Saturday 17th October 2015.

I watch a new Ted Hughes documentary made by the BBC, Stronger Than Death. Unusually for a TV documentary, there’s no celebrity presenters trampling their own uncalled-for views all over the material. Instead the film lets the poems, the archive footage and the interviewees do all the talking. There’s still omissions and bias, of course: Jonathan Bate appears, and it’s clearly timed to coincide with his major new Hughes biography.

Despite having 90 minutes to play with Hughes’s life, a lot of time is given to the shadow of Sylvia Plath. There’s a recital of a US feminist’s poem which openly dreams of Hughes’s murder, as revenge for Plath’s suicide. This is at the expense of even mentioning The Iron Man or Meet My Folks (both of which delighted me as a child). Hughes’s widow Carol is also noticeably absent – perhaps because she’s appeared in the news headlines lately, complaining about ‘damaging and offensive claims’ in Mr Bate’s book. Instead, one of TH’s extra-marital flings speaks about the poem she apparently inspired, with clear pride.

It’s tempting to say a lot of this is unfairly intrusive or even gossipy, but as Simon Armitage says early on in the film, Ted Hughes is one literary figure where the biography really is essential when considering the work. For my own part, I find myself reaching for my copy of Emma Tennant’s memoir Burnt Diaries, to look up her own contributions to the Tales of Ted. There’s much about Ms Tennant’s own affair with the poet in the 70s, but most memorably for me is the anecdote about his encounter with a mentally ill poet. This man had stalked Hughes for months and had even threatened him with a knife. Finally confronted by the man on a London street, Hughes shoves him into the passenger seat of his car, binds him with the seatbelt, and grabs a sheet of plain A4 paper from his satchel. Then he gets out his penknife, shouts, ‘Look at this!’ to the stalker, and slices the paper diagonally in two.

According to Ms Tennant, who witnessed all this from the back seat of the car, the stalker sat there looking at the paper, ‘as if a living creature had been sacrificed before his eyes – or his soul had been cut in two.’ He was then let out of the car and shambled off into the city. ‘He won’t trouble us again,’ said Hughes.

Bate’s new biography includes this story, and adds that the stalker in question may have been Henry Fainlight, troubled brother of Ruth, though he thinks the anecdote is ‘probably exaggerated in order to dramatise Ted’s quasi-occult powers.’ But Hughes was steeped in ideas of mythology himself, and what else is gossip but a form of mythology? From Leda and the Swan to Kim Kardashian, it’s all tale-telling of a kind.

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Wednesday 21st October 2015.

To the Tate Britain for the big Barbara Hepworth exhibition, Sculpture for a Modern World. It’s labelled as the first major Hepworth show for nearly 50 years. Perhaps the long gap is because people are used to Ms Hepworth’s work being part of the landscape – literally, given her association with outdoors art. This large-scale indoor exhibition brings out the ambient, calming side of her sculptures: a world of humane and peaceful geometry. One room recreates a 1960s outdoor installation in the Netherlands, the Rietveld Pavilion. The pavilion’s concrete walls have been transplanted inside the Tate’s galleries, to show Hepworth’s works in the intended context, though without the grass and sky. I see more visitors sitting and sketching the exhibits than usual. Perhaps there’s something about Hepworth’s sculptures that particularly invites sketching. Carving away at the paper, joining in.

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Thursday 22nd October 2015.

I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of The Flood. A satisfying sequel to Oryx and Crake, focussing on two women caught up in a post-apocalyptic world, where a ‘waterless flood’ – a global pandemic plague – has destroyed most of humanity. A pull-quote for the cover praises the novel for being ‘as pacy as a thriller’. This is a very telling statement on the way genre is viewed by the British literary scene: it implies that literary novels aren’t meant to be pacy, and thrillers aren’t meant to be read. But it’s also accurate for The Year of the Flood: the book uses short chapters, cliffhangers, parallel viewpoints, and flashbacks. All are devices of thrillers. I wolf through its 500 pages in three days.

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Friday 23rd October 2015.

