Alexandra Harris's Reading List

"This is partly a sentimental choice because Christopher Butler was my first tutor at university. I knew that I loved Virginia Woolf but I didn’t really know why. Nor did I have any clue about the artistic context from which she emerged. It was this book that showed me how it was possible to talk about art in a way which was quite alien to me then. We all grow up talking about novels in terms of what happens in them – plot and characters – but Early Modernism showed me how you talk about the form of a novel, the texture of a piece of music, or why it is that Matisse paints a room without perspective and how if you half close your eyes that flat canvas becomes a dance of forms. This book is very good for people looking for a language to describe that, and it’s also very liberating in its determination to talk in one breath about music, art and literature. Absolutely. Interdisciplinary studies are all the rage in academia at the moment but it wasn’t always that way. This is a really pioneering book in terms of showing how you can compare what goes on in a piece of music with what goes on on a canvas – which is not immediately obvious. You need to be given a little bit of help to see how things connect in that way. And there’s a wonderful geographical scope to it as well. My own work has been very British but Early Modernism swings off across Russia, Spain, Italy and France. It shows how very wide-reaching were those modernist changes, and how a conversation about art can go on across a thousand miles."

"Even if you are primarily interested in modernist literature, I would recommend having a good read of Fry on art. He totally revolutionises the way of talking about a picture. He will shut out the content of the picture and make you see it in terms of forms, blocks, colours and design. Design is one of his key words. One of the jokes about him is that he will look at a crucifixion painting, point to the body of Christ and say “this important blue mass in the centre”. But it also means that a window is opened up onto this whole new realm of aesthetic experience. You start to ask: “What is the difference between looking at a butterfly and looking at a painting of a butterfly?” Fry makes you acknowledge that a painting of a butterfly does something different from the butterfly sitting there, and asks what is it that a painting can do that nothing else in the world can do? That’s a central question for anyone wondering what happens when you walk around the Tate gallery in London – why have patterns on two-dimensional canvases acquired such status in our culture? What is it that they do? Yes, and what it does to our emotions. He’s intent on feeling his way into what happens in our bodies when we look at a picture – what is it that we feel . Most people writing about art in his period wrote like connoisseurs, trying to work out who influenced Michelangelo at a particular moment and giving good, dry, historical facts about a picture. Fry blurts out: “Yes, but why does it make you cry?” He shows you why, for example, a child’s instinct is to draw a human head with the eyes much larger than they should be in proportion, because eyes are important for communication. So he shows you why distortion beyond the photographic is meaningful, and why a brilliant painter will distort rather than simply represent what is in front of him. It was very different. If one thinks about late Victorian and early 20th century painting – lots of conventional, detailed, almost photographic social scenes – Fry caught hold of the great movement in France to post-impressionism. He invented the term “post-impressionism” and introduced to Britain French painters like Cezanne, Gauguin and Manet for the first time. That really was the beginning of modern art in Britain. It starts off with manifesto essays, like his essay on aesthetics and his essay on art and socialism, which politicises the making of art. Part of his politics is a tremendous eclecticism – he’s willing to pay attention to the art of what was then thought of as primitive peoples. He writes essays on African sculpture and the art of the Bushmen. He looks at the art of cave paintings, showing how very early primitive people instinctively distorted the form of an animal but did so with far more intelligence than bourgeois Victorian artists who were simply replicating the look of an animal down to every hair on its head. He really shifted the sense of what it is to be an intelligent artist. He famously draws attention to African and South American art, so there is a challenging of the European supremacy as well. That goes right across modernism – from Picasso looking at African masks to DH Lawrence talking about African sculpture – but Fry very seriously makes people in London think about South American forms and the dynamic of African sculptures."

