The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne: a Belfast Spinster

I CAN’T remember where I first heard about Brian Moore’s ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.’ If you read three or four fairly crummy or forgettable novels, then come across something as good as this as your fourth or fifth it is well worth it.

Judith Hearne is a lonely spinster who has spent a good deal of her life loyally looking after a sick aunt. Now she finds herself getting on in age and living in a series of bedsits in Belfast, each one as unsatisfactory for some reason as the last. Her co-inhabitants in this one include a memorably obese and troubled man named Bernie (fantastically described as a ‘monstrous baby swelled to man size’) who lives with the delusion of being a great poet and isn’t working and left Queen’s some years ago, his mother, Mrs Henry Rice, who means well but sickeningly fawns over him (she says he is ‘a little delicate’),  Bernie’s unfortunate secret lover, Mary, who is the bedsit cleaner and a victim throughout the novel one way or another, and Mr James Madden, a pretentious man who has lived in America, and is not who he at first seems, and is the unwanted object of Judith Hearne’s desire- her last chance, it seems, to become married and respected in a lonely and desperate world. Judith Hearne’s only escape from her problems are both desperate measures- the bottle, and her Sunday visits to Moira O’Neill and her put upon family.

This novel, written in 1955, is bold, full of passion and is excitingly unpredictable. Judith Hearne’s slide from a dull, predictable God-fearing spinster, into a pathetic, drunken non-believer is remarkable, and tragic.

From page one, Judith Hearne holds onto her items of security- a photograph of her aunt, who gave her a reason for living until she died, and what she calls ‘the Sacred Heart’, wrapped initially in tissue paper, and now hung proudly on her wall for comfort and prayer. Many of us have a wall hanging for this very reason, whether it be a photo of a relative, a simple beach scene, or a picture of a famous singer or sports star. There is so much about Judith Hearne that is so ordinary and believable, and typical for her age, at least in this early part of the novel.

Judith is soon flattered and excited when another boarder- James Madden- shows an interest in her. She seems to be the only one receptive to his boastful stories about living in New York. Madden can sense this and soon has Judith enthralled. They begin to have walks together where the discussion is always about America -‘the States is a hundred years ahead of Europe in most things.’ The other boarders are amusingly disparaging about America- ‘The atom bomb-that’s the American contribution to Western civilisation. Am I right?’ but Judith always defends him.

In a passage that is reminiscent of Fitzgerald writing about Gatsby’s past, we get to know Madden better and how his own dream, like Gatsby, is to open up a new promising world for himself- ‘..he stood at the gateway to all the things he had left behind, all the things he had ever done.’

By the end of the third chapter we see a glimpse of Madden that Judith will never see. Coming back to the bedsit, drunk one night, his passion is aroused at the sight of naked Mary with Bernie in Bernie’s bedroom. Madden, seemingly disgusted at the goings on in a Catholic home, threatens to tell Bernie’s mother (which would see Mary is immediately evicted), but loses his head like a madman and rips the blanket from her and fondles her and smacks her bare thighs. As Bernie says, if alone, Madden may well have raped her. Brian Moore’s characters have all the problems of the world but his depictions of them are searingly honest.

It is the interior mind of these characters that is the most compelling. Moore exposes their thoughts continually, and it completely gives them away. We get glimpses into Judith’s fascination with Madden- ‘I wonder if he’s old? Over fifty certainly..’ and at the same time Madden is musing about Mary- ‘ahh, I’m no good, drinking like that, pulling at that kid, but she was old enough though, what a build. Christ…why did I think that right n the church, an impure and filthy thought right in God’s house.’

Father Quigley is the priest at the church that Judith attends. Brian Moore became an atheist after a heavy and devout Catholic upbringing- as an act of rebellion he joined the British Army when he left Belfast- and his Father Quigley is passionate, but is also a target of Moore’s ridicule- ‘Plenty of money! Plenty of time!..Yes the people of this parish have both of these things…But they don’t have it for their Church!..They’ve got time for sin, time for naked dancing girls in the cinema, time to get drunk…time to go to see the football matches… time to spend in beauty parlours..time to go to foreign dances instead of ceilidhes (!)..time to do any blessed thing you could care to mention. Except one. They-don’t-have-time-for-God.’