To the ICA cinema for The Lobster. A surreal black comedy, in the Absurdist tradition – shades of Ionesco and Bunuel. It’s by a Greek writer and director, but is filmed in English, and has an impressive cross-European cast (including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Lea Seydoux). The dialogue has a stilted, almost robotic feel, as if translated by a computer program, but this is clearly part of the whole deadpan aesthetic. The plot concerns an alternative world where single people are forced to find a compatible partner in a month, while imprisoned in a rural hotel. If they fail, they are surgically transformed into an animal of their choice. Mr Farrell escapes one such hotel, only to find that the woods-dwelling ‘loners’ he joins have brutal rules of their own. It’s a very strange film indeed, but like the best Absurdist plays, the comedy balances out the alienation.

Then to Vout-o-Reenee’s to prop up the bar with Debbie Smith. I also bump into Hazel Barkworth, a friend I’ve not seen for years. We discuss how we’ve solidified our own looks – my blond hair and suits, her bob hair and black dresses. ‘Be your own cosplay’ is our decree. (cosplay being short for ‘costume play’, the practice of dressing up as a genre character).

Tonight the venue is hosting the launch of two new poetry pamphlets (I think ‘chapbooks’ is the proper term). Both are published by Annexe Magazine: Susie Campbell’s The Frock Enquiry and JT Welsch’s The Ruin. The former uses historical research into the plight of early 20th century British female workers, a kind of Suffragette in poetry form. Mr Welsch’s work is inspired by a visit to the ruined ancient temples of Tunisia, and makes some nice comments about the way Star Wars fans now make a similarly holy pilgrimage to this area, due to the landscape’s role as a Star Wars location. Certainly, the latest Star Wars sequel is generating anticipation on a level of religious rapture, and it’s not even out for another two months.

I also take a look at the latest exhibition in the venue’s Stash Gallery, Wilma Johnson’s Cat Amongst The Dogs. Ms Johnson lost her life’s work of paintings in a house fire last June, so this show represents something of a rebirth of her creative spirit. Some forty or fifty canvasses are here – not bad for four months. The theme is a playful and colourful celebration of film icons and pets, with a touch of the mythic about both. There’s also a little of a Pop Art Frida Kahlo in the mix. There’s Garbos and Hepburns and Taylors amongst marmalade cats and borzois. Perhaps proving the point about the British love of pets, about half the paintings have already been sold – and the cat paintings are going more than the dog paintings. Tonight, I chat to the artist and discover that she’s staying at her mother’s house in Highgate, which turns out to be the house opposite mine. We share an obvious cab home.

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Saturday 10th January 2015. Work this week: writing the first draft of an essay. Escapism in Brideshead Revisited, Day of the Triffids and Lucky Jim. Much of which is escapism through alcohol. I was aware of the scenes of unrestrained drinking in Brideshead Revisited and Lucky Jim before I came to read them, but the booziness of Day of the Triffids surprised me.

Brian Aldiss called John Wyndham’s sci-fi novels ‘cosy catastrophes’. The term caught on, but it’s ultimately unfair, given the often frightening or even disturbing events Wyndham subjects his characters to. Still, Triffids certainly has an unexpectedly large amount of scenes where the hero stops for a drink, where one would expect him to do something rather more practical. The first ‘day’ of the story effectively reads like a post-apocalyptic pub crawl. After most of humanity has been blinded, Bill Masen reacts by walking around a silent London from bar to bar, helping himself to brandies and ‘restoratives’. He ends the day in a luxury flat drinking an ‘excellent Amontillado’. The woman he rescues along the way gets ‘a small Cointreau’. Day of the Sherries, more like.

The phrase that springs to mind is the title of Bevis Hillier’s book about post-war design, ‘Austerity Binge’. All three of the novels were published in the age of austerity, the 1940s and early 50s, and all three have scenes of what would now be called binge-drinking. Given rationing went on until 1954, it’s hard to begrudge the original readers for wanting a little cosiness with their catastrophe.

Three things which found a surge of popularity in 1940s Britain, as learned today from the Hillier book: circuses, canal boats and anything with a mermaid on it.

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Sunday 11th January 2015. Over Christmas, some neighbours put a note through our door, asking if we’ve seen their lost cat. Missing since Boxing Day morning, it was a beautiful, exotically long-haired creature (a Maine Coon in fact). It would install itself in regal splendour on the top of the wall across the road. The sight of it would always cheer me up on my journeys into town. No sign of it since the note. Today I pass the wall and see a scratching post put out with the bins.

