For anyone interested in hearing Toby talk about how the LitSalon came into being, what it’s all about today and a little bit about swimming in icy waters, listen to her interview with Pendarvis Harshaw, a former student of hers at The Athenian School in California, here on Rightnowish.
I recently had to confess to our new facilitator, Anne Boyd Rioux, author of the highly acclaimed Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still Matters, that I have never really warmed to Little Women. This is in spite of its strong credentials as the archetypal feminist fiction and a book that has inspired countless women – many of them (including luminaries such as Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith, Coretta Scott King and Zadie Smith) celebrated for their talents and tenacity – to emulate the character of Jo March in forging their own brilliant careers.
On reflection I wonder to what extent my feelings are based on an instinctive distaste for the title (even as a child I thought it demeaning) and that of its sequel Good Wives. Anne patiently explained to me that in the US Little Women was first published in two volumes, the first in 1868 followed by Little WomenPart Two in 1869, soon thereafter becoming a single book following its huge success. However, here in the UK (and the rest of the English-speaking world), the publishers – rather than the author – persisted in maintaining two volumes: Little Women and Good Wives.
Further confusion was caused in 1880 when the US publisher produced a new edition in which much of the language of the original text was ‘improved’ by, for example, amending the March girls’ use of the “ain’t” to “am – or is, or are – not”, in the process robbing the original prose of its vitality! For this reason Anne urges readers to seek out the original text and recommends the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (ISBN: 978-0143106654).
All of the above (further encouraged by this New Yorker article) has led me to the conclusion that I should re-read Little Women (in its original form) with an open mind and, if my schedule allows it, join her Reading Little Women study starting on 29 March!
Even though days are getting longer, mornings lighter and sunsets later, February can be a grind. As we await the arrival of Spring we’re looking forward to getting away from it all in the coming months, so here’s a reminder that this year we have more opportunities to read great literature in evocative locations than we’ve ever offered before.
Some of our travel studies – Jacob’s Room on the Sussex Downs, The Oresteia in Greece, ‘Reading the Body’ in Umbria – are already fully booked, but there are still a few places left to read Homer’s Odyssey on the gorgeous Greek island of Agistri, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouseand Between the Acts in St Ives.
Some feedback from participants in previous travel studies gives an idea of what to expect:
The Odyssey on the island of Agistri, April/May 2022
“Discussing Homer whilst gazing out at the Aegean . . . heaven!”
“Rested? Not really, as there was simply so much to do, all of it interesting. Energised? Definitely . . . “
“Agistri and Rosy’s provided a wonderful setting which was both peaceful and invigorating. I so appreciated being surrounded by the beauty – bees buzzing in orange blossom – and being by, and in, the sea. This scenery that Homer would have known really enhanced the experience of studying the text.”
“The group was amazing and I loved your insights and questioning of the text. It was an amazing and enriching experience.”
“It was a wonderful trip . . . I think the landscape, especially around the islands, is so seductive that you can see how these wonderful texts were written.”
To the Lighthouse in St Ives, September/October 2022
“The collaboration between facilitators and participants was rich indeed and I wonder how it was accomplished that everyone in the group was so insightful and intelligent and I might even say soul-searching.”
“Wonderful . . . The studio where the discussion took place is a beautiful, extraordinary place, the participants were imbued with the light and landscape, creating a friendly and committed atmosphere. The two facilitators were wonderful – knowledgeable and sensitive, understanding in depth not just the book but the group as a whole.”
Meanwhile, if writing is your preferred route to escaping the February blues, your creative juices are stirring and you fancy some armchair travel, there is still time to register for Alison Cable’s ‘Writing for Wellbeing’ workshopJourneys beginning on 20 February.
Email us if you are tempted by any of our studies and would like to know more!
And, last but not least, although it’s not part of our own schedule, we’d like to mention Salonista Harriet Griffey’s Writers’ Retreat in Spain from 10-17 June. Harriet explains:
Writers’ retreat with Harriet Griffey at Las Chimeneas, Spain, 10-17 June 2023
Whether you are completely new to writing or are trying to begin, develop or complete a piece of work, this writers’ retreat facilitated by Harriet Griffey (ex-publisher and author of Write Every Day) offers creative space to do so, along with one-to-one feedback and optional group opportunities to share and discuss your writing progress.
Set in the peaceful village of Mairena in the beautiful Alpujarra region of Spain, prices including full board and airport transfer (excluding flights) for a week’s retreat range from €860-€1050. Further details and booking at:
As 2023 begins we are launching ‘Wide Open Reading’, a series of occasional studies that will be slightly different to those we have traditionally offered, embracing a broader and more diverse variety of writers and texts. Initially focusing on fiction and poetry, every study will comprise 2-4 weekly meetings in London led by facilitators who are continually exploring and developing their in-depth knowledge of these relatively new works.
