But to reiterate a theme in the previous part of this two-pronged post— James Wood’s list *The Elegant Variations*, after all, being important in an (intensely autism related) *The pattern seekers; a new theory of human invention* kind of way, even if Hemingway’s comment on F. Scott FItzgerlad “his talent was as natural as the dust on a butterfly's wings”, doesn’t apply to my own hapless writing enterprise ( there is nothing effortless about what I do, however much it is sometimes ‘Engelsian garrulous parrot speaking’ in character)—-Dickens, in *A Tale of Two Cities* says “There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached.” Well elsewhere in chapter four of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says; ‘His attention was drawn inward by a troublesome tooth, and he sucked at it spitefully” And—-if you substitute for spitefully a more positive, friendly word— then we can perhaps (Marxian ‘use-value’ sense) profitably remind ourselves that, as, in a (completely) previous post, GypsyMoth has said; ‘Remember. It only takes one rock at a time to build a wall, and it only takes one word at a time to write a book.’ (?)

Indeed, GypsyMoth may, and not just in a nomenclature kind of sense, be more of a latter day Fitzgeraldian , talent-as-natural-as-a-butterfly, natural writer than I am, but I certainly have a— however hapless— version of the work ethic! However hopefully it is evident that I have a child-like innocence that I’ve been stubborn on maintaining up until this, my thirty-sixth year; which perhaps means that although I don’t possess Fitzgerald’s talent from a Hemingwayian standpoint, nevertheless, my imagination is of the sort to be captured again and again and again, by such book titles of Fitzgeralds as *The Diamond as big as the Ritz*. Scientists tend to deem such ideas as hopelessly quixotic and hopelessly unscientific. However the literature-loving A. Einstein was surely onto something when he said; “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." ?

At any rate, we have talked of GyspysMoth, literary butterflies, and embarrassing but persistent work horses like me. We have talked of diamonds, but how about pearls? For not only has it been said of Kerouac's *On the road*; “A book that manifests a style more in keeping with Walt Whitman than with F. Scott Fitzgerald “--- see my previous post replying specifically to GyspyMoth where I allude to both Walt Whitman, ‘what I shall assume, you shall assume’ (and vice versa), and the long, rich practical invitation constituting literary tradition of ‘the epistolary novel’---but furthermore in Kerouac’s greatest novel itself, there is the quixotic disposition encapsulating line; ‘I knew that soon the pearl would be handed to me. That there would be girls, visions, everything.”

Many writers have ‘sketched’ (see, for example Melville’s 1847 work *Omoo* , although Kerouac, for example— and Walt Whitman before him in impressionistic works such as *Specimen days*--- would also often do it.) Painters in the 19th and early 20th century—when the sensuous spirit of both The Belle Epoque and The Fin de siecle captured the imaginations of thousands of creative souls!---- would, obviously but importantly, spend hours at the louvre in Paris, simply sketching. Well surely reading for pleasure, and occasionally breaking off to make notes on a scene, or other excerpt, can potentially be the source for original literature, also? It is in another sense, not only often an example of art proving to become even more important than science, but in a sense, potentially often always a latest historical example of, that sometimes most esoteric seeming multifaceted business, ‘the science of art’. (wink)

(Comments, as ever, welcome. Speak soon, hopefully. )


<<<<footnotes(!) >>>>>

**1** Please know that, although I have historically been an active Trotskyist, I am now on the ‘radical centre left’, political position wise (see Perry Anderson’s, in my opinion, strangely not consciously autism related book *Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas*); however I have never been a Stalinist. But I am interested in H. G. Wells. Hopefully that is not a contradiction too far. There is an old saying “have the courage of your curiosity’; perhaps my own curiosity is but a latest historical version, albeit of a sub kind, of Lewis Carroll’s *Alice in Wonderland*? At any rate, this raises again up into the old conceptual semantic field, so to speak, that memorable moment from *An Anthropologist on Mars*; i.e. concerning the rich inner life of autistic people, on the one hand, and their sometimes explosive desire to *communicate*, on the other; *sometimes* ‘..only a full biography will do’, And yet— fear not, readers!-- for again *pace* Dickens, but with J. D. Salinger, don’t worry, “l’ll spare you that David Copperfield kind of crap”. However the occasional, oddball autobiographical titbit I may still give to you guys, the patient readers, however much you are a, perhaps inevitably by this point, somewhat alarm-bell-triggering, ‘dwindling in cyber-demographic scope’ type of group, so to speak. (wink)

 

[GypsyMoth]

Well, @benaspiringwriter, I seem to have connected with you on some level!

I regret I have only had the time to make a cursory read of your reply. Likewise, I may not be able to read it in full until this weekend, due to the nature of the constant of time and the natural limitation of my ability to keep up with prior obligations within the constraints of time—which is, as you well know, the second constant in the universe after change. (Unless, that is, you subscribe to the view that change is time. I am in favor of it being geometrically amorphous myself.)

But yes, if you can write anything you most certainly can write a measly 90k manuscript.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 3 of x)

Elsewhere in chapter four of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says

‘...Things crowded upon Mr Polly. Everyone, he noticed, took sherry with a solemn avidity, and a small portion even was administered sacramentally to the Punt boy. There followed a distribution of black kid gloves, and much trying-on and humouring of fingers. ‘*Good* gloves,’ said one of Mrs Johnson’s friends. ‘There’s a little pair there for Willie,’ said Mrs Johnson triumphantly. Everyone seemed gravely content with the amazing procedure of the occasion. Presently Mr Podger was picking Mr Polly out as chief mourner to go with Mr Johnson, with Mrs Larkins and Annie in the first mourning carriage.
‘RIght-o,’ said Mr Polly, and repented instantly of the alacrity of the phrase….’

Things may have crowded upon Mr Polly, in this case, however, in life one must surely be expectant of such changes in the textures of experience, what S. Bellow, somewhere, calls, ‘the data of experience’, regardless of whether one is in a prime ministerial context or not—-Harold Macmillan, the British prime minsiter predominately active in this role across the fag-end of ‘baby boom’ characterised decade that was the 1950’s and across the opening interdisciplinary acts of the ‘swinging sixties’ decade that was the 1960s, once memorably expressed what he thought the most sizable problems that presented a prime minister to be with the telling remark, “events, dear boy, events”----but, as the literature loving, and politics enduring, imaginative scientist A. Einstein once said; ‘In difficulty lies opportunity.”

Furthermore, James Wood in his collection *The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief*, makes reference to not only Hungarian Marxist social scientist and literary critic G. Lukacs’s *Soul and Form* **1**, but also to “the man who accidentally leaves his gloves at a party.”. The aforesaid S. T. Coleridge and E. Hemingway, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, were promoters of the phrase 'suspension of disbelief’, as a supposed almost self help dictum for the aspiring literary practitioner. And yet, only children are supposed to believe in fairytales. Indeed, the first and last sentences of the above excerpt from H. G. Wells perhaps demonstrate how the nineteenth century existentialist philosopher S. Kierkegaard was really onto something when he said “Man is condemned to live life forwards and review it backwards”.

In the same collection, ace literary critic James Wood compares Martin Amis’s work, generally speaking, to sometimes being akin to the, ‘stop-start’ methodology employing, cartoon classic *Tom and Jerry*. For, the same could surely be said of H. G. Wells in the excerpt above that starts this still-in-training-phase writerly-apprentice instalment! He did, after all—unlike, alas, the wannabe author here vis-a-vis what lies ahead in our own century— predict much of the future development of not only science fiction but science itself. (The long running, astronomically influential science fiction magazine *Amazing stories*, brought into the world by another autism pioneer, Hugo Gernsback, dedicated some of it’s issues to him, just as the *Saturday Evening Post* sometimes dedicated some of it’s issue space to the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald ). So why can’t we say that H. G. Wells, in a sense, predicted also— partially, metaphorically— the future of both twentieth century cartoons and late twentieth century literature?

At any rate, we have begun to talk about the nineteenth century existentialist philosopher Soren Keirkegaard. But how about the twentieth century existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre? Well in those aspects of his work which deal with social science, he and his fellow existentialist comrades formulated the concept of *authenticity*, where for all the undoubted colossal social forces shaping everyone's lives, nevertheless, one should, in the final analysis, take full responsibility for how one chooses to live ones life, as terrifying and exciting as that formula for life is —-see Sarah Bakewelll’s book *At the Existentialist Cafe*, or even the ‘dream pop’ genre appearing-within album *Four calender cafe* by The Cocteau Twins—- however, in those more universal aspects to his writing, he once infamously argued ”Hell is other people”. J. P. Sartre wasn’t the sort of human being to go back to a party to retrieve the proverbial forgotten gloves!

