Sad to hear today of the death of Blossom Dearie, whose work I have admired for years. She was still working in her late seventies in a New York club. A very evocative voice, by no means technically brilliant, but somehow appropriate for the songs she chose- and her piano accompaniment was always brilliantly judged. Here, someone has put on Youtube her version of the fine Michael Barr song “Try Your Wings” with lyrics by Dion McGregor, from her Verve album of 1957 (and my favourite) “Give Him The Oo-La-La” Its visual accompaniment is from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of my favourite films, with the peerless Audrey Hepburn.
I was interested by this article. The poster has been a fixture, and a talking point, in my office for a few years now. It never fails to intrigue the visitor. I saw it on a visit to Barter Books, and ordered it from them, before the avalanche of interest they report. What’s the attraction? It’s simple. And it’s true.
This was the top story on BBC News website today. When are we going to get over this obsession with celeb royals? Maybe they should be giving more attention to this. And all hail Ed Stourton, for skewering the desperately feeble “Chief Operating Officer” on the Today programme. That this came the day after the return of £6 million a year Woss to the airwaves simply added to the impression of a corporation that really needs to sort itself out.
Topsyturvydom is proud to hold this leg of the virtual tour for Charles Lambert’s The Scent of Cinnamon. This is Charles’s second major publication, following his novel Little Monsters. First, a biographical note: Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, his occupations have included kitchen hand, shop assistant, medical journal editor, guidebook writer, receptionist, teacher of political science, and journalist with ANSA, the Italian news agency. He now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples, a stone’s throw from what was once the Appian Way.
The Scent of Cinnamon has been well received- Scott Pack went so far as to say that “the majority, the vast majority, of people who routinely enjoy the Richard & Judy books would wet their knickers (or pants, but let’s face it, it would mainly be knickers) over the title story of this book.” Well, up to a point, Scott… Where I would agree is that these stories are all exquisitely crafted, showing the same attention to the telling detail that was such a feature of Little Monsters. And if anything is going to restore the popularity of short fiction in this country, it must be the publication of stories such as these, by turns humorous, surreal, disturbing, but always memorable. Here’s a short question and answer session I conducted with Charles:
RS: You mentioned when we corresponded that you are working on a novel that might loosely be described as detective fiction. In The Scent of Cinnamon, at least one story, “Moving the Needle Towards the Thread”, might be said to have some of the characteristics of that genre. Are you attracted to genre fiction? I wondered if you like to subvert it, as, say, Gilbert Adair does.
CL: Yes, I am attracted to genre fiction but, bluntly, I’m not very good at it. What tends to happen on the occasions I set out to work within a genre is that, without wanting it, I find the writing wriggling off towards something else. The story you mention is a good example. The set-up – a corpse, a murder, a murderer, a sort of confession – certainly has the characteristics of, if not quite a whodunit, a whydunit, if you like. But what happens as the piece develops is that the narrator begins to find her own certainties questioned, so that by the end of the story what began as self-justification is crumbling in her hands and she no longer has an explanation for anything, least of all her own actions. The story has become, willy-nilly and regardless of its quality, ‘literary’ fiction in that it lends itself to, indeed necessitates, more than one reading. The Number Worm also looks like a pure genre piece – a classic horror story – before veering off into (and it’s been criticized for this by one irate SF/fantasy reviewer) ‘psychological metaphor’ (quite apart from its nodding salute to a story that has almost established its own genre, “Metamorphosis”). I’m a great admirer of certain genre writers, like Stephen King, say, or Ramsay Campbell, or Ian Rankin, and I have a special place in my heart for Patricia Highsmith, who has, I think, influenced me as much as any other writer, but these are all people who are challenged and stretched by the genre they’ve chosen to work in, rather than writers like, say, Patricia Cornwell, who stay within their genre for less creative reasons (I hesitate to use the word money). I also like and admire the work of Gilbert Adair, but I wouldn’t see my use of genre as involving the kind of very knowing operation he performs so skilfully in his Christie-inspired novels. The book you mention, by the way, has already broken free of its detective fiction moorings and is heading off who-knows-where… Right now, a study of what it means to be lonely might be a more accurate one-line description.