"This is a treasure trove book. It’s enormous and probably best not to be read in one fell swoop – it’s a wonderful dipping book. What I love about it is how it gathers together a huge number of writers from the 1930s and shows that they are using similar kinds of imagery and behaviour. What fascinates me here is to do with fashion – to do with what holds a generation of people together. I’m very drawn to the mercurial and elusive sense of what makes a particular moment, and what makes something important in that moment. This book is a very brilliant form of literary criticism that shows you how certain ideas gather currency and become significant for particular milieux and generations. The book is arranged thematically. You have, for example, a chapter on the movement of the masses which is full of ideas about people moving in mass – about the way people get about, and how the individual related to power and being a part of something big in the thirties. But you also have chapters on how certain people become the ring leaders. He begins with a chapter called Vin Rouge Ordinaire , which is about WH Auden as a vintage wine label of the thirties – how everything is a kind of response to Auden, either arguing with him or flattering him in some way. So it’s a book about how the mood of the times was made up, and how the texture of the literary culture came into being. I’ll answer the second question first. The Spanish Civil War was a great rallying call to the younger generation of literary and political people. If you were a young poet in the thirties, you had to take sides in the Spanish Civil War. There was a book called Writers Take Sides – you had to say what you thought of the war, and if you were going to intervene then you needed to get yourself to the front, which a great many writers did. You were defined in that period by having either military interventionist politics or various forms of passivism – that would go through to Munich and the Second World War itself. The question keeps being asked, “What can art do in the face of political crisis?” Should artists and writers be responding directly to world affairs, should they be writing poetry about conflict, or should they give up their poetry and go to fight? Which a great many did. Or do you take the view – as Virginia Woolf did, partly – that it’s tremendously important in a society to have reasonably objective voices who are not implicated in a cause, who are not taking sides, who are producing a literature that stays outside the realm of propaganda. Which leads in to your first question about the difference between the literature of the thirties and the twenties. The difference is largely politics. The pressure to either intervene or step back from politics is so great that the whole artistic scene is defined by it in a way. In the face of violence and tragedy, what does the artist do? That is one of the great questions of the 1930s. It’s about writers. Cunningham reads their whole lives as part of their art, which I find rather inspiring. Because [the poet] Julian Bell gets on the boat and drives ambulances in the Spanish Civil War, that is one of his artistic decisions of the period but it’s not a poem. There’s a way in which by writing about writers you include all that they do as part of the culture of the times. He writes about a culture, not just about what gets typed up on paper."

"Her novels are timeless in many ways. A great deal of interpretation tries to put us back into the historical context of those novels, which is tremendously important. There is also the way in which they have a universal significance as novels. I was shocked when I was first read her that it was possible to write a novel [ To The Lighthouse ] about a little boy going to a lighthouse and for that to be the central plot. Nothing else really happens at all yet it left me absolutely reeling, with a sense that I needed to reorder my life and that life was now going to be a different experience. What she does is all to do with style, form, structure and symbolism. It’s very much not to do with plot. That was one of the great mysteries that I wanted to keep getting at, and which sent me back to read more. Another thing I tried to emphasise in my book on Woolf was her capacity for enjoyment of all kinds of things in the world. She’s often portrayed as a very exquisite and withdrawn figure who was liable to have nervous breakdowns at any moment. But what strikes me most about her novels, diaries and letters is her garrulousness, her gossipyness – her relentless capacity for living and looking at the world. I would have been absolutely terrified to meet her, but I would have been absolutely seduced if what comes out on her paper in her novels came out of her mouth at me. I would be just bewitched by the speed of her figurative language, the precision with which she captures people, a street, the setting of the sun, the kind of wind. It’s so extraordinary. I agree wholesale. Woolf was able to tell the same story 50 times without repeating herself. She will report the same anecdote to three friends in different letters and never use the same word twice. That limitless exercise in reformulating the world – in seeing how life is so very multi-faceted – is an inspiration for the people who came after her to keep talking about her work. This was really her first experimental novel. We have a hero, Jacob, at the centre of the book who keeps going missing. When the book starts, Jacob is a little boy on the beach – he’s run off and we have to go find him. Then we chase him through his life, but we really never get to sit down and talk to him as you would in a Victorian novel where you would look at every facet of a character. We see him disappearing on the back of an omnibus and the narrator takes us to his student room in Cambridge, but he’s gone to dinner and he’s not there. So we look around and see the invitation cards on his mantelpiece, the books on his table and his empty chair. It’s a great test of how far we get to know the people in our lives. What can we tell about them just from meeting them for a moment? What can we tell from going into their room? How much of a mark do people leave on the world? What is a room like when they go out of it? These are questions which in a way are ordinary, because we all experience someone going out of a room, someone leaving a house. But we don’t think about it very much. We don’t think how well we know our friends, or how well we know members of our family. In this book, Woolf makes the subject matter not Jacob himself but the ways in which we know and don’t know each other – the gaps in our knowledge. It’s a very ghostly book in that we have a very likeable hero and want to get to know him a lot, but he keeps disappearing. At the end his surname, Flanders, comes into its own and he dies in the First World War. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Woolf captures this sense of an upper middle class young man with certain expectations in life, all the stereotypical things that he is likely to do – go to university, go on boating trips with his friends, or trips to the British Library. She looks for the social panoply around him. She pays attention to the old woman who’s sweeping up around the statues at Westminster, or the guards at night who shine their torches around the British Museum library when the posh people have gone home. She looks into the corners of life and what these dusty corners tell us about the central subject – as we can’t look at anyone straight in the face, we have to be detectives and nose around. No novel sets out to be traditional. People often hold up Dickens or George Eliot as “the traditional novelists”, but the moment you think about what Dickens is doing, you realise he is wildly experimental in creating his characters. So one has to be careful about condemning everything that came before modernism as stuck in the mud. But certainly Woolf does something new, which is to present us with very short chapters, each of which is a little glimpse, a little shard of experience. She doesn’t bother taking the reader by the hand and carrying us between chapters. She just leaves a space on the page and we have to catch up with Jacob in the next chapter. Maybe he’s 10 years older, but we have to keep up. The sense that life is not delivered to us fully narrated on a plate, but rather that we spend our lives piecing together bits of evidence, is partly what was so new about the book."