Talking of ‘Hell is other people’, one person demonstrably cognizant of it *as well as* his friend Hemingway’s idea about ‘suspension of disbelief’, was F. Scott Fitzgerald, in whose 1922 novel *The Beautiful and Damned*, and about his protagonist Anthony Patch he describes ‘he brooded in the bath’, which is an act that can, and often is, undertaking before the project of attending a party, or attempting the first stages of recovering after one; and this is not even in the same scene as where Fitzgerald makes allusion to ‘the pious groans of Adam (Anthony’s grandfather) Patch’s organ’.

Now, few parties, unlike weddings, are ever soundtracked by organ music, however a party can be one of the most serious things in the world. Always a magnet for devoted dionysian types, it is the place where Oscar Wilde's phrase “To live is the rarest thing in the world./ Most people exist, that is all’, perhaps finds one of it’s most zenith like arenas—-after all, during his tennis-themed, that most Fitzgeraldian of sports, essay on Roger Federer, *Roger Federer as Religious Expercine*, the aforesaid David Foster Wallace offers forward the opinion that sport can be a ‘prime venue for the expression of human beauty”; certainly, the very idea of ‘parties’, whether people actually say camp-hackneyed phrases such as ‘be a sport’(!) whilst amid them, or otherwise, tends to spark off something profound in the general, sociable but shy, autistic imagination! Too bad Foster Wallace, as indeed is the case with F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. G. Wells, is still not at the universal human party that is life.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 4 of x)

And yet, life goes on without such legends, and parties still, sometimes in a prolifically proliferating manner, emerge on to the proverbial scene, left, right and centre, geographically speaking. However, many decades ago, now, in one of her letters, Virginia Woolf, as well as during her 1925 novel *Mrs Dalloway*, argues that a party can be one of the most spiritually important activities that human beings can participate in and enjoy. Indeed, closer to our own age of life and parties, during their classic 1967 song *All Tomorrows Parties* The Velvet Underground sing “And where will she go and what shall she do/ When midnight comes around.’ The also Kerouac-influence Hanif Kureishi once wrote a book called *Midnight all day*. We have already spoke of Proust’s *Days of reading*. Virginia Woolf said about Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time* as being ‘her great adventure’. Fancy that! The man whose office was effectively sometimes not even merely his bedroom but merely his bed, being the proverbial tour guide, sometimes to terrain that is akin to the various snow-capped alpine slope located gallivanting that is such a fundamental part of the aforesaid Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast*, sometimes not. But, then again, as an old English phrase has it, variety is the spice of life.

Indeed, elsewhere in chapter x of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says.

’...There was a generous struggle to be pedestrian, and the two other Larkins girls, confessing coyly to tight new boots and displaying a certain eagerness, were added to the contents of the first carriage.
‘It’ll be a squeeze,’ said Annie. ‘
'*I* don’t mind a squeeze,’ said Mr Polly.
He decided privately that the proper phrase for the result of that remark was ‘Hysterical catechunations’.
Mr Podger re-entered the room from a momentary supervision of the bumping business that was now proceeding down the staircase.’

Now, in the Britain of the 1950s, the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ novel became wildly popular. The members of the literary group named ‘the angry young men’, especially collectively, became household names. Slightly later, and slightly elsewhere, over in America, The Velvet Underground also spoke about a species of ‘tight new boots’ in songs such *Venus in furs*. (i.e ‘Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather/Whiplash girl child in the dark/ Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him/ Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart.’ ) A generation later —the late 1960s, still hippy conditioned, utopian optimism of bands like The Velvet Underground, eventually transformed into the melancholic though utopian, gritty realism of bands like The Smiths, after Thatcher and Reagan’s near simultaneous electoral victories across both sides of the Atlantic had ensured the original hippy conditioned optimism had turned into hippy conditioned despair at ‘the new right’, free-market economics orthodoxy—S. P. Morrissey wrote a song on the first, eponymous Smiths album, *Reel Around the Fountain*, “fifteen minutes with you/ Ooh, I wouldn't say no” (!) The same song also alludes to the sentiment “People see no worth in you, oh but I do”. What’s more, specifically concerning the aforesaid actions of Mr Podger in the latest excerpt from H. G. Wells, the S. P. Morrissey influencing figure from several decades before, Oscar Wilde once said ‘Poverty comes in through the door; love flies in through the window.’

Indeed, H. G. Wells goes on to say. ‘The wonder of life! The wonder of everything! What had he expected that this should all be so astoundingly different?’ Now here’s a pregnant question for you. Is this linguistically-structurally three-part compositional moment a cast-iron anticipation of the Hemmingway-influenced Kerouac’s more succinct prophecy concerned offering during *On the Road*, “and soon I knew that the pearl would be handed to me, and that there would be girls, visions, everything”, or is it not? As it happens, the aforesaid James Wood once, I recall, wrote a London Review of Books piece where he compares the prose styles of E. Hemmingway with D. H. Lawrence, entitled *Seeing in the Darkness*, (volume 19; no 5; March 1997) and concludes that Hemmginway’s actual achievement, in trying to be scrupulously concise and punchy as a writer, constitutes throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is thus tantamount to loosing what he argues writers like Lawrence preserve in their prose styles, namely a comparatively intricate abundance of details, sometimes to the point of forming centrifugal pattern-galore-carrying arabesques, which offer for the reader, paradoxically, a feast for the mind. And yet, currently I don’t wish to choose between the aforesaid lines from H. G. Wells and Kerouac. What can I say? Sometimes, I am a ‘best of both worlds’ kind of guy.

At any rate that same publication, the London Review of Books, once said, I recall, ‘All literature is an archeology of previous literature”. *The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention* by Simon-Baron Cohen thus rises up again inevitably into the old conceptual semantic field. As I said right at the start of this thread, —but then again, the campus novel specialist (and are we not all of us here sometimes akin to a community of scholars, what the book *Neurotribes* calls ‘A convivial society of loners’?! ) David Lodge, in his Henry James referencing collection of literary criticism *The Art of Fiction*, articulates a perhaps still evergreen literary theme “Hemingway and repetition”----quoting Martin Amis’s 1973 novel *The Rachel Papers*, ’first you free associate, then you spot the jigsaw puzzle, then you put the jigsaw puzzle together.’ Ah! So much free associating joy on here since last week! I can only hope that my jigsaw-spotting and jigsaw-completing skills can improve over the coming months! However perhaps some of you may, over the long course, decide to offer me some game-changing help on that score, whether it eventually proving to be most shrewd to attempt informal essays rather than novels?


<<<< Footnotes >>>>
**1** It’s early days, having genuinely never hitherto contemplated GypsyMoth’s preference for ‘geometrically amorphous’ things , however my initial feelings are that both amorphous and very *form* (reassuringly-structural) enveloped phenomena are desirable in this fleeting lifecycle of ours.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 5 of x)

Elsewhere in chapter 4 of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says

‘...There they were tugging at his mind, and the funeral tugging at his mind too, and the sense of himself as Chief Mourner in a brand-new silk hat with a broad mourning band. He watched the ceremony and missed his responses, and strange feelings twisted at his heartstrings.

Mr Polly walked back to the house because he wanted to be alone…’

In Dickens’s *Nicholas Nickleby* he has Ralph Nickleby say:‘My nephew Nicholas, hot from school, with everything he learnt there, fermenting in his head, and nothing fermenting in his pocket..’. In his poem *Death’s Echo* W. H. Auden says: ‘The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews/ Not to be born is the best for man/ The second-best is a formal order/ The dance's pattern; dance while you can.’ In his novel *The Rainbow*, D. H. Lawrence says “he went out to get drunk.” In *A Tale of Two Cities*, Dickens starts a chapter with the also memorable line “Those were drinking days, and men drank hard”. G. K. Chesterton, also in *The Victorian age in Literature* says “they took their longest literary draughts.” About D. H. Lawrence’s similar-era-focused to G. K. Chesterton’s effort, *Studies in Classic American Literature* , it has been said— amidst Frank Kermode’s contribution to the London Review of Books archives, named *Lawrence and Burgess* (Vol. 7, No. 16, 19th September 1985) **1** —- ‘Of the major works of the war period, *The Rainbow* is called something of a failure, though the work of a great novelist; the *Studies in Classic American Literature* are commended for their amazing novelty…’

