February 5, 2002

“Girl power” is more venerable than the Spice Girls and was discovered by a man, the full Oxford English Dictionary disclosed. It was first spotted in a less raunchy setting by the novelist Malcolm Lowry almost 50 years ago . He described in a letter how he noticed a Roman Catholic church with a notice saying: “We want girl power for our convent.”

The term, added as a new phrase in the English language to the OED website and defined as “opposed to man power”, spread further in the early 1990s, thanks to the briefly prominent feminist punk US “riot girl” movement. Finally, according to the entry, it became identified in the late 1990s “with the British all-female group the Spice Girls”.

What are literary awards worth?

Writers not yet smiled on by the latest Whitbread might console themselves with the prospect of the IMPAC Award (whose shortlist is so long it defies the word), the WHSmith Book Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orange Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Blue Peter Book Awards, the Commonwealth Writers Prize or the Parker Romantic Novel Awards. These are but a few.

High-profile prizes are the visible tip of a creeping process that is quickening in most areas of literary culture. Meanwhile, publishers who have already had to satisfy an avid internal corporate market struggle to sell their more difficult or unclassifiable titles to booksellers, who then struggle to sell them to a reading public already battered by choice and mired in hype.

Several examples of such contrived reputations are currently walking around with no clothes on, while writers of real innovation, quality and depth battle to stay on their publishers’ books. By increasing the bankability of individual writers, prizes make themselves a part of the process that equates commercial success with artistic worth, and may also eventually contribute to the decisions about who does or does not get published.

So we must be aware that prize committees may have an agenda beyond the celebration of literature.

Sotheby brings fiction to life

One of the more bizarre mysteries of the cold war — unearthed by travel writer Bruce Chatwin in his last novel and later dramatized in a film — has been solved by ceramics experts who hunted down a missing private collection of rare antique porcelain which survived the Nazis and the Communists.

Chatwin painted a colourful profile of an obsessive character, he met briefly in Prague, when he wrote his 1988 novel Utz. After Chatwin’s death in 1989, many dismissed his tale as pure fiction. But years of detective work by specialists from the auctioneers Sotheby’s, for which Chatwin worked, have resulted in surviving members of the collector’s Czech family being tracked down and the missing figurines brought to London. The collection will now go on sale at Sotheby’s in London, on December 11. The eighteenth century Meissen vases, busts and figures are expected to raise around one million pound sterling.

Commercialization or outreach?

The revered American poet Maya Angelou has lent her gifts to the greeting cards company, Hallmark. As well as cards, the new line of products, called the Maya Angelou Life Mosaic Collection, will include mugs, bookends, pillows, wall hangings and journals, all featuring pithy and inspirational verses.

Angelou believed it would be a good way to reach a new audience. She dismisses the allegations of commercialism. “I have had criticism for a long time for different reasons,” she says. She also found it “challenging and daring” to craft two-sentence poems. Examples include “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet”, etched on the Glorious Banquet Bowl, and “The wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy, the wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim”, which appears in one of the cards.

Clash of words!

It is not often that a well-mannered cultural forum for the arts provides the TV highlight of the week, but not long ago during a discussion of two imminent feature films based on the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry 30 years ago, the show’s carefully observed protocol was ruptured by an explosion of anger from its reigning controversialist, the Northern Irish poet and essayist, Tom Paulin. Incensed by fellow panelist Germaine Greer’s intimation of sympathy for the paratroopers who had killed 13 civilians, Paulin countered by accusing her of talking ‘rubbish’ and then shouting that ‘they [the paratroopers] were thugs sent in by public school boys to kill innocent Irish people. They were rotten racist ba...!’ The set-to, in which the poet and the feminist academic tried to shout each other down, made for riveting viewing, in this age of dull consensus.

Stephen Ambrose:plagiarist?

In the US, there has been a recent furore about plagiarism in the books of popular historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of brothers. Earlier this month he was accused of pilfering passages from Thomas Childers’ Wings of morning to support his own ‘thinly researched’ book, The wild blue, about the US Air Force in the Second World War. Further accusations quickly followed over his earlier books. In each case, passages or phrases had been quoted without use of quotation marks. Commentators remarked that if college students or academics did the same thing, they would be severely disciplined, perhaps even suspended or sacked, but that because of Ambrose’s popularity as a history writer, he is likely to survive relatively unscathed.

Rediscovering classics

Some enterprising paperback publishers make a point of rediscovering works that have been out of print for ages — or never were in print, outside their country, in the first place. How brave is that?

Take the Pushkin Press. Motivated simply by a love of classical writing, scour the archives of Europe for books they love and then get them translated, in the hope that everyone else will love them too. They produce them in a coherent design in beautiful, neat little editions. Best of the bunch this year was the Hungarian Antal Szerb’s Journey by moonlight. Len Rix managed to translate Szerb’s book into beautifully fluent English, into a work of comedy and depth, the comedy all the more striking in that the chief subjects of the book are abnegation and suicide. Written in 1937, it’s the story of a man who accidentally gets separated from his wife on honeymoon and begins to wonder if he is really meant for this world. No one who has read it has failed to love it.

Anthologies

The Penguin verse anthology, is perhaps the best one-volume poetry anthology of English poetry ever to appear, with every choice a winner. Its novel arrangement — poems in order of date of publication rather than according to the poet’s date of birth — helps you watch language developing right under your nose.

Is the novel dead?

Andrew Marr a political editor ignited a lively debate in May 2001 when, as chairman of the Samuel Johnson Prize jury, he announced that ‘our non-fiction writing is currently eclipsing anything being done by the novel in this country’.

This variation on an ancient theme — the novel is dead — was partly a restatement of a 1990s critical debate, that fiction has become supplanted by non-fiction memoir, and that writers are now exploring their lives explicitly where previously novelists had done so through the refracting lenses of fiction. Several forests were cut down before the fiction vs non-fiction debate had run its course. Once the Booker Prize long-list was announced, it seemed momentarily as if this was true. Apart from Ian McEwan’s remarkable novel Atonement and Carey’s Ned Kelly, there were few novels with the kind of imaginative or literary stature that the ‘common reader’ would be entitled to expect from such a prize.

Angry old men

Between le Carr and Naipaul, the young hardly got a look in. The literary year opened with an enjoyable return to form by John le Carr, whose The constant gardener reasserted the author’s almost hypnotic hold over a generation of English readers. Le Carr is now 70, but his novel had the thrilling, polemical energy of a writer half his age. Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly gang (Faber) marked the welcome renewal of a career that had seemed, since he won the Booker Prize in 1988, to have been in danger of losing momentum. Just as, 100 years ago, it was established writers like Kipling and Samuel Butler who made headlines with, respectively, Kim and Erewhon, so 2001 was the Year of the Seasoned Literary Veteran.

September 11

For several weeks after September 11, everything on the books pages seemed trivial and pointless. Rarely had reality intruded into the world of books with such effect. Literary journalism did its best to respond. The great beneficiary of the crisis was Roy Jenkins’s biography of Britain’s archetypal twentieth-century war leader, Churchill . As the smoke and dust cleared, this compelling 1,000-page volume dominated the end-of-year landscape like some Stone Age colossus. The catastrophe of September 11 has been followed by a sub-genre of books (profits donated to charity) with titles like The day that shook the world (BBC Books), September 11: a testimony (Reuters) and Fred Halliday’s Two hours that shook the world (Saqi Books).

These, unquestionably, will not be the last in this field but they illustrate an enduring point that, in the era of electronic communication and the 24-hour news cycle, it is to the printed word that people turn for wisdom and consolation in a crisis.

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