"It really is a sad story, about four people – two couples – who are at a German spa resort and dance what Ford calls a “four square minuet”. They are a kind of microcosm of the upper middle class social scene in Europe before the First World War, and it falls apart. There are various affairs, splittings, attractions, secrets and lies between them. One of the great tag lines of the book is that it describes “just good people”. It turns out that these are not just good people. They are people who from the outside are respectable and pillars of society. But on the inside they are seething, raging and in love with the wrong people. It’s narrated by one of these four people – John Dowell, an American. He’s the archetypal unreliable narrator in that he hasn’t understood what’s been going on and he doesn’t understand that his wife is in love with another man. A great deal has passed him by, and the book is really his attempt to narrate his own story. So, as with Jacob’s Room , it’s about what is missing from a story – about everything that is not known. John Dowell says over and over again, “I don’t know”. He’s writing this story in an attempt to understand what has happened but sometimes he just has to say “I don’t know”. That is one of the great modernist admissions. It’s the movement away from omnipotent, omniscient narrators who can tell you exactly what’s what to narrators like John Dowell, who is very fallible, quite unlikeable and simply tells you what he experienced and what he can understand in retrospect about what happened. He also tells the story in a very roundabout way, which is another great departure from the logical chronology of earlier novels. The story is almost a maze. It’s not a straight line narrative at all. Again, this is about exposing the problems of art. Ford shows us the clockwork of a story, how a story is made and that there is no authoritative version. Nobody experiences the authoritative version of events. All we have are partial, flaunted, half-invented versions of experience."

"That’s it. Yes, it picks up on the energy and passion of the first year of a relationship; it’s a book of such hurtling wild energy that it’s difficult to find landing places in it. That’s partly what the poetry is concerned with: we’ve been launched into flight, or freefall, and we’re looking for somewhere to land. How do we find landing places for ourselves? It makes use of everything that poets do: finding measures and making forms. It’s very absorbing. Caroline Bird talks about finding clearings in forests—she gives her reader that sense of searching through a forest, and suddenly coming to a clearing. That’s your place of clarity, the place where you land. “She picks up on the energy and passion of the first year of a relationship” She’s a surrealist. It’s very much in dialogue with the modernist surrealists, experimenting with errant and outlandish patterns of association. But the exuberance of imagery—daffodils dunked in milk pails and windmills in vacuum-packed villages—is held in balance with a sort of melancholy and despair, in a way that is very mobile. You can never quite pinpoint its tone. You can go back to it and find it falls slightly differently with every reading. It’s full of grief and shame. It’s quite vertiginous, as if you’re on this tightrope over deep wells. If you stop, you might fall—but it’s not complaining, it’s accepting the dangerousness of being alive. So we were excited about the tumbling acts of this book."

