The Mastery of Alan Holinghurst's Novels: Stellar Authors

Alan Hollinghurst at the 2011 Texas Book Festival,
copyright Larry D. Moore

 Alan Hollinghurst has written seven novels, has won numerous prizes, and is renown for being the author who elevated the genre of 'gay novel' to the heights of literary endeavour, being often compared to Henry James. Since winning the Booker, his novels has been heralded as a literary event worth the wait. His publisher, (Pan Macmillan) sums all this up as being about....the question of what it means to lead a life in thrall of the beautiful. 

But don't worry about all of that. Because above all things, a Hollinghurst is a cracking read.

His new novel, Our Evenings (2024) had me addicted for three all-consuming days, while I read steadily on through the almost 500 pages at breakfast, coffee, lunch, G&Ttime, dinner, throughout the evening and often, into the night. Nothing got done until the book was complete. And then, rather like the first 24 hours of a steaming affair, I lay back on my pillows and gasped, groaned, cried aloud, Oh, Alan, Alan!!! and found it difficult to sleep. 

The Guardian calls it 'his finest yet'; The novel tracks the currents of gay liberation and race relations, but with never a moment’s schematic overview...Of course, this is his best book. But then, I thought that of all of them. 

The Stranger's Child (2011), tells the story of a minor poet, Cecil Valance, who, before being killed in the First World War, writes a poem "Two Acres", which goes on to become famous.  As I read, I was searching for 'the stranger's child' within the novel, and not finding it, finally had to ask Google. It turns out to be a quote fromTennyson's "In Memoriam".

"And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child." 

In 2012 interview, Hollinghurst explained how he thought 'the music of the words is absolutely wonderful, marvellously sad and consoling all at once. It fitted exactly with an idea I wanted to pursue in the book about the unknowability of the future'

This, I think may be the first of Hollinghurst's perennial themes, a gold thread in his work; the unknowability of the future. 

The Folding Star (1994) was my introduction to Hollinghurst. It's a hilariously funny book full of rampant gay sex and brilliantly executed scenes bursting with characters and dialogue. It is perhaps modelled slightly on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, exploring the theme of transient beauty. So these two themes, 'the unknowable future', and 'ephemeral nature of beauty' run constantly through his books.

The Swimming Pool Library (1988), his first book, was the second one I read, having devoured  The Folding Star and wanting more. It won two prizes and is the perfect debut novel by someone not afraid to state upfront what their obsessions will be. It centres round a chance meeting where the main character saves the life of an older gay man in a public toilet, creating  a story revealed within the story, dealing  with ageing, race and cruelty, but also about keeping secrets…hiding the truth about yourself. Holinghurst starts his career as an author as he means to go on; strongly described gay sexual encounters, and lots and lots of characters who are often together in one scene.

The Line of Beauty (2004), deservedly won the Booker Prize. The 80's obsession with cocaine, and  the emerging AIDS crisis form backdrops, while he's again exploring class and  privilege and homosexuality. I had no trouble with this title because I was already getting the idea that beauty is part of Hollinghurst's passions. The line of beauty is a double "S" curve, called an ogee, used in textiles, architecture, wrought iron work and even ship-building. You could say the ogee 'swings both ways', reinforcing the theme of transient beauty and very casual sex, while the story moves through Thatcher's London, which would have been unknowable as it was happening, in the same way as tomorrow and next year is unknowable to us know. 

Of all his writing accomplishments and prowess, I think his expertise in crowd control is the one I really admire. It's so hard, as a writer, to handle scenes in which a lot of characters are moving, and chatting, at the same time. Parties are his go-to settings, and he's simply brilliant at guiding conversations that, as they go on in real time, have subtle meanings exuding from them: 

 Have a look at that Nick,’ Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. ‘You know what it is.’

‘That’s a nice little piece,’ said Leo

‘It’s a very nice little piece,’ said Pete. ‘Louis Quinze.’

Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. ‘Well, it’s an encoignure,’ he said, and with a chance at charm: ‘n’est ce pas?

‘It’s what we call a corner cupboard,’ Pete said. ‘Where did you get this one, babe?’

‘Ooh...I just found him on the street,’ said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. ‘He looked a bit lost.’

