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Blog 23
Contents:
• Dissident Girl Meets
Dissident Poet
• Notes in Passing: Miro,
another perspective
• Five Haikus for Istanbul
• Correspondence: a
regretful cancellation

DISIDENT GIRL MEET DISSIDENT

POET
Number 3 in a series on ENCOUNTERS

An edited selection from

TICKET TO PRAGUE
(Gollancz, Penguin, Collins)

Since her parents were killed in a

motorway car crash Amy Douglas
has been at war with the world.
She has been expelled from
school, she has been involved in a
violent streetfight which has led to
her boyfriend being put behind
bars while she has been issued
with a controlling order. She has
ended up as a part-time carer in a
home for men who have either
rejected society or been rejected
by it.

Josef is a Czech poet. Almost a generation ago he had been

permitted to join a group of poets and other writers on a
cultural visit to Britain. He absconded, but the decision was
so traumatic that the poet, along with all the evidence of
who Josef actually was, vanished into silence. All he does,
from week to week, month to month, year to year, is stare
at an empty television screen.
Neither Amy nor Josef realise on their first meeting that
their period of isolation, their seemingly pointless and
directionless lives, are about to change. The key that
unlocks the door to silence is a shared love – of literature,
the enriching power of reading.

From a distance, High Lawns does a passable imitation

of a stately home. It stands on a pleasant incline among
acres of meadow and woodland, all encompassed by high
stone walls. Ancient beech trees escort the main drive which
stretches through rough pasture to a sunken wall. Beyond
this are lovingly tended gardens, smooth-cropped lawns, a
tennis court and an open-air pool…
…
'Whatever you do,' senior nurse Sylvia Benson, had
advised Amy, 'never call the place a loony bin. Never use
such words as "lunatic", "mad", "round the bend" or "round
the twist". These unfortunates are our family. Now they're
your family.'
…
'And this gentleman, said Mrs. Benson on Amy’s first
morning on duty, ‘is Josef, spelt with an "f", one of our
longest-serving customers.'
'Customers?'
'Oh yes, that is what we have to call them these days. It
sounds more business-like. Josef is foreign. He smokes too
much and hates taking exercise. A lazy old scruff, really –
aren't you, Josef?’
Still in pyjamas and slippers though it is past eleven,
Josef makes no response to Mrs. Benson. He is around sixty,
Amy guesses. He is short, scrawny but still with a generous
head of grey hair.
He spares one glance at the tall, handsome girl with
blonde hair. There is the dart of a smile from watchful green
eyes that seem to say, 'I know secrets but I'm not telling'.
'Josef won't give you any bother, Amy. There is little
point, by the way, in trying to engage him in conversation.
He's foreign and doesn't seem to have bothered to learn our
language beyond "I want", "No" and "Football!" He is what
Dr. Parrish calls homo mollusca, someone trapped for ever
in a shell of almost absolute silence.'
Amy is wondering, should Mrs. Benson be saying all this
in front of Josef?
'Don't worry, he never listens to what anybody says. We
call him Sir Stubborn.'
Amy takes to Josef instantly: Sir Stubborn, meet Lady
Stubborn.
 'Shall I turn the telly on for him?'
'No, he prefers it off.'
'He looks as though he is watching it.'
'Oh yes. If he's watching it, or looks as though he's
watching it, and it's off, don't wheel it away or he'll become
quite agitated.'
'And if I turn the telly on?'
'He'll walk away.'
Amy grins. 'That means he's got good taste. I'm not
struck on telly myself.'
Mrs. Benson isn't used to considering the opinions of
young people sent up on Community Service or from the
Youth Training, but Amy seems different; brighter, more full
of herself. 'You've got a point. All that violence and suffering
before your very eyes, well it's enough to make you feel
suicidal...'
'Like you want asylum?'
'Yes, I guess that's what we are at High Lawns, a refuge
from all the horror and carnage.' Ms. Benson explains that
Josef, as a special privilege, is allowed to stay up to watch
the late-night football. 'Otherwise he retreats into his shell
completely.'
Amy contemplates Josef. 'He looks so intelligent.'
Mrs. Benson drops her voice. 'There's absolutely nothing
wrong with Sir Stubborn that a good kick up the backside
wouldn't cure. Private opinion, mind.'

After settling a nocturnal fracas between two ‘customers’,

Josef and a Mr. Dodds over a packet of fags, Amy is curious
to draw Josef out of his shell.