In the pioneering book *The Shock of the New*, art critic Robert Hughes is generally preoccupied with so many varieties of that much lampooned human type, the *enfant terrible*. Elsewhere in *The VIctorian age in literature* G. K. Chesterton says of the James Joyce influencing (Joyce who, in *his* also funeral focused, mature work, *Finnegans wake*, once raffishly suggested vis-a-vis it’s labyrinth-cryptic-puzzles “well, this should keep the academics busy for the next two hundred years' ...) Henrik Ibsen; “when he was young he wrote solemn plays about vikings, it was only when he grew old that he started to smash windows and throw fireworks” Perhaps, then, the most destruction can be achieved in one’s dotage rather than in one’s ‘extreme youth’? Indeed, H. G. Wells ended his life focusing more on journalism than fiction, the latter where polemical writing— apart form rare exceptions such as, in, say, George Orwell’s *1984* and *Animal Farm*--- is far less a feature of what has, by WIlliam Strunk Jr, been called *The Elements of Style.*

And yet sometimes the poetic can help the production of the polemical, and the polemical can help the production of the poetical; or, as is said in *The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway* (Cambridge, the late, great Frank Kermode’s ‘stomping ground’ in his advancing years, to phrase it in one form of the vernacular) ’his fiction helped his journalism, and his journalism helped his fiction’. Cryil Connolly once famously said, in *Enemies of promise*, "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." . But perhaps if you are a dyspraxic, and ‘Caged in Chaos’---and even non dyspraxics are often the victim of what Jean Jacques Rousseau obviously but importantly in *The Social Contract* said, ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’----then maybe it is the propensity to go off on tangents that will prove to be the real enemy of promise?

However, Umberto Eco (no relation to W. H. Auden) once proposed the libertarian approach to things “...the monarch of your own skin”. If you are a born explorer, always taking the intrepid, and therefore possibly not always foolproof route, then maybe your writerly fate *is* to go off on tangents? Maybe that is your promise as a prose stylist? Maybe that’s why so many dyspraxic writers in the past have been preoccupied with journalism? For even S. T. Coleridge—who, as most famously a romantic poet, not the type of writing one most automatically connotes with the oft relentlessly *prosaic* world of journalism— once described journalism in almost romantic-poetry-style exalted terms; ’the ephemerality of journalism’ he once, said; or, as the aforesaid neurologist Oliver Sacks advocates in his autobiography *On the move*— published, coincidentally, like Hadley Freeman’s book *Life moves pretty fast* (see below) in 2015—-when not counting W. H. Auden and angry young men figure Thomas Gunn amongst his influences and collaborators —-“flowers of the moment.”

Indeed, as Elvis Costello once said —he of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” **2** fame—’Yesterday's news is tomorrow's fish and chip paper.’ The former is an insight I am indebted to Simon Reynolds book on post-punk *Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978—1984* (many books have been written about post punk’s close cousin, punk, over the years, but until Reynolds offered up to the discourse’s discernment this classic, the startling grand total of *no* books had been written about post-punk!) Furthermore, it is a sometimes surprisingly esoteric fact that another work of H. G. Wells’s, *The Shape of Things to Come*, influenced, not, in this case, a post-punk band, but a ‘post hardcore’ (although not ‘emo’) band, the post-hardcore Swedish band Refused with their classic album of that genre called *The Shape of Punk to Come.* V. I. Lenin, who once met H. G. Wells in Moscow, also once said “Step backwards, so as to leap forwards!” . Well, looking back, S. P. Morrissey was originally, believe it or not, a committed connoisseur of punk music before he was in The Smiths. In other words, he was into punk bands like the very much ‘ephemeral’ and ‘flowers’ of the movement’ type of career of *The New York Dolls*, long before he helped to compose counter cultural *pop* songs such as the also ‘ephemeral’ and ‘flowers of the moment’ aspect containing songs like *Frankly Mr Shankly*; i.e “I must move fast/ you understand me/ I want to go down in celluloid history”.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 6 of x)

After all, as French film legend, Jean Luc Godard, once argued: ‘photography is truth; cinema is truth 24 times per second”. And as *Guardian* journalist Hadley Freeman once said, reflecting upon both 1980’s movies, and, well, on *life* even more generally, *Life Moves Pretty Fast*; a book appearing during the 2010’s, the same decade, I pause to note, that two other *Guardian* journalists, Polly Toynbee and David Walker, wrote about in their 2020 book *The Lost Decade*, referring to life in Britain in the 2010’s, where perhaps fewer seriously dangerous punk bands emerged, ala The Sex Pistols et all in the 1970s, than you might perhaps have expected, from a—nearly— objective standpoint. Indeed, Jean Luc Godard, himself helplessly rebellious, very much a Hughesian *enfente terrible* of his era, seemingly prophesied the aforesaid Smiths lyric by two decades, whilst simultaneously recapitulating the aforesaid Hemmingway double-life theme, via briskly establishing his own dialectic between ‘journalistic’ and more ‘story’ based activities, in so far as he and his cinephile comrades from an early stage in their careers not only shot movies but also started up a journal dedicated to cinema called *Cahiers du Cinema*. It, too, was both ‘ephemeral’ in the Coleridgian sense, and ‘flower of the moment’ in the ‘romantic scientist’ Oliver Sacks sense. However, it too, like so many other things, will live forever!

Indeed, H. G Wells classic book *the History of Mr Polly* goes on to say

‘Opposite him was Miriam and another of the early Johnson circle, and also he had brawn to carve, and there was hardly room for the helpful Bessie to pass behind his chair, so that altogether his mind would have been amply distracted from any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about the education of the modern young woman had not sprung up between Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs Larkins, and threatened for a time, in spite of a word or so in season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony of the sad occasion.’

It has been said of a general gerontological intellectual trend, sometimes conceived as applying in conceptual harmony with Shakespeare’s renowned ‘The seven ages of man’, that “As your waist-line has expanded, you have move to the political right.’ Virginia Woolf, pace developments in H. G. Well’s narrative, never grew to have a rotund waistline, always being nearer to malnourished than to obese, however it is also true that she was never fully in support of the general strike that rocked Britain in 1926. Wells had a more collaborative relationship with the notorious Anglo Russian committee which was deeply involved with the great strike, near-revolution. And yet Virginina Woolf and H. G. Wells were not talking completely different languages as writers. For example, in her work *To the Lighthouse*, Woolf makes reference to, again a fictional scene unfolding at a dinner party, an older protagonist’s exclamation “What rubbish the younger generation talked these days!”. (wink)

Indeed, like Foster Wallace’s *Infinite Jest*, *To the lighthouse* has also been described as, again, in analytical parallel with Wells, here, ‘elegiac.’ However in the world of the austerity-obsessed Conservative Party that still governs the Britain of late 2022, sometimes we are faced with a morally grotesque state of affairs, where increasing proportions of the population are both more malnourished than they used to, as well as more politically right wing than they used to be, by way of now voting in swathes for the same Conservative party, the very architects of the still-playing-out tragedy of ‘austerity’ saturated economic thinking and acting. However, if we end this instalment how we began—following on from the first excerpt from H. G. Wells with Dickens’s line form *Nicholas Nickleby*: ‘My nephew Nicholas, hot from school, with everything he learnt there, fermenting in his head, and nothing fermenting in his pocket…’ —-then we can, hopefully not seemingly purposelessly, reiterate that G. K. Chesterton, paradoxically, of all people, given his ‘celebrated waistline’(!), was rather on to something when, referring to those most J. J. Rousseauian of events, those in late eighteenth century France, he proposed; “There is more of the spirit of the French revolution in *Nicholas Nickleby* than in *A Tale of Two Cities*.” For, as another high-functioning autistic type, Bob Dylan, once said; “When you’ve got nothing/ You’ve got nothing to loose.”



>>>>>footnotes>>>>

**1** Anthony Burgess, a favourite author of my fathers, as it happens, once wrote a book on James Joyce entitled *Here comes everybody*. My father studied at the Guildhall school of music and drama in the London of the 1970s, when the fashion sense was markedly on the retina-scorching, out-of-control gaudy psychedelic side of things. He once, as I once did, too, wanted to be a composer of classical music. This dream never worked out for both of us. And yet, as the European composer, Gustav Mahler, once said “A symphony should be like the world; it should contain everything.” I have certainly *attempted* to do that in these open-ended ‘literary notebooks’!

**2** Useless effort!

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 7 of x)

Elsewhere in chapter 4 of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says

‘..The knives and forks, probably by some secret common agreement, clash and clatter together, and drown every other sound..’

