Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”

Posted on | January 25, 2012 | No Comments

“When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire”.  In abrupt sentences, as stark as the icy landscape in which it’s set, Jack London tells the story of a prospector walking a deserted trail over a frozen river in the Yukon gold-fields.

It’s cold – so cold that spit freezes before it hits the ground, and any area of nose or cheek left uncovered goes numb. Accompanied only by his husky dog, ignoring the advice of the old-timers that at fifty below, you should not travel alone, the man falls into one of the deadly ‘traps’ set by the extreme cold, and with feet soaked in icy water, is suddenly dependent for his life upon the ability of unresponsive and quickly freezing fingers to complete the simple task of striking a match. It’s a gripping battle.

I love this story: you can’t help willing the man not to drop his last matches in the snow as you feel his limbs slowly freezing. There are echoes of London’s own extraordinary life-story here: he himself joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897, and saw landscapes like these first hand. But this is more than a simple adventure story. London pits his protagonist against the elements, but the man has no chance of winning against forces so enormous and desolate. In such extreme cold, the body itself becomes no more than a set of mechanisms, puny and ineffectual against the ice. It’s not just snow he’s up against, it’s the universe, as the “cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet”. And the universe will always win.

There’s an added layer of interest here for writers too, because the best-known version of the story is actually a re-draft of a piece London had published six years previously, early in his career. Comparing the versions is fascinating: the first is a simple man-against-nature adventure story, well-told but ultimately thin on character and theme and lacking in literary stickiness. Given six years to develop as a writer, London takes the same tale and turns it into a stark musing on man’s place in nature.

You can read the better-known 1908 version of “To Build a Fire” online here.

You can also compare the earlier, rougher version of the story from 1902 here.

 

Three Christmas Ghost Stories

Posted on | December 13, 2011 | No Comments

For a bit of fun this Christmas I’ve written three Christmassy ghost stories and published them on the Kindle. You can download all three for 89p, and all profits will be donated to the charity for single homeless people, Crisis.

A visit from the mother-in-law at Christmas takes a sinister turn, a Cathedral choirboy finds something nasty in the crypt, and a city high-flyer hears something coming down the chimney, but it’s certainly not jolly.

Download the collection from Amazon here.

Have a look at my small plays

Posted on | November 13, 2011 | No Comments

Found me through the Arthur Recreates blog and looking for something else diverting to while away a few minutes? Check out my Small Plays About My Day blog. They’re tiny plays that happened to me when I worked in a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London. They’re all true. Here’s a taster:

Sea Stories: A Small Play About My Day

Man in Denim Jacket: Ah, hello, yes, you’ve got a book in the window, it’s called, um… it’s …
Emily: Which window is it in?
Man in Denim Jacket: What was it called now …
Emily: It’s easiest if you tell me which window it’s in, then I can get it for you.
Man in Denim Jacket: It was something about the sea. Sea Stories, that was it.
Emily: Right, I don’t know the book, so if you just tell me where it is in the window…
Man in Denim Jacket: Oh I know where it is. It’s here.
Emily: This one?
Man in Denim Jacket: No.
Emily: Maybe if you go outside and point to it, then I can find it.
Man in Denim Jacket: Oh it’s this one. No, that’s not it. It was called Sea Stories.
Emily: If you point to it from outside…
Man in Denim Jacket: I’ll point to it from outside.
(Exit man in denim jacket. Pause. Enter man in denim jacket.)
Emily: You didn’t point to it.
Man in Denim Jacket: It’s that one.
Emily: Spa Towns of England?
Man in Denim Jacket: Yes, I’ll take it.
Emily: Right.
Man in Denim Jacket: I was thinking of Bath Spa. Bath water. Sea water. It’s funny, I’m usually good with words.

More plays here – www.smallplays.com

Mad Scientists and Literary Experiments

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

Article for Litro.co.uk

Aldous Huxley reckoned science and literature were alike because both observe the world and attempt to interpret it in words. Fair enough, but when science is described in literature, there’s some pretty poor methodology on show. If real scientists ever behaved like their fictional counterparts, Dolly the Sheep would have headed up an ovine clone army intent on world domination.

Some dubious experiments crop up in early literature, like Icarus testing his dad’s aeronautical design with scant regard for health and safety guidelines, or Dr Faustus deciding that after nailing all the academic subjects, his next step should be to try summoning a devil (I’d like to have seen the funding application for that one).

The Enlightenment brought about a revolution in scientific method, and nothing was off-limits to the enquiring mind. Authors like Jonathan Swift sent up the hubris of the harebrained experimentalists. Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado on his Travels, where bearded boffins carry out ridiculous experiments, from extracting sun from cucumbers to “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food.”

