**A Fan’s Notes**
By Emily Gordon
“For the first, but certainly not the last, time, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own,” wrote Nick Hornby in “Fever Pitch,” a memoir of his obsession with his local English soccer team. At the time, this proved to be a faulty theory, but today it seems perfectly apt. Just as Arsenal captures the soccer grail – winning the league championship and the FA Cup in the same season (“an event that’s happened only six times this century,” he reports) – Hornby is scoring writerly goals with his new novel, “About a Boy” (Riverhead, $22.95). On a tour wedged into the off-season, ending just before the World Cup, Hornby stopped to talk at lunch in New York.
“About a Boy” follows Hornby’s first novel, “High Fidelity” – starring Rob, record-store owner, dumpee and maker of lists – which has become a cult favorite in both Britain and America. The new book, too, is about a 30-something guy in London; Will, though, is single and comfortably unemployed, living off the royalties from an excruciatingly well-covered Christmas jingle composed by his father in 1938.
Surely something can alleviate the dullness of an existence consisting of soccer matches on TV, movies, shopping and a top-notch stereo: “It’s a little short on soul,” as Hornby observes. Will’s got the answer: attractive single mothers, to whom he will look great after the accursed ex. Inevitably, both moms and kids soon fill Will’s life – in particular one irony-impaired man in the body of a 12-year-old boy. His name is Marcus, he’s never heard of Kurt Cobain and, once the child-phobic Will has (reluctantly) let him infiltrate his ordered world, nothing can, of course, be the same.
Much like “High Fidelity’s” Rob, Will is winsomely familiar. (As a friend of mine put it of Rob, “I don’t know if I am him or I’ve dated him.”) This is no doubt why fans feel they know, in turn, Nick Hornby. “I get letters addressed `Dear Nick,’ ” he says, riffing on the likelihood of other novelists’ receiving similar greetings (“Dear Don”? “Dear Norman”?). In person, his demeanor does little to formalize matters; with an Englishman’s healthy lack of reverence for the press, he leans forward on his elbows, simultaneously casual and intent, with bright blue eyes focused in a thoughtful, impish gaze.
Easily as amusing as his characters, Hornby also comes off as kinder and more circumspect. Since the success of “Fever Pitch,” though, he has, like Will, been able to make his own schedule. “Some of Will’s TV routines correspond very neatly to the routines of a writer,” he says, grinning. “I live a charmed life. I have a little apartment around the corner from where I live where I try to go from 10 to 6. Of course, I don’t actually write from 10 to 6.”
When he gets distracted, he walks around Highbury, his North London neighborhood, which is full of “perfect writing material” (not to mention the Arsenal grounds). “When I can’t write I go to the record shop; I’ve made friends with the guy who works there. He told me he wanted to put the jacket for “High Fidelity” up against the register with a sign: `Yes, I’ve read it!’ He used to give me a 10 percent discount, but when the news that I sold my first film rights came out, he rescinded it.” (These days, Hornby likes pop bands from Ben Folds Five to Radiohead.)
Though Hornby’s life does overlap with Will’s, 12-year-old boys are not a regular feature (his own son is 4 1/2). He recalls that some of the inspiration for “About a Boy” came from being invited one day to “hang out with guys of all different ages, just spending the day doing whatever they would normally do.” The boy he spent time with was 11, and the two of them spent the day “playing Gameboy, playing football in the street, going out for chips.” Unlike Marcus when he first meets Will, Hornby’s companion wasn’t suspicious. “The funniest thing he said was when we were talking about marriage. He said he couldn’t wait to go on honeymoon, and I was startled because we hadn’t talked about sex or anything. But he said, `Yes, because you get to go to places like Hawaii and Cornwall.’ ”
Hornby has taught high school, which was exhilarating at times, but also draining. “What kind of bad day could a writer have compared with the worst day a teacher could have?” Now, he often gets called into schools to read to students. “They think since my first book is about football, I’ll be the magic route into literature, and before you know it, they’ll be reading `Great Expectations.’ After all, `Fever Pitch’ is kind of a book. But afterward the kids usually come up and ask me who looks good for Arsenal this year, or who has the best haircut.”
Hornby will soon have a new wave of admirers, since both his novels are being made into films (“High Fidelity” stars John Cusack as Rob) set in America. “People from North London ask me how the films can be set anywhere but North London, as though all I’ve done is set down a list of street names.” He’s not worried about how the movies will turn out. “If it’s a decent book, it has a life far beyond the film,” he says. “Does anyone ever say about Joseph Heller, `Why did he have to sell the film rights to `Catch-22?’ ” He’s now working on his own screenplay, about an American musician who defects to England after his sister dies.
Hornby’s work, like that of Lorrie Moore, whose writing he loves, is deceptively fun to read. Some critics have mistaken his light tone as unserious: “If you put a joke in your book, you’re doomed,” he says without concern. He’s also not afraid to put references to current culture in his books. A lot of contemporary writers, he muses, are “interested in posterity – they don’t want to put anything in that will date it. I don’t think anyone will be able to read `High Fidelity’ in 40 years.”
Doubtful, since his characters – churlish, wistful, morally vague – are so resonant. In Will, Hornby says, “I tried to make a character with no redeeming qualities. I saw `As Good as It Gets’ on the plane, and it’s a similar situation: Both Will and the Jack Nicholson character are forced into a situation where they have to break out of their routine.” As Will discovers, kids can do that to you, a fact Hornby knows well: “You don’t notice your life is changing.”
So has literary success changed his life on a grand scale? He cocks his head. “The particularly strange thing for me is that my first book is about being a fan, and now I have fans, I think.”
–Published in _Newsday_, June 21, 1998

