Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

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Hush, listen... Exploring the power of sound at the National Theatre

The Hush

The Shed, National Theatre, until 3 August

What is the true power of sound? What can it make you feel, remember, believe or hope for? This is the question asked by pioneering electronic music producer Matthew Herbert in his first foray into the theatrical world. We all know that a particular smell or a particular song can immediately transport you to a previous time or place, but if you isolate ambient noise and focus in on that, what kind of sonic journey can that take you on? And how can this help us appreciate the world we live in?

Herbert, together with NT associate director Ben Power, has created an avant-garde piece of theatre in which sound becomes a character, engaging with the actors, eliciting emotion and responding to and shaping the dialogue. Two foley artists stand on a balcony above the set, creating a variety of subtle sounds with which the performers, Tobias Menzies and Susannah Wise, interact below. From purposeful footsteps falling on a tray of gravel to a lapping lake conjured by hands splashing in a glass tank, they provide a soundtrack to Tobias and Susannah’s past and potentially future lives. This aural illusion is conjured within an apparent sound studio, that may also be a kind of therapy centre, or perhaps a futuristic facility to which people can come to recreate happy memories from a bank of sounds that has been preserved in an otherwise dystopian world. Herbert lets you come to your own conclusions.

The beauty of having the foley live on stage is that you are torn between watching the passions of the actors and the actions of the sound-makers. Its presence makes every moment feel enhanced and vividly realised, yet somehow also artificial, laden with the irony that none of what the characters experience is real. There is a distinct sense of pathos throughout the whole piece, precisely because of this dialectic between the invocation of desired memories and the production of actual sounds. Because these are made with the most mundane of objects, they simultaneously create and confound the fantasy.

Herbert seems to be examining the future of our fractured world – these soundbites, however accurately crafted, can never come together to be an enduring, meaningful, tangible whole. Are we destined to remember our perceived halcyon days by trying vainly to record, sample, index and replay every single decibel of sound, every byte of data? In these days of virtual realities and cyber socialising, should we instead be trying to experience life in reality and not expect every sense to be at our fingertips whenever we click our fingers, or a button? You can go and see The Hush and ask yourself these questions. And you can also experience it on a purely sensory level, appreciating the technical prowess of those who manipulate sound and valuing the sonic experience in a way you may never have before. It’s worth going along with open ears just for that.

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Will Self's self-indulgent modernism

On Will Self at Southbank Centre, September 2012.

Will Self’s concept of 'modernism' in the novel (can we even call it modernism anymore? Should that term not have been confined to the early 20^th century along with the modernists who first expounded it?) is flawed.

Perhaps within the parameters Self sets out, it is legitimate. But those parameters are far too rigidly delineated. When I went to see him talk about his new novel Umbrella, his propounding of, let’s call it experimentalism, in the novel was erudite and well-informed, and is well-executed in the novel. But I can’t help feeling he is a little too blinkered in the unforgiving nature of his philosophy. Yes, it is essential that creative writing in both form and content continues to push the boundaries of what has yet to be attempted in literature. And it is important that the multifarious nature of our world and of humanity can be linguistically encapsulated in the multifarious nature of the novelistic internal voice. But does that mean that the ‘realist’ tradition, honed by George Eliot and Jane Austen and now typified by the likes of Amis, McEwan et al, should be eschewed in favour of an attempt to conduct the darting meanderings of consciousness into language? And isn’t this language by its very nature carefully structured by the novelist and thus, ironically, ‘unreal’?

For what is language but a constrictive conduit through which we must necessarily articulate our abstract thoughts and emotions, and by which we are thus restricted within the very boundaries of that language and the limited manipulations upon it that we attempt to enact? Self’s argument that the novel should aspire to communicate the ‘reality’ of our thoughts and their infinite tributaries and deviations is valid, and has to an extent been executed by the 20^th century greats: Joyce, Woolf and so on. Self experiments in Umbrella with shifting time-periods mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and with the expression of what he calls ‘condensed thought’ via italics. And I do believe that such experimentation should be valued and acknowledged as a progression of the artform. But I cannot help but feel that his dogmatic insistence that this is the only way, or at least the closest way, of authentically conveying our inner thoughts is flawed.

Because for me novels express the most fundamental truths, emotions and expressions of being. And they can do this despite, or even due to, being composed of chapters, cohesive sentences and linear narratives. Not all novels achieve this veracity of course, but some do it to at least an equally potent effect as the stream of consciousness and some, I would argue, more so. Marshall Brown is speaking of poetry when he invokes ‘the vital round dance that lets form give life and meaning to content and lets content give substance and expression to form’ but I think this can apply equally to the novel and its form, be it experimental or traditional.

Think of Dickens in Great Expectations when he entreats the reader to ‘Think of the long chain of iron or gold, thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day’. Dickens is a proven master of the chapter, of the slow materialisation of the links that join together and form unbreakable nexuses around which an entire world can be created. Or think of Will Self’s contemporary David Mitchell, a fine example of experimentalism through the very distinct chapter partitions of his masterpiece Cloud Atlas, whose first character says: ‘Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent’.

These truer truths may be latent within the simulacrum of the realist novel just as much as within the simulacrum of the continuous stream of thought; they can be found not just in the attempted realism of the mind’s nebulous internal iterations but in the marshalling of these thoughts into something less ‘real’, perhaps, but equally true.