Nick Hornby: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006)

Nick Hornby writes an approximately monthly column for American literary magazine The Believer, entitled Stuff I've Been Reading. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree collects the first three years or so of this column (September 2003 to June 2006), and, even though it is quite a short book, the contents were originally published by the magazine in two smaller volumes; a third has since appeared, according to Wikipedia, so the title is no longer accurate. Not precisely a book review column, Stuff I've Been Reading is basically a short essay about books, themed around whatever Nick Hornby has happened to read (or, in many cases, what he has bought intending to read but hasn't). Its piecemeal nature makes it not as compelling to read in one go as his book on music, 31 Songs, but being Hornby, it is extremely funny and often thought provoking.

I did get tired of the running joke which gives the book its title. Hornby claims that The Believer is run by a cult-like group of individuals in white robes, and names this group the Polysyllabic Spree (a reference, in case you don't know, to the rock group The Polyphonic Spree). The point is that The Believer has a review policy that reviewers should not be overly critical: the point of the journal is to encourage a love of books, not to allow reviewers to make points at the expense of writers. (This is of course paradoxical, making a point at the expense of other literary magazines...)

One of the interesting things to me about The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is just how little my reading and Nick Hornby's reading overlap. I've read a lot, and he's read a lot, but of the hundred or more books discussed here, we have both read fewer than a dozen. Our tastes differ. He has an interest in recent history and political commentary which I don't, while I read a lot of science fiction, a genre which he freely admits is alien to him - he describes reading Iain Banks' Excession, in an attempt to break new ground, but gives up after only a few pages, finding it virtually incomprehensible. (It's probably not an ideal choice as a science fiction starter, being set in an idiosyncratic milieu already well established from the earlier Culture novels, and being written in a way which assumes familiarity which the genre in the reader. Thinking about what he should have read: that's a blog post in itself.) His descriptions have prompted me to look out for three books: Never Mind, by Edward St Aubyn (not itself mentioned, but the first of a series which is), Francis Wheen's When Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, and John Carey's What Good Are the Arts?


The biggest problem with The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is that the material in the book was not intended to be read consecutively. It certainly gives the impression that no editing was done to make them fit better into the book format. This means that the overall impression is not as favourable as it would be to reading the columns one at a time, with a month or more separating them, which means that my final rating is 6/10.


Edition: Penguin, 2007
Review number: 1452

T.S. Eliot: The Sacred Wood (1920)

Edition: University Paperbacks, 1960 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1022

The poetry of the past was extremely important to T.S. Eliot, and he wrote a fair amount of criticism. This is quite an early collection of essays, mainly about Elizabethan and Jacobean poetic drama. In most of them, the emphasis is on where earlier critics had gone wrong in their assessments of the significance and stature of the poets. While Eliot's writing is (unsurprisingly) insightful, this theme of re-examination and the tone in which it is carried out does make him seem very arrogant. (In the introduction to the second edition, he did say that some of his opinions had changed, without going into details about which, precisely.)

Generally, what Eliot has to say is interesting if rather academic. (Apart from anything else, there are untranslated quotations in at least three different languages.) He is particularly scathing about Gilbert Murray as a populariser of ancient literature - comparing a Greek actor speaking Euripides to an English one in his translation of Medea, he says that at least the original performer had the advantage of lines in his own language. With the concentration of the essays in general on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, it is the essays on Marlowe and Jonson which are the most illuminating.

Asbjorn Aarseth: Text and Performance: Peer Gynt and Ghosts (1989)

Edition: MacMillan, 1989 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 701

As part of a series aimed at sixth form and undergraduate study of drama, Aarseth writes about two of Ibsen's best known plays, Peer Gynt and Ghosts. They are both among his more complex, though the have little else in common. Parts of Peer Gynt, in particular, can seem almost incomprehensible, and it often seems especially strange on stage. (It was written to be read rather than performed, like Goethe's Faust.)

The structure of the book is to discuss the text of each play first, and then their performance histories, with two case studies for each (one Scandinavian, one in London). Each section is really too short for a detailed discussion to develop, and Aarseth concentrates on one aspect in the textual analysis, the themes which are frequently lost in translation from Norwegian. Much is made, for example, of the animal imagery in Peer Gynt. Traditional animal metaphors are difficult to translate, because they carry meanings beyond their literal words, and often the sense is retained in translation at the expense of the animal. This is quite important, because the major theme of the play is the nature of human as opposed to animal nature.

