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Blame it on Pound
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The contents of New Writing 10 — released recently — are fresh but not new in any significant sense. The best piece, `The Leviathan', dates from the 1930s. There is even a supermarket story, with an American flavour, which the editors put right up front to lure you in, but the collection is British, says ALLAN SEALY.
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FOR the better part of a century his dictum, make it new, has hamstrung literary endeavour. While few of the writers in the present collection obey the master, it's the publishers, busy elves, who must make slavish new and put a brave face on it. Stuck with a concept whose time has passed, what can they do but peddle it and hope that the same folk who bought New Writing 9 are back in the supermarket queue? Reach for their glossy package — blur of red, white and blue that dazzles in the hand — and you might be forgiven for checking the use-by date.
The contents are fresh, never fear, have lost no fizz on the shelf, but they're not new in any significant sense. Not in Pound's, not in the Devil's, not even in God's.
Quite the best piece in the book, Joseph Roth's "The Leviathan", lovingly translated by the poet Michael Hoffmann (who allows himself some silly footnotes along the way) dates from the 1930s. The story of a coral merchant in provincial Russia — can you get further from the new? — told in a voice of Biblical serenity, with an ending that readers of the Old Testament — can you get further from the new? — will surely cherish.
There's even a supermarket story, with an American flavour, which the editors put right up front to lure you in, but the collection is British, in a Harrod's food hall way. All climates represented in the perfect fruit baskets. A story that begins "Lilian was busy picking guavas at the side of the house when she heard the growling of the Alsatians on the stoep" has given two early hostages to the exotic. And here is a durian: "Mama died two nights ago ... Dono wy but I diden cry much."
I read the book alongside an old Graham Greene. Unfair competition, true, but then life's not fair. Greene kept drawing me while never once looking my way; the writers in this volume didn't quite stare, but I did feel looked at, even beckoned, summoned to do my duty. I did. No professional reviewer, I read manfully from cover to cover, not without enjoyment, not without profit, but also not without the kind of rapt attention every teller craves. Only Roth's tale won that, and perhaps Louis de Bernieres' black pastoral, "Rabbit". Most vivid were the period pieces: a glimpse of the tortured young Schumann tossing on sheets spattered with burn holes, riding cold unsprung coaches that stink of piss-hardened whips; Caravaggio in Dumfries; a frosty medieval English nightmare, crisper than St. Crispin and as real as Keats on St Agnes' Eve.
There are strong quiet voices here, often demotic, not always serious. Des Dillon's story, "The Blue Hen," talks over the New Improved loudhailer: things, it says, including writing, haven't got any worse even if they haven't got any better. Voices might be a nice way out of the "new" dead end. Call this volume Voices 10 and its commodity patina falls away. Voices also has the ring of truth, which the New corrupts with its marketplace anxiety. Even the most unsatisfactory piece in the book — curiously the most modern, "The Despair of Art Deco" — has a living voice that, alas, convinces.
Poetry prospers: three fine studies of fungi, some helpful hints for outback motoring, a huge and menacing wasp's nest among the pickings. Again, the more dense, allusive poems, like many of Pound's, weaken the farther they move from life. There are some bravura translations of French verse (Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Verlaine) by Ranjit Bolt, witty, forceful and apt — until you turn the page and have to endure the little yelps of self-congratulation that are inevitably part of the translator's private craft. Translators, like good Victorian children, should be seen and not heard; let publishers make good parents. Opinion is for slighter literary forms, such as the review, and confessional notes belong only to history.
Writers invariably live in the old year; publishers must inhabit the new. Pound of course didn't take his own advice seriously, mining old Japan even as the Meijis toiled to make it new. Green's mesmerising novel dates from 1938 (work that one out) and remains as fresh as the best work in this volume. New only as bread is new. After all, the pleasing thing about freshness is not that it's new — air is never new — but that it's unutterably real even as it passes, like an aroma. But let it be a little tousled like this morning's kingfisher: patient, surly, contemptuous of appearances, he got his frog in a flash of blue.
Go on, then, drop this glossy package in your trolley (only if you've already stocked up on basics). It's lighter than a feather, but be warned that it turns into a pumpkin at midnight on the 31st. Do I malign the pumpkin? Well then, it turns into a British royal coach, all gilt and bad parking.
Make it new? Rot. Make it live.
Writing 10, edited Penelope Lively and George Szirtes, copublished by Picador Books, Arts Council England, and British Council, paperback, p.318, £8.99.
Allan Sealy's book Trotter Nama won the Commonwealth Prize in 1989 for the "best first book".
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