In *Visions of the Great Remember* Allen Ginsberg quotes Kerouac’s. also macro being sucked into the universe and rules of the micro, inspiring phrase; ‘ants in orchestras.’ In terms of what a non philosophical writerly version of what R. Descartes called *Discourse on the Method’ might be, Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel *The God of Small Things* seems to fit the conceptual, pondering bill. In terms of what philosopher A. Schopenhauer— who gets a reference near the start of Kerouac’s *On the Road*--- called *The World as Will*, the aforesaid line from H. G. Wells can be seen as akin to Jessie Burton’s even more contemporaneous novel *The Miniaturist*. Back when, in many senses, the world was still young, in 1956’s *Howl*, A. Ginsberg talks of ‘Blake-light tragedy’.

But it is not a tragedy for William Blake that, in *Auguries of Innocence*, he got there long before H. G. Wells via the phrase ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand’ , or for T. S. Eliot, who, in *The Love Song of F. Alfred Prufrock*, by way of saying, ‘To have squeezed the universe into a ball”, got there near contemporaneously to H. G. Wells, here. Moreover, one of the most famous of all the classic literary texts compiled within the folky casement of *Aesop's Fables* is, obviously but importantly *The Tortoise and The Hare*. Well William Blake also once said, in his poem *Ah! Sun-flower* to be precise, “That sweet golden clime”. In *Kerouac Ascending* it is contended that it took nothing short of an entire decade, the 1950s, for a novel as impactful as *On the Road* to be perfected and disseminated. In long term presenter of that autistic culture lover staple *The South Bank Show* Melvynn Bragg’s novel *Crossing the Lines*, he says of *On the Road*, that, despite it’s frustrating flaws, nevertheless, one paean to it’s existence in the universe, can be summed up in the phrase ‘what a sound!’

Indeed, H. G. Wells goes onto say in chapter 4

‘Mr Polly was rising to the situation. ‘Or some Brawn, Mrs Larkins?’ Catching Uncle Penstemon’s eye: ‘Can’t send *you* some brawn, sir?’
‘Elfrid!’
Loud Hiccup from Uncle Penstemon, momentary consternation, followed by giggle from Annie.
The narration at Mr Polly’s elbow pursued a quiet but relentless course.’Directly the new doctor came in, he said “Everything must be took out and put in spirit—everything.” ‘

Kerouac was, like many writers before and since, from a working-class background. At Columbia university, where he won a scholarship due to his initial athletic prowess, he sometimes found it hard to to fit into a milieu and accompanying institution which was at times little more than a finishing school for the upper-middle, and upper classes. Melvynn Bragg’s aforesaid novel *Crossing the Lines* is preoccupied with the transition between a working class existence and a middle class existence, albeit in his fictive case, in England. However many other writers, not only the likes of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, but also in F. Thompson’s trilogy of novels *Lark Rise to Candleford*, have devoted their descriptive endeavours to such a— partially, at any rate— secretly sociological theme. Indeed, this also applies, hopefully in a matter that is not deemed as parodic, in a farcical hair-splitting sense, not only to other novelists, but to other playwrights, also. In her memoir *Must You Go?; My Life With Harold Pinter*, Anthonia Frasia says of her and HP’s relationship to class; “We weren’t working class, we weren’t middle class, we were bohemian class”.

The aforesaid D. H. Lawrence sums this is up in that novel which we have previously discussed as having been dismissed by some critics, *The Rainbow*, when he narrationally remarks of the beautiful English landscape ‘of all who saw it ‘; or, to hopefully relatively organic thematically flit back to the aesthetics of sound rather than the aesthetics of visions, Allen Ginsberg, more succinctly, in *Howl*, alludes to “contemplating jazz”. After all, as E. M. Forster once said ““Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Indeed, it is the author's opinion that it is healthiest, and most enjoyable, and least destructive of joyous things, to seek to become a sort of *hybrid* between working-class and middle-class. Then the notorious, cruel sharp elbows of some middle class people can be avoided in one’s own human practice, just as some of the notorious, needlessly-horizons-stunting ‘chip on one’s shoulder’ aspects to some working class people’s mentality can be avoided. The false dichotomy between what English Sociologist Basil Bernstein once called ‘restricted code’ and ‘elaborate code’ can, therefore, be avoided. In one word, by becoming a hybrid, you can avoid the twin insidious pitfalls of, ‘snobbery’, on the one hand, and ‘inverted snobbery’, on the other.

Indeed, Hanif Keruishi, is not only the coiner of the phrase ‘People in Beckenham **1** were economically upwardly mobile, but culturally downwardly mobile”, but also the author of a much praised book on popular music, *Pop*, with John Savage, as well as remarking on Kerouac's *On the Road*, that it demonstrated that most secretly elevated of achievements, “pop writing at its best”. Indeed, further evidence of what kind of ardent magic can be achieved when both snobbery and inverted snobbery are generally sidestepped by people and society, comes in the form of a quotation from another Bernstein, this time Leonard Bernstein, who not only pioneered serious but accessible classical music programmes on American television—years before French Sociologist Pierre Borudieu wrote the book *Television*, which is scathing in it’s denunciation of the changes in French television which had ensured that serious arts programmes, ala obviously but importantly *The South Bank Show*, had declined as a ratio within the schedule---but also summed up the kind of optimism expressed in other exemplary soul-rejuvenating examples of popular culture such as *Its a Wonderful Life*, with the phrase “Can life really be so bad if, for a few dollars, you can acquire on LP format, all of Beethoven’s symphonies?”

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 8 of x)

Ludwig V. Beethoven was both a man in thrall to various high-brow muses, but who also spoke to the general public, to the people. One of his most important sayings was ‘From the heart, to the heart!” But this shouldn’t be read as a secret manifesto for the dubious practice of ‘dumbing down’. After all, someone like the autistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (another Ludwig, of course, proving that sometimes, three is merely tantamount to an ineffective crowd, whereas, in the final analysis, it take two to tango.) was surely by no means not applying Beethoven’s aforesaid saying when he said things like ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world”? Indeed, to reiterate T. S. Eliot’s point in *Prufrock*, ‘To have squeezed the universe into a ball’, leads us to the cardinal existential question, what kind of universe do we all want to live in? A purposefully limited one or a purposefully expansive one? After all, as Virginia Woolf once advocated, ‘words need to be liberated from dictionaries!”

Indeed, H. G. Wells goes on to say

‘..The narration on the left was flourishing up to a climax ‘Ladies, she sez, dip their pens *in* their ink and keep their noses out of it’…’

And

‘ ‘If you choke yourself, my lord, not another mouthful do you ‘ave. No rice puddin’! Nothing!’..’

Bob Dylan, certainly a man keen on practising Virginia Woolf’s ritual for decades upon decades, during the album *Time out of mind*, says “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” During the song, *Subterranean Homesick Blues*, he lays forth an almost self-contained manifesto for how to endure in an oft hostile world; ”Get sick, get well, hang around the inkwell”.’ And during *The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll*, he in a class conscious acerbic way says of certain upper-middle class people ‘Who just cleaned up all the food on the table.” And yet, talking of all things subterranean, in F. Dostoevsky's *Notes from the underground*, he argues that the most degrading fate humankind can endure is that of resorting to begging on the streets. However Dylan was surely urging via verse over his career for more a type of equality of the ‘full claiming of the fruits of ones labour’ sort rather than a free-for-all, societal nexus comprised solely of meal tickets sort.. Or, as he says in another song of his, *My back pages*, ‘liberty is just equality in school.’

Now, speaking again of matters subterranean *and* Russian, Leo Tolstoy’s *The Death of Ilyich* tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness, thus rendering it a work of literature both similar and different from the aforesaid court-scene showcasing and expounding works, Dickens’s *A Tale of Two Cities*, and Camus’s *The Outsider*. Leon Tolstoy, who, along with the aforesaid Thomas Mann, was a key influence on Doris Lessing, the latter another sixties sensation like Bob Dylan, whose book *The Golden Notebook* will, I promise, be a thematic feature of future instalments of these literary notebooks. However, more express desk-overhanging requirements seem in need of more or less immediate attention. For although about Dylan it may have been descriptively postulated *Dylan's Visions of sin*, by Christopher Ricks, nevertheless, to reiterate, one sin for Dylan was another version of Harper Lee’s (one more practitioner of the ‘court room scene within literary work’ great tradition) idea of ‘It’s a sin to kill a mocking bird’, as expressed in poetic lyrics of his such as *Love Minus Zero/No Limit’s* ‘My love she’s like some raven/At my window with a broken wing.’ However, just as Doris Lessing may have written other works apart from *Notebook*, such as *The Grass is Singing*, what’s more, in Bob Dylan’s *It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding* he suggests that for both mockingbirds and other social types— anyone, indeed, who has ever suffered in any form—the long term prognosis is reassuring-ly rosy, by way of the astoundingly striking line; ‘You find yourself, you reappear/ you suddenly find you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Indeed, further into chapter 4 of *The History Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says

‘...The general effect upon Mr Polly at the time was at once confusing and exhilarating; but it led him to eat copiously and carelessly, and long before the end, when after an hour and a quarter a movement took the party, and it pushed away its cheese plates and rose sighing and stretching from the remains of the repast, little streaks and bands of dyspeptic irritation and melancholy were darkening the serenity of his mind…’

Dylan, during his 1975, seemingly *Anna Karenina* themed album *Blood on the Tracks*, says; ‘Was in another lifetime/ One of toil and blood’. Dickens, obviously but importantly, begins *A tale of Two Cities* with the lines; “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.” In 1980’s *Rites of Passage*, part of his own social-class analysing trilogy of novels, William Golding depicts his protagonist Edmund Talbot’s influential godfather presenting him with a journal to record the significant events of a nautical journey. He considers it a time of reflection for the young man. Most twentieth century intellectuals went through some sort of communist phase, their own rites of passage. The French social scientist Raymond Aron once went so far as to irreverently say “Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.” Too true! The author was once that very kind of sub de Quincey-ian addict himself. However, as Bob Dylan elsewhere, again in *My back pages*, says; “I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now”.