Most of what Aarseth has to say is interesting; the problem is that it is not enough. Even concentrating on certain aspects of each play, he can only be relatively sketchy, and there are many interesting questions about which he has nothing to say at all. By fitting into what I suspect are the confines of the series, the interest of the book is diminished.

John Sutherland: Where Was Rebecca Shot? (1998)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998
Review number: 624

The third of John Sutherland's collections of short essays on literary puzzles looks at modern (twentieth century) literature, from Henry James' Wings of the Dove to Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Each essay, taken by itself, is thought provoking and interesting, even if you have not read the novel under discussion (though they are probably a bit too revealing to read if you don't want to know what happens before reading).

To read them through in one go, as I have done, reveals a certain repetitiveness. A large number of the essays are concerned with discrepancies in the treatment of time, such as the non-mention of the Suez crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and possible resolutions of these difficulties. (In this case, Sutherland suggests it is deliberate and ironic on the part of the novelist, emphasising his central character's ignorance of the fact that his cherished patriarchal world is about to be finally destroyed as the incompetence of establishment figures as Eden is demonstrated incontrovertibly.) The repetition does serve to show just how much readers are willing to accept from a novelist in terms of manipulation of time without even noticing it.

Since many of the novels discussed are relatively recent, Sutherland has been able to approach some of the authors for responses to his essays. In fact, most seem to have chosen not to comment, which is understandable. (I suspect that many authors get tired of others reading things into their work which were not deliberately placed there, and would want to echo Samuel Beckett's "No symbols where none intended".) Most of the response section, in fact, consists of the view of those who worked on screenplays of the novels; this is a good idea, since the literal detail of film means that problems not immediately apparent to a reader have to be urgently solved.

The most interesting essays are those which are not purely literary, such as the discussion of Rambo knives and the different reactions to them by British and American audiences of the film of First Blood, or the literary origins of erotic auto-asphyxiation. The most enjoyable is an entertaining roundup of the Hitchcock style cameo appearances made by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and Martin Amis in their own novels.

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)

Edition: Granada, 1977
Review number: 614

Woolf's extended essay on women and literature (based on talks given at Cambridge University women's colleges) is one of her best pieces of writing. Her basic argument is simple. The reason that there were so few top rank female authors before the twentieth century is because women have in general had hard lives. They have mostly been the ones principally responsible for bringing up children (not to mention bearing them in the first place), and they have been subject to male domination which has denied them such useful attributes for a writer as education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. (This is the point of the title, as Woolf expresses her thesis succinctly by saying that what a woman needs to write is a room of her own and a guaranteed private income.)

The argument could be applied equally well in just about every field of human culture: philosophy, science, fine art, music are obvious examples. In most of these areas, the pattern is similar, with a massive improvement in the representation of women at the highest level as the twentieth century has progressed. In fact, I think that in English literature, the most prolific and most reprinted authors are both women, though I would not give either many points for quality (I'm talking about Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton).

The thesis doesn't necessarily hold literally in individual cases. One of the most successful authors currently writing is Joanna Rowling, and she wrote a large part of her first novel in cafes in Edinburgh because it was cheaper than heating her home - neither a room of her own nor a guaranteed income.

While there are certainly more top quality women writers today, the position they hold is still not as secure as that of male authors - one of the most prestigious league tables of twentieth century literature produced to mark the year 2000 was strongly criticised because it contained so few women (of 100 novels listed, there were only eight by female authors). This has led some feminists to try to exaggerate the importance and ability of writers simply because they were women (and similar moves have been made to champion the achievements of other groups which have not made a huge impact for the same reasons, such as writers from developing countries). Unfortunately, this does not have the desired effect and tends to bring ridicule to those involved. It is not a trap into which Woolf falls; she dismisses some of the earliest female poets who were basically gifted by amateur and untutored noblewomen with plenty of leisure. (A poor education is a serious handicap for a writer.)

Once women began to write (Woolf citing Aphra Behn as the first true female author in English), they changed literature. Men, Woolf says, had tended to write about women as sexual and romantic objects; even Shakespeare heroines are generally important as characters through relationships with men. Woolf suggests that women characters with interests other than marriage and family are a late nineteenth century phenomenon, but that is partly because she dismisses George Eliot for a different reason (effectively, because she stooped to using a man's name for the purposes of publication), and it seems to me that Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch is an obvious earlier example.

While not always persuading me to accept the details of it, Woolf presents her general argument very well. It is perhaps most strikingly expressed in the famous example she gives of a fictitious equally gifted sister of Shakespeare who remains uneducated, runs away from home to escape a distasteful marriage, is laughed at when she tries to get work as an actor, and ends up killing herself after being seduced by actor-manager Ned Greene.