‘Hardly a mark on him,’ said Pete.

‘Not yet,’ said Leo.

‘So where’s your father’s shop, Nick?’ said Pete.

‘Oh, it’s in Barwick – in Northamptonshire.’

‘Don’t they pronounce that Barrick?’

‘Only frightfully grand people.’

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, then coughed and looked almost sick. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he said. ‘Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It’s what you’d call a funny place, isn’t it.’ (Pg 107)

Although this has been plucked from its context, the reader can see that speech and meanings are at complete odds. As the three characters talk about antique pieces, we are given glimpses of what they can see as well as the subtext, offered in mostly body language and speech patterns. Hollinghurst doesn’t allow the dialogue to stray from the context of the scene, but it’s easy to picture what is going on during the chat. In other words, he supports his dialogue. Lengthy pieces of dialogue in prose, unsupported by narrative description and action, can lose emotional hold on the reader. 

While I was reading Our Evenings, I kept changing my mind about what sort of book this was. At first I was sure this story was a bildungsroman––a coming of age novel, that charts the growth and change of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood. Soon, I realised that this would be the story of an entire life. Then, towards the end, I wondered if it might be a metafiction––when he grows towards old age, David decides to write his memoir. His husband asks what he'll call it and he takes that quote...'Our Evenings'. By the shocking end of the novel, you realise you might be reading just that...the memoir of this life, written by the man who lived it to his best. 

But––finally––I realised that what this novel does so brilliantly is map Britain’s changing attitudes to class, race, politics and sex from 1960 to 2010.

A triumph indeed!

Gerald Manley Hopkins

You might wonder at this stage, how Our Evenings came to have its title. David Win has to learn and recite at school the sonnet by Gerard Manly Hopkins; ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves'.

    Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

   The poem reflects what the book achieves; it leaps, it soars, from impermanence to timelessness. 

    Take a look at Alan Hollinghurst's canon, pick a book at random and enjoy... then post me a note at Kitchentable and let everyone know what you think of this masterful author. 

Salman Rushdie's Victory City: Stellar Author

Salman Rushdie's Victory City

'Stellar Author'

 an occasional series of posts on 

Kitchen Table Writers

Copyright New Yorker

Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 in what is now Mumbai, India, but is also a British-American citizen. One might say he's a citizen of the world, being a writer whose novels are  allegorical examinations of historical and philosophical issues. He achieves these heights by using magical realism, non-linear narratives and surreal but very believible characters. There is always a dark, yet gentle strain of humor, and a dramatic, exhuberant, unconstrained prose style. Rushdie has never muted what he wants to say about sensitive religious and political subjects, and as a direct result of this, he barely escaped with his life in New York in 2023.

I first encountered him when Midnight's Children came out in 1981 and immediatey won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize  and the Booker Prize. It was also awarded the special Booker of Bookers prize in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. It was so well recieved, it's been called 

Copyright  Sky News

a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel,  and in the 80s subsequenty became known as 'post-Rushdie'. The story moves back and forwards in time, but is focused on the children born in India at midnight on the moment of its independence. In it he employs inherited myths, and generates new myths as it traces the story of these children. 

Having loved Midnight's Children, which was his second novel, I couldn't wait to read The Satanic Verses when it came out in 1988. This is the story of two Muslims confused by the temptations of the west. The first returns to his cultural roots. The other, intellectually unable to return to the faith, finally kills himself. I loved it. One of its themes is the way immegrants are treated in the UK and another looks at the very foundations of Islam.  

As I read, it was being burnt. Despite the fact, that to me, a westener, I couldn't see any content that seemed to denounce or critique the faith of Islam, Muslims had many issues with the book, including the story, the title, and some of the names used. In December 1988, around 7,000 Muslims in Bolton held a peaceful protest where they burnt a copy of the book. The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran, announced a Fatwa was on 14th February 1989.

Could Rushdie have expected this reaction? 

Writers stick out their necks. By the nature of being able, especially via fictional works, to say anything about anything, they constantly fall foul of current morals, ethics and the law. Of course, it’s wise not to be disrespectful, especially without researching and understanding your chosen subject. On the other hand, remaining neutral and inoffensive generally results in bland, insubstantial writing. 