"Exactly, yes, these are all books published in the UK and Ireland. Natalie Diaz is published here by Faber. Actually, that’s another thing I think is great about the Forward Prize—it puts a spotlight on UK publishing while also being very open. It puts Britain on the international stage, and embraces poets from all over the world who are being published over here. It won’t be long before Natalie Diaz is well known among British readers. I felt rather happy that this book had only just come out, so we had a chance to showcase it early on and celebrate it. This is a really big voice—she’s a writer of epic in some ways—but what’s interesting is the mix of big-ness and small-ness, amplitude and intimacy. She brings to the surface the long history of Mojave culture, exploring its relationships with mainstream American culture, and with global ecology. She’s working on huge scales here, but at the same time writing love poetry. There’s a great deal about one-to-one human love. She finds the rhythms of sympathy, of eroticism, the sensuality of the simple touch on a waist, or of legs in motion, running and jumping. What’s really special, I think, and what I hope people will respond to, is the way Diaz fuses feelings common across nations with the intimacy of loving another person. Yes. It follows an earlier collection of hers about her brother’s troubles and addictions. This continues, in part, with that family story. There are some very moving poems celebrating the athleticism of her family, and in particular her younger brother. We speak the language of emotion through basketball, through running. God knows I’m not one for playing any sports at all. But she has this almost baroque sensibility—she sees the golden light on a leaping leg, and she makes us feel a kind of truth in what the body says when it’s moving. This is not a sentimental book. It’s too baroque to be sentimental, somehow. It’s too ornate in its language, too resonant with the divergent voices of other writers. There’s a great deal of conviction in it. I think outright conviction can read oddly here in Britain, particularly among readers who deeply value understatement and irony and doubt. But there’s an elusive quality in Diaz, she’s interested in the echo of voices beyond her own, and her conviction carries weight."

"Ageing, but really the ages of women. It has a section on girlhood, a section on middle age, and one on older age. There’s a wonderful sense in which the children and the grandmothers are remarkably alike, and both causing trouble, and wanting to say ‘I want!’ That title is very indicative of the determination to discuss ambition and desire in this book. It’s fighting against the English habit of telling girls to pipe down, you know: they should be seen and not heard. Many older women aren’t heard much in public either. She’s thinking about older people who are absolutely at the height of their creative powers and who are full of life still. She’s a lyric poet, who makes pared down little bundles that spring open at you. She does a boxer’s punch at the end of her poems, often, when you don’t expect it. All the way through it’s a punch back against politeness. It’s fierce and hungry. It takes domestic imagery—the flowerbed, the lawn mower—but the lawn mower in this book is likely to be accelerating and chewing up all the flowers, a metaphor for the hungry woman accelerating wildly through life. The subject matter is just so ordinary and delightful. It’s splashing and tickling and making hot water bottles, and she’s so very sharp and fierce with precisely those materials. And there’s an underlying affiliation with William Blake—she’s thinking a lot about his Songs of Innocence and Experience . She uses his image of the ladder put up to the moon. So there’s a kind of cosmic force field that comes from Blake and occupies her domestic work. There’s another poem I really recommend called ‘The Recital’ where the child must perform brilliantly on the piano at the appropriate moment. It shows us in ten short lines what we consider to be ‘appropriate’ ambition: a mother urgently wanting her child to show promise. To say ‘I want to be a poet’ is ridiculous. But you must also excel when asked to play the piano in the middle of the night. It’s very wry about the contradictions and expectations of ambition."

