Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997
page 27 | 2203 words
All the Cultural Bases
Ian Sansom
- Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland by Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell
Faber, 160 pp, £7.99, November 1996, ISBN 0 571 17539 2
This is tricky. First the facts. In 1936 W.H. Auden persuaded Faber and Faber to commission a travel book about Iceland. He spent three months in the country, part of the time travelling with his friend Louis MacNeice and a group of schoolboys and a teacher from Bryanston School. Auden and MacNeice collaborated in the writing of the book, which was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 pages (the review in the TLS compared MacNeice’s contributions to ‘desolate pools unmoved beside a volcano five times in eruption’). As well as the poems and prose pieces the book includes 52 black and white photographs, all taken by Auden, appendices containing pie-charts and graphs, and a fine, coloured folding map. There is an extensive bibliography and one chapter is entirely devoted to an anthology of excerpts from other books about Iceland. The pages of the volume are thick, white unwater-marked wove paper and the whole thing – as eloquently described by Bloomfield and Mendelson, in their Auden Bibliography – is
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997
From S.W. Dawson
Ian Sansom writes of Simon Armitage that ‘he has coined a number of memorable phrases,’ among which he cites: ‘I’m so hungry/I could eat a buttered monkey’ (LRB, 20 March). When Doug Murray, a morally dubious motor mechanic, said this on Coronation Street in (I think) 1993, my family seized on it with delight, believing it to be a current Lancashire saying, and we made it our own – it sounds even better with Northern vowels. Now its provenance seems doubtful. There are three possibilities: (a) Simon Armitage wrote the Coronation Street script, or (b) he did not ‘coin’ it, but simply used it, or (c) a Coronation Street character surprisingly quoted a contemporary poet. Would someone kindly resolve this quasi-demotic scholarly problem?
S.W. Dawson
Swansea
From Adam Roberts
Ian Sansom seems a bit sniffy about the selection of pop Simon Armitage took with him to Iceland (Talking Heads, Scott Walker, Bjork, The Smiths, The Fall, The Pixies, Prefab Sprout, Bob Dylan, REM, Felt and the Lemonheads). ‘What was once modish now seems outdated, a reminder of life before Britpop,’ Sansom says. ‘Fashion has moved on, and Armitage hasn’t.’ In fact, the whole process of forming the pop canon illuminates questions to which theorists of the canon would do well to attend. Far from being outmoded, Armitage’s list carries a pretty impeccable kudos. The Fall and the Pixies are both highly credible, the more so for their lack of commercial success; while it would be difficult to deny the canonical status of Dylan, REM or the Smiths. Replace Felt, Prefab Sprout and the Lemonheads with some black artists (say, Prince, George Clinton and Hendrix) and you’d have a pretty watertight mini-canon, a class list for the 21st century, of a sort unlikely to be infiltrated by Gene, Dodgy, Sleeper or even the commercial bulk of Oasis. The question that then most vigorously asserts itself is: why is the canon coalescing around almost exclusively male artists?
Adam Roberts
Royal Holloway College
Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997
From Matthew Hughes
I was surprised to read Adam Roberts’s complaint (Letters, 3 April) about Ian Sansom’s supposedly snobby attitude to the music Simon Armitage took with him to Iceland. Being relatively young and aware of (almost) all the bands mentioned, I felt depressed at Roberts’s pretentious attempt to turn the ephemeral into a canon. He would do well to remember the immortal line of Morrissey, the singer of The Smiths: ‘So what difference does it make?’
Matthew Hughes
Nene College, Northampton
