Sandstone Press

Our Mutual Friend

Posted by RLD on 4th May 2009

By the end of August 1939 Wysten Auden had arrived in New York with his lover, Chester Kallman, with whom he would spend the rest of his life, not always in New York and not always happily.  On the 1st September, a few hours after learning of the German invasion of Poland he sat alone in a gay bar on 52nd Street and there began, if not on paper, certainly in his head, his great poem, 1st September 1939.

His thoughts on his own position are not recorded but they must surely have been melancholy.  For all he had been warning of German expansionism for years, for all he had been in Spain during its awful civil war and witnessed Nazi attitudes and methods when he lived in Berlin, he was bound to be regarded as a runout, never to be wholly accepted in England again.

Although I have read this poem many times I still thrill to its courage and technical mastery, and to the surprising turns in every verse.  It opens with great immediacy thus, ‘I sit in one of the dives/On 52nd Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low, dishonest decade’.

When George Szirtes was reading SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN, in preparation for his deep introduction to Remzije Sherifi’s book, we discussed it several times, eventually settling on its last line of stoicism and injunction as ultimate summary, ‘Show an affirming flame.’

The poem first came within my ken in a book titled LESS THAN ONE by Joseph Brodsky, Selected Essays.  This following statement comes from his essay on Auden’s masterpiece.  ‘Remember: it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically.’

The trail this put me on led me to The Law of Second Things, which I must some day formulate properly.  The idea is that second things are more significant than first things.  As Brodsky says, the second line determines the metre.  It also either develops the first theme or introduces the second.

An author’s second book, especially after a successful first, establishes his or her distinctive subjects, that might have been present but dormant in the first book, themes that will likely dominate their writing henceforth.

Here at Sandstone we are now actively working with authors on their second books and we make a point of NOT saying, ‘What you did before, do it again.’  In fact we say, ‘You are now going to sound the notes that will form the chord you will play for the rest of your life, one way or another.  Choose them carefully and strike them well.’

The other day I returned to OUR MUTUAL FRIEND by Charles Dickens, a book I loved in my twenties and haven’t opened since.  It was Dickens’ last completed novel and he was acutely aware when he was writing, in 1863, of a financially polarised nation, of a newly monied class that worked hard not to look at what was under its nose, of foreign wars.  As he had written in another book they were times, ‘much like these times’.

Of those who have read the book, few will forget the opening chapter, the boats on the river, the night, the stink, the girl at the oars, the body, the treachery, the pared down language.  Dickens’ hook goes in deep, and it carries more than just a barb because essential characters have been introduced and the first theme established.

More complex and longer than the first, the second chapter is very different.  In a room filled with artificial light we attend a fancypants dinner party and here meet characters both superfical and essential.  A back story is sketched using a more elaborate diction, and the plot is sprung with the arrival of a mysterious letter (a Dickensian lever if ever there was one) that will alter everything.

The Law of Second Things has been observed and the book is moving.  In both chapters, but especially the second, elements have been laid down that will influence the story as it goes and, because they have been introduced here, will not appear as obvious machinations later.

I often receive quite well written manuscripts where the information arrives as it must have for the author.  A point is reached, something must happen, the machinery is constructed and planted just there.  The author’s presence, and thought processes, are blatent and credibility dies.

Great books don’t arrive entire as creative spasms.  They take working and reworking.  Good writers attend to the language.  Better writers redesign the architecture at the same time.  There I will leave off although you might have noticed that I have inadvertantly left a clue about Sandstone’s future directions.  I should probably come out with it now but an email has arrived and it looks quite urgent.