There is this terrible silence. Amy recognises it because

somewhere in the building, far off, somebody is crying – a
child, a grown-up, it is difficult to say. And the crying goes
on and on and it makes the silence in this room and the
silence outside so clear; like a frost…
…'You've got a real reputation, Josef. Your friend Mr. Dodds
says you killed your kids. I don't believe that... though you
were pretty violent just now. He says that's why you never
tell anybody about yourself. Because of your guilt.
'I don't believe that either...Do you know what I think?
You're afraid. If you just stick with Please and Thank You,
nobody will report you: am I right?'
Why did I say that? Guesswork. But it's pressed
something in his head. Josef's gaze for a second shifts from
the empty TV screen. 'Still, don't think you're the only one.
Everybody's afraid – I mean everybody who's ever lost
anyone. Or lost themselves, you know what I mean?'
Another flicker of the eye; a recognition. 'Yes, I think you
do.
'I hope you don't mind me talking to you like this. I lost
my parents, you know. They were passengers in this car
going along the M25. Heard of that? It's the most dangerous
stretch of road since the First World War. Then I went to live
with my Auntie, who's not actually my real auntie at all. She
was kind – so long as I didn't bring home any “darkies”.'
The mournful weeping from a distant ward has
continued, and until it slips into silence, Amy keeps on
talking.... 'I quite like it here, actually. It's a sanctuary. I
think you like it too, Josef. It's a horrible world out there, do
you agree?
'I get my meals, same as you. And Mrs. Benson thinks
they might take me on, as a temp. Pay me, even...Mind
you, I've only got GCSEs. Though I can swim. I used to
race. And when I did, when I competed and left others ten
metres behind, I was somebody. When I didn't, I was
nobody.
'You're very trim, Josef. I bet you did sport when you
were a boy. Football? They're very keen on it in
Czechoslovakia, am I right? Course, personally I'm more
into books these days.’
She dangles a juicy literary worm. 'Now Czechoslovakia –
that's where Franz Kafka lived.' A pause; a flicker of
recognition, no, more than that. 'A bit morbid, though – that
story about a man turning into a beetle. Poor Gregor
Samsa!'
Something is happening. Josef's face seems suddenly to
melt in the glare from the strip light above; melt, go out of
shape, and then re-form, almost into a new face.
'One of your favourites, is he, Josef – Franz Kafka? We
could sort of read him together. The Castle, what about
that? No? Okay, The Trial then. My English teacher Mrs.
Ambler was very keen on him.'
Josef suddenly emits one word. Amy does not recognise
it, fears it might be a curse. 'What was that, Josef?'
'Sveyk!'
'Sveyk? Right.' A long pause. Baffled. Sveyk – doesn't
sound like a swearword. Josef is reaching out his hand.
'Come. Please!'
Three words! This must have exhausted Josef's usual
tally for the year.
'Okay.'
 Upstairs, to his room, head nodding now, vigorously.
Josef switches on the light, goes to a set of drawers, opens
the top one.
Amy waits by the door. 'Sveyk.' She practices it aloud.
Does it mean 'bedroom' or 'drawer' or perhaps even a
'secret case' that Mr. Dodds accused him of hiding away?
Josef produces a fat paperback with a flash of yellow on
the cover. He holds it up. 'Sveyk.'
At last.
'He's the author?' She receives the book. She reads out
the title. 'The Good Soldier Sveyk by Jaroslav Hasek.'
'Hashek!' replies Josef, correcting Amy's pronunciation.
Eyes meeting, eyes aglow now.
On the cover, an officer in a blue uniform is sitting down
and smoking a fag. Coming through the door, saluting, is a
plump soldier with a stubble beard and a big grin. 'Sveyk?'
Amy points, Josef nods. She turns to the back cover and
reads: The Good Soldier Sveyk and His Fortunes in the
World War...it says here that it's the "classic novel of the
'little man' fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the
only weapons available to him – passive resistance,
subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence".'
Dumb insolence, eh? Amy gazes across at her new
friend. All she says is, 'Sveyk!'
Josef nods again, and now he smiles. 'Sveyk!'
'And you want me to read this to you?' She examines the
volume which has suddenly brought her close to this old
man full of dumb insolence. '752 pages, Josef, that'll take us
a lifetime!'
Another nod. No sweat. She flicks through the pages,
pauses at Chapter 4: Sveyk Thrown out of the Lunatic
Asylum. She looks up but does not speak, then turns to the
opening page.
She reads out the first few lines:

'And so they've killed Grand Duke Ferdinand,' said

the charwoman to Mr. Sveyk, who had left military
service years before, after being finally certified
by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now
lived by selling dogs – ugly, mongrel monstrosities,
whose pedegrees he forged. Apart from this occupation
he suffered from rheumatism and was at this very
moment rubbing his knees with Elliman's
embrocation...

