Tom Roper's Weblog

Virginia and the Ouse

I tried to answer the question I set myself during this morning's train ride through the mists on the Ouse, but the bext i coudl find is that it was near Monk's House in Rodmell which I think I knew. But I'm sure Special Collectionsat the University of Sussex library will have the answer

Booker Prize 2004

Perhaps I shouldn’t encourage them, and literary prizes have not very much to do with literature, but the Booker (or Man Booker as they seem to want us to call it) still exerts an odd pull, though I long for the good old days when it was a little exciting, as when John Berger won with G and donated the prize money to the Black Panthers. Of course I haven’t yet read any of this year’s short list. The Times quotes prices from Hills and Ladbrokes this morning as follows, and I found BlueSquare offering prices as well, so I list them in that order, but no prices with Paddy Power, Victor Chandler or The Tote:

Achmat Dangor Bitter fruit 12/1 10/1 8/1
Sarah Hall The electric Michelangelo 10/1 10/1 8/1
Alan Hollinghurst The line of beauty 5/2 3/1 7/2
David Mitchell Cloud atlas 5/4 Evens 11/8
Colm Tóibin The master 4/1 4/1 7/2
Gerald Woodward I’ll go to bed at noon 10/1 10/1 6/1

The difficulty is that form has little to do with who wins the Booker. The team of judges changes from year to year, so one can’t look for patterns in their decisions, and the novelists themselves can hardly be said to run to form; and if that is so, it’s nonsense to try to look for value in any of the prices on offer. With those caveats, I’m inclined to avoid the favourite (for no good reason other than that it's too obvious) and back Alan Hollinghurst or Colm Tóibin

2004 Bullwer Lytton prize

Good to see the 2004 B-L prize won by a chap who likens the ending of an affair  "Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail". When I was at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons we had a full set of a first edition of B-L's works sitting untouched in the historical collection, God knows why. No veterinary connection that I could see.

Petrarch on Radio 3

I was much impressed by Sunday's Radio 3 feature on Petrarch, it being the 700th aniversary of his death. Although it included statements from Clive James, Germaine Greer and assorted Petrarch scholars, the finest point for me was made by Vito Terribile Wiel Marin, professor of pathologic anatomy at Padua, involved in the attempts to reconstruct the poet's face which failed when they discovered that the head buried in Petrarch's tomb was in fact that of a woman (see the Guardian's account). At the end Weil Marin said that he had reconstructed more than 70 bodies and mummies, and carried out over four thousand autoposies, but "it is still a sad thought, of a great man and what remains." It was also notable for t for the interpolation of Monteverdi settings of Petrarch: I'd never realised the author of the words was Petrarch.
It made me resolve to seek out the Canzoniere, and I was lucky enough to find that the University of Sussex library has a parallel text, the Italian and an English translation side-by-side:
Petrarca,Francesco,1304-1374
The canzoniere (rerum vulgarium fragmenta)/ [by] Francesco Petrarca/translated into English verse together with the original texts, introduction and notes by Frederic J. Jones 2v
Market Harborough:Troubador,2000
Petrarch's Italian looks simple, though this may be a trap, but with the aid of the translation and my tourist/culinary/musical and operatic Italian, I may get by. As there are 366, I can to read a poem a day for a year.
So here's the first:
Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i' sono,

del vario stile in ch'io piango et ragiono
fra le vane speranze e 'l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono.

Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;

et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è 'l frutto,
e 'l pentersi, e 'l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

Bloomsday

I'm rather sceptical about the Bloomsday ballyhoo, but it is a hundred years, so I shall record something here....

Patrick Hamilton on Radio 4

Nick Robinson kindly alerted me to Valentine Cunningham and D.J. Taylor discussing Hamilton on the Today programme.

BBC - Radio 3 - Work in Progress: Kevin Elyot

Nick Robinson referred to a transcript of a talk by Kevin Elyot on dramatising Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: BBC - Radio 3 - Work in Progress: Kevin Elyot

Patrick Hamilton at the Brighton Festival

I went today to one of the three events that the Brighton Festival have included to mark the centenary of his birth (in Hove). I missed the one with Doris Lessing and had to choose between one of two today, so I picked one with his two biographers, Nigel Jones and Sean French, which was fascinating. Both Jones and French were good talkers and the chair, whose name I’m sorry to say I missed, but was from the University of Sussex’s creative writing course, didn’t have to do much to keep discussion going
The only criticism of the event I can suggest is that a celebration of Patrick Hamilton should properly involve a lot of self-destructive whisky-drinking and falling in doomed love with shallow and unfeeling coquettes, barmaids and prostitutes for the men and caddish con men à la Gorse for the women.
Nigel Jones and Sean French started by discussing Hamilton’s’ early life and the influence Hamilton’s father, a vain, pompous and fascistic barrister, had over him and his brother Bruce. I refer you to their books for details, alas these biographies are out of print, but second-hand copies may be had and public libraries will be able to supply them through the interlending networks.
French,Sean
Patrick Hamilton :a life/(by) Sean French
London:Faber,1993
0571143539

Jones, Nigel
Through a glass darkly : the life of Patrick Hamilton / Nigel Jones
London : Scribners, 1991
0356197018

The matter of the availability of Hamilton’s works came up several times, as it has before recently and as I have commented in this blog the trade database BookFind suggests that more titles are available than is actually the case. There were no real answers to this question. Someone suggest that Hamilton was really only a "writer's writer" (and a comparison with Henry Green was made here, as someone who fascinates writers through his technique but who non-writing readers find difficult if not impossible to read) and therefore without wide appeal. But in his lifetime the plays were extraordinarily successful One of the speakers, I think Sean French, suggested that the reason might simply be that Hamilton was, “the poet of failure” and that failure is not an attractive subject for publishers or for the common reader.
Apart from the theatre and radio, Hamilton’s relationship with other media was not happy. He was unhappy with Hitchcock’s film of Rope and there was a ludicrous film made of Hangover Square which turned the hero, Bone, into a composer. But there is apparently to be an attempt to televise Slaves of Solitude and I think ITV made a version of the Gorse trilogy in the nineteen eighties. See also Nick Robinson's helpful comment on an earlier post. Nigel Jones suggested that Hamilton was now unknown “except in academia”. But there were many people in the room and not all of them from the universities
The Bruce Hamilton archives contain the letters between Patrick and Bruce, which both French and Jones used in their biographies. They were left to Nigel Jones by Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Aileen and are now kept at the University of Austin, Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre.

Patrick Hamilton again

And the Brighton festival has three Patrick Hamilton events to mark his connection with the town in his centenary year:
Doris Lessing with Nigel Jones
Sean French & Nigel Jones
Michael Holroyd and Lynn Truss

Patrick Hamilton

A good piece in Saturday's Guardian on Patrick Hamilton by Dan Rhodes,. Among other things Rhodes returns to the issue of the availability of Hamilton's work, discussed elsewhere in this blog and calls for the London trilogy to be reissued. He says it's out of print; as I pointed out in a comment on Lynne Truss's article in the Times, the BookFind database disagrees. Who's right?