C.S. Lewis: The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964)

Edition: Cambridge University Press, 1967
Review number: 470

C.S. Lewis introduces us to medieval and Renaissance literature by describing the medieval world view, which he calls the Model. Some parts of this will be familiar to most of those who know something of medieval history, theology or philosophy, or who have read some of the typical literature of the period. However, some of what Lewis has to say was new and illuminating even to someone like myself, fascinated with the medieval period.

The Model can perhaps be seen in its most complete form in Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and Dante's Divine Comedy, but it informs and influences just about every work of literature from the period and continues to resonate until the seventeenth century (Lewis citing many examples of its use by Milton, for example). An explanation is given for the existence of the Model, for the overall shape it took, and for the ways it can be seen in literature (concentrating on the more obscure, more easily misunderstood or more easily overlooked references as far as modern readers are concerned).

Lewis attributes the origins of the Model are attributed to two factors: the medieval passion for orderly classification (he goes so far as to say that the modern invention most likely to be admired by a medieval thinker would be the card index), combined with the reverence for authoritative writing which means that truth was seen in even the most fantastic works of classical poetry. The first trait is in some manner present in all ages; it was one of the founding principles of modern science, for example. But symmetry was sought where it would not be expected by a modern thinker - paralleling the four elements which make up the universe with the four humours inside the body, for example. The second trait is more unusual, and can explain much about medieval culture: the liking for allegorical interpretation, for example, is useful in that it makes it possible to see underlying meanings which agree in works which disagree on the surface but which must both be true as both are authorities.

The elements which make up the Model are very varied in origin, including the Bible, the church fathers, and Greek and Roman philosophers and poets (the Greek ones mainly through Latin translations and digests). To synthesise these contradictory elements was quite an achievement in itself, and that so much supremely great literature could be inspired by it and derived from it a greater one still.

Dennis Kay: Shakespeare: His Work, Life and Era (1992)

Edition: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992
Review number: 401

As yet another biography of Shakespeare, a book needs to have something different about it to fight its way through all the others. Apart from his eminence which means that there is much competition, his life also suffers from a scarcity of hard facts as opposed to legends. Kay's particular slant is to aim to place the plays and poems in the context of the life and the times. It is almost more a work of literary criticism than a biography, if unfashionably centred on the author rather than the reader. He has little to say about the life that isn't well known, his descriptions of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and theatrical history are more interesting, but it is his summaries of the themes and circumstances of the plays themselves that are the finest parts of the book. Each play gets about four pages, little enough space to describe them; but Kay is able to illuminatingly set out the themes which show Shakespeare's concerns and development as a writer. He is unfailingly orthodox, keen to avoid the strange obsessive flights of the imagination that characterise many writers on Shakespeare, most obviously (recently) Ted Hughes. He does not want to use the writings to illuminate the life, a dangerous but common practice, but vice versa.

The book has a terrible index (but even that is more than Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being). Every play is given space in the book, but some are not listed at all in the index.

Vera Mowry Roberts: The Nature of Theatre (1971)

Edition: Harper & Row, 1971
Review number: 374

This book, a description of the forms and development of drama, came out almost thirty years ago, and its age shows, especially in the chapters on cinema and television. Its analysis is very conventional, based around the ideas traditionally associated with Aristotle's Poetics.

Roberts is particularly keen to distance live theatre from cinema and television, partly because there are clear similarities but principally I suspect because she has a somewhat elitist agenda and wants to make the reader feel that theatre is "better" without explicitly saying so. All three are indeed dramatic arts, involving an interaction between actors and audience. It is the nature of that interaction which is different in each one (ignoring the existence of documentary films, news and other non-dramatic forms in television especially). In television and film, a performance is mediated through the screen, allowing the use of techniques such as multiple camera viewpoints and location shooting which cannot readily be utilised in theatre. The almost universal use of recorded material as opposed to live performance is another source of difference, as is the fact that the actor is performing to a host of machines and their operators rather than an audience; both these change the relationship of the actors to their work. The major difference between film and television is the intimacy achieved by the latter with small screens inside the home. In the theatre, the actors and the audience are physically present in the same space, each constantly reacting to the other. This produces a different kind of intimacy, though it makes impossible most of the commonplace effects of film and television.