An attempt at a private prosecution to get The Satanic Verses banned was unsuccessful, in fact, the Home Office announced it would not allow any further blasphemy prosecutions. 

Martin Amis, who interviewed Rushdie, suggests… a Fatwa is at once a death sentence and a life sentence. In his own phrase, Rushdie is firmly ‘handcuffed to history’. He is neither a god nor a devil; he is just a writer – comical and protean, ironical and ardent…I bought an evening paper. Its banner headline read: EXECUTE RUSHDIE ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH. Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page…His uniqueness is the measure of his stoicism. Because no one else – certainly no other writer – could have survived so well…. Amis interviewed Salman in September of the same year, at a Mystery Location…‘When I first heard the news, I thought: I’m a dead man. You know: that’s it. One day. Two days’… (Visiting Mrs Nabokov, Penguin Books 1993  pg 172) 

After a failed assassination attempt  in 1989, Rushdie began came out of hiding and soon became a central figure in debates on free speech and censorship. In 2007 he received a knighthood for services to literature and by then, was in public more and more. 

On 12 August 2022, he was about to start a lecture in New York, when man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, including in the face, neck and abdomen. Rushdie was airlifted to a trauma centre  and underwent surgery. Only one day later, he was taken off the ventilator and was able to speak. He had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand but survived the murder attempt and was soon writing a memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which hit number one in the Sunday Times Bestsellers List straight away. 

Perhaps the most Rushdiean part of this awful event was the fact he reported remembering a vivid dream, in which he was stabbed in a Roman amphitheatre, only two days before the actual stabbing occurred. The intensity of the dream caused him to consider canceling the event–but he eventually decided on attending.

Since then, just one novel has been released, an amazing, rich and vibrant story called Victory City which was mostly written before the attack. 

The story is  purported  to have been found, hidden in a earthenware pot by a woman called Pampa Kampana, who is reaching the end of her 250 years of life. It begins when she is nine, and watches her mother commit Sati along with hundreds of village women. Immediately after this tragedy, a goddess enters Pampa and she becomes magical, and long-lived.  She takes refuge in a cave with a holy man, and is abused by him, but also educated. 

She is still a young woman when the magic begins. Pampa instructs two of her brothers, Hukka and Bukka, to sow a bag of seeds at the site of their old village.  A city grows, and  people sprout from the earth. Pampa whispers memories into them, so they feel they have a history. The brothers become the first kings. Pampa marries them each in turn, though her daughters are born of her true love, a Portuguese horse trader who names the city Bisnaga.

The city she founds becomes a utopia—a feminist one–Pampa is an avid advocate for gender equality, and wishes her daughters to rein after her husbands’ deaths. This request is met with much conflict and her sons seize control of the kingdom. Pampa and her three daughters are forced to flee into a magical forest where they shelter for several decades. The three daughters eventually grow in separate directions and Pampa returns to Bisnaga. In her absence, she had become a legend, and, as she still looks much the same age, can move about the city freely. Eventually,  she becomes the advisor of the latest monarch, Krishnadevaraya.

After many wars to guard and widen the borders of the kingdom, Krishnadevaraya goes mad and Pampa, caught in one of his rages, is forcefully blinded with an iron-rod. She takes up refuge with a holy man, finally beginning to feel her age which is now over two hundred. The residents of the city become outraged at this betrayal and turn against their king and the kingdom degenerates and is ransacked and destroyed. The novel ends with Pampa burying her written history in a pot and waiting for the Goddess to release her so that she may die.

So what is this allegory about? 
It is possible that he has used an ancient empire, the  Vijayanagara, and to a degree followed major turning points in the history of the empire. But it strikes me we could actually be following major turning points of human history. Even so, there are moments that need careful analysis; for instance the invasion of the pink monkeys in the forests where Pampa and her daughters have settled. Who are the conniving pink monkeys who inveigle their way into the monkey tribes and then take them over? Maybe that is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats (pg 155).

 And why, when she takes refuge in a cave with a holy man after her mother’s death, is she regularly abused by him? This passage struck me: That's how men were, Pampa Kampana thought. A man philosophized about peace but in his treatment of the helpless girl sleeping in his cave, his deeds were not inlignment with his philospopy. 