When Judith sees the patient O’Neill’s she begins to boast about her new, fabulously interesting life as an acquaintance and sometime walking partner and church attendee James Madden, and she is starting to have too much to drink. It is shortly after this that James Madden makes his proposal. He wants to start up an American eating house/ café in Dublin, and he needs Judith to be his partner purely and solely in business terms- Madden is under the misapprehension that she has money. Sadly, tragically, cruelly, when he finds out he is mistaken, he will abandon his plans with her, and cut off his once expedient social ties, and dump her, claiming that if she felt his intentions were otherwise, and if she got her hopes up, then it was all her imagination, and no fault of his own.

Bang smack in the middle of all this, in chapter 9, Moore gives us a diary entry of each of four boarders on the topic of Madden and Judith Hearne. He is absolutely fascinated by the inner going on of a person’s mind, and it is a fascinating subject. And the purpose of it all is for us to boldly see that everyone one of these boarders, Bernie and Mary included, can see right through Madden and his little schemes, and here is poor, sad Judith, hopeful and blinded because of her desperate hope of salvation from an untrustworthy Yank.

When Madden, becoming a more grotesque character by the minute, visits Mary in the middle of the night, aroused because he saw her ‘short slip, white creamy legs’ going up the stairs, he finds her in her bed in the dark and, Moore tells us, ‘tore and shook her like a dog at meat.’ It reminded me a little of what a poor, very young Maya Angelou went through- ‘easy, easy, be nice, be nice…’

Madden suddenly goes cold on Judy Hearne- perhaps he knows she isn’t loaded after all, and would make a useless business connection Judy meanwhile is becoming anxious, desperate, knowing at heart her last chance is slipping… and now taking to the bottle and singing like Blanche Du Bois too loud and causing a stir. He tells her flatly one lovely day in Belfast when she pressures very firm for an answer- ‘Who said anything about getting married? Did I? I never even considered it.’ There is a sort of Joycean stream-of-consciousness thing happening straight after in a long passage without any paragraphs and full stops- poor Judy’s thoughts tumbling out at a rate of knots. Church sermon is not much help- it’s back to the O’Neil’s I’m afraid, and a tall story seeping out- ‘As a matter of fact, he proposed to me’ (!)

On the bus Judy’s disintegration is continuing, noticeably shaking, trembling on the way to an illegal after hour’s public house. A sad and shocking thing to see her receiving a brown paper bag with a cheap bottle of whiskey inside and then Bernard waiting for her back at the bedsit to cruelly fill her ears with the notion that she needs to keep pursuing Madden because really loves her…vile characters in this story! High drama follows when Bernard’s mother comes on the screen with Madden. Madden finds out Bernie’s lies about Judy and then Bernie’s mother finds out about Bernie and sixteen year old Mary.

Judy is evicted and her reflex action is to see Father Quigly in church and ask why. Poor Judy doesn’t get any comforting response- or any that, by this stage, have any mean g for her. ­Five Hail Mary’s has lost all meaning for her. ‘An unhelpful  God. Why does He make men suffer?’ Like many before her and since, Mary is pleading for a sign.

Mary books herself, incredulously, into the Plaza Hotel and continues her drinking. It seems she will simply end up, like Dylan Thomas, sliding into oblivion. There is a final, pitiful excursion to the O’Neil’s. Any faint remnant of respectability is gone when Judy begins sobbing and begins a Blanche type rant about being left on the shelf, about drinking too much and about losing her faith. ‘Nobody wants me, Moira. I’m too old. And I’m too ugly.’ Moira O’Neill plays the pacifying Stella Kowalski type role perfectly. And what to make of Judy, weeping in front of such respectable company. Nothing but pity. She is an awful, pitiable sight. But what a wreck and how sad for her, for anybody who feels so alone and unwanted and desperate.  We can all turn out like this, anyone at anytime, it just takes a cruel twist of fate.

