light in the dark

Twice recently, I’ve walked through the darkness that descends in late afternoon and pushed open the door of my local bookshop, The Suffolk Anthology. I go there often anyway, of course; but these visits were prompted by requests, on two separate days, for a replacement copy of my poetry book Sudden Arabesque, because, mirabile dictu, two different people had bought one! This heartwarming news meant I could brighten the winter’s evening by a visit to the bookshop. *

And what a delight it is to do this! Books everywhere, displayed standing, and shelved, and spread out on the central table of new arrivals. You can pick them up and handle them and turn them over in your fingers and leaf through the pages. There are so many beautiful cards as well, with all sorts of art; not to mention coffee and cake for those who want to linger. Of course I always come away with a book, or a card, a treasure of some sort. As so many bookshops close, any bookshop represents great courage if it has opened in recent years, and endurance if it has been there a while. I want to support this—and of course, it’s easy, as I love what bookshops offer!

Those two lovely unknown people who bought a copy of my poetry book have therefore supported (and I mean this is a wider than monetary sense) the bookshop, and also the poet; as well as the artist of the book’s cover, Ruth End, whose work I first saw on the walls of this very bookshop, where you can still see it now. And when we buy books published by a small poetry publisher, we validate the labour of love that such publishing entails.

In my bookshop you can find the work of many other local writers, and local as well as nationally-known writers do readings and signings there; writing workshops happen there too. So a bookshop becomes a cultural hub as well as a place to find books.

A bookshop is a light in the dark.

*An explanatory note in the unlikely event you wonder why I take Sudden Arabesque to the shop myself: it is published by Oversteps Books (that’s a clickable link) and anyone wanting a copy can order online directly from the publisher. Bookshops can also obtain it easily too. But, for my local bookshop, it’s quicker and easier to get replacement copies from me, and of course I love an excuse to stop in.

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Book-loving

Today, it seems, is #Nationalbookloversday...I saw this on Twitter, and so global is the world nowadays that only this moment have I realised it is a US rather than a British thing. When I saw it, I wasn't actually thinking of it as connected to any particular nation, but rather to all of us who belong in the Republic of Books. Anyway, I may be based in the UK now, but I lived twenty-seven years in the States, and most of my library (or what's left of it after moves and downsizings) was gathered there.

"Blessed books—any one of which is worth all the toggery we ever put on our backs," wrote the artist Samuel Palmer in a letter. And how true. I'd always sooner buy a book than a piece of clothing. I read Palmer's words in the wonderful biography Mysterious Wisdom by Rachel Campbell-Johnston; she brings this artist of poetic landscapes to life, often quoting his own vivid expressions and forceful opinions, as well as delicately probing the mystery of his art. I heard her speak at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2011, the year the book came out, and on the strength of her brilliant talk I bought the book on the spot. I hadn't read it properly, though, until just the other day. The book was waiting on the shelf for just the perfect time; that is what books do, our faithful companions. 

My novel Inscription is a love letter to the book, to the book's codex format as well as to the richness reading brings. The books we write are alchemical compounds of all the books we've read, transmuted somehow.  Inscription touches on the historical mystery of how the codex book form evolved, and I have my first-century protagonist affect its spread a little. The protagonist of the modern strand is herself a book-lover who says, "Books have become my country."  The books on my shelves, or so I feel, hold my life, remind me I have lived and read; they are part of me. 

Of course, I also love libraries and bookshops. Second-hand and charity bookshops are my favourite haunts. In Cheltenham, where as a teenager I combed the shelves of Alan Hancox's room after room of books, I now browse in Peter Lyons's eclectic and fascinating collection; or in Cheltenham Rare Books next door, with its tempting first editions and literary oddities (as well as Inscription, honoured to find itself in such company). Even a modest budget will stretch to something in both these places. Then in the charity shops, especially those just selling books, there's always some great find, and the money goes to a good cause, or that's my excuse.

For new books there's Waterstones, and I am glad of it, but when possible I go to the independent Suffolk Anthology, a beautifully curated (as the trendy saying goes, but it's really fitting here) selection of new books on every subject. I'd be singing its praises even if it too didn't stock my book, as it also has coffee, cake, a place to sit down, and always a warm welcome.

