Winner to Winner: Bertrand Russell on T.S.Eliot

'One day in October 1914 I met T.S.Eliot in New Oxford Street.  I did not know he was in Europe, but found he had come to England from Berlin.  I naturally asked him what he thought of the War.  "I don't know," he replied, "I only know that I am not a pacifist."  That is to say, he considered any excuse good enough for homicide.  I became great friends with him, and subsequently with his wife, whom he married early in 1915.  As they were desperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my flat, with the result that I saw a great deal of them.  I was fond of them both, and endeavoured to help them in their troubles until I discovered that their troubles were what they enjoyed.  I held some debentures nominally worth £3,000, in an engineering firm, which during the War naturally took to making munitions.  I was much puzzled in my conscience as to what to do with these debentures, and at last I gave them to Eliot.  Years afterwards, when the War was finished and he was no longer poor, he gave them back to me.'- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1914-1944.

10th Anniversary

Ten years ago I started this blog as a English Lit student who wanted to learn more about the Nobel Prize Winners of Literature.  I began the blog as a way of documenting my reading but also opening out my passion to the whole world as something of interest to read in an area that few have delved deeply.

Ten years on I am delighted to have so many people reading my work and visiting the website that it's giving me an incentive to make my work even better, more informative and insightful for people who would like to know more about global writing but haven't the time to read the immense amount of books that exist in the Nobel Prize field.  Hopefully it will also inspire you to read some of these great works and gain something precious in doing so.

Reading these books has been a great privilege and I've yet to come across a dud one!  Some of these books have been the best reading material for me and has really given me a broader scope to what literature can do.  This work is truly outstanding.  The main thing I've learned from doing this is that it is utterly impossible to predict who will win this Prize, though I still bet on it for the fun of it.

Thank you for supporting me in this endeavour in which I'm taking more seriously by reading biographies of the Prize Winners and doing more rudimentary research into it.  I want this site to be seen as a relevant resource for those who wish to know more about some of the books by the authors.

If you would like to support me more there are several ways you can do that:

Leave a comment at the end of an post, these can always be suggestions of books I should review.
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Become a follower so that new posts will be delivered straight to you.
You can donate to my patreon page, link on the side of the website.
Or you can buy one of my books, also linked on the side of the website.

Thanks again and all the best with your reading/ writing.  Here's to ten years!

Alistair David Todd

The Nobel Prize For Literature 2018 and 2019

This is the most exciting day for this website, in fact almost totally dedicated to this day, the day when the Nobel Prize Committee announce their choices for the Nobel Prize For Literature.

It's also the day when my work load increases substantially in having a lifetime of one person's work landing on my desk to read.

But this is an unusual year for the Nobel Prize Committee, where they have selected not only this year's Prize but last year's as well.

They are:

For 2018: Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."

For 2019: Peter Handke "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."

It's been a longer wait than usual and hopefully these Winners will invigorate your reading and interest you in theirs, and others', work.  I'll try to read as much as I can from all Prize Winners but hopefully I might get a copy of both their books to read in the near future.  And I congratulate both Winners for their success that they've duly earned.

So was this as you expected?  What's your reaction to the chosen Winners?  Leave a comment below and tell me what you like or dislike about the choices.

'Widowers' House' by Bernard Shaw

Didactic theatre has a long tradition, possibly theatre has always been didactic, but it is most notably sustained by plays such as Widowers' House by Bernard Shaw.  

Shaw was no slouch.  In his ninety-four years he produced more than sixty plays as well as criticism, his prefaces to his plays and pamphlets advocating various social causes as well as pursuing boxing.

Being one of the three Plays Unpleasant, unpleasant because they were not supposed to be entertaining but to raise awareness, Widowers' House is something of a black play of defeated idealism where 'dirty' money is unescapable and all is unclean.

The premise of the play is of a poor but aristocratic doctor, Dr Trench, who is on holiday with his friend, Mr Cokane, when he spies the beautiful Blanche and falls in love with her.  Her father, Mr Sartorius, the widower of the title and self-made businessman, is cautious with the doctor but tells him that if he can get the right letters of recommendation than he may marry her daughter. 

In the second act Trench finds out that Sartorius makes his money by being a slum landlord, brought to attention by Sartorius newly fired rent collector Mr Lickcheese.  Trench is distraught and decides that he cannot marry for such ill-found gains and calls it off.

Being a staunch socialist Shaw was acutely aware of the plight of the poor and how the working man loses out in the capitalist world and which also corrupts the rich.  He used his writing for political purposes to further the socialist cause through as varied a medium as his newspaper articles on opera and sport and through his drama.

Full of argument Widower's House dissects a social problem through individual characters who are fully rounded and not just ideological puppets.  These people are human beings with complexity working in a particular social context.  Take a later scene with Sartorius and his daughter Blanche:

SARTORIUS

My dear: if we made the houses any better the rents would have to be raised so much that the poor people would be unable to pay, and would be thrown homeless on the streets.