Moore is really wound  up now. He really has Judy, and the reader, exactly where he wants them. He wants to explore this lunatic woman even more closely and with even more scrutiny. Judy is very much at the stage of relying on the kindness of strangers. Tennessee Williams would be loving it, and Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner- in fact all those Southern writers, and James Joyce for that matter with Nora on his knee.

Back in church, Judy is drunkenly asking Quigley ‘are you sure he’s there?’ she becomes obsessed with the tabernacle and what is really there. ‘Is it just bread?’ she spies the ‘little white curtain that screened the tabernacle door.’ Judy does a terrible thing in her terrible state. She opens the Communion rail and tries to scrabble open the ‘golden door’- very cinematic this, with Quigley in pursuit running down the aisle- she is dragging on the door until there is blood running from her nails- but it will not budge!

Finally, inevitably, like Blanche at last, Judy has become the sick woman with nurses at her side, and now referred to as the ‘sick lady’, now almost Judy Hearne no more. She is placed by Moira O’Neill (Stella Kowalski) in a private room for convalescence. A new place and a new, altered Judy, hopeful of being discharged some day, but perhaps at peace wishing for the Sacred Heart to be place above her bed again.

 

There is a town...

I HEARD the news today, oh boy. Apparently Dustin Hoffman helped a jogger in Hyde Park in London, after the jogger had suffered a heart attack. I am very hazy on the details- just a 20 second radio grab. But all these thoughts about London tumbled into my mind on the way to the train station. I never lived there though- only visited lots of times- but oh, to be back there again.

My days in London typically consisted of the horrendous drive from Maidstone to London. The busy traffic, the many lanes, the navigation around Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, on the way to my sister-in-law's pad in Shad Thames. Or, less bravely, the Greenline bus from Maidstone, taking a lot longer, and the train from Bearsted Station in Maidstone to Victoria Station.



Once in London, finding myself near Fleet Street, there was a walk around the corner to see the beautiful Van Gogh and Leonardo paintings at the National Gallery, as well as Seurat's huge 'Bather's' (Une Baignade) near the front entrance. Then a skip across the road to the National Portrait Gallery, and Bramwell Bronte's famous portrait of his sisters. Outside are the black marble lions that Sylvia Plath sat amongst and drew some 50 or so years ago.


Visiting and staying at Shad Thames, Tower Bridge was around the corner. I remember Catherine Deneuve (as Carol) wandering languidly in Polanski's 'Repulsion', the Tower Bridge in the background. I would always visit my favourite second bookshops, at Long Acre in Covent Garden (Bertram Rota), the magnificent 'Ulysses' bookshop in Museum Street, and on the other side of London the molto expensive Peter Harrington's and Simon Finch. London's antiquarian bookshops leave Melbourne for dead.



The blue plaques always fascinated me. My favourites were the ones in Hampstead Heath- D H Lawrence in Well Walk (circa 1915) and Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry living in the block known as 'the Elephant' (or Portland Villas) on East Heath Road, I think it was. There are blue plaques everywhere- Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, naturally, and the one poor Sylvia Plath shares with W B Yeats on Fitzroy Road near Primrose Hill, in which she suffered for a time the coldest London winter for many years, at the start of 1963.



London offers so many other grand adventures, and I would visit and re-visit the lovely green William Morris dining room at the Victoria and Albert, walk through Kensington Gardens to get to High Street, feel lit up inside walking along Whitehall seeing all the treasures, and find myself in one of the greatest corners of the modern world, up there with the streets snaking around the Spanish Steps in Rome, and the left and right bank of the Seine- the corner in which rests Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.


In London one Christmas, on the eve of my departure to Melbourne, I bought Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' for the plane ride. It wasn't snowy but there was a fog in the streets and it was icy cold. Lamps along Regent Street glowed and I looked towards the sadly now defunct Cafe Royal, imagining Oscar Wilde smoking cigarettes on its steps, and remembering the Domino Room which I was kindly shown where D H Lawrence talked of 'rananim' with his friends and became drunk and vomited sometime in the twenties.