Our goal is to feature writers ranging from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, traditional or experimental in style, voicing the experiences of people from an unlimited range of places, communities and perspectives. This may include South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa (north, south and central), the Middle East, people of colour, displaced peoples, indigenous peoples, post-colonial experience, exiles, migrants, LGBTQ+ and more . . .
We aim to be genuinely wide open and invite you to join us with a correspondingly wide open mind. Our first title is Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with meetings starting in February.
Andy and I have travelled to Krakow to meet our daughter, Madeline, who has been working outside of Lviv. She has been doing humanitarian aid work for a small local NGO that is providing food, power and medical supplies to the eastern part of Ukraine that has been destroyed — and then re-destroyed — by Russian missile strikes. I gather her fiercely in my arms, but no encompassing hug, no comforting words can erase the reality of war that she is living. And that reality, despite my over-active imagination, I cannot truly comprehend as I have only read about it. What she speaks about in her time with the Ukrainian guys she works with is their laughter, their teasing, their attempts to understand her feminism against their more traditional gender roles — how they meet the logistical challenges of moving truckloads of donated items across war-torn spaces.
We are reconnecting with her as we wander around the beautiful city of Krakow. I learn more specifically about the cycles of the portioning of Poland and the vast and violent re-drawings of empire that this land bears witness to. We enter the Wawel Cathedral and, amidst the relics of saints and royals, we find the Crypt of National Poets. And there on the wall is a poem, shared with me many years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by my Athenian colleague Lisa Haney, and returned to when the horrors of history and the moment well up in me: Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski.
Try to praise the mutilated world
In reading that poem again — in marble, on the wall of this crypt, next to my weary daughter — I feel how the layers of unliveable history shape us. Zagajewski connects the daily acts of praise of living with the web of struggle and loss that we inherit.
You must praise the mutilated world
This is a call, a demand that in spite of the mutilation we should find beauty and coherence. The horror must be included in the blessing. I don’t know how. And I want to turn away. And I know we are all called to learn, to seek understanding where there is grief, to see the scars of the past on the earth.
Praise the mutilated world
I remember first reading this poem in the aftermath of 9/11 and thinking — briefly, self-indulgently — that I had an understanding of living in war. Such an American indulgence! My understanding has become more layered as I contingently watch what happens in Ukraine. As a citizen of London, I am learning all the time how the aftermath of war has shaped and shifted time and place, how it reframes our lives today. The poem reflects how deeply and desperately the mind holds the everyday miracle of living in equilibrium with injustice and violence. The poem connects me to past reckonings with history’s wrath — and gives me the breath of the light of living.
Solstice is a celebration of the necessity of the darkening days with the shift towards more light in our daily cycle. This poem meets that primal movement with the historical movement between times of peace and times of struggle. Zagajewski catches the experience of using our imagination as a way into other stories (the eternal role of the creative arts), other histories. Isn’t this in part why we wander through old buildings, tapestried halls? And it is not really the moments of triumph we seek, but a map of how to negotiate the exiles, the griefs — the blasts into the work of living.
In The New Republic, the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 1993 that Mr. Zagajewski’s poems, in a collection titled Canvas, were “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day — and in the ways we see and feel.”
I had the wonderful opportunity to study two of the works of Javier Marías in Valencia in the years before the pandemic. Veteran Salonista Robin Tottenham hosted our gatherings on her lovely terrace overlooking Valencia’s glorious Mercado Centrale; Salonistas Keith Fosbrook and Ellie Ferguson had been emphatic in their urging me to dive into the works of Marías—and I am so glad that I did.
At first, I struggled to get a grip on his aesthetic vision. With his works, I often felt that I was a voyeur observing the lives of contemporary people struggling in spaces of passion and betrayal—his characters felt like people I had come to know, the entanglements dramatic but recognisably arising from all-too-common blindspots in human behaviour. But the work of studying Marías with a committed group paid off: I came to understand that what Marías offers is an acute understanding of how human consciousness is revealed in all the forces that press upon our fragile integrity: desire, history, injustice, guilt, betrayal…and how we employ narrative to give a shape to what has happened—even when we cannot shape what has happened into coherence.
I think this quote from a Guardian article on Marías in 2013 gives a sense of his profound probing:
“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” – he has published a whole book of just his football articles – “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”
Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 22 February 2013
We have lost a wonderful writer and philosopher in the death of Javier Marías. I hope to re-visit the works I have read and expand my knowledge of his writings in the coming year. I am grateful to Robin, Ellie and Keith who inspired the Marías studies—and I look forward to more.
“Marías also wrote movingly about old age, and cast an unflinching eye on male-female relationships. The novels often begin with a shocking scene – an unexplained suicide, the sudden death in bed of a lover, a complex love triangle – plunging reader and narrator into the plot-to-be.