BLANCHE

Well, turn them out and get in a respectable class of people.  Why should we have the disgrace of harbouring such wretches?

SARTORIUS

[opening his eyes]

That sounds a little hard on them doesn't it my child?

BLANCHE

Oh I hate the poor.  At least I hate those dirty, drunken, disreputable, people who live like pigs.  If they must be provided for, let other people look after them.  How can you expect any one to think well of us when such things are written about us in that infamous book?

SARTORIUS

[coldly and a little wistfully]

I see I have made a real lady of you, Blanche.

BLANCHE

[defiantly] 

Well?  Are you sorry for that?

SARTORIUS

No, my dear: of course not.  But do you know, Blanche, that my mother was a very poor woman, and that her poverty was not her fault?

BLANCHE

I suppose not: but the people we want to mix with now don't know that.  And it was not my fault; so I don't see why I should be made to suffer for it.

This may be melodrama but it isn't pantomime, there are no straight up villains to hiss and boo at just people who make certain moral choices in how they make their living.  It, also, isn't stuffy and tired, it's has plenty of vigour and panache to make it a lively read and it is constructed very satisfactorily.  

There are plenty of snide remarks but few jokes in this play, which probably make it 'unpleasant', as it doesn't let the audience off the hook.  You feel complicit in how awful society is and for the best of us it spurs us on to make the world a better place rather than feel how hopeless it is.  And there is a hope at the end, it's not full blown tragedy but rather a sordidness.  It is something to make you feel very uncomfortable.

The play is a battle and you have to go in fighting if you want to come out feeling less than defeated.  But Shaw was always known for making people laugh and then making them angry and this is definitely one to make you angry.

In a sense this was written for immediate effect for his public and the fact that it has survived outside it's politics is a testament to Shaw's ability to create durable characters whose outrages and feelings connect with us today, even if the conditions are different, as we are drawn into their lives and exist with them.

That's the first play in my Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw so expect many more of these to come in the future.

Now this is where you hit a paywall- well not exactly a paywall more like a moat you can swim across- but what I'm saying is that if you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me by going on Patreon.com and search for Alistair David Todd-Poet, which is the same name for my facebook page where I post these blogs.

I only ask for the lowest possible donation ($1) so that you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night sweating about bills and tax.  Two reasons I ask you of this is 1) It would mean a lot to me and 2) I can buy more Nobel Prize Winning books.

You can even message me with recommendations of books I should cover that I haven't already have (being that the canon is huge), I'd be really interested in what you have to offer me.  In the meantime stay safe and all the best to you

  

Lofty Ideals in the Nobel Prize for Literature by Chris Meyer

Prudhomme was the very first in 1901, to be awarded literature’s greatest prize; ‘in special recognition of his … lofty ideals’. Lagerlöf eight years later; ‘in appreciation of the lofty idealism. Rolland, 1913; ‘lofty idealism…’ and Gjellerup in 1917 for ‘his rich poetry … inspired by lofty ideals.’ Clearly the Swedish Academy didn’t share the same wordsmithery of some of its early prize-winners. Nor does it share the appeal of ‘lofty idealism’. Well, maybe not since 1917 at least.

100 years later and no further mention of loftiness or idealism, combinations or cocktails thereof, the Academy found itself swamped in scandal from which it needed draining. Rape and further sexual assault, corruption, deceit, misappropriation of monies and myriad misdemeanours, another aging institute was rocked by an emboldened and woke generation, and rightly so. #MeToo. Sounding more like a series ending cliff-hanger on Netflix, the Swedish Academy decided it no longer had the trust of the public, nor quite frankly, after a run on resignations, did it have enough judges to select a winner for the 2018 award.

Lucky us then - that we get two winners of the (formerly known as) prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature; two artists to further explore and admire, two purveyors of prose pleasuring us all over again, immersed in their imaginations, poets, playwrights, authors or essayists at the top-end of their game. But I am bothered to wondering whether I’d feel just a little bit peeved if I was the 2018 winner, still to be announced.

“Congratulations to so-and-so for thingamabob, the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature…for their inspired … blah, blah, blah … lofty ideals.”

Applause. Applause. Applause.

Applause dies down.

Host retakes centre stage - lights up.

“And now onto the 2019 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not since Prudhomme have we seen such idealistic loftiness…”

And that’s it.

In an instant - in the moment of an audience gleefully letting the pins-and-needles in their hands dissipate after a sycophantically long round of applause (as if they’ve read anything by the 2018 winner anyway). It’s all - kind of - over. Yes, the press will pay you lip-service, on the evening, but already you’re just a line in a Wiki-page, or even worse still; the answer to a pub quiz tie-break question. No ‘this year’s Nobel Prize winner…” for you. No mainstage appearance at literary festivals filled with the great and good. No Oxford Union addresses. No…let’s be honest here; adulation.

