Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Jo Bell, "Boater: A Life on England's Waterways"

Jo Bell, photo by Lee Allen

Jo Bell is an award-winning poet, writer, and archaeologist whose collections include Kith and Navigation. She was the UK's inaugural Canal Laureate and is a former director of National Poetry Day. Originally from Sheffield and raised on the edges of the Derbyshire Peak District, she has spent the past twenty years living a life afloat on the waterways of England. She can usually be found on a mooring somewhere in Cheshire. Boater is her first memoir.

About Boater, by Jo Bell
After decades of calm aboard England’s historic canals, a turbulent relationship finds Jo Bell embark on a year-long odyssey navigating the country’s canals. Exploring the past and present, Boater is both her story and the story of the living waterways – told with wit, wisdom, and deep insight into a culture found on the other side of the map.

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Jo uses her experience as an archaeologist to guide readers through this floating world. Along the way, there is heartbreak, disaster, a particularly grisly episode involving a Canada goose, biscuits, and an array of unforgettable and curious

characters.

She also highlights the importance of key historical figures who shaped the system we know today – James Brindley, Thomas Telford, L. T. C. Rolt – whose groundbreaking work revolutionised and revitalised transportation in England.

You can read more about Boater on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the memoir. 

From Boater
This is an adventure story. The adventure is a small one, and the country in which it happens is not on the usual map, because the place where I live is not on your map. It sits inside a parallel geography, on a map-within-a-map of England and Wales. It requires you to look differently at the land you live in. Its history, too, is a history-within-a-history; a rival to the chronicles of great men whose monuments are columns, and whose homes were themselves monuments. This watery nation is an idiosyncratic country, which inspires a love of place without nationalism.

Its people include ordinary workers, clowns, freaks, and charlatans. All share a sense of self, time, and purpose, which makes their world different to the one that lies ten feet away, beyond the water’s edge. I have not crossed the Atlantic in a dinghy with nothing but a jar of peanut butter and a waterproof hat. I have not scaled Everest, or rescued a friend from a crevasse by cutting off my own leg. But then, adventure is not a question of scale. What I have done is travel the waterways of England (and sometimes Wales) for twenty years, meeting with extraordinary people in an extraordinary environment. I have learned a lot about human nature, including my own; about rope, and Brasso, and bravery; and above all, about the necessity for a constant supply of biscuits.

Barbara Cooke, "Evelyn Waugh's Oxford"

 

Dr Barbara Cooke is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She worked in publishing before completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is Co-executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

About Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, by Barbara Cooke, with illustrations by Amy Dodd

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford is a site-specific, creative-critical biography focusing on Waugh’s emotional and creative connection to the city. It begins by looking at Waugh’s Oxford through the lenses of invention, memory and imagination before exploring locations in the city that are particularly significant to his life and work. Waugh was a visual thinker, and the book includes reproductions of archival objects alongside specially commissioned images by Amy Dodd to create a dialogue between words and pictures, the imagined and the real.

You can read more about Evelyn Waugh's Oxford on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the book's location vignettes. 

From Evelyn Waugh's Oxford

Hall Brothers

When Waugh was at Oxford, all dapper undergraduates bought their suits from Hall Bros. The tailors were a city institution, and in the 1920s traded from a mock-Tudor building, replete with Elizabeth I’s coat of arms, at 94 Magpie Lane. 

…

In the 1920s they became the city’s foremost purveyor of ‘Oxford bags,’ very wide trousers first popularized by Waugh’s friend Harold Acton. Oxford bags really took off after Waugh had left, but they belonged firmly to a period when he still thought, talked and dressed like an undergraduate and became one of those – as he put it – ‘who cannot at once sever the cord uniting them to the university and haunt it for years to come.’ Like his student friends, Waugh teamed his bags with a high- or ‘turtle’-neck jumper which, he observed in November 1924, was ‘rather becoming and most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties. It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.’  