"It goes back to a subject that has preoccupied Morley for much of his working life, really, which is Romani culture. It’s part of his family inheritance, but he’s also at a distance from it and continually rethinking that relationship. He’s deeply interested in forms of oral telling and the power of speaking voices. He dramatizes, too, the contrasts between lone figures and communal cultural rites. He uses patterns and repetition in the poems to teach us a little Romani. Part of the experience of reading the book is that language-learning. And the use of Romani is a counterpoint to English, suggesting another way of seeing the world. When we first read the book it was still at proof stage, and we found some of the poems transformed in the final copies. Morley had been working intently through the spring lockdown, feeling (he said later) like a lone figure by the gypsy campfire, talking in the dark. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He split a long pantoum into sonnets that run all the way through the collection. They’re called the ‘Lyrebird’ sonnets, and are inspired by the capacity of lyrebirds to imitate the sounds around them. They’ll imitate the sounds of other birds, or a fire alarm, or a chainsaw. Morley sets up this wonderfully playful, but also ecologically true, concept of these sonnets mimicking each other, and lovers answering each other, and writers picking up echoes of each other. There’s a thick weave of connections that holds the book together. He often takes his methods from wildlife. He studied zoology and specialised in freshwater midgies; he’s an expert in long slow watching of insect behaviour. And this title, Fury . Partly it refers to a poem about Tyson Fury, but Morley talks about his stammer—he has quite a pronounced stammer—as his personal version of the classical Furies. So he’s thought hard about how he could use that stammer to think differently about language; he’ll come up against a word he can’t say, and it will make him think around that word. So when he invokes the furies he is, yes, invoking a sort of Greek terror, but also something that has been creatively enabling for him: being forced to find synonyms, to find another angle. Yes, it becomes so surprising, bringing private patterns of association to the surface. There are wonderful poems about bird’s nests, and comparisons with human structures like wattle and daub. The poetry is its own intricate weave with little tufts of moss tucked in between places. There’s something very made about this book, it’s superbly crafted."

"Yes, in that there’s a campaigning element here, worn quite proudly on its sleeve. Pascale made ambitious exploratory journeys to India , and is writing about parts of the subtropical jungles. She’s taking on a whole new continent from her last book, in which she looked at the Amazon. She went to see why people were capturing owls and sewing up their eyes, she went to see what prices were being asked for poached animals. You might associate that kind of investigative journey with documentary reportage, yet what she makes from it is very incantatory poetry. Her model is more Keats than Orwell I think. She wants to give us the lavishness of creatures in poems like ‘The Flycatchers’ or ‘The Bee-eaters’ when the streamers of tropical bird tails become the poem across the page. You feel you’re in the jungle, but you’ll also meet very distressing things. This is also made to feel very close to home, not somewhere way across the globe. The book is partly shaped around her relationship with her half-Indian grandmother. All its most extravagant and remote-feeling imagery comes to rest in evocations of her grandmother’s Welsh home, the greenhouse, particular pieces of furniture. So distances are closed, space concertinas. The family dynamics of a grandmother bringing up a small child become a way of thinking about huge global networks. Yes. This grandmother is fierce throughout, and has “tigress eyes.” And, like a tigress, she is protective of the young girl she has rescued. You can tell just from that outline that there’s a fairytale quality to it. Petit is very delicate and careful about how she uses fable and fairytale to forms of life-writing and documentary. Yes, it includes two poems from every shortlisted collection. And then each judge gets to recommend 10 or 12 other poems that were personal favourites from throughout the judging process. So there’s a terrific mix. There are the greats – Don Paterson has a comical and metaphysical masterpiece of a poem here called ‘Death’ —jostling with lots of entries for the best first collection, so poets we may not have heard before. Mina Gorji writes these miniscule four- or five-line poems: exquisite miniatures that suggest worlds; we’ve included her tiny poem ‘The Wasp’, and I hope those few lines will encourage people to buy the whole collection, The Art of Escape . You get a real sense of range: meditative poems of quiet watchfulness sit alongside Danez Smith’s ‘my president’, recalibrating American politics into something more like a house party. From the convent to the dance floor, new poetry comes together here, and all behind this blazing pink cover. Part of our best books of 2020 series."