>>>>>footnotes >>>>>>

**1** In South London, and within the borough of Bromley, where H. G. Wells grew up.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 9 of x)

Elsewhere in chapter 4 of *The History of Mr Polly* H. G. Wells says

‘Nobody missed Mr Polly for a long time’

In *The Great Gatsby* F. Scott Ftizegrald has his narrator say of Jay Gatbsy, firstly, ‘There was something gorgeous about him’—Foster Wallace talks about the ‘gorgeousness’ of John Updike’s prose in the essay *John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists*_—and, secondly ‘I often wondered what had happened to him.’ (Updike and Foster Wallace both died in the public eye; the amateur author here will probably die in obscurity)

At any rate, H. G. Wells goes onto say

‘..When at last he reappeared among them his eye was almost grim, but nobody noticed his eye. They were looking at watches, and Johnson was being omniscient about trains..‘

In *Becoming Dickens:The Invention of a Novelist*, R. Douglas-Fairhurst makes reference to only the very ubiquitous-within-fiction theme of ‘lost and found’,but, also to that most secretly sociological of literary themes; ‘the clock watching classes’. In the preface to *The Great Gatsby* it is argued that Fitzgerald often wrote surrounded by clocks. Thus sometimes ‘the clock watching classes’ syndrome, if it can be called that, can effect even the aforesaid Frasierian ‘bohemian classes’. Just as that bohemian’s bohemian, Oscar Wilde, in *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, makes a pathos-laden, heart -quickening allusion to ‘The clock ticked like a hammer’. As Shakespeare, and, indeed, actors within *The Mighty Boosh* series, once said ‘Time waits for no man’. However, as Louis Amsrtong, secret hero of Roddy Doyle’s underrated novel *O, play that thing!*--- later covered by the Irish shoegaze band My bloody valentine—once said “We have all the time in the world.”

Indeed, proving that ‘Alls well that ends well’, the only Shaespeare play that George Bernard Shaw ever rated, is often a good maxim with which to encourage oneself when the chips are down, H. G Wells closes chapter four with the lines…

‘..Mr Polly was left very largely to the Larkins trio. Cousin Minnie became shameless, and kept kissing him goodbye—-and then finding out it wasn’t time to go. Cousin Miriam seemed to think her silly, and caught Mr Polly’s eye sympathetically. Cousin Annie ceased to giggle, and lapsed into a nearly sentimental state. She said with real feeling that she had enjoyed the funeral more than words could tell…’

Now, several themes immediately spring to mind. Firstly, that Fitzgerald makes various tantalisingly sensuous references to ‘her soft kisses’ in *The Great Gatsby*, *Tender is the Night* and even in *The Beautiful and Damned*. And, secondly, it is well known that F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase ‘the jazz age’ (we have previously mentioned Ernest Hemingway’s ideas of ‘his talent was as natural as the dust on a butterfly's wings’), Fitzgerald’s own version of another obvious but important moment in Oscar Wilde *The Picture of Dorian Gray* ; “He tossed phrases into the air and winged them with paradox.”. One jazz standard that still generally endures and emotionally provokes is *In a sentimental mood*. In the autism-community preoccupied book *The power of Neurodiversity*, Thomas Armstrong makes reference to ‘the gift of mood’.

And yet with all the cognitive idiosyncrasy of neurodiverse people in the world, even Saul Bellow, in *The Dean’s December* says “Fitfulness of vision was the problem. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t.’ Hopefully this latest essay has been a latest historical version of Whalt Whitman’s nothing less than categorical-imperative carrying idea that “What I shall assume, you shall assume.” And yet even before Mr Polly’s predicament amounting to ‘Nobody missed Mr Polly for a long time’ becomes fixed, in the minds eye, by other protagonists returning to his vicinity, perhaps Clive James’s thesis in *The Blaze of Obscurity* can, by being applied to the same minds eye, suggest that being out of the spotlight can sometimes be better than being in the spotlight. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald, having reached the zenith of literary accomplishment and renown, went on to experience the kind of excruciating distress and ensuing disappointment which was so tragically codified in laters works of his such as *The Crack Up*.

At any rate, H. G. Wells begins the next chapter, chapter 5 of *The History of Mr Polly*, entitled *romance* (“Romance without finance is a nuisance” being another jazz standard, and another secretly Fitzgeraldian theme), with the lines. ‘Mr Polly retired to Clapham from the funeral celebrations prepared for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit.’‘ The aforesaid Harper Lee in *To Kill Mocking Bird* says ‘ ‘I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.’ ‘ Wells, however, goes on to say ‘Holidays were his life, and the rest merely adulterated living. And now he might take a little holiday and have money for railway fares and money for meals, and money for inns.’ Now, ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’, said Oscar Wilde, in doubtlessly another paradox-tossing dinner party moment. However even someone as gifted at futurology as him could not have predicated the coming into being, and predominantly rigid enforcement of, the prohibition in FItzgerald’s America, predominantly during the 1920s, where, for all the flapper girl festooned parties, the stability of not just one man, but one entire body politic seemed to eventually ‘crack up.’ .

Deeper into chapter 5 of *The History of Mr Polly*, *Romance*, Wells goes on to say

‘...But—He wanted someone to take the holiday with.
For a time her cherished a design of hunting up Parsons, getting him to throw up his situation, and going with him to Stratford-on-Avon and Shrewsbury, and the Welsh mountains and the Wye, and a lot of places like that, for a really gorgeous, careless, illimitable old holiday of a month. But, alas!, Parsons had gone from the St Paul’s Churchyard outfitter’s long ago, and left no address..’

We have previously made reference to Robert Burns’s spirit rousing line ‘A man’s a man for all that’ . But not only is it true that Shakespeare’s ideas, courtesy, then, of an English feudal rather than Scottish enlightenment figure, seem to tie themselves to one’s heart with hoops of steel in the form of phrases like ‘What a piece of work is a man!’; but it is also true that Robert Burns’s analysis concerning ‘the best laid plans of mice and men.’ also tends to hang around in some of the antechambers of the mind, once heard/read. Indeed, many centuries after the emergence of John Falstaff on to the general scene came John Steinbeck with works like *Of mice and men*, and *The grapes of Wrath*. And in *Romantic Image*, Frank Kermode alludes to the perennial literary connoisseur's daily ritual of ‘piercing the grape’. However, although sometimes finding illumination in literature during dark times can be akin to what Vladamir Nabakov once called *Laughter in the Dark*, nevertheless, as Bob Dylan— again on the Anna Karenina themed album *Blood on the Tracks*, during the song *Meet me in the morning*---once said; “They say the darkest hour, comes right before the dawn”.

Mr Polly may not have had anyone to meet, as in Dylan's *Mr. Tambourine Man*, but is certainly the type of literary personage to have experienced Shakespeare’s idea of ‘A meeting of minds’ (First expressed, obviously but importantly, in works such as *Sonnet 116*), and one of the beautiful aspects of such meetings is that they are programmed to oft come again. And yet Balzac, in *The unknown masterpiece*, makes reference to a not entirely un-Dickensian *steep* staircase. Balzac, obviously but importantly, being often called ’the French Dickens’, just as Dickens was often called ‘The English Balzac’; i. e *The Unknown Masterpiece* begins with the lines….