…

Waugh’s appreciation of the turtleneck jumper was typical of his pragmatic approach to fashion at the time .… As his financial situation eased, however, Waugh raised his sartorial ambitions. His brother Alec introduced him to Anderson Sheppard of London’s Savile Row,  whose suits made him feel, for the first time, not ‘the worst dressed person in every room.’  Being well turned out satisfied more than just Waugh’s vanity. For a man of his relatively humble origins, the cut of a seam could be the difference between social acceptance and rejection.

Illustration by Amy Dodd

John Schad, "Paris Bride"

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at University of Lancaster.  His books include Victorians in Theory (Manchester, 1999), Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Sussex, 2004), a memoir, Someone Called Derrida (Sussex, 2007), a novel The Late Walter Benjamin (Bloomsbury, 2012), an experimental biography called Paris Bride (Punctum, 2020), and (with Fred Dalmasso) Derrida | Benjamin: Two Plays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).  He has also had two retrospectives published - Hostage of the Word, 1993-2013 (2013) and John Schad in Conversation (2015). He has read his work on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb and at various literary festivals, and his plays have been performed at The Oxford Playhouse, Duke’s Theatre Lancaster, Watford Palace Theatre, HowTheLight GetsIn (Hay-on-Wye), and the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford. You can find out more information here. You can read an interview with John Schad on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

About Paris Bride
By John Schad

In 1905, in Paris, a young woman called Marie Wheeler married, or thought she had married, Johannes Schad, a clerk from Basel. Marie and Johannes then lived together in suburban London until one day, in 1924, they went to the High Court in the Strand, and the marriage ended - or rather was declared never to have been. 

The stated reason for what happened in the High Court was, and is, hard to credit. Marie then returned to Paris, with no more known of her. And that is all the official records reveal. 
Almost 100 years on, new evidence from Paris reveals quite another version of events. Thus, whilst London gives one account of the nineteen-year-long marriage, or ‘marriage,’ Paris now gives another. Which is true?

Paris Bride investigates and as it does so I, who am Johannes’s grandson, begin to recreate the lost life of Marie, of whom little is known beyond a few legal papers, a number of letters, some photographs, the diaries of a friend, and her obituary. 

With so little else known of Marie’s life, I read her back into existence by drawing on a host of contemporaneous modernist texts, each one being uncannily connected with Marie through some coincidence of time, place, or theme.

Paris Bride soon becomes a weave of remarkable lives, loves, and places.  

Marie Wheeler, c.1895

From Paris Bride

Chapter One

           Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

 - Virginia Woolf, 1925  

*

April 7, 1924

Marie said she would buy some flowers, and the trams, the pigeons, and the motor cars all murmured “yes.” She was light upon her feet; quick, careful, lest she should brush against another. None, she thought; there would be none who would know her, though some had smiled. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to.* She would buy the flowers on her way back, and as she walked her head was set low.

She paused to allow a file of children to pass in front of her. Nineteen in all. Two-by-two save one, who turned and looked. It was her hat. Johannes may have bought it in Russia. But she should quicken her step. She never tired of walking, for all her delicacy. On she walked. On. I love walking in London, she thought.

Did Johannes ever come this way? On foot, to his office. He did not like the omnibus and, besides, walking was even more natural than talking, he would say, quoting their friend, the eminent Linguist, Mr. X, as he had been introduced the night they had first met.

The Linguist was an elegant man with a fine moustache, the points of which seemed to quiver as if receiving messages from the air. Some said his name was Ferdinand de Saussure, Professor Ferdinand de Saussure. He certainly spoke with authority; though was inclined, Johannes would say, to mistake language for Switzerland. “A panorama of the Alps,” the Linguist had said, “must be taken from just one point. The same is true of a language.” The Linguist’s great-grandfather, she had heard, was a mountaineer. Among the first to conquer Mont Blanc. But she must be getting on. Such traffic. Piccadilly. Such traffic.

“City of death.” Yes, that was it. That was he had said about Mont Blanc. Shelley, not the Linguist. Shelley, the poet. Strange thing to say, or write, whatever the light. Though he was an unbeliever, Shelley that is, even among the mountains. Especially among the mountains, Johannes had said, pointing out that the unbelieving poet had signed the guest book at Chamonix as “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist.” Ah, and here, right here was Somerset House. Over the Strand the clouds were of mountainous white.