Amy's turn to nod. 'It looks as though it might give us a

laugh or two.'
 Josef is beaming. All at once Amy begins to feel good.
She closes the book.
'Sveyk!' says the old man.
'Sveyk!' repeats Amy Douglas, little realising how this
one word will change her life.

Amy and Josef become friends and she discovers that far
from being the murderer of his kids, Josef is a poet of
distinction, almost but not quite forgotten in his own
country. Her aim becomes to reconnect him with his past
and bring him fully and creatively into the present. In doing
so, she comes to terms with her own past and present.

CONTINUES…
********************************

Notes in passing…
MIRO, ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE
Unless you’re an expert it’s so easy to get art wrong,
specifically to have an idea about an artist which prevails in
the absence of certain significant information. When this
becomes known a sort of revelation takes place. You look at
the same painting but with new eyes.
This happened to me at Tate Modern’s current Miro
exhibition, Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape. My previous
experience of the artist’s work was always when it was hung
alongside the paintings of others, and my impression was of
verbal wit, fun in a world of surrealist elements; a sort of
play theory on canvas.

Pain in Spain
Reading of Miro’s Spanish upbringing and background, of
the historical contexts in which his art was created forced an
engagement, a link between painting and history which
drew me away from former impressions. This history
included Miguel Primo Rivera’s military coup in 1923, the
suppression of the Catalan language and customs, not long
to be followed by Franco’s overthrow of the short-lived
republic.

Such events impacted powerfully on Miro, eventually driving

him and his family out of his homeland, to settle in Paris
where he was soon to witness the Nazi occupation of France.
The paintings as seen, not in the memory but on the walls
of Tate Modern, studied in the light of history, demand a re-
view and reconsideration.

Encoding the serious

Miro does not translate his reaction to repression by
becoming a realist, rather he turns reality into a powerful
iconography in which the abstract or semi-abstract images
are dramatically encoded. What I’d previous read as visual
jesting now revealed themselves as charged with a deep
seriousness. The passion lies, as it were, beneath the paint’s
surface, controlled by Miro’s fidelity to the act of painting
itself.
Yet even here there is a paradox: what we see on the
canvas is exact and painstaking. It strives after, and
achieves, considerable aesthetic satisfaction; but one gets
the impression that it was in the act of painting that Miro’s
passionate response to events going on around him, is to be
found.

Deceived by titles
Perhaps in the first place my take on Miro was over-
influenced by his idiosyncratic titling – Dog Barking at the
Moon (1926) or Woman With Blonde Armpits Combing Her
Hair By the Light of the Stars (1940). Such titles actually
belie the paintings’ content and the act of creation, as does
the sheer mastery of colour and design. Inside these
formalities is an astonishing degree of savagery.

In referring to one of Miro’s series, the Tate Modern guide,

written by Marko David and Matthew Gale, refers to ‘heavy
encrustation of paint often laden with sand, accompanied by
hacking, stretching and nailing – urgent, frustrated action’.
No joker here!

Conflagrating
Influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, Miro
stepped out of his precise iconography to produce large
canvases some of which he set alight, leaving the viewer to
scan both burnt painting and exposed canvas,
communicating anger, even outrage, perhaps prompted by
events beyond the act of painting or just as likely recording
the inevitable pain and frustration when vision rides ahead
of application. Burning canvases but still exhibiting them is
an apt comment on the creative process.
Miro’s better known (less inflammatory) works may serve as
symbolic concealments of his reaction to the world, but they
are never wholly hidden. At the same time, as we enjoy Miro
as painter, we acknowledge his own pleasure in the creative
process; something that took him away from the horror of
contemporary events. The title of the exhibition and of a
1940 painting, The Escape Ladder seems to speak for Miro’s
art generally.

