What I Didn’t Do in 2007

Letters

Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008

From Alan Myers

Alan Bennett’s dismissal of Auden as a ‘poet of Cumbria’ seems misplaced (LRB, 3 January). In 1950, Auden wrote: ‘My great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the S by Swaledale, on the N by the Roman Wall and on the W by the Eden Valley.’ This is where Cumbria, Northumberland and Durham meet. There are well over a hundred place names in this area to be found in Auden’s writings, and another thirty across the Eden Valley in the Lake District. But to be moved, inspired (even obsessed) by a wilderness does not oblige one to live there.

Some forty poems of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the unpublished epic ‘In the year of my youth …’ and two influential plays, Paid on Both Sides and The Dog beneath the Skin, are set in the North Pennines. Rookhope in Weardale, where Auden first became aware of ‘self and not-self/Death and Dread’, is also here. In A Certain World (1970), Auden states clearly that his fascination with these limestone moors and the associated lead-mining industry prompted him to formulate principles which he applied to all artistic fabrication.

Alan Myers
Hitchin, Hertfordshire

From Charles Turner

Alan Bennett says that ‘all’ of the ‘Writers’ Rooms’ featured in the Saturday Guardian ‘have had awful fireplaces’. I have photos of 11 of them in front of me. Only one, Jacqueline Wilson’s, has a fireplace. Apart from a life, am I missing something?

Charles Turner
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

From Anthony Rudolf

Alan Bennett doubts whether a literary masterpiece would ever be set within the frame of a story. But there is no reason in principle why someone capable of writing a masterpiece could not write a distinct or discrete masterpiece within it, given that the frame narrative is a common enough literary device, as in Wuthering Heights, for example. Doctor Zhivago, too, ends with a marvellous sequence of poems purportedly written by the main character. In practice, however, the best examples of a masterpiece within a masterpiece deploy a different art form, thus obviating the necessity to deliver the goods. It is a specialised form of suspending one’s disbelief. Balzac’s story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ famously involves a great painting which Balzac is not obliged to paint.

Anthony Rudolf
London N12

From Glenn Lang

Alan Bennett may be right about the dearth of rent boys in Penrith but he’s wrong about libraries: there’s a good public one right by the church.

Glenn Lang
Cumbria Library Services, Carlisle

Vol. 30 No. 3 · 7 February 2008

From Sean Gallagher

I learned from Alan Bennett’s Diary of the great Reg Park’s death last November (LRB, 3 January). Also, that Park was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inspiration. Mine too! Transplanted from Park’s home county of Yorkshire to South Africa as a child in the late 1940s, I remember watching with awe and pride a performance of the new Mr Universe on stage at the Playhouse cinema in Durban in 1951, where such high-culture events were rare. A mighty six foot two and almost eighteen stone, he bench-pressed a 450 pound barbell, to the applause of a full house (that of the women muffled, through their practice of keeping on their white gloves, worn, always, to the Bioscope). Intrigued that a half-starved postwar England could produce such a behemoth (South African men believed they had the world copyright on size), I pestered my father for a set of weights. A nine-stone youth not quite up to it as second choice outside-half in the college rugby junior XV, I needed the body that weight training seemed to promise.

Spotting an ad in an English tabloid for a muscle-building course offered by a ‘Holborn Academy under the direction of Professor Walsh’, I sent off my 10s 6d postal order together with my shaming measurements, and waited for the Union Castle mailboat to deliver the professor’s assessment of my potential, plus the first month’s set of exercises. I was promised a 17-inch neck, and other startling measurements in proportion. The professor could not have been overjoyed with my progress, reported monthly along with the postal order; and it was with a mixture of shock and guilt that I read after some months that a bodybuilder called Walsh had thrown himself under the wheels of a train at Liverpool Street Station. My overdone letter of condolence to the academy in due course brought a reply, poorly typed on cheap notepaper with a crudely inked-in black border, claiming the ‘professor’ had specifically urged that I be kept at the exercises to achieve the ambitious goals promised. But the weights were now leaden in my hands, and soon abandoned. I never made the 2nd XV.

Sean Gallagher
London W14