Mad scientists were soon getting down to business, meddling with incomprehensible forces and unleashing uncontrollable evils with wild abandon. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein made his appearance in 1818, for some reason under the impression that reanimating a corpse might turn out alright. Frankenstein is the daddy of many crazed fictional offspring, from unhinged vivisectionist Dr. Moreau to wild-eyed time machinist Doc Emmett Brown.

The Victorian era saw the appearance of a plethora of fictional scientists whose methods would make a peer-review panel blush. In Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll goes for the trusty experimental method known as “downing the stuff yourself to see what happens”.

Jekyll manages to separate out the dark, animalistic part of his character with such success that it needs its own moniker and a separate entrance to his house. Unfortunately, instead of refining the civilised part of the human soul too, Jekyll is eventually destroyed by Hyde. (Never would have happened if he’d done trials on mice first.)

In H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man, Griffin discovers the secret of invisibility, a condition which sends him mad. Although, just how sane he starts out is questionable: laughing in the face of the concept of controlled clinical trials, he also decides that the most effective way of proving his theory is to try it out on himself.

Raving researchers aside, science and satire have remained close companions: in 1925, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Professor Preobrazhensky implants a human pituitary gland and testicles into a stray dog in The Heart of a Dog. The mutt Sharik turns into a human, but with his dog’s habits intact, he’s coarse and boorish with a terrible taste in ties (and if dogs wore ties, they would surely be terrible ones). Sharik becomes a send-up of Communism’s grand experiment to transform the proletariat into New Soviet man.

The temptation to mix pseudo-scientific experiment and the supernatural has been too much for some authors to resist. Experimenting on spectres never turns out well, as a rule. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a Dr Montague (where he got his doctorate is never specified), decides it would be a good idea to choose his researchers based, not on their scientific credentials or academic publication record as you might expect, but on their state of mental imbalance, reasoning that the needy and unstable are more likely to see ghosts. (An approach later adopted by the production team of ITV2’s Ghost Hunting with the Happy Mondays,who came up with the genius idea of locking Sean Ryder in a haunted cellar with a camera.)

The Haunting of Hill House is a genuinely unsettling book, uncovering more about neurosis than it does about spooks. Dr Montague’s experiment doesn’t prove the existence of ghosts, but it does prove that locking four unbalanced people in a house produces unpleasant results. And for all their similarities, that’s where science and literature part company. Scientific experiments attempt to prove things about the world around us, whereas the literary experiment is more interested in what’s inside.

Article for Litro.co.uk

 

Can Fiction Give Life To Childbirth?

Posted on | March 3, 2011 | No Comments

My article on the Guardian Books Blog:

 

What does giving birth feel like? It’s become a pressing question for me, as I’m due to do it myself in five weeks’ time. No one can give me an answer. “Oh, it’s an unforgettable experience,” mums coo. Then add, “I can’t describe it; you forget the pain.” Make your mind up!

Can literature provide an answer? Surely one of the greats has nailed it, and can explain how an event can be simultaneously unforgettable and impossible to remember?

My antenatal teacher claims the best description of labour in literature was written by a bloke…. click to read more at the Guardian Books Blog.

Writing as if you’re telling the story: Once Upon a Wartime at the Imperial War Museum

Posted on | February 20, 2011 | No Comments

Article for Litro.co.uk

It’s the first time I’ve been to the Imperial War Museum since I was 11 and I’m a bit disorientated, so I ask a member of staff where the Once Upon a Wartime exhibition is. “See the Sherman tank in the corner?” he says, pointing to a monstrous tank surrounded by kids with clipboards. “Just behind that.”  It’s a good introduction to the idiosyncrasies of the museum’s collection of weapons and war and the constant stream of school parties of shrieking kids moving between them.

Once Upon a Wartime is a new exhibition at the IWM exploring the themes of loyalty, separation, excitement, survival and identity in children’s war literature, with a focus on four classic books: Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, Bernard Ashley’s Little Soldier, Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War and Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword.

In the way of the modern museum exhibit aimed at children, the exhibition seems rather sparse to adult eyes. It’s beautifully presented, and has a lot to interest kids, but perhaps is a touch style over substance for older visitors.

