In 2014, the British government tried to ban prisoners receiving books sent to them through the mail. Their declared reason for doing this was to prevent drugs being smuggled in.
After vigorous protests, the ban was overturned in the High Court.
This makes sense, for one only has to look at the illiteracy and numeracy rates of those imprisoned. Half of the male and three-quarters of female prisoners have no qualifications at all, and 67% of them were unemployed at the time of their offending. There has to be a link between their breaking the law and the opportunities that they’re denied through a lack of education.
Poor self-image doesn’t help either, so for those wanting to better themselves and turn their lives around through the education programmes available inside, having access to books is vital. Prison libraries are poorly funded, and wouldn’t necessarily stock the much-needed books that a prisoner needs to transform their thinking.
Restricting access to the latest and most pertinent books would have been petty-minded censorship. As Joseph Brodsky, poet laureate of the United States in the 1990s, said: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
The short story form is not easy to master. Many accomplished writers who attempt it produce tales that lack resolution. My favourite author of such brief forms of story-telling is Guy de Maupassant, a Frenchman who wrote in the nineteenth century. He says in a few pages what some cannot convey in an entire book.
Most of his stories are only a few pages long, and I prefer them to the six novels that he wrote. The most famous of these is ‘Bel-Ami’, which has been filmed several times. The Franco-Prussian War formed the backdrop for some of his work, showing ordinary citizens caught up in events beyond their control.
He liked writing moral stories about the peasants of Normandy, with their sly, earthy and penny-pinching ways. A good example of this is ‘A Piece of String’, in which a misunderstanding over a miserly action leads into an accusation of theft.
Death stalks the worlds that his characters inhabit, and revenge is always imminent. Maupassant eventually descended into madness, but not before penning several brilliant depictions of psychological horror. Of these, the disembodied and murderous hand in ‘The Hand’ has been stolen several times for films and television horror series.
‘The Horla’ is a haunting description of a man who is joined by a supernatural being, or is he imagining things – or losing his mind?
‘Idyll’ is laden with eroticism, while ‘Regret’ is a cautionary tale about how faint heart never won fair maiden. It should be read by anyone who has a long felt want for a prospective partner.
Seamus Heaney was a much-loved poet, and rightly so – he was a real sweetheart and so skilled. His death in 2013 was one of those which made me go “oh no” when I heard of it. His text message to his wife, shortly before he died is moving. His son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father texted his final words, “Noli timere” (Latin: “Do not be afraid”), to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.
I always think of his poem ‘Rite of Spring’ at this time of year, when the temperature dips below freezing in Cornwall. Having lived on a remote sheep farm on a high part of Bodmin Moor, I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of the weather. My water supply pipe once froze for several days, so this poem resonates with me, and its suggestive sensuality seems to be saying more than just a struggle to restore the pump to working order:
Rite of Spring
So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump
In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.
Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light
That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.
Seamus Heaney
He wrote evocatively about ageing and continuity, including this poem ‘Digging’ from his first published collection of work ‘Death of a Naturalist’:
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By god, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it. He fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The colds smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney
Heaney’s powers of observation were acute, as shown in this two-line verse which perfectly captures a moment in time :
The riverbed, dried-up,hall-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.
I grew up in a market town called Stevenage. It’s in the county of Hertfordshire, about 30 miles north of London. The New Towns Act of 1946 designated several towns to become so-called ‘New Towns’ and Stevenage was one of them. These were to take the overflow of population from London, whose housing stock was dilapidated and which had been decimated by German bombing in the Blitz.
When I was born, in 1954, the population of Stevenage was about 7,000. Today it stands at 85,000. The old town is an ancient settlement, situated on a long straight Roman road known as The Great North Road. It has the widest high street in Hertfordshire, with a medieval row of shops called Middle Row.
I attended Alleyne’s Grammar School, one of the oldest in the country as it was founded in 1558. I walked the fields with my dog, feeling myself to be more of a country lad than a town dweller. I was a young naturalist, so seeing wide open spaces turned into housing estates broke my heart. A pasture that we called ‘Skylark Field’, where I once counted a dozen larks in the sky at one time, became a sterile development of 400 little boxy houses.
I knew that people needed somewhere to live, but I also felt, even at that young age, that there were way too many people. A distaste for the incomers saw them labelled as ‘New Towners’, with the older inhabitants clinging to their ‘Old Towner’ status. A modern pedestrianised shopping centre harmed the old-fashioned shops in the high street, with many closing and being taken over by fast-food chains.
Seeing all of this desecration coloured by attitude to modern housing and shopping developments. I left home as soon as I could, rarely returning. I last visited twenty-four years ago, and got lost – in my own home town!
I’d done some minor disruption of the stakes and lines laid out by a surveyor, for houses to be built on an old orchard which was my childhood refuge, so it was easy to take to the writing of Edward Abbey. His best-known novel is ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’, a title that comes from ‘throwing a spanner in the works’ – that is, deliberately sabotaging machinery being used to destroy wild places.
Edward Abbey
Cover of the first edition
His work spawned the term ‘monkeywrenching’, and his disparate gang of malcontents take on industrialists who are despoiling the landscape. Abbey worked as a park ranger for the United States National Park Service and was passionate about protecting the environment. A prickly character, he riled many people and was considered sufficient a threat to warrant the attention of the F.B.I.
The work that he did, along with his writing proved inspirational for those who tired of the wishy-washy, compromised campaigns of early environmental protection groups. He was deliberately outspoken in his views, mainly to keep people aware of the threat posed by those who would rape the land for profit.
Abbey’s early death at only 62 was probably a relief to some. Awkward to the end, he ensured that he was buried in the way that he wanted and where he chose. His friends put him in the ground of the Cabeza Pieta Desert in Arizona so that he could rejoin the circle of life by becoming fertiliser for cactus.
He remained true to his beliefs, and I think that he would have got on well with some of the other outsider, rebellious writers that I’ve written postings about on this blog. It’s easy to imagine him sitting around a campfire and sharing some beers with Charles Bukowski, Richard Brautigan, John Kennedy Toole and Tomi Ungerer.
During the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, Brigitte Bardot visited the studio of Pablo Picasso. Escorted by her husband, the film director Roger Vadim, it’s thought that they wanted the artist to paint her. He refused, as he already had a muse, the ‘ponytail girl’ – his next-door neighbour Lydia Corbett.