Perhaps, she thought, she should not read so much. After all, there were, these days, so many curious books and so many curious authors. Mrs. Woolf, for instance, or Mr. Eliot, Mr. Eliot-the-Clerk, as Johannes would say. Mr. Eliot, however, she rather liked, seeing that he had written about a woman called Marie. Moreover his Marie, Mr. Eliot’s, was also inclined to read through the night. And then there was Miss Emily Dickinson, the hermit of Amherst, they said. “Our lives are Swiss,” she had written, “So still - so cool.” Yes. “Till some odd afternoon, the Alps neglect their Curtains.” Yes. “And we look further on.”

Marie paused, a little faint, and glimpsed a poster in the window of a shop. “The British Empire Exhibition, Wembley Stadium.” Yes, many would come. Odd, though, that the poster should portray London as a woman in bronze, naked and slim. Marie tugged at her coat. April was indeed a cruel month, just as Mr. Eliot had thought. And, now, a shower was upon them. Rain, rain all over London, she should not wonder, even at the Exhibition. It is nature that is the ruin of Wembley, she thought. The problem of the sky remains, she thought. Is it, one wonders, part of the Exhibition? Marie put up her umbrella. How mountainous those clouds.

Was Johannes out in the rain? Perhaps, but then he was used to weather of all kinds. He travelled so much. What with his languages. French, German, even Russian. The rubber-trade took him to so many places.

*

Metropolitan Police

January 7, 1927

           Johannes Schad has  paid  periodical  visits  to the Continent on business and 
           pleasure and intends doing so in the future.

*

She did not, herself, like to travel by train; it was not, she had heard, altogether safe. Villains there must be battering the brains of a girl out in a train. The continental trains were, though, very different. She had once said so to the Linguist. He, though, had simply muttered something about trains in general, about how no two trains, whatever we think, are identical. “We [invariably] assign [the same] identity to two [quite different] trains,” he had said. “For instance, ‘the 8.45 from Geneva to Paris.’ One [such train] leaves twenty-four hours after the other, [and yet] we treat it as the ‘same’ train.”

Trafalgar Square was stirring. People of all nations and none, she thought. She had not intended to come this way but paused to open her purse for a man without legs, his upturned cap begging on his behalf. He gazed for a moment. Every man fell in love with her. “The bride is beautiful,” as Johannes would say.

It is true that he would sometimes add “but, she is married to another man.” This, though, had been a jest of his. “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man” were, he would explain, the famous words of a famous telegram. Coded words. The cable, he would say, had been wired from Palestine by two Jewish zealots hot-foot from the world’s first Zionist Congress, a gathering held, strange to say, in Basel. Yes, his Basel. The two zealots had, apparently, gone off in vainest search of Israel. Zion. The Promised Land. And they had found her indeed to be beautiful. But also to be another’s.

The man without the legs smiled. Then touched his cap and smiled again. She must help him. Find a baker’s. Ah, here. That smile, though. Yes that smile, it lifted her up and up when — oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!

“Dear, those motorcars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically as if those motorcars, these tyres of motorcars, were all her fault. 

No, thought Marie, it was her fault. She had grown comfortable from the tyres that rubber made, and, in fact, from all that rubber made. Yes, the disturbance in the street was her fault. But she could not stop. She must give the man the sandwich. She could not stop. She was expected at noon. By another man.

Marie’s shoes concerned her. The heels, though modest, were about to give way, and the points of her shoes were worn. Better not to look down; best look up, right up. And why not, seeing that all down The Mall people were looking up into the sky. See, an aeroplane! There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! The Linguist, how he would have loved these letters. “C was it? And an E? Then an L?” There was, she saw, no “A” in the sky. Don’t tell the Linguist. He had loved the French letter-sound a, handling it like the most fragile shell. “In its consistency,” he had once said, “it is something solid, but thin, that cracks easily if struck.”