Virupaksha Temple, Vijayanagara, Karnataka

In some ways, Pampa could almost be Salman, who has experienced both adoration and opprobrium for his acts of creation. Without doubt, to me, the writer is saying that we humans are both good and evil. In this book we meet oppression, religious zealotry, authoritarianism, divide, patriarchy. But there is also equality, redemption, the power of love, and a demonstration of how humans can be at their most creative when they live in an atmosphere of openness, tolerance, and egalitarianism.

The 'Stellar Author' series of posts on Kitchen Table Writers has looked at several amazing writers, including:

George Eliot

HenryJames

Cormac Mccarthy

Virginia Woolf

A S Byatt

Herman Melville

Boris Pasternak

Just click on the link to read the blogs. 

Donna Tartt, Carel Fabritius, and The Goldfinch

 

Once morning in 1654, in the city of Delft in Holland, there was a "thunderclap". That was the way the people of Delft described the  explosion of a  factory containing 90,000 pounds of gunpowder. Large sections of the city were devastate, and 100 people died. 

Carole Fabritius was among them, and that may be why so few people have heard of this artist, who had been a  pupil of Rembrandt, and, before he reached his thirties, was already an  acclaimed painter of the Dutch school. He left a sadly small portfolio of work, and it's clear might have gone on to paint so much more, if he had survived the blast.

One of his most beloved works is also one of the most upsetting, from the viewpoint of an animal lover; The Goldfinch.  Just 9X13 inches, and possibly as a trompe d'oeil and perhaps a clever part of a window shutter, it is beautifully rendered. A small songbird sits on its perch, staring out at the viewer. Every feather is a perfect rendering. And the little gold chain that prevents the bird from seeking its freedom is lost in shadow, you have to peer closely to see that the goldfinch is a captive. It was sitting in Fabritius's workroom, almost next door to the factory, when the blast destroyed almost everything there, including the artist himself.

Donna Tartt launching The Goldfinch in Amsterdam
. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty Images

When I read Donna Tartt's third novel in 2014, titled The Goldfinch, I was expecting something grand, something with an explosion at the centre of it, because her previous two novels had been acclaimed and their powerful stories were still in my mind.

She certainly offered an explosion; moments after the story begins, a bomb blows out the New York's Metropolitan Museum. 14 year old Theo Decker is in one section, his mother elsewhere. She is killed by the blast.  As Theo tries to extricate himself from the wreckage, a dying man tells him to take the small, framed picture  lying in the dust. He thinks to  take to his mother for safekeeping and finds his way home; she never arrives. From then on, The Goldfinch, with its imploring theme of captive beauty, is his guilty secret, and a physical connection to his mother. It becomes something he can't bear to be rid of but something he cannot admit he possesses.

How fittingly linked these two stories are. The fiction of a boy who walked out of an explosion with the painting of an artist who died in an explosion.  The Goldfinch, painted in the year of Fabricius's death, was one of only about 12 of his paintings to have survived the tragic explosion, and  in Tartt's story, it survives again, albeit in a setting it has never traveled to; it's hung in The Haig. 

I was reminded of The Goldfinch when I read Laura Cumming's latest book

on art; Thunderclap. Although the focus of this book is Fabritius and his works, she also looks at her own approach to art, as an art critic. She says, 'We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence…' I wonder if that is also true of fiction; certainly, a school of literature theory suggests that works can only be judged though the eyes of the reader, who brings their own emotional smörgåsbord to the interpretation.

Certainly, I began reading The Goldfinch knowing nothing about the painting, or having even heard of Carel Fabritius, but I devoured this long book; it reminded me of Dickens in its complexity and with its whirlwind of amazing characters, and its 'cause and effect' plotting – the dying man who tells Theo to take the painting is guardian to a young girl named Pippa, who was also in the museum when the bomb exploded, and is the only person who Theo feels can understand his heart, as they both lost someone dear in the explosion. Their lives will collide and separate, repeatedly, throughout the book. 

