Tag: Ernest Hemingway

Posted on

Cormac’s tales from the riverbank

 

© Vintage

 

I’d assumed I was long past the age where I could get really, really excited about books.  If I had to compile a list of my favourite 20 books of all time, I would expect everything on it to be stuff I’d read in my teens, twenties or, at a stretch, my thirties: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946-59}, etc.  I still read a fair bit, but nothing I peruse these days seems to generate the same frisson that certain books did in me during my youth.

 

I wouldn’t completely agree with the legendary blues singer and musician B.B. King when, in 1969, he sang The Thrill is Gone.  But I would say the thrill survives in a reduced capacity.  You get older, you become less impressionable, and nothing surprises you anymore.  Or so I thought.

 

I was surprised when, a couple of years back, I read the books in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy (1995-97), about King Arthur, and found myself entranced by them – so much so that when I got to the final volume, 1997’s Excalibur, I wrote on this blog that I was “almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.”  It’d been a long time indeed since a series of book had had such an effect on me.

 

Now the same thing has happened with Cormac McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical novel Suttree (1979).  A few pages in, I realised I was reading a very special book – for me, anyway – and I consumed the rest of it with a passion.  And I imagine that in my top-20 books list, one of the entries that I read during the first half of my life has just been demoted from it and Suttree has taken its place.  Yes, I reckoned McCarthy’s novel was that good.

 

Before I continue talking about Suttree, a warning – there will be spoilers.

 

The novel recounts the adventures, and misadventures, of a young man called Cornelius Suttree while he lives on a houseboat on the Tennessee River by the rundown edge of Knoxville in the early 1950s.  He ekes out a living fishing and selling his catches at the local market.  He also fraternises with the neighbourhood’s underclass, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, eccentrics, down-and-outs and mad people.  McCarthy, who died in 2023, was not one for giving interviews, so I assume it’s never been determined how much of Suttree is autobiographical.  I’d imagine, though, that the novel – written over 20 years – is at least partly inspired by the period of his marriage to Lee Holleman in the 1960s when, according to his Wikipedia entry, “McCarthy moved to what Holleman’s obituary calls ‘a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxviille.’”

 

As the narrative unfolds, we learn about Suttree’s past.  He’s from a well-to-do family and his lifestyle choices haven’t pleased his father.  In a letter to him, that father states his belief that “the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it.  If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it.  In the law courts, in business, in government.  There is nothing occurring in the streets.  Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”  We also learn that he’d been in a marriage that, ultimately, he’d run away from.  More on that in a minute.

 

Incidentally, we get clues that Suttree is quite a handsome devil – as McCarthy himself was in his young days.  At one point he and some mates get into a catastrophic brawl in a dodgy Knoxville dance-place: “Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle…  He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing.”  Though he’s now gap-toothed, Suttree has the following conversation with a nurse: “You created quite a sensation.”  “What, among the inmates?”  “No, silly.  Among the nurses.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Evening Star Books

 

I’ve used the word ‘narrative’ but Suttree doesn’t have the structure of a typical novel.  It’s rambling and episodic, really a patchwork of vignettes and short stories featuring the same characters in the same setting.  The reader takes pleasure in the randomness of it, not knowing what grotesqueness, hilarity, idiocy, beauty, horror, weirdness or, indeed, moment of sheer poetry is going to appear next.

 

A couple of the longer ‘short stories’ see Suttree leave Knoxville, temporarily, with painful results.  In one episode, he discovers that the son he left behind has died and sets off to attend his funeral, even though he has barely any money.  When he gets to his destination, his former wife and in-laws, and indeed the whole community, react to him with contempt and hatred.  He only leaves the town alive thanks to the begrudging intervention of its sheriff, who opines: “You, my good buddy, are a 14-carat plated son of a bitch.  That’s what your problem is…  Now I’m goin to do you a favour.  Against my better judgement.  And it’s not goin to make me no friends.  I’m goin to drive your stinkin ass to the bus station and give you an opportunity to get out of here.”

 

Another time, a chancer called Reese and his family arrive on the scene.  This symbolically occurs during a flood, when all sorts of flotsam and jetsam are being washed past Suttree’s houseboat: “Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear…”  Reese inadvertently befriends Reese, his wife and his children, who inhabit that barge-shack and, for all his worldly wisdom, gets suckered into helping Reese with a get-rich scheme we know is doomed from the start.  They travel upriver and begin fishing for mussels, believing there’s money to be made from selling their shells and pearls.  Though there’s a little light, with Suttree romancing Reese’s daughter, what follows is mostly a gruelling litany of hardship, futility and, finally, tragedy.