**Dame Iris Murdoch, 79, Celebrated Novelist**

By Emily Gordon

Dame Iris Murdoch, a novelist whose mastery of the English language was equaled by her confidence in the world of ideas, died Monday in Oxford, England, at the age of 79.

In his recently published book, “Elegy for Iris,” critic John Bayley, her husband of more than four decades, confirmed that she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the past five years.

Murdoch, who wrote more than 30 books – including the novels “The Sea, the Sea,” which won the 1978 Booker Prize, and “The Green Knight” (1994) – had lost contact with her intellectual faculties, though she and Bayley continued to be, as he wrote, “fused together.”

Murdoch was born in Ireland on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents, and grew up in the suburbs of London. She had a sparkling career as a scholar; educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, she studied for a year with disciples of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein before going on to a lifetime of teaching philosophy at Oxford University. She also produced a legion of highly charged, intricate, sometimes comic novels, as well as poetry and plays. In 1987, Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood for women.

Murdoch’s novels stand apart from anything written during her lifetime, in part because her style developed without sway to literary trends. Her earliest work is informed by existentialism; while working for the UN after World War II, she met Jean-Paul Sartre and the French writer Raymond Queneau, whom she considered an inspiration.

In her books, intensely thoughtful people are wracked with intellectual and moral struggle, which often requires the searchlight of an even greater mind for the relief of some understanding. Her themes are love, freedom, metaphysics and even enchanted mysticism. This often lends her scenarios and her characters a radiant quality that is both recognizable and utterly strange. Yet they cohere, because, as she told the Times of London, “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

As Bayley lovingly describes her, Murdoch was a contented eccentric, unconcerned with conventional standards of female allure or housekeeping; their home in north Oxford was a sea of books, papers and a collection of stones. She refused most editing, even of punctuation, and wrote every book – which she conceived in full before penning a line – in longhand, eschewing even manual typewriters. She and Bayley had no children. She once said, “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

Yet it seems, in both Murdoch’s published interviews and through Bayley’s searing portrait of her both before and after the fog of Alzheimer’s surrounded her, that she had found that fortune in her own life as a writer, scholar and companion. She wrote: “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”

–Published in _Newsday_, February 9, 1999

**Obituary: Poet Laureate Ted Hughes**

By Emily Gordon

Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, died Wednesday of cancer at age 68 in his Devon home. Known as much for his tragic marriage to American poet Sylvia Plath as for his own formidable work, Mr. Hughes spent decades in the light of a public scrutiny that was highly unusual for a modern-day poet.

He was born Edward James Hughes in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, England, the son of a carpenter. After serving two years in the Royal Air Force, Mr. Hughes went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, first studying English, then switching to archaeology and anthropology. Upon graduation he moved to London, where to support his writing he worked as a script reader, as a gardener and at a zoo. (His extensive knowledge of animals would become crucial to his poetry, which often drew on the violence of the natural world.)

