THOMAS HARDY BEGINS A NEW NOVEL

I went to YouTube this afternoon to see if there was any archive footage of Thomas Hardy reading his own poetry. He died only in 1928 so theoretically it was possible. I couldn't find any, but, beckoned here and there in the usual YouTube way, I dipped into a bit of Jeremy Irons reading ‘Afterwards' in his actorish, labouredly sensitive way  -  a sonority that had worked perfectly on the wistful voice-overs that were an integral part of the original TV series of Brideshead Revisited  but didn't suit Hardy. Then I tried a bit of someone folksy reading a different short poem, and soon stopped. Then, unexpectedly, I reached this much more satisfying clip, hearing it for the first time in decades and laughing:

ON RICKS ON LARKIN

uncredited photo taken from Amanda French's blog

Two details especially struck me when I read the highly alert, warm review by Christopher Ricks (in the New York Review of Books) of The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited and with an introduction and commentary by Archie Burnett, published this year in New York by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

First is the pleasing way that when he comes to sum up the strengths of the new edition’s editor, Ricks draws  -  provocatively, one’s now forced to say, though it shouldn’t be so  -  upon the resounding phrase of T.S. Eliot's that gave F.R.Leavis the title of his collection of rebarbative essays The Common Pursuit, first published exactly 60 years ago. Ricks, still an old soldier in the theory wars, it would seem, writes:

‘[A]lthough editing asks critical acumen the editor’s job is rightly understood as not the issuing of critical pronouncements or appreciations but the provision of such information textual and contextual as makes possible the common pursuit of true judgment.’

Second  -  and this is in the fond and celebratory spirit of the whole very substantial review  -  here is Ricks on Larkin, using Larkin on an earlier, less well-known figure:

‘I’ve often found myself gratefully retorting upon Larkin the anecdote with which he honored the Dorset predecessor of Hardy William Barnes: Nor was his appeal limited to men of letters: “an old Domestic Servant” wrote to him in 1869 having found his poems among some books she was dusting: “Sir I shook hands with you in my heart and I laughed and cried by turns.” ’

ELMORE LEONARD’S 10 RULES OF WRITING

I’ve taken this ruthless but fair summary, and drawing, from the fine blog Northern Light by Seán Dodson, but Leonard’s rules themselves were published in his book 10 Rules of Writing, published in 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (in the UK). Sensible rules, but ones that great books, and successful books, have often ignored.

Rule 1: Charles Dickens’ Bleak House famously opens with an inspired description of London’s “implacable November weather". The first chapter of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is itself implacably about the weather, serving notice that it will be a main character in the novel.

Rule 2: William Boyd’s no.1 bestseller (and James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner) Brazzaville Beach has a Prologue. So does Sarah Gruen’s Water For Elephants, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler's Wife and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

Rules 3 & 4: These are so sensible as to be ignored at your peril. To bring in a whole barrage of verbs like “remarked", “opined" and “elucidated" suggests brainless falsity. But there’s nothing wrong with a sparing use of “asked", “whispered", “shouted" and so on: it can be helpful. And naturally any number of successful, popular novelists go their own way in the matter. I’ve been reading John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids (1951), for the first time since 1967. It’s very good - and fascinatingly of-its-time but not datedly stiff - yet within a typical dialogue-spiced page we have speech without any narrative add-on, some uses of “he said", but also “he admitted", “he smiled", “agreed Umberto", “observed", “explained", “suggested" (twice) and “remarked". I didn’t find this intrusive or awkward. And then there’s the novel with which Hilary Mantel finally won a Booker Prize, the magnificent Wolf Hall - which doesn’t tell you who speaks any line of dialogue. You have to work it out for yourself. There isn’t even the hand-holding of a “said Thomas". No “said" anybody. No “said".

Rule 5: Indisputable truth. It applies too for every written sentence of non-fiction, of a letter, an e-mail, a tweet or a text message. It can only justify itself at the end of a one-word message - say, “No!" - for a more seemly form of emphasis than capital letters. In my opinion.

Rule 6: If he means as in “Suddenly, a man burst into the room and shot everyone", fair enough. When asked to serve a less clunky purpose, it can work. With “All hell broke loose", he’s wrong. As Bob Dylan, for one, has been repeatedly skilled in showing, cliché can be used in many witty, sly and beguiling ways.

Rule 7: Er... Mark Twain, D.H.Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb (ie in her Precious Bane, now a Virago Modern Classic) and any number of Southern US novelists, old and new (including Kathryn Stockett in her flawed but fine book The Help).

Rules 8-10: So pleasantly unmeasurable as to be hardly rules at all.

Good list, though: as long as you don’t take it any more seriously than Elmore Leonard did.