Perhaps the purists among you don’t write for the adulation. Not that you’d admit it aloud. But recognition without adulation is being promoted to the bronze medal position in the discus eleven years after you’ve retired, from being a P.E. teacher, part-time, because somebody you’ve hated for a lifetime cheated. I’m just suggesting that it helps.

For what’s the point of writing if you don’t want to be heard?

And in a world in which everyone and anyone can be published at the click of a button (clearly), it can be difficult to rise above the cacophony of opinion and hackneyed nonsense, but write you must, and for adulation. Whether it be poems or essays, write. Whether it be philosophy, biography or drama, write. Write your truths and write them well, as literature can still transcend societal norms and cultural differences, the pen is mightier than the sword, as our most recent winner knows only too well.

Japanese born; Kazuo Ishiguro is Britain’s (to some contention in Japan) eleventh recipient of the Nobel prize in Literature. Awarded to him in 2017 his canon of writing he always conveys differing points of view, an ability to see things in an alternate light - probably born out of his experiencing two very different cultures, needless to remind ourselves, two warring cultures. How sublime then, given the current cultural temperature, that it takes an immigrant to pose the question of what it is to be English, in his 1989 novel; The Remains of the Day. In it he is able to fuse the servitude of the British and Japanese working class through Stevens; the novel’s unreliable narrator, but unflinchingly devoted butler to Lord Darlington. Stevens ignores his master’s cosiness to the pre-war Germans, he follows the command to fire Jewish staff members though he later regrets it, yet still disregarding his master’s political motives, in order to devote himself to a class system he could never enter. And to such cost, the cost of his own decency and in Stevens himself finding love. A message perhaps worth reminding ourselves of today. As we witness once again Britain’s penchant for far-right politics, it is worth reiterating how those with the pen fought this rhetoric of nationalism and hate.

From Orwell via Brecht, it is time again that we write for adulation for we need to be heard. Time to follow the correct masters, not out of loyalty and faith to their wealth and status but to their inspiration and education.

In accepting his Nobel Prize, Ishiguro said; ‘Can I, as a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place?’ Perhaps he can no longer, but nor should we expect him to, as it is the turn of others to now write the truths of their time, to write again with lofty idealism and fight the right to write.

And don’t forget, please, when the 2019 winner is announced later this year, mid-October, to just rewind the tape and check out the winner from 2018 and share their lofty ideals too.

Beloved

Toni Morrison, at the age of 88, has died after a short illness.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993:  

   "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."-Nobel Prize Committee.

To her family this blog acknowledges their loss and wishes them well as they cope. 

A Possibility of Something: A Case for Howard Barker to be Awarded the Nobel Prize by George Jones

“Beauty is a thing seized on a landing

While ugliness is halfway up the stairs.”

Howard Barker, Dead Hands

For most of the last three decades¹, Howard Barker has been Britain’s greatest living dramatist. Over the fifty years since his first radioplay, Barker has produced a body of work both wide and deep, ranging over poetry, drama, film, painting, and criticism. Whenever possible, he does his own lighting, costume design, sound design, and directs his own work, and despite the breadth of his talents, he manages to be extraordinarily prolific. To date, he has written sixty-three plays, two marionette plays, eleven teleplays, six books of poetry, an opera, and three collections of writings on theatre, in addition to numerous radio plays, short film scripts, and paintings. Still - prolificity alone does not make a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. In this essay, I’ll be examining what makes Barker unique as a playwright and poet, and making the argument that he should be the next Nobel laureate for literature.

One of the most immediate ways in which Howard Barker stands out from the rest of British theatre is his refusal of realism. Of course, there are other playwrights who set their plays somewhere other than the world we know, like Bryony Lavery or Howard Brenton, but most of the time those plays are still grounded in the principles of realism - the characters talk and act in much the same way that you or I would talk and act in their situation, and the setting is often a slightly altered version of our reality. Barker takes it a step further, setting each of his plays in its own self-contained universe, that does not necessarily behave according to real-world logic. His masterpiece Found In The Ground, which deals with the collective trauma of World War Two, is perhaps the finest example of this. The play works on a kind of associative, impressionistic level. The audience is presented with dogs on wheels, a headless woman who “perambulates” across the stage, a man who ritually consumes the ashes of famous Nazis (although not Hitler - “We never serve him here”) and is asked to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of it all.