The main characters are often translators or interpreters – or, latterly, spies – people who have renounced their own voices, but who are also, in a sense, interpreters of people, which is, of course, precisely what any good novelist aspires to be. In Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator, Deza, is recruited to become exactly that, “an interpreter of people”, whose job it is to write detailed reports on the people he has seen only in videos or via a two-way mirror.”
Margaret Julla Costa, The Guardian, Obituary 15 September 2022
The jacket of the first edition of Midnight’s Children
I have taught Midnight’s Children for three decades, in three countries and to readers of many ages and nationalities. The humour and poignancy of the work – as well as its epic vision – buoy the reader through complex history and multiple cultures. The strongest aspect of the book is how Rushdie uses the body and mind of his protagonist Saleem as a canvas on which to illustrate the birth of India as an independent nation, with all its bloody communal tensions and its incredible possibilities. Although it is given to a cruel teacher to point to how Saleem’s physiognomy symbolically represents the continent of India, this is just the more crude slippage between symbol and actuality that Rushdie employs. Saleem’s ongoing struggle for identity and agency – and his cry that the blows he suffers are “not fair” – these more crucially reflect the struggle of India for independence against the forces of other national and tribal power struggles.
This is what narrative can do: in a deft way, a carefully crafted narration makes comprehensible and digestible the huge political and historical forces that impact us all.
The brutal attack on Salman Rushdie, as he was preparing to speak about the importance of providing sanctuary to exiled writers – and appreciating the United States for this – is a reminder of just how threatening free speech is seen to be by regimes of intolerance.
As usual, the author himself says it better:
‘We are engaged in a war of narratives, incompatible versions of reality, and need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance and are already creating a legend of freedom. Meanwhile America is sliding back toward the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over black bodies, but women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from centuries ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand. Violence grows as democracy dies. False narratives of Indian history are at play that privilege the majority and oppress minorities, and are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed.
‘This is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said that the powerful may own the present but writers own the future, for it is through our work—or the best of it the work that endures—that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. How can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, what can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all satirists are heroes.
‘But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that song is stronger than death.
‘We can sing the truth and name the liars.
‘We can stand in solidarity with our fellows on the frontlines and magnify their voices by adding our own. Above all we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have attracted many.
‘So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories in which people want to live. The battle is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are also contested territories. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.’
Salman Rushdie’s words delivered at PEN America’s 2022 Emergency Writers Congress
August is the moment when I breathe in and gaze across the previous months of studies and work. This August feels particularly welcome: the Salon has grown with the incredible energy of the new facilitators (new as in going from myself and Mark a few years ago to a current staff of 13) and Nicky Mayhew keeping the Salon ship moving with communications, strategic advice and administrative support. We are also indebted to Sophie and crew at TPR media who have helped raise the Salon profile with interviews and news on Start the Week, BBC London and more.
At the heart of our work is always the experience of the studies themselves: the magical and enriching journey through the words into the blossoming spaces of imagination and contemplation. I am sharply aware that all around me the world is challenged with wars and violence, with climate change and suffering. I am also aware that the monsters of intolerance and prejudice are swelling, greedy in their appetite for discord. Sometimes I realise the Salon discussions offer an escape—an immersion in the artistic rendering of the human mind that emphasizes the lyric and generous visions of writers able to illuminate all aspects of our living.
But it is more than an escape. Within Salon discussions we learn to form and speak our insights to provocative ideas. We learn to hear each other and even—perhaps especially—to disagree respectfully, opening our minds to differing views and the reflections of others. Stepping out of our individual perspective and entering into the mind of an author, a character, another being—this is the practice of empathy. I experience this both in deep reading and discussion of the literature, and also in focused engagement with the participants in a Salon discussion.
Mohsin Hamid recently explored the dangerous progression he has witnessed towards binary thinking and how reading and writing literature pushes against it, read his article here.
“I wrote this novel to explore what it has been to be myself, and also to explore what it is to be other selves. I intend it as a means for readers to do the same. We risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Perhaps fiction can help us investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the space that presently seems empty, impossible, but then, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all.”
Mohsin Hamid
August is also the time (well, of course, it should be July or earlier but, hey, we are all doing the best we can) when we plan and announce the bulk of the studies for the coming year. This has been a big year for Joyce and Ulysses (one hundred years since publication) and I am still basking in the afterglow of the three study groups—one for returning readers, with whom I was privileged to explore again, more deeply, this incredible work that celebrates curiosity, fantasy, and desire while skewering one-eyed prejudicial perspectives. The Bloomsday festivities—in London and in Dublin—were particularly sweet this year. The building Ulyssian energy has prompted a new ‘Slow Read’ of the great book, commencing in October, rolling forward in ten-week waves so participants can join along the way. This format echoes the Finnegans Wake approach that is now on its second cycle after four years of study, and it is so satisfying to dwell in such a complex text with the time and space for careful consideration.