RS: We touched on your relatively late emergence as a writer in our interview. Many reviewers have commented on the sense of craftsmanship and maturity in these stories. Has it been an advantage to do your apprenticeship in private as it were?
CL: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, talks about the numbers of hours a person needs to devote to a certain activity before becoming proficient in it. I haven’t read the book, but I think he suggests a minimum of 10,000. That would work out, roughly, as three hours a day for ten years, or one hour a day for thirty. In these terms, I’m definitely proficient, which, for me, means being aware of what I can do and of which limits I can profitably push against. Having said that, the stories in the collection cover a fair number of years and I hope they’re all both well-crafted and mature, though I’d like to think that some of the newer pieces were, if not better, perhaps more sparely written. It’s noticeable that the most recent work of, say, Bob Dylan and Alice Munro– to take names out of a mixed-genre hat of personal favourites – has a feeling of being stripped back, and I’d tend to say that maturity is also a process of freeing the text from what’s inessential and decorative. I hope that I’m doing this. As far as conducting my apprenticeship in private goes, I can take no credit for this at all. From the very start, I did everything in my power to go public and I’d still be happy to see a novel I wrote over 15 years ago sitting on readers’ shelves. Over to you, world of publishing.
RS: You’ve lived nearly all your adult life as an exile. Do you still feel as if you belong to Britain, and has your sense of place been affected by your long absence? Your novel Little Monsters moves easily between British and Italian settings, and there’s a similar breadth of setting in The Scent of Cinnamon.
CL: I’m not sure I’d choose the word ‘exile’ to describe myself, though I might if the alternative were ‘ex-pat’. I don’t feel exiled, by myself or anyone else, from Britain. At the risk of alienating readers of Private Eye or the Daily Mail, one of the papers incidentally that reviewed Little Monsters most enthusiastically, I’d like to think of myself as European and equally at home in both the UK and Italy; but that wouldn’t be true either, because what I feel is not-quite-at-home in both, which I think is the state I was aspiring to when I first left Britain. Bilingual speakers are said to achieve 100% proficiency in neither language. I’m not bilingual, though I wonder sometimes about my linguistic competence in English and Italian, but I’m certainly bicultural, by which I mean twice incomplete. I’m made aware of this most strongly when I watch programmes like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and discover that the first few questions are the ones that flummox me: I’d need to ask the audience. More seriously, I’m not sure how far I actually have a sense of place. In the sense of feeling rooted, or the need for that, I have very little. I had a fairly nomadic childhood, if only within the confines of the Midlands (from Lichfield to the Pennines, with quite a few stops in between), I’ve moved around quite a lot in Italy as well, and I’m beginning to look forward to the next country, whichever that might be. What I do have is a strong visual memory, which comes in handy, a strong curiosity in the minutiae of other people’s lives (a faculty that people who don’t have the excuse of being a writer call nosiness) and a sort of reckless belief that I can write about anything if I try hard enough. Transmitting the feel of a place, or time, is often a question of reducing detail to a minimum. There’s nothing less convincing than a sense that the author is ticking stuff off on a checklist of local colour: what I call the Bakelite ashtray syndrome. The thing that makes Penelope Fitzgerald’s other places so utterly convincing isn’t the precision of her attention – which is extraordinary – so much as the sparseness of detail. There’s a moment in Innocence when she talks about one of the characters buying school exercise books from the local Upim and it’s perfect. and all that’s needed to fix a world.
Thanks, Charles for those illuminating answers. Now, gentle reader, buy the book!
Yes, that haunting line from The Tempest. It’s one of the stories in Charles Lambert’s new collection, The Scent of Cinnamon. Topsyturvydom is proud to be one of the virtual stopping points on Charles’s virtual tour, and we will be virtually hosting him on 20th January. In the meantime, check out the tour so far at Salt, and read Charles’s always entertaining blog, which I see currently features one of my faves, David Byrne.