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 10 of x)

‘...On a cold December morning in the year 1612, a young man, whose clothing was somewhat of the thinnest, was walking to and fro before a gateway in the Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris. He went up and down the street before this house with the irresolution of a gallant who dares not venture into the presence of the mistress whom he loves for the first time, easy of access though she may be; but after a sufficiently long interval of hesitation, he at last crossed the threshold and inquired of an old woman, who was sweeping out a large room on the ground floor, whether Master Porbus was within…’,

And the aptly named Garret Stewart’s book *Dickens and the Trials of Imagination* includes tantalising chapters as ‘the quarantine of the imagination’ and…. ‘release’ —for that most freewheeling figure in his own era, Balzac, nothing short of the French Dickens, is referenced during the preface to Henry James *The wings of the Dove*, the latter that most Dylan-eque of themes, such as in *Blowing in the wind*. Sometimes Mr Polly feels that his desire for romantic consummation will never come, yet he is condemned to, as Clive James says in another of his books, the very title itself being an effective loadstar fixture in the imagination of sorts, as being *Sentenced to life*. ‘Recalled to life’, however, is a chapter from Dickens’s *A tale of two cities*.

Indeed, talking of all things rooted in a revolutionary atmosphere, the also Dickens and Balzac devouring, relentless internationalist, Marx, in a way uncannily not entirely dissimilar to Dickens’s old shoemaker in said novel, in *The Communist Manifesto* says; ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ Moreover, Hemingway’s *The old man and the Sea* is another canonical example of a fictional character gaining wisdom through both ageing and suffering. And yet, paradoxically— Hemingway after all in *Up in Michigan* exclaims, ‘Chesterton's a classic!”--- the Chesterton-praised Dickens, elsewhere in *A tale of Two Cities*, sketched out a scene where an adolescent and a middle aged character both rediscover youthful innocence and enthusiasms, during, that is, the immortal scene where Mr Cruncher and son find themselves embarking on an astonishingly, profoundly, gloriously sensuous, however quixotic, fishing trip in the very middle of the night.

James Wood may have preferred D. H. Lawrence’s prose style to Ernest Hemingway’s—E. M. Forster once said ‘Two cheers for democracy, but three cheers for D. H. Lawrence’—-however sometimes it is hard to alight on a satisfactorily tesselating couple of episodes concerning the comparative merits of Hemingway’s fishing, nautical themes in *The old man and the Sea*, and Dickens’s fishing, river-based landlocked substitute for nautical themes in *A tale of two Cities*. (Lawrence was the author of many books but including *Sea and Sardinia*) Indeed, in *The old man in the Sea*, Hemingway says elegiacally, pace Mr Cruncher and son’s bountiful achievements, “He had not caught a fish for several days straight”. This is almost certainly not unrelated to that profound insight Hemingway gives in *A moveable feast*, namely, the cardinal point of each writing session one engages with being to come away from it knowing that one has discovered, or sometimes rediscovered, ‘one true thought’.

However sometimes Dickens somehow managed to tower far and above even the prose heights that Ernest Hemmingway would write. For example, having one true writing thought per writing session was merely childsplay, when, as Dickens says during *The Pickwick Papers* “What presented themselves before us was an immense reservoir of facts. We just lay them on” The English novelist Will Self once said, referring to the also English comic phenomena—though different from ‘the infant phenomenon’ of *Nicholas Nickleby*---- the 2000’s decade appearing sitcom *The Office*, “Sometimes, it’s darker than Beckett”. Further examples, then, of more than one moment of ‘truth’ emerging during a creative composition-al session. Indeed, Dickens was one of the more peculiar influences on the prose style of Proust, of all people. And the autism pioneer Leo Kanner summed up an aspect of all autistic prose styles, as well as personalities, with the phrase ‘fascinating peculiarities.’

At any rate, the aforesaid John Updike once commented on Alain De Botton’s surely classic example of the Chesterton and Orwellian notion of ‘the good/bad book’, *How Proust can change your life*, with the phrase, concerning the latter book’s relationship with *In search of lost time*, “it offers a distillation of that vast sacred lake”. From Dickens to Proust. From Gogol to Google. Proust, sometimes a literary version of scientist Henry Cavendish’s achievements in the eighteenth century of being a reliable ‘human google’ to various associates, would habitually attend dinner parties across Paris, and ‘x-ray’ the attendees, perhaps showing a version of what Henry James, in *The Violent effigy: a study of Dickens’s imagination* called Dickens’s ‘military eye.’ We have talked previously of The Smiths lyric from the song *The Headmaster’s ritual*, ‘Sir leads the troops/ Jealous of youth/ same old suit since 1962.’, on the one hand, and a key chapter in campus novel specialist David Lodge’s also Henry James referencing work of literary criticism, *The art of fiction*, ‘Hemingway and repetition’, on the other.

The problem comes, of course, in being able to distinguish between good repetition, what James Wood refers to as ‘the elegant variations”, and bad repetition, a latest historical version of Truman Capote’s notoriously acerbic, but sometimes hardly inaccurate, description of Jack Keroauc’s writing; ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing”. The Dickens-influenced kafka—he once obviously but importantly said of Dickens “the great, careless, prodigality of his imagination”----once had an article written about him in the aforesaid London Review of Books called *Kafka in the office*. And yet Kafka probably wouldn’t have had much time for the long running British sitcom *The Office*. However the Kafkaesque elegiac absurdity of the general universe, particularly the general *social* universe, lives on, through the historical influence and midwifery work of Samuel Beckett, in Ricky Gervais’s still to this day *Magnum opus*.

‘Bureaucracy’ may have been a term invented by a sociologist, Max Weber, but it was debatably Franz Kafka who gave the most profound expressive articulative form to the concept in many of his works. The romantic may be someone who wants to live their life like a character in a novel. But the novelist is someone who has nothing short of a love/hate relationship with the office. Or, as another Franz, Franz Liszt, once said about the pianoforte, “it has been the source of all my joys and all my sorrows”. But this is not all for Kafka was also a pioneer of the concept of ‘writing machines’. This is not unrelated to the also WIll Self influencing William S. Burroughs's pioneering work with ‘the cut-up technique’’, expressed in such works of his as *The Word Hoarder*.

In *This side of paradise*----for, after all, hoarding words is often frowned upon and mocked, but as Dylan said “They say the darkest hours/comes right before the dawn”—- the aforesaid F. Scott Fitzgerlad alludes, in this, his debut novel, published in 1920, to the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the jazz age. Kafka was also interested in some of that novel’s themes of moral corruption through such almost objectively dubious pursuits as status seeking. The aforesaid R. Descartes, via his stubborn insistence on strict philosophical dualism, viewed human beings as often being nothing more than *machines*; well in that age of literature, modernism, where Kafka died young in obscurity and Fitzgerald cracked up in middle-age still near the peak of fame, human beings, especially in America, had been generally brutalised by a materialistic, instrumentalist culture, so that most human individuals became corrupted on the personal plane, just as the —not, incidentally, unrelated to the prohibition movement, and counter movement—’machine politics’ of gangsters in New York such as George W. Plunkitt et all became more and more of an influential set of factors working insidiously away upon society. However, like Dickens’s, and many others, the author remains a stubborn optimist, generally speaking, regarding the past, present and future of human society, and, indeed, of human life.

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 11 of x)

Elsewhere in chapter 5 of *The History of Mr Polly*, *Romance*, H. G. Wells says

‘..Polly tried to think he would be almost as happy wandering alone, but he knew better. He had dreamt of casual encounters with delightfully interesting people by the wayside—even romantic encounters. Such things happened in Chaucer and ’Bochashiew’.; they happened with extreme facility in Mr Richard le Gallienne’s very detrimental book, *The Quest of the Golden Girl*, which he had read at Canterbury; but he had no confidence they would happen in England—to him…’

In George Orwell’s *A Clergyman's Daughter* he says “what was a man like him trying to write for a magazine like the primrose?’. Surely as the old English saying has it ‘pride comes before a fall’, and thus what Jane Austen called *Sense and sensibility* can run into all kinds of bother in so far as Evelynn Waugh’s ideas in *Decline and fall* becomes manifested in a latest historical version of Marx’s statement “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”, however much one may feel that Orwell’s statement form *The Road to Wigan Pier*, “If there’s any hope, it’s in the proles.” applies to him or her.