There are so many wonderful and unique studies coming in the next few months. I am still harnessing the right words to express the particular magic of the travel studies—this past year in St Ives, Umbria and Greece—these adventures create on-going groups connected through their combined love of literature and adventure. We are working on the travel offerings for the coming year, and this year’s September/October St. Ives studies are in place with one remaining space for Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as I write.
Thinking across the variety of genres, historical and social contexts that we offer in the Salon, an old verse from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls plays on the edges of my mind. My hungry brain seeks an answer, THE answer (how to fight inequities in power and resources, what is the best way to live, what confers meaning on our existence?), but the study of great writing bends my mind towards possibilities and means of expanding my understanding. Art can offer a gasp of insight to the big questions—not to stop the asking but to find a moment of solidity on the climb.
And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains There’s more than one answer to these questions Pointing me in a crooked line And the less I seek my source for some definitive (The less I seek my source) Closer I am to fine, yeah
Congratulations to Salonista Farah Ahamed, who has been shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The overall winner will be announced on 21 June.
You can hear Farah speaking about her story Hot Chutney Mango Saucehere.
The story is included in an anthology of writing about menstruation in South Asia, Period Matters, which Farah has also edited and which is due for publication on 28 June.
Have you noticed the way in which, when there is more than one child in a family, each of them tends to be given a particular role? In my case, my mother always used to say that she hoped I would become a banker, or a lawyer – someone who would earn enough money to look after her in her old age. My brother, by contrast, was expected to be ‘an Artist’. It wasn’t entirely clear what this should involve, but clearly included him being somewhat unstable but brilliant, bringing reflected glory to his parents because of his talent, even if the consequence might be a painful (and impoverished) life… It didn’t really matter than I wrote poetry (and had no interest in banking), or that my brother quite liked the idea of having a comfortable and stable life (and maybe even helping to look after his parents in old age). In both our cases, growing up involved us having to work out our own responses to the expectations we were born into…
It won’t come as any surprise, then, that when I started reading about the life of James Joyce, I quickly became fascinated about his relationship to his younger brother, Stannie. As the eldest son of an eldest son, James was his father’s favoured child, carrying all his father’s frustrated hopes for fame and glory. Stannie did his best to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but that meant he was always a step behind – looking up with admiration (and some envy) at his brother’s achievements. From his teenage years onwards, Stannie kept a diary, much of which was filled with commentary on his brother’s life. Some of this was published posthumously, as The Dublin Diaries. He became Joyce’s first reader and critic – and gathered materials for his brother to use in the short stories that were eventually to be published as Dubliners. When Joyce went into exile in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, Stannie followed them out there; working tirelessly to earn enough money to allow his brother to write, often ‘rescuing’ him from the bars of Trieste, where he feared his brother was dissipating his talents. Joyce never fully acknowledged his brother’s contribution. Indeed, he cut the character based on him (Maurice) almost entirely from the final version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh, and when it was finally published, he forgot to include the promised dedication to his brother in Dubliners.
Even today, with biographies and novels about the lives of Joyce’s father, John, his wife Nora, and his daughter Lucia, there is still no full-length book about Stanislaus Joyce. So when I joined the Lit Salon to re-read Ulysses, which I’d first had a go at when I was at university, it was no surprise that I also started to remember my fascination with James Joyce’s brother…
Eighteen months later, and I’m delighted to say that my radio play about the relationship between the brothers, Stannie and James Joyce, is going to be broadcast on RTE, to coincide with this year’s Bloomsday celebrations on 16 June. The play is called ‘Bloomsday’ and tells the story – in a fictionalized form – of the ten years when Stannie lived with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste, between 1905 and 1915. Joyce wrote in Ulysses that ‘a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella’, and in some ways my play was an attempt to bring Stannie back into the story – indeed, to tell his story, the one that he never really got to write.
A small coda however. After finishing work on the play, and having had so much pleasure reading Ulysses again, I decided to have a go at reading Finnegans Wake with Toby in the Lit Salon. Although I hadn’t known about it at the time I was writing my play, it turns out that Finnegans Wake puts the relationship between two brothers – Shem and Shaun – at the heart of the book. Shem is an artist; and Shaun is a postman, one who can only deliver letters, not write them. So even in his final work, the family roles were still being played out. But I think Finnegans Wake is also a reckoning with these family scripts too. Indeed, despite the contempt in which Shem seems to hold his brother, and the sense of disapproval that Shaun shows towards his irresponsible sibling, in the end they both recognise that they need each other. And love each other. The family roles each were asked to play is part of what makes them who they are; but in questioning and challenging those roles, they also each become the person they should truly be.
Nick Midgley’s radio play, ‘Bloomsday’, will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June at 8.00 pm (BST) and will be available online at rte.ie/dramaonone.