But the best bits, from the point of view of anyone interested in literature, are the sections on the writers themselves. There are recordings of each talking about their work, and glimpses into their writing processes in the form of notebooks and manuscripts. Michael Morpurgo writes his stories by hand then reads them aloud to a friend, who types a manuscript, a page of which is on display, with Morpurgo’s corrections. You can see Bernad Ashley’s pocket-sized ideas notebook, and Ian Serraillier’s “plot book”, where he kept notes on his characters and on the complex mess of war-torn Europe he had to navigate them through, and the school exercise book from which Robert Westall read The Machine Gunners aloud to his adolescent son in an attempt to win his attention, changing bits if he found them boring.

What comes out of the exhibition is the ability of great children’s literature, especially when dealing with a subject as visceral as war, to forget for a while that it’s meant to be children’s literature at all, and simply become literature, ageless, plain and powerful.

Michael Morpurgo says that “I try to write as if I’m telling the story … as if I’m telling my best friend,” and it’s a quality all these books share – an immediacy of narrative and a vibrancy of experience that many adult novels lack. I’m working my way through them again, revisiting the vivid scenes of Bawden’s Druid’s Bottom, Westall’s Garmouth and and Seraillier’s Warsaw that I remember so clearly from my childhood, and enjoying War Horse and Little Soldier for the first time.

It’s easy to forget the label of children’s literature as I read. The Machine Gunners hardly seems like a children’s book at all, beyond the fact that some of its main characters are kids. Shot through with the constant threat of death on the Home Front, it hints at the harsh realities of bereavement, orphaned children, prostitution and cowardice.

In the exhibition, Robert Westall talks about his lack of that clichéd “sense of wonder” as a child. “To me [...] the wonder was in the adults. I wanted to be an adult from the age of 5.” This is also the grim effect war has on children in The Machine Gunners, making them more grown-up than the grown-ups around them, until they end up robbing corpses, stealing and opening fire with a real gun. It’s a harrowing read, and I’d recommend it, whatever age you are.

What Once Upon a Wartime also achieves, sometimes brilliantly, is to show glimpses of the reality behind the fiction. There’s a letter on display addressed to Lord Kitchener, written during the drive to requisition horses for the war effort. It’s from a little girl called Frida, who is, she says,  “…writing for our pony which we are very afraid may be taken for your army. Please spare her. [...] It would break our hearts to let her go. We have given two others and three of our own family are now fighting for you in the Navy.” (A good sense of priorities in her list: the horses, then the family members serving.)

It’s a relief to see a scribbled reply from Lord Kitchener’s office, reassuring Frida that “no horses under 15 hands shall be requisitioned.” I imagine Betty the pony safe in a quiet field on an English farm, the war to her only the distant rumble of passing planes.

Once Upon a Wartime is on at the Imperial War Museum London until 30^th October.

Article for Litro.co.uk

How Do You Shelve Your Books?

Posted on | February 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

Article for Litro.co.uk

It’s official: Amazon now sells more e-books in the US than it does paperbacks. The gradual disappearance of the physical book could be the long-awaited solution to that old problem: how do you organise your bookshelves?

It’s a subject close to my heart; we’re moving house soon and the whole issue is going to raise its ugly head again. I work in a bookshop, so I like to think that shelving books is a bit of a skill of mine. I go by subject: short stories on the short story shelf, history on the history shelf, that kind of sensible approach. At the shop, making shelf labels for obscure subjects is one of the perks of the job. Some of my favourites are the Hobos and Tramps section, the Knots shelf, Books About Other Books, the Sundial section, and Holmes Clones (original Sherlock Holmes books have their own section: this is strictly imitators only).

When I snoop the bookshelves at other people’s houses (come on, we’ve all done it), I’m checking their shelving system as well as the titles. (The Da Vinci Code next to Dostoyevsky? These people are sick.)

The trouble starts with the clash of two systems. My partner is an advocate of colour-coding. According to him, the easiest way to find that Bukowski book he’s after is to remember it had a reddish-yellow spine, and so will be found in the yellow section, at the red end of the spectrum, in the front room. I suspect myself that this is one of those obsessive bloke things, and he just likes the pretty rainbow colours the books make on the wall. I don’t think he’s forgiven me for wrecking his rainbow when I moved in.

It’s a problem that goes back a long way. Samuel Pepys noted in 1666 that he was desperately in need of shelf-space, his books “now growing numerous, and lying one upon another on my chairs, I lose the use to avoyde the trouble of removing them”.

With no recourse to IKEA back then, Pepys commissioned a joiner to make some shelves, which were delivered a month later, “…and thence with Sympson the joyner home to put together the press he hath brought me for my books this day, which pleases me exceedingly.” I like to picture Pepys struggling with an incomprehensible set of instruction diagrams. He did a decent job though – his glass-fronted shelves themselves can still be seen at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Pepys arranged his books by size on his new shelves, small volumes in front, large behind, which isn’t far off colour-coding the spines, if you ask me. Another obsessive bloke, clearly.