 

However, much of the book simply records Suttree’s interactions with the characters who live, fish and scavenge around him.  They’re an intriguing bunch even if you don’t envy them their existences.  They include the Ragpicker – his title says it all – who claims not to believe in God because “I got no reason to think he believes in me”; Daddy Watson, a former railwayman happy to tell Suttree about the gory train crashes he witnessed during his working life; Ab Jones, a black man who with his wife Dolly runs an illicit bar on another houseboat and whose defiant nature invariably gets him into trouble; Mother She, an ancient and decrepit witch who provides the novel with its most hallucinatory episode; Michael, a native American fisherman whom Suttree briefly befriends; and Red Callahan, who ‘s perhaps the closest thing in Suttree to the psychotic Francis Begbie in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), another episodic book about a bunch of misfits living in punishing circumstances.

 

One part of Suttree that’s particularly Welsh-like – i.e., simultaneously horrible and funny – concerns a male prostitute called Leonard.  He enlists Suttree’s reluctant help to dispose of the corpse of his father, which his family has kept hidden at home for months, pretending the old man is still alive so they can keep collecting his social security money.  At one point during the operation, Suttree protests, “That’s the awfullest stink I ever smelted.”  Leonard retorts, “That‘s the biggest reason we had to get him out of the house.”

 

Apart from Suttree, though, the most prominent character is the chaotic Gene Harrogate, a youth whom Suttree first encounters while they’re both in prison – Harrogate for the unusual crime of sneaking into a watermelon field near his home, cutting holes in the crop and then having intercourse with them.  (As the stunned farmer says, “You ain’t goin to believe this…  Somebody has been f*ckin my watermelons.”)  Following his release, Harrogate takes up residence in Suttree’s neighbourhood, living “under the final concrete arches of the viaduct where they ran to earth…  The earth was cool and naked and dry.  Here some bones.  Broken glass.  A few stray dog-turds…  there was never a retreat so secluded.”

 

From pixabay.com / © Riedlinger

 

Suttree becomes his surrogate big brother, trying to rein in his wildest and daftest impulses and having to mop up after him when his antics end in disaster.  He’s remarkably patient, considering how madcap Harrogate’s schemes are.  At one point, the lad learns he can earn a dollar for every dead bat he finds and hands into Knoxville’s medical authorities, who are keen to monitor rabies in the local chiropteran population.  Soon Harrogate is firing poisoned pellets into the air from his skiff, at dusk, hoping the swooping bats will mistake them for insects.  “Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens.  Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river…”  More spectacular, and no more successful, is a project he devises after finding a cave / tunnel system that takes him under Knoxville – where, he believes, he can dynamite his way into the vault of the city treasury.

 

Incidents like these make Suttree the funniest of McCarthy’s books.  Although folk who’ve read Child of God (1973), or Blood Meridian (1985), or The Road (2006) would probably argue that having more laughs than the norm in McCarthy’s oeuvre is not a particularly high bar.  Anyway, I found myself guffawing loudly in places.

 

The prose oscillates between Joycean flamboyance and Hemingway-esque precision.  The opening paragraph reads: “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming of the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunks and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brink or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”

 

In contrast, after Suttree’s friend J-Bone informs him of his son’s death, McCarthy describes the moment thus: “Suttree set his cup down and looked out of the window.  There was a small pool of spilled cream on the marble countertop at his elbow and flies were crouched about it lapping like cats.  He got up and went out.”  Some may find this disparity in writing styles off-putting.  I have to say, for me, the combination is like catnip.

 

Unflinchingly, the book explores a harsh, brutal but somehow fascinating world, one whose inhabitants certainly suffer, yet you also understand the hold that world exerts over them – through the moments of peace and calm, the occasional pleasures, the camaraderie, the satisfaction of knowing you’re not bound by the rules and regulations of conventional society.   But it’s also a transitory world where nothing lasts for long, including the people living in it.  As the book progresses, characters get killed, get permanently incarcerated (in the prison or asylum) or simply vanish.  As you near the book’s end, you wonder what Suttree’s choice will be.  Will he decide to stay here and become a casualty too, or will he try to escape?

 

But if he does escape, you suspect his experiences on the river will haunt him for his remaining days.  Just as Cormac McCarthy’s experiences of poverty and desperate living in Tennessee haunted him for 20 years and informed this marvellous novel.

 

From pixabay.com / © Leoleobobeo

Posted on

Ian Jenkins 1941-2025

 

From facebook.com / Peebles Beltane Festival

 

At the end of last month I received some sad news.  Ian Jenkins, a teacher, a politician and a well-kent face in the Scottish town of Peebles, where I spent some of my formative years, had passed away at the age of 84.

 

He taught me English for four of the five years, from 1977 to 1982, that I attended Peebles High School.  It’s impossible to think of the English-literature texts I had to study during those four years – novels like Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1871) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); drama like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1959), Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959), Barry England’s Conduct Unbecoming (1969) and the Shakespeare plays Romeo and Juliet (1595), Hamlet (1601) and Macbeth (1606); and poems by Robert Burns, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes – without hearing Ian’s voice, with its gentle, mellifluous accent, explaining and quoting from them.