To Liverpool, for the Transition. My reader will recall that my views about Liverpool and its status as Capital of Culture were formed in the days when a new disaster was announced every hour on the hour, and the whole thing seemed an absolute joke. Well, time to eat my words, because, in the hands of Phil Redmond, a laughing stock was turned into a fantastic success. There’s still a tendency in Liverpool to trade on the past – come on, the Beatles split forty years ago- and a habit of trotting out the cliches about how everybody in the city has a marvellous sense of humour and community spirit – especially, and paradoxically, when something awful, such as the murder of a child, has happened. Boris Johnson, who was lampooned in the presentation, had to apologise for offending Liverpool’s delicate sensibilities by using the “victim culture” stereotype- but at the time, Liverpudlians just subscribed to another stereotype. Someone who had a similar experience to mine is the estimable Lynsey Hanley, who also mentions that bizarre phenomenon of the outdoor pyjama-wearer, but in a serious context. I noticed on my last visit to Liverpool that peculiar juxtaposition of dereliction and prosperity that she comments upon. The transition night was great fun. Big screens at the Pier Head showed a fast-changing collage of the year’s events to the accompaniment of a soundtrack that cleverly referenced everything from Sgt Pepper to the La’s (always hated that apostrophe) though, of course, Lennon’s dreadful Imagine dirge had to be in the mix. It was all narrated by a bizarre disembodied Roger McGough head. The official handover was done to the Lord Mayors of Linz and Vilnius- no speeches, as the thumping soundtrack was still going. (By the way, when did we finally crack the problem of public address systems, which, by definition, were always inaudible? At Liverpool, and in train stations, and football stadia, it’s crystal clear now). Then a huge firework display – the best I’ve ever seen, and then 30,000 people went off to roam the streets, shop, visit art galleries and museums, and generally have fun. We had a brief visit to a very crowded Tate, where we had a glimpse of Blake’s work, an even briefer visit to an even more crowded Bluecoat, and finished with an excellent pint or two at the Lion, before taking the train back to where we were staying (thanks for a great night out and, as usual, marvellous hospitality, Robert and Christine)
To a well-known supermarket (not T*sco, obviously) with ‘er indoors to purchase such Christmas baubles as we require for our frugal Winterval celebration. Amongst the seasonal tat, I discover a CD of Ella Fitzgerald for one of your English pounds, or Euros, as we now call them. A quid! I spent £2.95 on a very indifferent coffee at Piccadilly station last week. For a third of that, I get Ella with Satchmo, the Inkspots, Louis Jordan and others singing a great collection of classic tunes. I can’t think of anything for a pound that would give me greater pleasure.
Over the tannoy in a supermarket yesterday: “Can a member of price integrity go to aisle 24, please? Customer waiting.” Price Integrity? Do you think there’s a Price Integrity team? Do they have team meetings where they pledge to uphold price integrity against all threats? Do they finish with a group hug and a rousing chorus of “Simply the Best?”
A colleague (thanks Anthony!) drew my attention to this rant from Susan Hill. It’s not the first time she has expressed her views on this topic, and doubtless won’t be the last as long as GCSE and A level students see the reading of books as a chore to be got through as painlessly as possible and with the least possible effort. I don’t think it’s actually their fault: the system encourages it, and has been running like this so long now, that, as “Suze” points out, there are teachers with the same attitude. I have commented in similar fashion myself before now. Ms Hill used to publish a lively blog until she suddenly pulled it recently. At the time, I thought it might be because she’d received criticism for a post which, without apparent irony, praised Sarah Palin to the skies. I wonder if actually she just became so fed up with being accessible to all and sundry that she just felt she should concentrate on her writing. We have a generation of students now for whom failure is not possible. A “pass” rate of 97% at A level means, in essence, that you pass by turning up. Coursework can, it seems, be endlessly deferred, and multiple attempts can be made to improve it. I have had to explain very patiently to lots of students what a deadline is, and also counsel them when they relapse into shock at the notion that once work is marked, that’s it. The idea that students of Literature might actually enjoy reading is seen as a quaint one by many eighteen-year-olds. I notice a distinct difference in the attitude of older students, who accept with equanimity, and, indeed, enthusiasm, the instruction to read a book – a whole book!- for next week’s class. I don’t think there’s any way round this. We need to re-establish in schools the habit of reading, and reading entire texts rather than the bleeding chunks beloved of A level syllabuses. I’ve no confidence that this will actually happen of course.