Having put the relationship between actors and audience at the heart of the theatrical experience, Roberts spends most of the book discussing theatre from a different point of view, the analysis of playscripts. There are several reasons for this. Scripts are permanent, while performances are not. Verbal descriptions of performances can convey little, and even films of a performance cannot communicate all that is happening (which is why watching a video of a stage show taken through one stationary camera is not as satisfying as being present at the performance and seeing it from the same viewpoint). Scripts (together with performing spaces) constitute the raw material from which theatre is made - in almost every case. There is a vast body of criticism already in existence analysing theatre through scripts, from Aristotle onwards, some of which has in turn influenced the writing of plays through the ages. Yet, given where Roberts places the central aspect of the theatrical experience, such a description is rather unsatisfying. It would be interesting and unusual to read an analysis of what passes between actor and audience, though it would be much more difficult to write.

The vast amount and variety of drama means that in a book that attempts a holistic description of theatre the reader can probably find exceptions to almost every generalisation. The conservative nature of Roberts' book makes this even more likely. She doesn't talk about non-Western theatre traditions at all, and religious ritual, out of which Western theatre developed, is only mentioned in the historical survey. Nevertheless, it is an interesting summary within its limitations.

Ted Hughes: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992)

Edition: Faber and Faber, 1993
Review number: 258

One of the last books written by Ted Hughes, this monumental piece of literary criticism aims to show connections between the plots and imagery of many of Shakespeare's plays. These connections are based around what Hughes calls 'the Tragic Equation', derived from the two early poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The supposed fascination of Shakespeare with this theme is based on Hughes' reading of the spirit of the Elizabethan age, with the barely suppressed warfare between Catholic and Puritan reflected in the unconscious of a sensitive man like Shakespeare. (The two poems are explained as expressions of the central 'myths' of Catholicism and Puritanism respectively, Venus and Adonis dealing with the power of the Goddess - whether the Virgin or the Church is intended, Hughes doesn't say, and The Rape of Lucrece the downfall of the Goddess at the hands of Yahweh. The fact that these interpretations of the poems would be deeply offensive to both devout Catholics - the idea of the Virgin or the Church as a sensualist! - and evangelical Protestants - God as a rapist! - is not even considered.)

The Tragic Equation synthesised from these poems' themes goes something like this. The tragic hero falls in love with the pure woman; a moment of double vision means he sees her also as the faithless "Queen of Hell"; in rage, he destroys her, or himself; sometimes he or she returns to fuller life to end the play on a note of redemption.

There are, I think, many problems with Hughes' general idea. The major problems seem to stem from his own captivation with it, which makes him rather unwilling to consider other possible interpretations of the plays. The offensiveness of his Catholic and Puritan interpretations of the poems which has already been mentioned is a good example of this.

Hughes develops the Tragic Equation from play to play as he sees Shakespeare's use of it growing in understanding (which may be - probably to Hughes should be - unconscious); however, from a sceptical point of view, he ends up tailoring the details of the Equation to fit the play. The play that his analysis illuminates most is Othello, which is probably not coincidentally the play which the bare version of the Equation given above fits best. (The moment of double vision, caused by Iago's false but convincing accusation of Desdemona, and its expression by Othello, is the basis for one of the best sections of the book.)

There is a tendency to argue without supporting evidence, as when Hughes takes the view that the plays Pericles Prince of Tyre and The Tempest, which he views as the culminating use of the Tragic Equation, reflect Shakespeare's integration of mystical Gnostic parables with the equation. Hughes takes the popularity of the philosophical ideas of the Gnostics among the Jacobean intelligentsia on the one hand and Shakespeare's use of similar imagery and themes (to do with rebirth and a spiritual journey to enlightenment) on the other, and says the two must be connected. But, like the Equation itself, there is a lack of evidence that Shakespeare was really doing this. The connecting themes are sufficiently vague - and certainly part of the orthodox Christianity which every Elizabethan and Jacobean was taught as a child - that it would be possible to see them in just about any work of art; and to see a connection in the use of flower imagery is to my mind just silly.

Hughes is strongest, as you would expect from a poet of his calibre, when analysing Shakespeare's language in detail. His linked discussions of Shakespeare's use of neologisms and of the word "and" to create poetic effects are particularly interesting. ("And" is often used to connect two contrasting ideas, instantly creating a vivid picture in the imagination.)

Other than his eye for detail, the strongest points in the book are the analyses of the lesser known plays, such as Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens and Pericles. In general, Hughes' ideas are interesting and thought provoking, but just not convincing.

A final, minor, point: a book of this length and complexity should really have been given an index.