 

He hailed from the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde and, to my ears at least, his accent seemed mellifluous.  Mind you, I came from western Northern Ireland, where folk often spoke broadly, gruffly and roughly.  Compared to there, most types of Scottish accent sounded charming to me.

 

When I was at school, attitudes about educating young people had shifted from the old-fashioned, dictatorial approach to a more humane one.  But even in the late 1970s and early 1980s there remained some intimidating, traditional-minded teachers who made pupils feel as uncomfortable and on-edge in their classrooms as newly-conscripted troops hunkered down in the trenches.  Also, the European Court of Human Rights didn’t get around to banning the tawse – that palm-flaying form of corporal punishment informally known as ‘the belt’ – from Scottish schools until the mid-1980s.

 

But you never approached Ian Jenkins’ classroom with a feeling of trepidation.  You never worried he’d got out of the wrong side of bed that morning and he might lose the rag and start swinging the tawse at the slightest provocation.  No, you looked forward to his lessons because he was a mellow, kindly and jolly soul.

 

And unlike some of his colleagues, he treated his pupils like grown-ups.  I remember the occasional English lesson with him giving way to a debate about one of the big political issues of the time, such as nuclear disarmament – Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, East-West tensions were high and the prospect of the world vanishing in a puff of mushroom-shaped, radioactive smoke was not a remote one – or whether there should be a Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a protest against that Soviet invasion.

 

Another issue of great geopolitical importance we discussed was the terrible performance – under the hapless stewardship of Ally MacLeod – by Scotland’s national football team at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

 

© Revelation Press

 

I remember one lesson that made me wonder how happy he was being a teacher.  In teaching, after all, you tend to talk about the same things year after year, in the same surroundings, with the only element of change being your pupils arriving, growing older, and departing again.  During that lesson we looked at Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem Ulysses, in which the legendary Greek hero is now an old man, is back home after his many travels and adventures, and faces spending the remainder of his life in peaceful domesticity.  But he decides, “To hell with that!”  He resolves to set sail again and look for new adventures: “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world / Push off and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.”

 

Wistfully, Ian remarked that sometimes he felt he should follow Ulysses’ example and set off in search of excitement and adventure before it was too late.  And by the time of the poem, Ulysses had already done stuff.  He’d fought in the Trojan War, escaped from the cyclops Polyphemus, encountered the sorceress Circe, survived the Sirens, sailed between Scylla and Charybdis and been the lover of the nymph Calypso.  Whereas Ian had merely taught English at a high school in Peebles.  I’m sure, though, countless Peebles schoolkids during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were glad he didn’t clear off as Ulysses did and persevered with the teaching.

 

He certainly had my gratitude, for the help he gave me with my writing.  I’d been writing stories since I was nine or ten years old and in my teens, after class, I’d sometimes approach Ian clutching the latest piece of fiction I’d penned and ask him if he could read it and offer me advice on it.  The poor man.  At the time I was heavily influenced by the great, if verbose, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and my stories were written in florid prose and featured some hopefully horrific (though more often absurd) subject-matter.  For example, one story I gave him was about a man who comes into possession of a grandfather clock that’d once belonged to a witch and discovers that the witch’s monstrous familiar still lives inside it – the inspiration for this effort was Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (1933).  Yet Ian was remarkably patient, civil and encouraging in his feedback.  He did advise me to use fewer adjectives, though.

 

I left school in 1982 but kept in touch with Ian and his wife Midge – who was also a teacher, of French, and who at school had had the unenviable task of trying to coax the euphonic French language out of my broad, gruff and rough Northern Irish-accented mouth.  I frequently bumped into them around Peebles and also sometimes called at their house, which seemed a wonderful place to me because: (1) it was full of books; and (2) it contained whisky too, a generous dram of which was pushed my way any time I visited.

 

Ian was always eager to lend or recommend books to me.  The first time I read Ernest Hemingway, it was a collection of Hemingway’s short stories he’d lent me – no doubt hoping I’d discover from it you could write effective prose without sticking three or four adjectives before every noun.  Another book from the Jenkins lending-library important for me was one that introduced me to the ghost stories of M.R. James.  In the early 1980s, in response to his urging, I procured and read a copy of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), now regarded as the most important Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century.  And he championed the works of Thomas Hardy.  After reading Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), I remember arguing with him – in a friendly way, over a nip of whisky – about the book’s most outlandish character, Little Father Time.  “He’s a bit over the top,” I said.  Ian retorted, “Aye, but he’s fun.”

