From Dissections To Depositions, Poets’ Second Jobs

By David Orr

“No man but a blockhead,” Samuel Johnson famously observed, “ever wrote, except for money.” This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second-grader’s math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem’s composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author’s life.

In the meantime, everyone has to eat. So unless you win the lottery, being a poet means finding a job that can support the writing of poems. Over the past few decades, that job has overwhelmingly involved teaching in university departments of English and/or creative writing. In , for instance, almost all of the 75 contributors have taught poetry in universities or earned an advanced degree in poetry, or (more frequently) both.

But the university job is a relatively recent development in Anglo-American poetry. spent eight years in a bank and decades in publishing. was a lawyer and insurance executive. was a doctor. worked in a university library, and ran the Library of Congress. was, improbably enough, a postal clerk.

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Barbara Pym gets rediscovered — again

From Paula Fox to Richard Yates, literary rediscoveries are in vogue. The latest model is wry satirist Barbara Pym

By Laura Miller

It sometimes seems there are two schools of enjoyable fiction. In one, the fate of the world hangs in the balance: There’s running and shooting on the low-brow end of this spectrum, and scheming and intrigue higher up. In the other school, the stakes are low — in fact, that’s a key to its appeal. Making this latter sort of fiction work is infinitely more difficult, but the author who pulls it off, especially if he or she is funny, can command a fearsomely loyal readership. Barbara Pym is one of those authors.

Born a solicitor’s daughter in the West Midlands of England in 1913, educated at Oxford, serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during World War II and working for much of the rest of her life at the International African Institute in London, Pym was a quintessential middle-class Englishwoman, much like her idol, Jane Austen. Like Austen, Pym wrote comedies of manners about the members of her own class, modeling the characters on people she knew. Her novels are populated by vicar’s wives, dotty unmarried sisters living in rural villages, holders of mid-level office jobs in sleepy London concerns and assorted anthropologists (based on the ones she met at the institute).

Pym had a modest success with the first six of these novels, publishing during the 1950s, but in the early ’60s, one publisher after another rejected “An Unsuitable Attachment.” She believed this was because her low-key style and unsensational subject matter had gone out of fashion. To a correspondent she conceded that her seventh book “might appear naïve and unsophisticated, though it isn’t really, to an unsympathetic publisher’s reader, hoping for that novel about negro homosexuals, young men in advertising, etc.” She was, probably and typically, right on the nose about that.

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Lady Chatterley, Philip Larkin

		D. H. Lawrence On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a series of censures from the book’s first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. . . .”

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Lady Chatterley, Philip Larkin

		D. H. Lawrence On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a series of censures from the book’s first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. . . .” ...read more

The Dragon’s Egg

The Eragon books offer the enchantment of an alternative world fully entered.

High fantasy for young adults.

by Adam Gopnik

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, thereby inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry. Beginning with Terry Brooks’s mid-seventies “The Sword of Shannara”—which is almost a straight retelling, with the objects altered—fantasy fiction, of the sword-and-sorcery kind, has been an annex of Tolkien’s imagination. A vaguely medieval world populated by dwarfs, elves, trolls; an evil lord out to enslave the good creatures; and, almost always, a weird magic thing that will let him do it, if the hero doesn’t find or destroy it first—that is the Tolkien formula. Each element certainly has an earlier template and a source, but they enter the bookstore, and the best-seller list, through Tolkien’s peculiar treatment of them. Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

What did Tolkien do to this stale stuff to make it so potent? Another British don, Christopher Ricks, once dismissed Tolkien as “our Ossian,” referring to a third-century Irish bard, supposed to be the author of “Fingal” and other Gaelic epics, and wildly popular in the eighteenth century, whose works were actually written by his supposed “translator,” James Macpherson. Dr. Johnson knew it was a fraud, and when asked if any modern man could possibly have written such poetry replied, “Many men, many women, and many children.” Ricks meant the comparison to Ossian as a putdown—that there is something fraudulent and faddish about Tolkien’s ginned-up medievalism.

But the remark helps bring out Tolkien’s real achievement.
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Raiders of the lost archive

Writers’ papers don’t necessarily belong at home.

THE flimsy manuscript pages of J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel “Crash” are scrawled with corrections in blue ink. This evidence of the intense composition process forms one item in the 42 boxes of the writer’s papers that the British Library unveiled on August 1st, after acquiring them last year. Anyone visiting the library’s reading room can now peruse these pages, along with the first draft of Ballard’s semi-autobiographical “Empire of the Sun”, and his school reports and letters.

The appeal of such relics is partly the “magical value” of the thing itself, as poet Philip Larkin termed it, and partly the chance to understand authors and their work better. Collecting them was once a hobby for rich individuals, but over the past 50 years acquiring authors’ complete archives has become a mark of status for universities and libraries. As manuscript prices shot up, Britain’s state-funded institutions have often been trumped by private American ones. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, used oil wealth to build its cultural collections, which now include papers from British writers such as Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald and Julian Barnes. Coca-Cola endowed Emory University in Atlanta, which bought Salman Rushdie’s archive in 2006.

Not all writers have sold to the highest bidder.

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Philip Larkin as Monument and Sewer

		Click to buy On this day in 1922 Philip Larkin was born. Larkin’s mordant tone and accessible verse became so popular in mid-twentieth-century Britain that he was offered the Poet Laureateship-a position which he characteristically declined. Over the next decade, after his Collected Poems, his Selected Letters and a biography by Andrew Motion (then himself Poet Laureate) appeared, some found “the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.” …read more

Motion pens Larkin paean for cancer charity appeal

 By Tom Peck

The former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion has written a poem in memory of Philip Larkin, the celebrated English poet who died in 1985. The poem, titled “Legacy”, describes some photographs taken by Larkin. One, he writes, features “a young man wearing a trilby hat who has settled / Into a deckchair and seen how manifold kinds of half-light / Can weave a leopard skin rug where a couple lie together”.Motion said the poem’s intention was to remind people “to see the miraculous in the ordinary”.It was written for an exhibition entitled Willpower: What’s Your Legacy?, which opens on Thursday at the Saatchi Gallery in London.                             

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Lady Chatterley, Philip Larkin

		On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a series of censures from the book’s first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. . . .”…….read more