And yet, Tartt told The Telegraph, shortly after publishing the book that she hadn't even known about the Delft Thunderclap when she wrote it.  She said. 'The the first time I saw it, I connected very strongly with it. This little bird, so brave and so dignified, and then you see that terrible little chain…' She was simply looking for the right painting, that would be small enough to carry and would appeal to a child. 

The rôle of synchronicity in creating a novel can make one gasp. For, if Tartt didn't know much about Fabritius’ death when she chose the painting, why is her central character called Theo Decker? Because at the time of his death Fabritius was painting the portrait of a church deacon named Simon Decker. 

Writing is full of such coincidence, as Tartt admits: 

'It all fit together in ways I could never have imagined. When coincidences like that start happening you know the muses are at your side. ”

It's good to know that when such amazing moments occur, the writer should grasp them with both hands. 

Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Joy - (Writers Writing about Writing).

 My copy of Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER'S DIARY

In this occasional series, A Writer's Joy (Writers Writing about Writing), I want to look at how writers use their notebooks and diaries to record their thoughts, reflections and ideas on writing. A wealth of interest and knowledge from down the ages can be found in these pages, often unpublished, but nevertheless facilitating and enlightening. 

 My copy of Virginia Woolf’s A WRITER'S DIARY seems to be a first edition of 1953 from The Hogarth Press. It has that smell of an old book about it – a mix of tobacco, spores and midnight oil. The original owner of the book has written her name in on the first page in slanting black ink...Marjory Todd...and dated it 1/1/54,suggesting that this was a Christmas present. Dipping into it on occasion, as I do, reminds me of  something Virginia wrote...What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever...Virginia Woolf’s diaries were kept over a period of twenty-seven years and after her death, her husband, Leonard, gathered extracts from them together. He went through 30 handwritten volumes and selected passages that related only to her writing life. They take us from 1919, when she was 36, to 1941. The last entry, just 20 days before she walked into the River Ouse with an overcoat filled with stones, finishes...I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down. 



 It has been suggested that Leonard kept the more intimate areas of Virginia’s diary from publication because she wrote of their relationship, her sexuality and the state of her mental health. But he maintained in his lifetime that the abridgement was far more to do with concentrating on the entries that demonstrated her art and intellect as a writer so that her reputation could be restored. It seems remarkable to me that this might need to be done, but in fact through the 50’s and 60‘s Woolf was not widely read and no university taught her work. She had lost her rating as a writer in the vanguard of modernism and English literature. And so the published diary accompanied her return to recognition; in the 80’s the full diaries were published for the first time and she become reinstated as a great writer.

 Woolf teaches the 21C writer through humility and humanity. She feels ‘like us’; we can empathize on the depressions and mood swings of a writer’s life...I’m a deal happier at 38 than I was at 28; and happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel...(January 26th 1920)..the creative power that bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in...(May 11th 1920) I expect I could have screwed Jacob up tighter if I had foreseen, but I had to make my path as I went...(October 29th 1922 – all referring to Jacob’s Room). Sometimes she witnessess and records things that feel historic...It is a decaying village (Rodmell) which loses its boys to the town. Not a boy of them, said the Rev. Mr. Hawkesford, is being taught the plough. Rich people wanting weekend cottages buy up the old peasants' houses for fabulous sums...(September 25th 1927)

 Although she is modest in her own appraisal of her writing, clues to the homilies
people have recently paid to Wolfe can be spotted. I was gripped to read on June 19th 1923.But now what do I feel about my writing?–this book, that is The Hours, if that’s its name? Finally, Woof called the book she was writing Mrs Dalloway, but that The Hours was the title Michael Cunningham chose for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about three generations of women affected by Mrs Dalloway. 

 Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m often amazed at how organized she was. On April 12 1919, she wrote...Moll Flanders, which I finished yesterday in accordance with my time sheet...Not everyone likes to be so regimented in their work, but any of my students who have suggested to me that they can’t get a routine going will know I do recommend using tick lists, time sheets, work diaries and pie charts to get motivated – I would certainly recommend reading A Writer’s Diary as a wonderful way to inspire your own writing, and one of my students has been doing just that...