I miss London a great deal, both new and old parts, places reuilt after the bombings of the war around Bank and St Paul's Cathedral, and going to the pictures at the Barbican seeing profoundly non-commercial cinema and the Australian Film Festival when it was on. I miss London a lot, but I miss the rest of England more- I miss Cornwall, and Bath, and Yorkshire, and Northumberland and Shropshire and Kent, all terribly, but I am reminded again and again of the Nick Cave song- 'There Is A Town' from the album Nocturama, yes the grass is always greener, blah, blah, blah.



'There is a town
Where I was born
Far far away
Across the sea

And in that town
Where I was born
I would dream
That one day
I would leave
And cross the sea

And so it goes
And so it seems
That God lives only in our dreams
In our dreams

And now I live
In this town
I walk these dark streets
Up and down, up and down
Under a dark sky
And I dream
That one day
I'll go back home

And so it goes
And so it seems
That God lives only in our dreams
In our dreams.'

Books with female protagonists

I HAVE read a number of memorable novels that feature female protagonists. Anne Elliot in Persuasion comes to mind, as well as Anna Karenina (although it could be argued that Kitty and Levin are just as crucial in this novel), and Emily Elder in Conditions of Faith, Eilis Lacey in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, and so on and so on.

Of late I have read a few more novels that feature strong central female characters, all interesting and unique in their own right. I found The Member of the Wedding to be up there with my favourite reads. Frankie is a misfit teenager who would like to be older than she is. There are a number of memorable passages that show her restlessness and naivety, especially in connection with her soldier boy acquaintance who tries to take advantage of her. In her meanderings and uncertainties she reminded me of a girl in another Southern story- As I Lay Dying (one of my favourite novels), a girl called Dewey Dell from memory. Carson McCullers other great book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter which I tried to describe elsewhere.  I didn’t enjoy Reflections of a Golden Eye, or The Ballad of the Sad Café nearly as much as these other two. However, in all four of her important novels she has created memorable outsiders, both male and female; all seemingly unusual and complex people that struggle to fit in with those around them, but with the same needs and desires as the rest of us. They remind me of the type of characters that attracted Montgomery Clift when he searched for film roles. He almost played in the film version of Reflections of a Golden Eye as a matter of fact, however death got in the way (in 1966) and Marlon Brando took over. Tennessee Williams, also from the South, writes about people like this too, Blanche being the obvious example.

Then when I finished with McCullers, I somehow came across Muriel Spark on the library bookshelves. The Driver’s Seat was intriguing. I read it twice, which I don’t normally do, just so I could pick up a few more subtleties that exist in the storyline. Muriel Spark’s writing is a little avant garde. The Driver’s Seat is about an eccentric woman named Lise who is desperate to get to Italy for a holiday. The reader thinks she is looking for male company for a relationship, however it soon becomes apparent that she is looking for someone who will be able to kill her because she wishes to die what she sees as the perfect death. We find this out during the course of the novel- in fact, very early on we discover that she is going to eventually die- which is an interesting aspect of Spark’s narrative style- this kind of flash forward. In the end I didn’t really care for Lise’s eccentricities, and the book left me quickly.

Another book of hers that features this ‘flash forward’ style is The Prime of Jean Brodie. Jean Brodie is a school teacher who cultivates a young group of impressionable girls that are heavily influenced by her and become known as ‘the Brodie set.’ The Headmistress doesn’t approve of Jean Brodie’s unorthodox methods and is looking for an excuse to be able to dismiss her. The girls, however,  are loyal to her for a long time. Instead of teaching the regular curriculum, she is secretly talking to them about art, literature, the imagination, and controversially (it is slightly pre- WW2), Mussolini and the Blackshirts. Jean Brodie favours the Italian Fascists, and this will be the trigger to have her removed, when one of her girls eventually decides to become disloyal. Jean Brodie is amusingly and refreshingly different, non-comformist and rebellious in a lot of ways. In other ways she is self-indulgent, reckless and egotistical, so I had a very ambivalent attitude towards her. When she is being dogmatic and supercilious she is very aggravating. She keeps telling the girls she is in the ‘prime of her life’ which is doubtful anyway. Once again Spark offers ‘flash forwards’, so we find out the fate of the ‘Brodie set’ early on- Mary will die in a hotel fire in a certain year for example, etc, etc and Jean Brodie will be dismissed from her school. One thing that we do have to wait a long time to find out is ‘which one of her set will become the disloyal one?’ And, as in the case of a good Agatha Christie novel, it is quite difficult to predict.