I Want to say

Without temper

If possible

without the least sense of the heroic

Without even the measured ambition

to speak the truth

which is only another vulgarity

To say

I am not what I was

Indeed

I was nothing

and now I am at least the possibility

of

something

and this

I will defend²

Barker is, as one Guardian piece put it, “a champion of imagination, not ‘relevance’”³ - that is, he does not concern himself with passing comment on the issues of the day. Rather, Barker’s plays attempt to imagine what does not exist - to explore the possibilities of human behaviour. In particular, Barker returns over and over again to the theme of the perverse, in Poe’s sense of the term, to characters who do the wrong thing. Barker’s characters are driven to rebel - against society, against those who presume to judge them, even against their own moral codes - by overwhelming desires.

Barker did not name The Wrestling School - the theatre company dedicated to performing his plays - but its name is appropriate. Barker’s characters are constantly at war with themselves, torn between what is expected of them (and often, what is beneficial for them) and what they are driven towards. Barker’s conception of desire - both sexual and otherwise - is of a force both destructive and revelatory. His characters’ decisions often condemn them to suffering - and they are usually aware of this when they make their choices - but no other course of action would allow them to maintain their integrity.

Rather than seeking material advantage, or some other motive common to conventional drama, Barker’s characters are driven towards ecstasy. That word - with its connotations both religious and sexual - is key to any understanding of Barker’s art of theatre. The ecstasy Barker’s characters endure is the culmination of their desires, but it is also destructive, both to the characters themselves and on a personal level. Ecstasy in Barker’s work is a force of social disruption - something whose nature consists of the violent assertion of individuality in opposition to the group.

Another important aspect of Barker’s work is his approach to writing dialogue. Since his dramatic career shift in the mid-eighties (which I’ll cover another time, if you want to read about it), Howard Barker has eschewed conventionally “realistic” dialogue in favour of his own brand of grandly expressive, poetic speech. Barker has spoken of seeing Edward Bond’s play Saved, and of being offended by the inarticulacy of Bond’s working class characters. Barker - who grew up in a similar area to where the play is set - resolved to give his characters the same facility for language that he saw in the people he knew. As his career went on, however, his approach to this task changed. In his earlier, more social realist plays, Barker writes dialogue much like any other playwright of the era, but after his dramatic artistic shift in the eighties, he began to have his characters speak more in the register of poetry. Poetry, after all, is the art form which explores to the greatest extent language’s capacity for meaning, so it makes sense that Barker would merge his dramatic and poetic voices in the way that he has done.

Barker’s characters speak in a kind of free verse, reminiscent of the linguistic vortography of The Waste Land. They interrupt themselves mid-sentence; they pause like a poet would pause when reading; there are sudden eruptions of expression, as though characters’ deeper selves are forcing their way to the surface. The words demand to be heard; the characters often seem appalled by the truth that they reveal, frightened by their own eloquence.

As important as what the characters say is how they say it. In the jagged line breaks and shattered phrases of his dialogue, Barker creates a language that matches the chaotic and unstable environment of his stories. His language is one of extremes, both in content and delivery, and is so unlike anything else on stage today that Barkerian actors have had to develop a style of acting unique to his material. If you go to see a Barker play put on by the Wrestling School, or Lurking Truth, you will be presented with a company of actors struggling to give expression to works that defy the rules that much theatrical practice is based on. This struggle is not due to a lack of ability - both those companies are full of phenomenally talented actors - but rather to the demands that Barker places upon anyone involved in producing his work. His writing requires actors to push the limits of their abilities. His stage directions are often deliberately vague or difficult to express onstage (“an effect of light and sound,” “a grief passes between them”) and this contributes to a sense that these actors are fighting with the limitations of their art, just as Barker’s words struggle against the limitations of language.

More than his facility for language or the uniqueness of his plots, what makes Barker important - important enough to be a worthy candidate for the Nobel - is his profound and defiant uselessness. Barker’s work refuses to educate or edify; he does not intend to spur social change, or give the audience a glimpse into the lives of their neighbours; his plays are no more useful to society than the sphinx or the Mona Lisa. Barker’s philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the cult of practicality that demands all art serve some social function - he creates great plays that are designed simply to be great plays. In a culture paralysed by the market, by the belief that nothing should exist unless it can give a financial return on investment, Barker - amoral, poetic, challenging, obscure Barker - is the necessary shock to the system.

In conclusion, British drama has no-one like Barker. The continent has produced a few who can claim to be as original as him, to challenge the boundaries of theatre the way he does (Handke, Muller, Grotowski of course) but the English-speaking world has no-one who can touch him. His poetry is of exceptional quality, and he brings his keen poetic ear to his plays; the phrase, the conjunction of words, is the basic unit of all aesthetic language, and Barker is the master of the phrase. Not only is he unmatched in terms of the quality of his work, but he is a unique and underappreciated artist who deserves to be brought to wider attention.

1 With the exception of the seven hallowed years when Sarah Kane walked among us

2 This quote is the source of my title, and a fine example of Barkerian dialogue, and I wish I could remember what play it’s from

3 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/apr/29/howard-barker-playwright-relevance