Virgnia Woolf often felt denied an education from her eminent father. Near the start of *To the Lighthouse*, a young protagonist is cutting out entries in a catalogue, this similar to the rifling through encyclopaedias that is part of autism pioneer Leo Kanners ‘fascinating peculiarities’ reference including 1943 paper *Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact*. Orwell, for his part, as well as probably being high functioning autistic also makes references to popular fiction and even popular catalogues in many of his works but including *Coming up for air*. The also high functioning autistic political prose practitioner, Leon Trotsky, once argued that being a left oppositionist was akin to ‘swimming against the stream’. He also, counterintuitively, at first glance, surely, argued of his 1938 masterpiece *The Transitional Programme*, “the transitional programme is not a catalogue of truisms, but a manual for action.”

Orwell hoped that other works of his such as *Homage to Catalonia* would become the same in the hands of future generations facing the emergence and/or persistence of fascist, or near fascist regimes. And yet hardcore politics and fascism needn’t be the sole focus of one’s writerly attention. Or, as HItchens says in *Hitch 22*, “all they ever talked about was politics” and then “I realised that I wanted to ensure I had some sort of a good time” Indeed, James Wood, when not writing books such as *How Fiction Works*, also wrote *The Fun Stuff*.

And, further on into chapter 5, of *The history of Mr Polly*, H. G Well says

‘When, a month later, he came out of the Clapham side door at last into the bright sunshine of a fine London day, with a dazzling sense of limitless freedom upon him, he did nothing more adventurous than order the cabman to drive to Waterloo, and there take a ticket to Easewood.
He wanted—what *did* he want most in life? I think his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun—fun in companionship.’

Hitchens, at whose funeral Wood gave a eulogy, in *Hitch 22 also says *, “ah what is is to be 24 and cutting one’s first heady swathes through London’. G. K. Chesterton once wrote a short story called *The extraordinary cabman*. Even Trotsky got in on the act, once describing a chauffeur he once had the fortune and pleasure of acquiring and utilising the services of as a ‘titan’. Gustav Mahler’s first symphony— Mahler who, as we’ve seen, once said “A symphony should be like the world, it should contain everything”--- was quickly nicknamed ‘the titan’, just as Brahms’s first symphony had quickly been nicknamed ‘Beethoven’s 10th’. And what better locale to attempt to artistically include everything in than London?

Keoruac, may have said in *October in the Railroad Earth* , “and everything is coming in”, surely in a latest twentieth century version of Graham Greene's deservedly well known remark “There is a point in childhood where a window opens, and the whole world comes pouring in’ , but as William S. Burroughs once said of Kerouac “useless outside of America”. Therefore we can turn to another dyspraxic writer, Samuel Johnson, for instruction here. “He who is tired of London, sir, is tired of life”. H. G. Wells gives off the sense of being benignly in suspended animation in so far as he is displaying a youthful ardour and a relentless desire for exploration all due to being imaginatively firmly situated in the big smoke.

London has often had that effect upon writers. G. K. Chesterton, when not writing about cabmen, but writing about the certainly at times cabman theme utilising Dickens, said “Dickens needed London to think.” Twentieth century literary critic I. A. Richards once said “books are machines for thinking with.” WIlliam S. Burroughs, when not writing *The Word Hoarder* wrote *Cities of the Red Night*. Ferdinand Celine, author of *Journey to the end of the night*, is referenced in *Letters to a young Novelist*.

At an early stage of the similar but sublimely unique *Letters to a young Contrarian*, Christopher Htichens makes reference to Emile Zola and the aforesaid dreyfus affair. London is a place for all of life to emerge into view and shimmer away radiantly as the sun beats down, and for what has been called the eternal carnival by the sea-side to also emerge, albeit if you substitute for seas-side the mighty river Thames. And this includes the twentieth century's nearest version, slightly more racy in character, to the Dreyfuss affair, *the Profumo affair*. Again, as Harold Macmillan once said, concerning what general element tends to bring governments to their knees, ‘events, dear boy, events.”

However even at his most daring and risque I’m sure that the man that the London Review of Books once called ‘the most debonair of British prime ministers”---- after all he once also confessed that often he liked nothing better than to ‘go to bed early with a Trollope’---- could not have foreseen an event as scandalous as the Profumo affair. As for the Trollope-Macmillian dialectic, well, Hitchens wrote another book called *Unacknowledged legislation; writers and the public sphere*; sometimes it is difficult to tell with complete confidence whether themes from novels like Trollopes *The way we live now* had more of an influence on real, historical life than themes from novels like Trollopes *The prime minister.*

At any rate, H. G. Wells goes on to say

‘He had already spent a pound or two upon three select feasts to his fellow assistant, sprat suppers they were, and there had been a great and very successful Sunday pilgrimage to Richmond, by Wandsworth and Wimbledon’s open common, a trailing garrulous company walking about a solemnly happy host, to wonderful cold meat and salad at the Roebuck, a bowl of punch, punch! And a bill to correspond..’

And

‘He stared out of the window at the exploitation roads of suburbs and rows of houses all very much alike, either empathically and impatiently TO LET, or full of rather busy unsocial people. Near Wimbledon he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly gentlemen of grace and leisure, addressing themselves to smite hunted little white balls great distances with the utmost bitterness and dexterity. Mr Polly could not understand them..’

 

[benaspiringwriter]

(part 12 of x)

In Allen GInsberg’s *Howl* he says ‘lost battalions of conversationalists’. Someone was once attending a party with S. T. Coleridge, and said “it seemed like he would talk forever; and you wanted him to go on forever”. In *The part played by labour in the transition between ape and man*, Engels talks of a garrulous parrot who delights in mechanically reproducing the whole of its vocabulary. Trotsky once wrote about ‘the arsenal of marxism’. Well it is not hard, but not uninspiring, to reflect upon the connections between *The part played by labour in the transition between ape and man*, and *The transitional programme*. Labour MP Tritsham Hunt once wrote a book on Engels called *The Frock coated communist*.

Yes, Engels was sometimes at home amongst the ‘refined’, chattering classes. So to was Harold WIlson, a decade after Harold Macmillan, who, before his own experience of the 1968 *eventments* on both sides of the channel----- captured in novels such as the secretly H. G. Wells-ian suburbs evocative novel *Metroland* by Julian Barnes, where pace Wells here he features often two *young* men shuttling through suburbia making a running commentary of a different, sport by others means kind of sport ( Barnes, who also wrote *Flaubert’s Parrot*)—- said “I became prime minister without having read a word of Marx”.

Flaubert also once, obviously but importantly, said “language is like a cracked kettle that we teach bears to dance, when what we really want to do is to move the very stars to pity”. Kerouac, near the end of *On the Road* makes reference to Pooh bear, and —-the very *The part played by labour in the transition between ape and man* related, especially considering how *On the Road* also refers to Allen Ginsberg as a sort of post marxist messianic figure named ‘Carlo Marx’----line ‘old slave men in ancient civilisation rowing to a beat’.

We have previously talked about Jean Jaques Rousseau’s idea of ‘man appears free but everywhere he is in chains”, on the one hand, and Cyril Conolly’s ‘the enemies of promise’, on the other hand. Keroauc could not stand the polite, (in some senses) cautious, effete fiction of Henry James. Yet devotees of Henry James feelings towards Kerouac were often always, and are often still, mutual, in this regard. However in *How to be Both*, Ali Smith suggests that two thoughts can be kept alive in the same mind without leading to the sorry psychological state of schizophrenia. Indeed, even more broadly speaking, for example, zeitgeist-towering-over tomes like *The end of history* and *The revenge of history*, both, at times, seem to be historically true. Communism, in any form, largely seems discredited now, but a permanent liberal capitalist democracy that maintains now forever a peaceful unbroken hegemony, as Fukyama claimed, seems equally as utopian.

Indeed, H. G. Wells was both utopian in his more ‘social commentary’ works as well as in his more ‘science fiction’ works. And further on into chapter 5 of *The history of Mr Polly* he says

‘She closed the door on him abruptly, leaving him a little surprised in the street. ‘Ma!’ he heard her calling, and a swift speech followed, the import of which he didn’t catch. Then she reappeared. It seemed but an instant, but she was changed; the arms had vanished into sleeves, the apron had gone, a certain pleasing disorder of the hair had been at least reproved.’

This, with it’s rapid-fire narrative development, is another version of James Wood’s diagnosis of Martin Amis’s stylistic tendencies and achievements as begin often uncannily like the cartoon *Tom and Jerry*. Or as Shakesapre once said ‘brevity is the soul of wit’. However even if Shakespeare were still alive, he might cry out after observing such things that suggested the likes of Wells and Amis were taking even the invitation-ally elastic nature of his great poetic dictum a bit too far. And yet, even more generally speaking, had not Eric Hobsbawm named his history of the ‘short’ twentieth century, *The age of extremes…*? He had. Or, as Harold Bloom, in *The Western Canon*, coming at the matter from a different angle but reaching a similar conclusion, calls the twentieth century; ‘the chaotic age’

Indeed, H. G Wells goes on, in chapter 5, of his 1910 work *The History of Mr Polly*, *Romance*, to say

‘..Mr Polly was aware of a rustling transit along the passage, and of the house suddenly full of hushed but strenuous movement..’