Judging by these two stories, Muriel Spark is a clever writer but not a magical one for me. The writing didn’t enthral me like the writing of someone like Carson McCullers. And yet, in the book ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’, Muriel Spark has four entries, and Carson McCullers has none! Give me Carson McCuller’s anytime, with her fascinating people and their utterly convincing flaws and predicaments.

Baroness Madeleine Deslandes

WE SAW some elephants, monkeys and seals in the morning, then a soldier or two wandering along St Kilda Road in the afternoon (being Anzac Day), and went screaming down dark and winding water tunnels at the pool in Albert Park. But the highlight of the day was seeing this beautiful picture for the first time in the flesh. Baroness Madeleine Deslandes was a French aristocrat who admired Burne-Jones and visited him at his home called the 'Grange' in Fulham, London in late 1895.  She was a writer of romantic fiction who established a Parisian artistic and literary salon. The portrait was the result of a rare and important commission, coming at a time late in Burne-Jones' life in which he was gaining many admirers from the Continent.

The wealthy Frenchwoman is wearing a dress of a beautiful deep blue and the inky black background compliments it well. She looks vague, distant and cerebral, as well as cool and sophisticated. She cradles a crystal ball in her lap which adds a mysterious dimension of something akin to clairvoyancy. I found the little reflective squares on the ball beautiful as well as her buttoned sleeves and the simple bows on her dress. Her fingers are smooth and slender. I imagine she would have appreciated the dreamy, mysterious quality of the painting which Burne-Jones achieved after several sittings. It's fabulous to see beautiful pictures in the flesh like this.

Cold Chisel - Cheap Wine (1980)

THE GUARDIAN, in its music section, had a really nice tribute to Cold Chisel recently, including an original clip of 'Cheap Wine.' I always liked the band, and the song, when I was growing up, but I wasn't crazy about it like some people, and even then I preferred to listen to The Doors and The Beatles, etc. But seeing the film clip again I found it quite charming and a little bit mesmerizing, appreciating it more this time. The article talks about how Cold Chisel were more than just a pub band- articulate songs and songs that were about meaningful things. So I played the clip a few times the other day, not remembering having seen it before. And then, today, I heard it on the bus, drifting in and out, battling with the bus chatter and the sounds of the gears. And it's been in my head all morning. And, appearing in The Guardian, I wonder if it is revolving around in the mind of some English chap or English gal as they cross busy Piccadilly Circus or even David Cameron as he is driven down Whitehall on his way to 10 Downing Street, or the Queen, tinkering with her jewellery, inside Buckingham Palace, Nick Cave sitting in his studio at his piano in Hove near Brighton, Mike Leigh planning and plotting in his favorite cafe in Soho, the proprietor of the fabulous Ulysses bookshop thumbing his way through a first edition of Mrs Dalloway in Museum Street in London, a dancer flexing her muscles inside the Royal Ballet school in Covent Garden, etc, I could go on doing this forever.

The Guardian, April 6, by Russell Cunningham (edited):

Cold Chisel started out as pub rockers, but that workaday sobriquet sells them short – they're no small beer. Formidable and, at least as younger men, volatile on stage, their reputation was also forged with articulate songs touching on charged issues such as abortion and civil strife, and delivered with whip snare, searing guitar and soaring voice. They've filled arenas, not just bars, so by all means call them rockers, hard rockers even, but "pub rockers" plays them down.
They were formed in Adelaide in 1973 but by 1977 their stomping ground was Sydney. The city's streets, particularly Kings Cross and the inner east, bled into the lyrics of laureate keyboardist Don Walker and portrayed a band not so much of the land as the asphalt. This sense of place in their songs made Cold Chisel seem knowable and worth knowing. To the suburban youth who revered them they were like mates, hitting the town with you on a Saturday night and knowing where to lose the hangover on Sunday morning, and in their strident fashion showed many a disaffected teenager it was OK to rail at the world so long as you could laugh at it, too.