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Tuesday 13th January 2015. To Birkbeck for a class on Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, her 1970s memoir of growing up as a Chinese American. Very unusual – the term ‘memoir’ doesn’t describe it properly, as it uses digressions into folktales, retellings of superstitions and family anecdotes retold in turn by relatives. Chinese whispers in every sense. The woman warrior in question turns out to be the mythical Fa Mu Lan, whom Disney turned into Mulan. We discuss Orientalism, which always reminds me of the imposing School of Oriental and Asian Studies building next door. It was founded in 1916 for the original orientalists, as in students of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Thanks to Edward Said’s 1970s book, Orientalism, never far away from any college reading list, the word ‘orientalist’ now tends to mean a pejorative distortion of such cultures, especially by the West. I’m guessing they study that next door, too. It’s no surprise to add that the O-word has also been bandied about in discussions about Charlie Hebdo magazine this week.

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Wednesday 14th January 2015. Class on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Ted Hughes’s Crow. I manage to read both in time, though the discussion of Plath takes up the whole seminar. No time for Ted. We listen to a radio recording of ‘Daddy’: I hadn’t realised how strong, confident and even sassy Plath’s voice was. At thirty, she sounds at least ten years older, not at all like the fragile waif I had imagined. I suppose what I really mean is that she doesn’t sound like the type to kill herself. Then I realise what a meaningless comment that is.

Still, her death will always inform any talk of her work. ‘Avoid biography’ is a common tip for literary scholars, ‘except when it’s Sylvia Plath’. With her it’s definitely ‘know the biography’. Biographies plural, too. New ones seem to pop up all the time.

Someone else in the class mentions that Frieda Hughes, the daughter, is a poet herself, and that she has her own pet owl.

Hughes’s Crow couldn’t be more different from Ariel. A rewriting of creation myths, giddying surreal vistas, unsettling shape-shifting tales of gods and universes. Plath bares herself, Hughes dissolves himself. I find both works intoxicating, though in different ways.

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Thursday 15th January 2015. More essay, more hours at the British Library. John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists is a dangerously addictive book. A doorstopper to dip into, it gives the reader potted biographies of hundreds of writers, and manages to include all the bits one really wants: gossip, love lives, anecdotes, myths, plus a decent smattering of criticism about the actual work. Mr Sutherland has his own preferences, however: there’s as much commercial fiction as there is Literature with a capital ‘L’. Jeffrey Archer makes the cut, Angela Carter doesn’t.

Interesting how some critics think Sebastian dies in Brideshead Revisited. He doesn’t. It’s Cordelia’s detailed prediction which muddles the memory. Sebastian simply drinks himself out of the text, last seen on a hospital bed in a Tunisian monastery. Also: a common error regarding The Day Of The Triffids. The mass blindness is not caused by a meteor shower. It in fact turns out to be the accidental triggering of a secret Cold War weapons system; or at least, that’s what the narrator decides. I mention this because today I read a piece on Wyndham which names and shames other scholars for making this error. A few paragraphs later, he himself gets the name of the main character wrong. Hubris in motion.

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Friday 16th January 2015. I watch a YouTube video by Mark Kermode about misleading film marketing. The American DVD cover of Pride makes no reference to any of the characters being gay. Even the activists’ banner is airbrushed out. The director is fine with this, however, saying that’s it’s important to preach to the unconverted, and get a film seen by as many people as possible. The problem with this good intention is that it might backfire, leading to simple complaints of false advertising. This is nothing new, though. In the 80s, the US poster for Prick Up Your Ears tried to play down its gay theme, by crowbarring Vanessa Redgrave’s minor character into the white-toothed image of Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina. No sign of any connection stronger than friendship. More recently, the posters for Hanif Kureishi’s Le Week-End made it look like a fluffy romcom, rather than the simmering drama it really was.

But sometimes all the advertising in the world can make no difference, misleading or not. Some people only go to see a film because they’ve been dragged there. I witnessed this when I went to see The Hobbit Part One. As the lights went down, the man next to me said to his girlfriend, ‘I’ve no idea what this is about’.