My theory is that this obsession over classification comes from the belief that the perfect bookshelf could solve life’s big questions.

In 1873 Melvil Dewey came up with his new decimal shelving system, partly due to an ideological dream of making knowledge available to the masses by making it easy to find, and partly because he was a bit of an obsessive himself. (He wanted everything standardized, including measurement and spelling. He changed his name from Melville to Melvil to get rid of the unnecessary letters.)

Before Dewey came along, libraries all shelved books differently. The New York State Library organized its whole collection alphabetically by title. Shelving The Da Vinci Code when it came out would have meant shifting every book after D in the library down one.

Dewey organised the knowledge of the world into ten classes with potentially infinite subdivisions, meaning his system could accommodate all the books ever written, and any book that could possibly be written in future. And adding a new book wouldn’t mess up the whole system. Brilliant? Certainly. Obsessive? Yup.

Then there was Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the affectionate nickname for the Harvard Classics series, a collection of titles selected by Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1910. The idea was, if you owned this one shelf of books you had all that was required for literary self-improvement.

See, books, if shelved right, can change the world.

Or maybe just represent it, as Jorge Luis Borges’s infinite library does in his story The Library of Babel. The fundamental law of his library is that its endless books contain all possible combinations of the alphabet, and so therefore the library houses every book ever written. Everything that could be written is already shelved there. (Even this blog.)

The librarians search the endless shelves for the catalogue of the library, which must exist because everything exists in the library, (although thousands of false catalogues must exist too, because they can). The catalogue could lead them to the ‘total book’ which is a compendium of all the rest, “analogous to god“. In this library, most of the books are nonsensical combinations of letters. Order is rare, chaos is the rule.

Which brings me back to moving house. We still haven’t come to an agreement about what our shelving system will be. All I know is that Melvil Dewey would be turning in his grave at the mention of colour-coded spines.

Article for Litro.co.uk

Old Money

Posted on | February 5, 2011 | No Comments

Next week it’ll be forty years since Britain went decimal, and 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound were replaced by our current multiples of ten. I was born three years after decimalisation, but when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, it was a common thing to find old currency floating round our house. I’d collect the coins and keep them in a jar; the half-penny with a sailing ship on it, sixpences with their intricate rose design and my favourite, the chunky 12-sided three-penny piece with its portcullis.

As a child of a decimalised Britain, born so soon after the big change, the old currency has always had a bit of a romantic fascination for me. I grew up reading about it in books, never quite sure what the terms meant exactly, but knowing them intimately all the same: sovereigns, half crowns, shillings, farthings, thrupenny bits, tuppences, tanners, bobs. They’re lovely words that don’t seem to be matched by today’s prosaic quids.

The language of the old money is bound up with literature for me, because that’s where I experienced it. There’s something delicious about the thought of Sherlock Holmes pushing a weighty shilling into the palm of an informant’s hand in return for information, or wearing the sovereign on his watch-chain that he got as a tip while disguised as a horse groom .

The sixpence especially seems to have permeated our culture. Like a Homeric prefix, Sixpences always seem to be bright sixpences, new sixpences, shiny sixpences, given to boys like Richmal Crompton’s William for good behaviour (or rather, in William’s case, bad behaviour with unexpectedly good consequences.) There’s something magical yet obtainable about a sixpence, and even I, who’d never been tipped one, coveted them.

The mention of sixpences always reminds me of A. A. Milne’s poem Market Square, which starts out with a boy who has a penny to take to the market. “For I went to the stall where they sold sweet lavender / (“Only a penny for a bunch of lavender!”) / “Have you got a rabbit, ‘cos I don’t want lavender? / But they hadn’t got a rabbit, not anywhere there.” Returning with two pennies and then a “little white sixpence”, there are mackerel and saucepans at the market, but still no rabbits, until the boy goes to the “old, gold common”, with no money at all, only to find  “little rabbits most everywhere!”

I’m not alone in my love of the sixpence. There was even a campaign to save it after decimalisation, and it limped on for a few years, doomed to end up in jam jars of odds and ends across the country, a relic of another time.

I’ve still got my jar of old money somewhere. I’m going to show it to my kids, so that they know, when they’re reading Sherlock Holmes, exactly what a shilling feels like in the palm.

Hmm, January … time to start a journal?