I remember buying Chisel albums with uncool glee. I remember cradling home their third, East, in 1980 and unleashing its bonfire blues on my parents' sitting-room stereo. It's a compelling album, raw but deceptively well reined, with Cheap Wine the toast of 12 fizzing tracks. East spent a year in the Australian charts and was the only Chisel album to enter the US Billboard 200, even though a superior studio effort followed with Circus Animals two years later.



   The cover of EAST, June 1980
.

A SORDID PHASE

I MUST be going through a bit of a sordid or subversive phase- maybe too much time on my hands. Amidst doing things like creating a birthday book full of lovely, innocent images, and reading about how fiction works, and having a nice, carefree time in Bendigo in the sunshine, and trawling the magnificent LaTrobe University library like the old days, I have been reading and watching these nasty pieces of fiction and non-fiction, mostly about complex subterranean desires. First there were the films SHAME and WOLF CREEK, and then Micheal Haneke's HIDDEN, all exploring complex notions of destruction and desire, now I have recently watched the recent Australian film SNOWTOWN, another Haneke film, THE PIANO TEACHER, and a factual study of the recent manslaughter of a local multi-millionaire businessman.


SNOWTOWN was gripping, at times brilliant, but often uncofortable viewing. A much more complex film than WOLF CREEK, it explores further the pysche of an Adelaide man's unquenchable desire to inflict pain and murder on what he ses as the degenerates of society, especially homosexuals and paedophiles. The violence was graphic and a bit nauseating. In cinemas some people walked out- perhaps partly because of the 'true nature' of the events that were being shown- the notorious bodies-in-the-barrel 'Snowtown murders' of a few years ago. The violence left me a bit shaken as well, especially a bathroom sequence- I walked around the house feeling like I was covered in some sort of awful grime- but this is not what I am applauding the film for. I am applauding the film for its incredible central performance of Daniel Henshall playing John Bunting. At first a very likeable, seemingly generous chap who ensures the poor kids in the dysfunctional family are fed well and looked after, something that is desperately needed in such a sordid and squalid town. Lucas Pittaway is also very good, playing the 17 year old kid, Jamie Vlassakis, whose mind is numb most of the time and whose expression is usually blank, until it breaks occasionally into torment and pain as he witnesses the horrors that Bunting unleashes around him. The cinematography and the dialogue are exceptional, particularly in one scene that takes place in the kitchen, with the gathered mob talking about what they should do to the local degenerates, considering the police seem disinterested or ineffectual. The film has a mesmerizing feel about it and is not easily forgotten.




I found THE PIANO TEACHER to be less interesting, although undoubtedly it is a very well-made and brave film. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika Kohut, a bizarre woman who teaches music and is a target of obsession of one of her impressionistic students. She is emotionally very complex and the student who pursues her can not have predicted what he was in stall for when he encourages her advances. The poster sums up a lot of the feel of the film, depicting a stark photo of little colour of the teacher and her student locked into a strong sexual embrace on the floor of the women's toilets. There is a shocking scene of genital mutilation that is reminiscent of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and a number of scenes of what most people would classify as bizarre sexual behavior in a peep show, at the drive-in, and even with Kohut in bed with her mother. Haneke loves extremities and I admire the four films of his that I've seen. But I found this one depressing, emotionally uninvolving and less memorable than the others.

                                     

The non-fiction book that I read is called THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HERMAN ROCKEFELLER by Hilary Bonning. If you google 'herman rockefeller' you will discover the whole sorded story. What compelled a multi-millionaire to travel to Hadfield in Melbourne's north-west to have sex on a mattress with Bernadette Denny is anyone's guess, and one of life's mysteries. The book is an intriguing read for this reason, and also for the discovery of how the police glean facts in order to find the ansers to things. The police interviews of Denny and her boyfriend Mario Schembri are very telling, and there is also quite a lot of time devoted to the court appearances, and Rockefeller's amazingly stoic wife. We don't find out exactly how Rockefeller died, beyond being bashed by both Denny and Schembri in their garage in South Street. But the disposal of the body makes interesting reading. This was not a planned 'murder' by any means. The two accomplices must have received the fright of their life when they say it was who they had been dealing with on the news stations every night for a week. Schembri didn't hide Rockefeller's hybrid car very well. When it was found a GPS expert brought in by the police could tell them that the last address punched in was 125 South Street Hadfield! Easy detective work. The suburbs are full of strange occurences. I am about to teach the film LANTANA again.

