The Great Bloomsday Tortoise

Team Ulysses finally made it to the summit and have every reason to be proud of themselves. This was essentially a year-long online book group devoted to reading the world's second most unreadable English-language novel (actually the first, if you consider Finnegans Wake to be multi-lingual) at sixty pages a month, beginning on Bloomsday '09, ending a week last Wednesday, and hosted and led by the oft-linked-to dovegreyreader.

I left a partly encouraging, slightly patronising comment on the initial post, bestowing a handful of brief impressions of my own, as I'd begun Ulysses in December '08. I'd been working up to it for some time, having read The Odyssey in the Fagles translation at the beginning of the year, and then Dubliners and A Portrait. I was also dipping into Anthony Burgess's Here Comes Everybody, picked up second-hand a few years before, which is typically fluid, intelligent, enthusiastic.

By the time Team Ulysses began I had read around 200 pages. I toyed with the notion of taking part, but I had already been a member of a book group, and the joint-reading thing just doesn't ring my bell. (Anyway, I was well ahead of them.) Real life and other interests intervened, and when I got round to hefting Ulysses again, nearly a year had gone by. The hare had slept too long.

I have now completed 300 pages. It has gone back on the shelf. It won't be taken down again for a while. I have some sympathy with Roddy Doyle's invective against Ulysses, still more with his criticism of what he terms 'the Joyce industry', but most of all with something I heard him say in interview in 1996: at some point one has to accept that there are some books one is probably never going to read. He was talking about War and Peace (which he did in fact read, very quickly, when he was in his teens), but for me the most likely candidate is Ulysses. At some point I'll have a go at the final chapter, the famous Molly monologue, but I make no promises regarding the rest of it.

Now this is interesting, because that makes three key modernist novels I've been unable to finish: Ulysses, The Good Soldier, and That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. Perhaps I'm too bound to narrative, skewered by time's arrow, but in my more frustrated moments it seems as though modernism is simply a licence for the writer not to bother telling a story - and Al Alvarez, who if I recall correctly thinks it was the last great movement in European literature and possibly its high point, can go suck a runny egg.

From Here Comes Everybody [1965]:

[Ulysses] is, in many ways, a precursor of the new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia - something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. The 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses is a reminder that the whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested of its bullying hurry-along authority, and this is reinforced by the knowledge that the final image is of a human body, presented piecemeal in its various organs. Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has to be put in its place.

On the other hand, one only has so much of it, particularly when one sees the chapters getting longer and longer, and Joyce's accretive writing method becoming more in need of a fierce edit. The two most attractive words in the quoted section above are 'partly read'. I accept that this is close to a contradiction of a recent post on the virtues of browsing, but whaddaya know? I am legion - I mean to say, I contain multitudes.

*

I find one thing to say without equivocation in defence of Ulysses, and have said it before: one does get to know Bloom to a degree that one simply doesn't and can't with the characters in Dubliners. (Dubliners, I should say, is one of the very few books which I think demonstrates art in prose, as opposed to craft, and which I would urge other people to read without feeling I was being an unjustified nuisance.) Orwell says something of the same in his essay on Dickens:

You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Pierre Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to - Bloom, for instance [...]

Just so, and this is down to the space that a novel affords, and to the terrific expansion in technique beyond the standard tropes of realism which Joyce made use of in Dubliners, the famous 'stream-of-consciousness' which has been very interesting to see at work.

The more Bloom is exposed, the more one sees of his various aspects (or inspects, as so much of what we read is internal mumblings, half-finished thoughts and reflections, flashes of desire and surges of memory), the more one appreciates him. Among other things, he is much more sympathetic than any of the Dubliners: kind, tolerant, humble, fallible - in fact, the complete opposite to his Homeric counterpart, who is cunning, proud, violent, resourceful, respected - a king, not an advertising canvasser - and of course fiercely protective of his wife's virtue, whereas Bloom is a cuckold perfectly aware and accepting of his position.

According to the introduction by Jeri Johnson in the OWC edition of Ulysses, Joyce saw that the ancient heroic attributes could not be applied to modern urban life, and sought to present an everyman heroic in his ordinariness, his life being lived internally rather than through action. It's an interesting notion, particularly in the light of a criticism by Gore Vidal:

Until the last century the mainline of imaginative literature had always been stories of the gods, heroes, kings of a people. From Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoi, what went on in the palaces or on Olympus provided the main line of narrative in verse, prose, drama. [What about The Beggar's Opera? Tom Jones? Simplicissimus? But perhaps these are stops on a branch line.] I think it a pity that, as a character in Saul Bellow's Herzog remarks, somewhere around 1840 the novel fell into the quotidian, to which Professor Herzog irritably asks, So where was it standing before it fell? The answer was in myth or history or whatever narrative is back of us.