Posted on | January 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

Money, Sport and the Big Show

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | No Comments

Latest blog post for Litro Magazine…

Money and sport go together. In the last few weeks, as the credibility of cricket wobbled under allegations of corruption and match-fixing , I’ve been reading the funny and satirically scathing baseball stories of Ring Lardner, whose naive ball-players, obsessed with cash and celebrity, sound strangely familiar.

Regarding himself as a sports journalist first and a fiction writer second, Lardner started writing stories about baseball to fill newspaper column inches in the early 20^th Century. He was off-hand about the critical acclaim his work received from peers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Dorothy Parker, who described the ‘strange and bitter pity’ of his stories. He was a modest writer, who saw himself as a hack rather than a literary genius. When his stories were first collected together as a book, Lardner had to write to the magazines who had published them to ask for copies, as he hadn’t bothered keeping any himself. When he died in 1933 at the age of 48, he had a memorable but tiny body of literature to his name.

Lardner’s best-known work, You Know Me Al, is a series of letters written by the fictional Jack Keefe, a bush-league ball-player who’s just made it up to the ‘big show’, the major leagues. Jack writes home to his old friend Al, reporting back on the contracts he gets, the games he plays and the people he meets: pitchers, strikers, left-handers, coaches, managers and hangers-on.

Lardner was brilliant at recording the American vernacular as it was really spoken. Before Lardner, cod-American speech had been used by writers like Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe, who tried to write speech as they imagined their characters spoke it, but their ‘La sakes’ and ‘looky yonders’ sound twee today. Lardner on the other hand, had the knack of writing American as someone like Jack Keefe truly spoke it. You Know Me Al, written with Keefe’s terrible spelling, dodgy grammar and sports slang, holds your attention even if you don’t know the first thing about baseball. This is Keefe telling Al about a recent game.

‘Well I come up in the eighth with two out and the score still nothing and nothing. I had whiffed the second time as well as the first but it was account of Evans missing one on me. The eighth started with Shanks muffing a fly ball off of Bodie [...] Callahan says Go up and try to meet one Jack. It might as well be you as anybody else. But your old pal didn’t whiff this time Al. He gets two strikes on me with fast ones and then I passed up two bad ones. I took my healthy at the next one and slapped it over first base. [...] I felt so good after the game that I drunk one of them pink cocktails. I don’t know what their name is.’

Keefe writes (and spells) as he speaks, and the words leap off the page in his slow but insistent voice. It’s subtle, funny and engaging, and Lardner’s ear for spoken language is perfect.  The journalist H. L. Mencken wrote that he’d once used the word feller in a conversation with Lardner, who asked him “where and when … did you ever hear anyone say feller?” Mencken realised Lardner was right. No matter what literary types might put between their speech marks, the ordinary American pronounced the word fella.

Over the course of You Know Me Al, Lardner’s Jack Keefe emerges as a childish, naive, stingy and semi-literate buffoon, conceited, not half as talented as he believes, blind to his own faults and unaware that he’s the butt of his teammates’ jokes.

But despite all this, you can’t help rather rooting for Jack Keefe, caught up in a world far more sophisticated than he is; a world obsessed with winning, peopled by players chasing paycheques and women out to take the gullible star of the moment for all he’s got.

It’s a world where money corrupts the knowing and the innocent alike. Jack Keefe is obsessed with how much he’s worth, and how much he’s paid. As he gets embroiled with drinking, gambling and girls, Keefe goes from resentment over spending fifty cents on a meal to worries about keeping his new wife happy with ‘mohogenny’ furniture for their flat. In nearly every letter he agonizes over his finances, begging never-to-be-repaid loans from his friend Al or setting out the costs of his wedding, down to the flowers and candy at 50 and 30 cents respectively.

Ring Lardner’s Keefe is as relevant a character now as he ever was – substitute football for baseball and Wayne Rooney for Jack Keefe and You Know Me Al is a very modern set of stories. Sport has always been populated by men who have the brawn and talent but maybe less of the brains or self-awareness, who are suddenly exposed to adulation and more money than they’ve seen in their lives before, and the effects can be devastating. 18 year old cricketer Mohammed Amir’s glittering career, ruined through naivety, George Best or Gazza, brittle and delicate shadows of themselves – in the big show, sport raises its champions high and brings them down hard.

Larder was no stranger to the sports scandal. As a sports reporter and close associate of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, Larder was devastated when it emerged in 1919 that members of the team had taken bribes from gangsters to throw matches and lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, in what became known as the Black Sox scandal. It shook Lardner’s faith in his friends and associates, and in sport itself.

The American judge Earl Warren once said “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” Ring Lardner would surely have disagreed: his fiction reveals that the sports pages are as full of human failure as any other part of the paper.

Emily Cleaver

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