 I’ve had a Virginia Woolf splurge this month...she wrote to me... I particularly liked Woolf’s discussions about using her notebook and especially her entry on 20 January 1919 which talks about her freewriting leading to “the diamonds of the dustheap”...She went on to say how the diary contained lots of very useful nuggets of advice on writing generally and this led to me reading To the Lighthouse and Orlando....which has provided some helpful lessons in bending the boundaries of life writing and I was inspired by Woolf’s amusing observation that when the facts aren’t there, sometimes the writer has to make them up... Helen quotes Woolf in Orlando...We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination...explaining how this affected her  her own writing... With this in mind, I have conflated a number of events to create a more focused story... bringing techniques from fiction, I’ve used some stream-of-consciousness to try to convey the strangeness I felt ... 

It has been said that writers are ‘born not made’, but they don’t come fully-formed from an egg – they have to practise their skills to hone them.As I write, my son is  playing the same phrase from Chopin over and over again. Perhaps he’ll perfect it and move on before I brain him! But, like musicians, writers do have to practise ‘over and over’, and it really does get better as you do that. Recording the slow improvements you make will help you see real progress.

Keeping  a diary, as Woolf did, or a notebook in which you only write about your own writing can feel perverse to some new writers; they ask why on earth, when they're so busy writing creatively, why they should stop to talk to themselves about the process. But doing so is invaluable - and reading it back to yourself from time to time  will really inform and inspire you.

The analysis you attempt will increase your ‘learning curve’ considerably –  do this for a week or two and you will quickly see the affects for yourself once you’ve begun. Reflecting on the progress of your writing life is an important aspect of starting to write.

Even though it’s possible you may think you have nothing to record at the moment, that simply isn't true. I'm not, after all, suggesting you fill this diary with notes that start I got published today! Instead I'm suggesting you look at the process you use to write.

At first, you might find it hard to know what to put down. Sectionalizing your analysis may help your understanding. Try writing about:

• What works for you as a writer, and what you find difficult
• Your journey through each session of writing.
• Any advice you read or are given – what you understood and what you didn’t.
• How any witing exercises you try out went – also make a note of those you wish to extend or repeat
• Why you’ve chosen certain genres and ways of writing, 
• What you think about your abilities – track their improvement
• Explore various ‘parts’ of writing; your thoughts and your preferences on:
• Dialogue 
• Description
• Narrative 
• Characterization
• Structure and plot
• Your understanding and clarification of concepts such as Show, don’t Tell
• Problems of drafting, redrafting, tightening
• Discuss themes with yourself; look at how you can add symbolism to your work by exploring themes
• Add commentaries on the books you have read
• You can moan about the pitfalls of the writer’s life
• And of course you can note down anything that feels like progress.

Start this diary now! 

A writing diary help you talk through your writing. It’s important to help yourself to make sense how it works for you – how your thought processes relate to your growing battery of skills and understanding. When you put all this down in words it begins to be understood on an intellectual level…whereas, when writing, you may be learning more on an intuitive level. It’s like ‘synergy’ in medicine – the idea that two separate things work okay separately, but together they work many times better. Grab any bit of paper (you can always paste it into a nice book you later buy) and try to answer some of the bullet points above. Don't think too much about what you write. You're writing this to yourself, for you and only you to read back later. Even as you write, you might notice how you're putting your thoughts in order through the things you're jotting down.

I  will be recommending other writers writing about writing – aptly titled 'A Writer's Joy'. To find these posts  search the Label for 'A Writer's Joy.'

Meanwhile,  I can’t recommend Woolf’s diaries highly enough to any writer; it won’t matter one whit if you’ve not read anything else of her work...although reading the diary may entice you into the marvel of her novels. Perhaps we should end with Virginia's words; a marvellous description of the June 1927 eclipse of the sun...In our carriage were Vita, Harold, Quentin, Leonard and I. This is Hatfield, I daresay, I said. I was smoking a cigar...so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got out our sandwhiches and I came in from the W.C to find Harold being rubbed clean of cream....We got out (at Barton Fell, Yorkshire) and found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting...We could see a gold spot where the sun was, but it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm...Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping - it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we got out our smoked glasss; we saw it, crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We felt cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were very like old people, in the birth of the world - druids on Stonehenge. At the back of us were blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now, the colour going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over - this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills - at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. If was like a recovery.