Metaphors and other ideas in James Wood's 'How Fiction Works.'

JOHN Banville, on the inside cover of 'How Fiction Works' (2008), says that James Wood  is 'one of the finest critics at work today.' To get the most out of this book it would be essential to have a vast literary  background encompassing works of Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Stendhal, Balzac, Conrad (and in more recent times), Waugh, Nabakov, Naipaul, Pynchon and Roth. All of which I either don't have, or do have, fleetingly, due to too many hours when I was younger watching television and football, and in latter years being married, working, and having children. Still there was plenty to interest me, with my fleeting understanding of works by a number of these authors. And I took solace with the beautiful references to Lawrence, Hardy, Woolf, Forster, Mansfield and others that I could easily grapple with.

My favourite sections of this book were the references to metaphor which Wood identifies as among his favourites in a vast body of reading. This includes reference to a newspaper article in the US in which he discovered NYC garbage collectors call maggots in trash cans 'disco rice.' A metaphor that after three weeks hasn't left me.

In an early discussion of metaphor, Wood makes a well known reference to King Lear- the passage in which the hideous Cornwall rips out Gloucester's eyeball, calling it a 'vile jelly', his way I suppose of dehumanising Gloucester to make the repulsive act easier to perform.

Wood seems mesmerized by a simple phrase Virginia Woolf uses in her novel The Waves: 'The day waves yellow with all its crops.' For him, the unusual phrase 'waves yellow' conveys the sense that 'yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too...the sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of our will.' I read- some of- The Waves several years ago and found it a very strange book. I think it's fantastic that eight words strung together in unusual phrasing can move him so much, as it shows what impact great and inventive language can have.

Wood enjoys Lawrence as well and he makes reference to Sea and Sardinia, one of Lawrence's great travel books. Lawrence refers to King Victor Emanuel as having 'little short legs.' As Wood points out, technically there is no sense in having 'little' and 'short' grouped together like this. But together they create an interesting, farcical  effect. 'Little short legs', says Wood is better than 'short little legs' 'because it is jumpier..more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly...over the unexpected rhythm.' It is absolutely true, though I would never have picked this up on my own.

In a perhaps similar way, Jane Austen is referenced via her novel Emma. Mrs Elton is picking strawberries, and is described as dressed in 'all her appartus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket.' Wood points out that there is a clash between the 'scientific register' of apparatus and the words 'of happiness'- he says it soundsm ore like 'an inverted torture machine than a bonnet or basket'- the point being that it reflects Mrs Elton's character in some way, her 'doggedness' or 'persistence' somehow. Again, a great example of a particular kind of advanced and interesting thinking.

Wood explores metaphors again near the end of his book when he writes ravishingly about Lawrence in Sea and Sardinia one more time - a fire in a grate has become 'that rushing bouquet of new flames in the grate'- so the unusual pairing of fire with flowers (bouquet), flames can rush, flowers cannot, and 'new flames' as Wood suggests, making a sudden third metaphor in the same small grouping of words.

Wood finds further unusual fire metaphors- from Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd comes 'a scarlet handful of fire'- as opposed to dust, which is much more common- and Saul Bellow has 'The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire'- the school of fishes perfectly capturing that idea of flickering and moving about.

A final, lovely example of metaphor I liked comes from Virginia Woolf's beautiful story To The Lighthouse. As Mrs Ramsay says goodnight to her children, she carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets 'the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock.' Wood appreciates the effect of the verb 'lengthen' which lengthens the sentence to reinforce the 'slowly' part which reinforces the need to make sure she doesn't awaken the children.

There are many other great things in this book, but as usual I only have to time to reflect on a snapshot as work, family, marriage all serve to take me back to the less imaginary world.