[From the introduction to Creation.]

I'm not convinced by either argument, but I see the merits of both. It is of course Joyce's right to rework the ancient myths for modernity (and Modernism), but with considerable relief I'm going back to Richard III.

Changing tastes

Recently got a text from a former colleague who is now also working furth of the book trade: a relief, she says, as she's rediscovered her enjoyment of books. Orwell experienced something similar:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro.

I'm not sure that I ever had to lie about a book (this is one of Orwell's characteristic, too-strong assertions; time and again one admires the cadence and force of one of his sentences, and agrees with the bulk of the sentiment, while being unable to entirely submit to his fiat) but one does have to learn the market, recognise what certain types of people are likely to want to buy, and simply accept that one won't approve of an awful lot of it.

In my experience, even when I was asked for advice, people very rarely took it: instead, I would present them with no more than three options, often only two, and let them get on with it. You could actually see them making their decision in the first few moments, and even when they asked about the merits of Y over X, they would almost always go for their first choice. It was very, very rare for customers to actually listen to what you were saying. Perhaps I didn't lie often enough - or maybe I should have read Gladwell's Blink. Certainly it proved that the cover of a book is terribly important.

Anyway, since leaving bookselling I've had the opposite reaction to my friend: books no longer seem as vital as they once did. Partly it's because I am no longer in the daily swim of things, peripherally aware of even the dross which contributes to the front-of-store bricklaying, let alone the fruitful oddities of customer orders. I don't regard this with any particular sadness. It's a reflection of growing older, changing priorities, developing new perspectives, and in any case I've always been of the opinion that one should never forget that books are, in the final analysis, a handy source of fuel. What matters is the stories, which don't rely exclusively on print.

The process actually began prior to leaving, when Bastardstone's saw fit to introduce staff searches. No longer could you blithely bring in your two or five or twelve titles, proofs, sample chapters, library copies: everything had to be signed in, every day and - this was what drove me hog-wild with fury - had to be witnessed by other people. What in the name of fuck was this? Scotland in the 21st century, or the 17th? I could just about have tolerated the signing-in, on the grounds that if anyone had suspicions of jiggery-pokery, there would be some means of checking what one declared against what one possessed. But the introduction of the staff searches, the proofs becoming store property until being signed out, and the everyone-is-guilty-until-proven-innocent-before-the-kirk attitude killed off the last of my enjoyment. I stopped bringing books into work, and nearly stopped buying them.

Because I needed something to do on the bus I began listening to classical music again, after a nigh-on twenty-year hiatus, and so got back into Beethoven, discovered Mozart, Copland, Boccherini (through, yes, Master and Commander), and am making some progress with Schumann who, it turns out, was my maternal grandfather's favourite composer. I can recommend the following recordings in particular:

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20; Clifford Curzon with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten

Beethoven Piano Sonatas 8, 14, 21; Wilhelm Kempff

These are very well known pieces, and recordings, to anyone who knows anything about classical music, but I pass them on with the unashamed enthusiasm which only an amateur or newbie can muster. The Kempff has some dropped notes here and there, but I understand that's almost inevitable unless you are Maurizio Pollini; both Curzon and Kempff seem to me display concentration but not overt seriousness, they're not showy but they don't let the music play itself either.

Finally, here's a link to a YouTube video of Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann's Traumerei in Moscow in 1986. If I read it right, this was his first return to Russia in over sixty years. The reaction of the audience is fascinating.

On bookselling

From Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's by Brian Aldiss:

Those were years of revelation for me. Every day brought new discoveries. I fell into books in my eagerness to catch up on all those years lost in the sun [military service in Burma]. History, psychology, philosophy, biography, literature, art: the bookshop became my library. When Sanders promoted me to buyer of new books, I ordered from publishers whatever interested me. I believed that if I filled the shop with books I liked I would have no difficulty in selling them.

That is a pathetic fallacy (and who among us, who have worked in bookshops, has not fallen into it?) because, as Orwell recalls in 'Bookshop Memories' (published 1936):

...the thing that struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one.

Almost everything Orwell has to say in this essay is still relevant to bookselling today - though here his habitual pessimism and misanthropy seem to have failed him:

Also [bookselling] is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point.

It all depends, I suppose, which point you have in mind.