And

‘.. Her hair was just passibly tidy, and she was a little effaced by a red blouse, but there was no mistaking the genuine brightness of her welcome..’‘

‘
In *Hitch 22*, Hithcens alludes to ‘Chaste but warm’ interactions with certain females. In *Experecine* Amis contends that ‘morals begin in manners’. In Balzac’s *The Unknown Masterpiece* he, as so many writers before and since (usually male), alludes to *coquetry*. In *Touched with fire; manic depressive illness and the artistic temperament*, Jameson quotes one manic poet as concluding ‘the muse is a fickle hussey’. We have previously made allusion to Saul Bellow’s line form *The Dean’s December*, ‘fitfulness of vision was the problem. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t’”. In his literary essay on his friend Martin Amis *lightness at Midnight*, —seemingly the antipode to the conceptual creation of another of his heroes, Arthur Koestler’s *Darkness at Noon*---- Htihcens says ‘Even the farcical episodes of his fiction are set on the bristling frontiers of love and death and sex’.

This is an example of the aforesaid Kafkaesque absurd, and the ‘theatre of the absurd’ connected with Albert Camus, and others, in the 1950s. Indeed, Hitchens’s comments on the footnotes of Martin Amis, that they, like Whalt Whitman, contains multitudes, but the same could be said of the footnotes at the end of David Foster Wallace’s *Infinite Jest*, which come after the novel’s official denouement, where a video tape of the same name is said to be so hilarious that it actually leads to the grizzly death of those who watch it. It puts a whole other slant on Trotsyk’s line ‘The transitional programme is not a catalogue of truisms, but a manual for action.’ For the record, Foster Wallace’s manual for action was often Harold Bloom’s *The anxiety of influence; a theory of poetry*. We have talked initially previously about Franz Liszt’s idea that the pianoforte ‘has been the source of all my joys and all my sorrows”.

Virginia Woolf, in one of her essays, compares the keys on a typewriter to the keys on a pianoforte. Hitchens, carelessly dismisses the likes of VIringa Woolf as ‘the feminist school’ in *Hitch 22* The author takes a different approach. He aspires to be partially akin to Foster Wallace minus the insidious long term interest in pornography. And yet, as *The Guardian* once said about Angela Carter ‘*Angela Carter: Far from the fairytale* The otherworldly figure conjured after her death in 1992 doesn’t do Angela Carter justice. Her biographer Edmund Gordon attempts a more accurate portrayal of a complex, sensual and highly intellectual woman.’ As an aspiring irreverent, free-thinking writer himself, at the current state of play within hoped-for said trajectory, he has decided that the influence of Foster Wallace and Carter needn’t be mutually exclusive.

After all, it has been remarked that, all those year ago, now, Kingsley Amis’s achievement with *Lucky Jim* was in a sense a cunning comic synthesis betweens the prose styles of P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. Food for thought, then. The universe of *Piccadilly Jim* is perhaps not so far from that of *The magic toyshop* as you might expect. Certainly Edmund Gordon has a chapter of his biography of Carter entitled ‘A psychedelic Dickens’. Virginia Woolf, no fan of Dickens— partially, sadly, for snobbish reason— would be horrified. As Mrs Ramsey says in *To the Lighthouse*; “what rubbish the younger generation talked these days!”. And yet Woolf, Dickens, Foster Wallace and Carter *all* still remain canonical writers of a kind. Perhaps, for all the still palpable undulating echos of tragedy that cling to lists like that, there is some justice in the literary universe after all.

 

[GypsyMoth]

@benaspiringwriter, still with us?

I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and are able to spend it with family and loved ones.

 

[autism-and-autotune]

Hello there!

When I was younger, I wanted very much to be an author. I was heavily inspired by the works of Stephen King as well as Paolini. But everything that I wanted to write seemed...too imitative. It's well known that we with autism tend to imitate others, and this fact seemed to vex me at the time. Also, anything I ended up writing seemed too biographical.

So instead of peddling fantasy (or attempts at fantasy) which was showered with hints of my life (my love of Baroque music, my loneliness, my lack of romance--I was a teen, after all!) I just decided to begin writing journals.

Currently I'm a fan of Tolkien and am attempting to complete a memoir.

 

[Shevek]

It's well known that we with autism tend to imitate others, and this fact seemed to vex me at the time.

My writing is non-fiction and highly original. It may sound fantastic, but the math works. Unfortunately, people don't check the math, and stay with considering it fantastic.

 

[autism-and-autotune]

My writing is non-fiction and highly original. It may sound fantastic, but the math works. Unfortunately, people don't check the math, and stay with considering it fantastic.

This sounds...fascinating. Can you elaborate?

 

[Shevek]

This sounds...fascinating. Can you elaborate?

Here's a footnote to a chapter on vehicle efficiency, about how we have been throwing away about 3% of all our gasoline:
Car engines are regulated by a throttle plate that usually keeps the intake manifold under partial vacuum. Wherever there's a pressure difference, you can get power if you are going from high to low, and you need power to go the other way. A stock Chrysler hemi does not make enough power to run the supercharger on a dragster. Steam engines run on high pressure steam going out to the air, and they can be run just as well on compressed air, as is done on the "Air Hogs" toy aircraft, which give a satisfying piston noise. On this dodge, we are going from atmospheric pressure to a handy lower pressure zone. Your vacuum cleaner works hard to create a low pressure zone with flow.
1 US gallon of gasoline = 6.26 lb.
If it is burned at maximum efficiency at 1: 15, it needs 94 lbs of air.
Air weighs .0752 lb/cu', so 1250 cubic feet of air is used.
Assume air at 15 PSI and manifold at 7.5 PSI - approximately 15" hg of vacuum. This is not an unusual reading at cruise.
Air doubles in volume across the throttle. So, a tank 1' X 1' X 1250' would expand another 1250', at an average force (3.25 PSI X 144 'sq) of 540 lb. = 627,000 'lb / 33,000 = 19 hp for 1 min. /60 = .315 HP for 1 hr.
At 20% efficiency for gasoline gives 1.57 hp/hr per pound, so X 6.26 lb. = 9.83 hp hr.

So, .34 / 9.83 = 3.2% more with the intake power added. Realistically, there will be some loss in the collection, so say almost 3%. Probably the best replacement for the throttle plate would be a two-stage vane pump with variable displacement by shifting the outer case relative to the shaft. Such a rig could also just go past center to work as a supercharger, but the more we vary the intake pressure, the more we need variable compression to get the most from the thin mix.

 

[autism-and-autotune]

Here's a footnote to a chapter on vehicle efficiency, about how we have been throwing away about 3% of all our gasoline:
Car engines are regulated by a throttle plate that usually keeps the intake manifold under partial vacuum. Wherever there's a pressure difference, you can get power if you are going from high to low, and you need power to go the other way. A stock Chrysler hemi does not make enough power to run the supercharger on a dragster. Steam engines run on high pressure steam going out to the air, and they can be run just as well on compressed air, as is done on the "Air Hogs" toy aircraft, which give a satisfying piston noise. On this dodge, we are going from atmospheric pressure to a handy lower pressure zone. Your vacuum cleaner works hard to create a low pressure zone with flow.
1 US gallon of gasoline = 6.26 lb.
If it is burned at maximum efficiency at 1: 15, it needs 94 lbs of air.
Air weighs .0752 lb/cu', so 1250 cubic feet of air is used.
Assume air at 15 PSI and manifold at 7.5 PSI - approximately 15" hg of vacuum. This is not an unusual reading at cruise.
Air doubles in volume across the throttle. So, a tank 1' X 1' X 1250' would expand another 1250', at an average force (3.5 PSI X 144 'sq) of 540 lb. = 675,000 'lb / 33,000 = 20.45 hp for 1 min. /60 = .34 HP for 1 hr.
At 20% efficiency for gasoline gives 1.57 hp/hr per pound, so X 6.26 lb. = 9.83 hp hr.

So, .34 / 9.83 = 3.5% more with the intake power added. Realistically, there will be some loss in the collection, so say 3%. Probably the best replacement for the throttle plate would be a two-stage vane pump with variable displacement by shifting the outer case relative to the shaft. Such a rig could also just go past center to work as a supercharger, but the more we vary the intake pressure, the more we need variable compression to get the most from the thin mix.

Wow. This is very impressive!