 

© Penguin Classics

 

I managed, though, to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) before he did.  In the mid-1990s Ian told me one of his pupils had decided to write her English Sixth-Year-Studies dissertation about it.  So, he thought he’d better familiarise himself with Trainspotting to be able to give her support.  “Well,” I asked, “what did you think?”  He replied, “It’s, er, robust.”

 

Then in 1999, like Ulysses, Ian did set sail in search of new adventures.  Okay, he only sailed 21 miles up the road, from Peebles to Edinburgh, where he became a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) representing the constituency of Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, which included Peebles.  But as this was the first time Scotland had had its own parliament for nearly 300 years, it was a historical occasion and being one of the new MSPs was an achievement.  I’d known he was a political creature and in our conversations politics was a regular topic.  He was a lifelong Liberal Democrat, which led to some bickering between us – again in a friendly way, because it was invariably done over a nip of whisky – because during the 1990s my lapel regularly sported a badge for the Scottish National Party (SNP).

 

I lived in Edinburgh during the late 1990s.  July 1st, 1999, saw the official opening of the Scottish Parliament.  As I’ve said, this was the first time since 1707 there’d been a Scottish parliament, so it was a big occasion with a big parade.  Because the streets of central Edinburgh are narrow and aren’t conducive to large crowds gathering to watch a parade, a giant screen had been set up in East Princes Street Gardens so that folk could watch the festivities there.  That was where I headed.  The parade included delegations of schoolchildren from all over Scotland and, at one point, a group of kids from Peebles High School appeared on the screen.  Then the camera cut to an excited, jolly-looking man jumping up and down and waving at them.  I burst out laughing, which prompted a woman standing nearby to ask, “What’s the matter?”  I told her proudly, “That’s my English teacher.”

 

During his four years as an MSP, Ian served as the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for Education, Culture and Sport.  It pleased me that Robert McNeil, the journalist and sketch-writer who covered the Scottish parliament for the Scotsman newspaper, referred to him affectionately as ‘Jolly Jenkins’.  I worked on the upper part of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and a couple of times bumped into him there – in those days, the parliament did its business in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall on the Mound, before the official parliament building was opened at the foot of the Mile in 2004 – and, as ever, he was happy to stop and chat.

 

After he stood down as an MSP in 2003, I continued to bump into him and Midge in Peebles.  I’d encounter them at Peebles’ annual agricultural show.  At one show in the early 2010s he told me how pissed-off he was that the Nick Clegg-led Liberal Democrats had formed a coalition government with the Conservatives.  I’d also see them at Peebles’ Eastgate Theatre.  One evening, my partner and I arrived there for a late showing of the 2014 Mike Leigh movie Mr. Turner, which starred Timothy Spall as the unorthodox English painter J.M.W. Turner, and we met the Jenkinses emerging from an earlier showing of it.  “I hear Timothy Spall grunts a lot,” I said.  Bemused, they confirmed that, yes, Spall does grunt a lot in the movie.  Our last meeting must have been in 2015.  That was when I had some work lined up in Kolkata in India and I needed to write the name and contact details of a possible referee on the application form for an Indian visa.  So, I asked Ian if he’d be my referee and, naturally, he agreed.

 

It saddens me that I didn’t see him after that.  My work situation changed, which kept me in Asia for most of the time and reduced my opportunities to go back to Scotland.  Covid-19 happened, which changed my work situation even more and reduced the opportunities to go home even further.  There were many things I’d have liked to tell him during the past ten years.  I’d have loved to report that, finally, I’d managed to read all the novels written by his beloved Thomas Hardy – even the most obscure ones, like Desperate Remedies (1871), A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882).  Not being a fan of Britain’s honours system, I’d have enjoyed ribbing him about the fact that, in 2024, he’d been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) – though I should add that he got his MBE for very good reasons, for his work for charity and services to his local community.  “Does this mean,” I’d have asked, “you can now call yourself ‘Emperor Jenkins’?”

 

Most of all, I’d have liked to tell him that the number of short stories I’ve had published has now reached treble figures.  My 100th story appeared in print in 2024.  At least part of that achievement is due to the encouragement I got from my old English teacher.

 

After he died, one of my siblings sent me a link to a Peebles Facebook page, where the announcement of his passing had brought a flood of condolences and tributes from people who’d known him, often first of all as pupils in his classroom.  It felt like half of Peebles had posted.  Dozens and dozens of messages spoke of his kindness and decency, his patient and good-humoured teaching, his sense of civic duty, how he did his best to help and encourage the folk he came in contact with, how – whoever you were and whenever and wherever you met him – he was always pleased to stop and blether with you.   Which reminded me that my experiences of the man were by no means unique.

 

So, Ian Jenkins might not have been a hero in the roving, adventuring, Greek-mythological mode of Ulysses.  But in terms of the positive impact he had on many people’s lives, and the simple pleasure of his company, he was a hero – a true local hero.

 

© BBC