American dreamer?
Art is escape, the making of marks, the application of
colour, but it is the process, not the subject-matter which
constitutes the escape. Yet the one does not necessarily
work without the other. In paintings done towards the end
of his life, content seems to have taken something of a
back-seat, somehow losing substance (in the triptychs The
Hope of a Condemned Man and the paint-splattered
Fireworks) simultaneously with the loss of the iconography
that had stood the artist in good stead from his student
days.

They are brave canvases, but seem to indicate that Miro, in

those final days of success, riches and celebrity, might have
been looking over the wrong shoulder. It’s a moot question
whether the American art that so impressed him hasn’t
something to answer for.

***************************

FIVE HAIKUS FOR ISTANBUL

February 2011, when it never stopped raining

1. B(L)O(W)SPHORUS HAIKU

Fingers frozen, brolly soaked

Finding it hard
To warm to Istanbul.

2. A TIFFIN HAIKU

Muezzin for breakfast

Muezzin for lunch; grant us
A peal of bells for tea.
 3. SAYS IT ALL HAIKU

No sink plugs our guide

Points out is down to the Turks’
Fear of still water.

4. A NEITHER NOR HAIKU

No sun in Istanbul
Nor promise of it
In Constantinople.

5. FAMOUS ARAB ARCHITECT HAIKU

Sinan: four hundred and more

Buildings later; what was
His name again?

Correspondence
An urgent notification from Ned Baslow, secretary of the
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Summer Festival
Committee.

Dear Jim
I’m desperate to get this letter to you prior to the publication of
your Blog No.23 on account of the fact that we have had to
postpone our summer festival till the autumn or beyond.
Following my letter to you last month, introducing such items as
the Tableau of Womanly Beauty and the Battle of the Titans, I’ve
received several inquiries for tickets from your readers.

Very regrettably Gilbert Stokoe (‘Lord Gilbert’) is booked for a hip

operation and a carthage operation during what were to be
rehearsals for his starring role as Don Quixote in The Spectacles
of the Man from La Salamander. Bearing in mind that he was also
lead singer in our Tribute to Wolfy (vocals from the light operas of
Mozart) we have decided to cancel rather than let the festivities
go off at half-cock.

This has been a disappointment for the scores of actors and

musicians who have been rehearsing round the clock for a range
of festival events, but also for the local athletic and body-builders
clubs. They volunteered their services as Ancient Greeks and
Robin Hood’s Merry Men only for us to cancel the Battle of the
Titans as a result of the local recreation ground being bought up
by a national supermarket (whose name I can’t mention at the
moment pending a legal enquiry).

As my wife Betty said – she is studying hard for an Open

University degree –finding time to catch up on her studies is poor
compensation for losing out on her chance to play opposite Don
Quixote as the Fair Dulcy-Naya, a part she has really got her
teeth in to.

We are not disheartened. I know the whole district of Wickerstaff-

cum-Fernhaven is resolute in its determination to put our show
back on the road once Lord Gilbert can turn his limp in to a leap
following surgery (this of course being dependent on whether
recent government cuts won’t extend his waiting time till the next
millennium!).

Please reassure any of your readers who feel let down as a result
of our festival postponement: their application for tickets will be
kept on record; indeed for those who contacted me so promptly,
via your good offices, there will be a number of complimentary
tickets available for performances by the Under-Sevens Choir and
the Garland of Poetry Evening performed by members of the
Fernhaven Women’s Insitute, always memorable occasions.

Councillor Stokoe asked me to mention that while for the moment

his mobility is restricted, he remains in excellent voice, promising
a special solo-event singing a medley of areas from The Magic
Flute and Cosy Fran Tootie. He will be accompanied on the piano
by his good wife Beryl, though her own health has not been of the
best lately.
Kindest regards,

Ned.

A real pity, Ned, but knowing the people of Derbyshire we at

Watsonworks know the festival will be back on course soon.
We had applied for tickets for the ELVIS RESURRECTED gig
under canvas and were on the waiting list. Keep in touch.

****************************************************

PREVIOUS Blog topics:

Politics and Fiction (Blog 17)

Fiction and History (Blog 16)
Aspects of Storytelling
Triggers (7)
Props propel (8)
Frames, Codes & Character (9)
Fiction & News (10)
Tale Power (11)
Thanks for reading Blog 23. Watsonworksblog
will be taking a summer break. Back in the Autumn
with more in the ENCOUNTERS series.
JIM.

*************************************