The aeroplane above breathed several more letters into the sky. But it was not a day to stand and watch. Not like that day in Palmers Green. The dazzling day. 1912 it was, before they had moved in. “Honeymoon Land,” or so it was called. Newly-minted suburbia. Modern Houses for Modern Couples. This dazzling day, they said, was the day an airman, Italian, heading for Hendon, had found his engine faltering high over Honeymoon Land and, seeing Broomfield Park, had attempted to effect a landing. The aeroplane was, though, by now flying so low that its wings, they said, touched first one roof and then another before finally settling, with a murmur, upon the slates of 75 Derwent Road.



*In this chapter, all italicised quotations come from Woolf (most from Mrs Dalloway, some from her diaries and letters).

Annual Creative Writing Lecture: Blake Morrison

You are cordially invited to this year's Annual Creative Writing Lecture, which will be given by Blake Morrison on Monday 18th March 2019 at 6.30pm, in Lecture Theatre 1, George Davies Centre, at the University of Leicester. The event is free and open to all - students, staff and public alike. Below is a description of the lecture.

About the Lecture: Life Writing and the Writing Life

Drawing on his experience in working in several different genres, Blake Morrison considers some of the ethical and formal challenges authors face in doing justice to the story they want to tell. The talk - aimed at creative writers, literature students and general readers - will include short extracts from poetry, fiction and memoir while addressing a number of key questions: What are the drawbacks of writing about family and ‘real’ people? How likeable does a narrator have to be? How strictly should a memoir writer adhere to the truth? Is remembering the same as inventing? When is ‘confessionalism’ acceptable rather than prurient and exploitative? What risks are there, and what advantages, in using regional dialect rather than standard English? 

About Blake Morrison
Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, and has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. Among his best-known works are his two memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, and has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University since 2003. His latest book is a novel with poems, The Executor (2018). http://www.blakemorrison.net/

Writing Lives Together

By Jonathan Taylor

At last night's Leicester Shindig Open-mic Poetry Evening, the Centre for New Writing launched its new pamphlet, Writing Lives Together, an anthology of original poetry and prose inspired by nineteenth-century life writing.

This pamphlet grows out of a project called ‘Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Biography,’ run by Dr. Felicity James and Dr. Julian North, who also hosted a major conference and edited a special issue of the journal Life Writing (June 2017). As part of this wider project, contemporary writers were commissioned to produce their own, creative responses to the research into nineteenth-century life writing. This pamphlet is the result. It features poetry and prose by Jo Dixon, Richard Byrt, Gregory Leadbetter, Alyson Morris, Anna Larner, Aysar Ghassan, Jonathan Taylor and Seán Body.

You can read more details about the pamphlet, which is free to order, as well as the Centre for New Writing's other publications here.

The Shindig launch last night included an introduction by Julian North and readings by some of the writers in the pamphlet. The evening also included wonderful readings by featured poets Julia Bird and Simon Turner, as well as lots of great open-mic poets. 

Here is one of the poems from the Writing Lives Together pamphlet, called "On Reflection," by Anna Larner:

On Reflection

If we were to meet again, I would say

sorry today, for then, when mad with love,

deranged with passion, all reason astray,

I cried “I love you!” Three words – not enough.

So I left flowers to wilt at your door,

composed mixed tapes, wrote odes, baked cakes, your name

on my lips, in my brain. “Be mine” I implored,

as I failed exams, missed deadlines, endured pain.

I lost sleep, got sick, felt weak, refused to 

see sense – still convinced that you could be mine.

And through it all, silent, wise and kind, you

knew the one answer for me would be time.

You were so gentle with your rejection.

Yes, I can see that now, on reflection.

Note

"On Reflection" was inspired by Coleridge’s poem "To Asra" (1803) which speaks in passionate terms of overflowing, limitless love. The hyperbole of language and the exaggerated feeling expressed by Coleridge evoked a memory for me of experiencing that same consuming passion when I fell in love at university. I have used the rhythm of the iambic pentameter and the rhyme of the fourteen line structure of the English, Shakespearian sonnet employed by Coleridge.

- Anna Larner