"Blessed books,"indeed; I can't help loving them, and wanting them. What I have to safeguard, in this new world of addictions like facebook and twitter, is time for the reading of them. And I have to make sure I have a bit left over to write my own.

Umbria and Coventry

I'm back from Umbria, "the green heart of Italy," as the tourism literature very justly calls it. Such beautiful landscape, and yes, very green, with rounded hills, and the thick woods where they find the truffles. And those lovely towns and cities: Perugia, Gubbio, Assisi, Spoleto. And Urbino, in the nearby Marche. 

And everywhere, the most wonderful art. I particularly love early Sienese and Florentine painting: Giotto, Simone Martini, Ghirlandaio, Uccello, and Umbria is a feast of work by these artists, and many more. Beautiful buildings abound, too: churches, medieval town halls, and palaces. Among the most memorable was Urbino's Palazzo Ducale, which is also the regional art gallery. Here I saw for the first time Raphael's Portrait of a Gentlewoman, known as La Muta; thought to be a widow whose grief compelled her to silence.

It is so much more luminous, so much more alive, in real life than in reproduction. It is the kind of painting you want to gaze at for a long while. To look at her hands, the way the tensile fingers grasp her wrist; at the shadow of the necklace cord against her skin. And she, La Muta, with those eyes of sorrow, regards you coolly in return. 

While I was in Umbria, there was the atrocity in Nice. So many lives lost, so brutally. People shattered by raw anguish far from La Muta's sad composure. The kind of anguish shown in the many paintings I saw of the death of Jesus, where his mother's face is deformed by the horror of it; for of course most pre-Renaissance paintings in Italy tell the stories of Jesus's life and death, and those of his followers and saints.  Agony down the centuries. Inexplicable cruelty. St Lawrence on his gridiron; St Agnes with her breasts on a plate. 

This often gruesome Christian iconography is, of course, not the whole story; it also bears a message of hope about life after death, and a testimony to miracles down the ages.  But this is too unscientific for many of us these days to believe.  (I try).

Art has always grappled with the awfulness of death, how it suddenly extinguishes life. Just the other evening, I went to a marvellous event run by independent bookshop The Suffolk Anthology. Sam Guglani (doctor, writer, and director of the annual November conference Medicine Unboxed) talked to author Sarah Moss about her latest book, The Tidal Zone, in a way that illuminated its themes and feel and impact. In the novel, she looks at our fears full on, especially that worst parental fear, losing a child. I haven't yet read it, but those who have done so say that despite the unflinching gaze, it's a wonderful read. One of the topics discussed that evening was how fiction, and by extension other kinds of art, can have a consolatory rôle in the face of darkness, but that the consolation comes in the form of the art itself, rather than in platitudes.

I'd forgotten till this moment, as I look up the second passage she read, that her book mentions Mary's face and the shadow of crucifixion. It comes in a section about the West Screen in Coventry Cathedral (which I saw once many years ago, and now long to revisit). This is what her character Adam says about John Hutton's magnificent sheet of glass with its etched angels and saints: 

"Look on St Mary from the new building and you see the young mother, but from the other side the agony of the cross has fallen over her face. It is not all right.

It is not all right, but there is beauty. We have ways of saying that it is not all right, that there is death and suffering and evil, and they are the same ways we have had for hundreds of years. Buildings. Glass. Weaving.

Words."

What happened in Nice, what is happening in so many places, is very much "not all right". Call me callous, or cowardly, but I focused on the treasures around me in Italy, instead; works of art that use formal beauty to transmute horror, so it can somehow be borne. I could not bear to know any details about Nice.

In the same palace in Urbino is another portrait, a small painting from the late 1400s, attributed to Bramantino. (Findable online, though it isn't the same). It shows Christ lifting his hand in blessing. The image is partly damaged, but the face remains, the red tunic, the blessing hand. And the extraordinary eyes. The painting is hung low enough that even a short person like me can look straight at it; and suddenly I felt, more than with La Muta who remains slightly distant, that the eyes were truly looking right back into me. Gazing at me; with such a compelling depth of expression that—I hesitate to say this, but it happened, and I don't know why—actual tears came into my own eyes. It's just a painting; but that light-brown heavy-lidded gaze seems to know and understand all the sorrow in the world.