In 1957 in Cambridge, Mr. Hughes met the brilliant, and still unknown, young Plath. They married within a few months and moved to Amherst, Mass. Their meeting – instantly dramatic and literally bloody (in a fierce embrace, she bit him hard on the cheek) – foretold the passionate combat that would characterize their life together.

That same year, Mr. Hughes published his first book of poems, “The Hawk in the Rain,” followed by “Pike” (1959) and “Lupercal” (1960), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and the 1961 Hawthornden Prize. In 1962 his “Selected Poems” appeared, by which time Mr. Hughes and Plath had returned to England. After Plath committed suicide in 1963, Hughes stopped writing poetry for nearly three years.

Even after he returned to writing, producing an astonishing number of volumes of poetry, prose, translations, children’s books, plays and criticism – more than 75 over his lifetime – Plath continued to haunt him.

He came under fire in his role as her literary executor. (Though Mr. Hughes had left her for another woman – Holocaust survivor Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with her child by Hughes – their divorce had not yet gone through at the time of Plath’s death.)

Mr. Hughes provoked a sustained outcry for withholding some of Plath’s work and papers from publication and denying scholars permission to quote. He omitted the angriest poems about him from her book, “Ariel”; he lost an unfinished novel; in an act that appalled Plath’s students and fans, he destroyed the last volume of her diaries.

The conflict between Mr. Hughes’ perception of his family’s privacy (his two children by Plath; daughter Frieda, and son Nicholas, are now in their 30s) and her literary and historical stature has produced its own field of scholarship and discussion, resulting in works that include Janet Malcolm’s “The Silent Woman.” It has been an emotional subject for many nonacademics as well. Repeatedly, people have chipped the name “Hughes” from Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire. Throughout the years, while providing introductions and corrections, Mr. Hughes would not speak about his former wife, and the subject had seemed closed.

Yet earlier this year Mr. Hughes, who was appointed poet laureate by Queen Elizabeth in 1984, made a dramatic reversal and published “Birthday Letters,” a substantial volume of poems about Plath’s indelible influence on his life. By publishing the book in the last stages of the cancer he had kept secret for 18 months, Hughes ensured, and perhaps sanctioned, a perpetual interweaving of their words and lives. While often uneven, the book is startingly raw and tender.

Critics have praised Mr. Hughes for his willingness to take risks in his subject matter, his interest in mythic themes and the richness of his language, characterized by one critic as having a “nearly Shakespearean resonance.” With equal insistence, others have objected to his fascination with gore and the animal world and dismissed him as a “cult poet.” In his poem “Pibroch” (from the book “Wodwo,” 1967), all of nature is caught up in destruction and change:

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.

–Published in _Newsday_, October 30, 1998

Speaking From Memory
By Emily Gordon
HANDWRITING, by Michael Ondaatje. Knopf, 78 pp., $22.
THERE IS SOMETHING almost boyishly game about Michael Ondaatje’s poems: He takes risks he rarely approaches in his prose, despite the tremendous ones he ventures there. It can be startling to come upon such tender honesty, so much personal reflection and detail, in fragments from a writer whose characters and narratives–like those in his best-known book, “The English Patient”–are so well formed. We may catch ourselves wondering whether this material would be better served in fiction or memoir. But these stories are undeniably his, and his to make into poetry.
Throughout “Handwriting,” his ninth book of poems, Ondaatje continues to demonstrate that he is an emissary of the world. A Canadian who lives in Toronto, Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and speaks from memory when he summons up saffron, parrot trees and jackfruit, “a silted water garden in Mihintale,” “a nine-chambered box from Gampola.”
The book’s first section (of three) presents landscapes and historical vignettes from his first home, replete with buried Buddhas, bronze Buddhas purloined by shaking men in the dead of night, a Buddha’s tooth “smuggled…from temple to temple for five hundred years,” heady smells, stealth and secrets. It’s clear Ondaatje loves the sounds these scenes evoke. Indeed, the names of the plants and the cities alone are redolent and magical, unfamiliarly intoxicating.
Yet what this collection proves even more clearly is that Ondaatje’s true mastery lies in his diplomacy of the senses. The book’s second section, titled “The Nine Sentiments” and drawing on themes of classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetry, is a celebration of the body, particularly in the form of a beloved woman. Ondaatje’s eroticism occasionally crosses the line into excess cleverness: “I hold you the way astronomers / draw constellations for each other / in the markets of wisdom.” And sometimes it’s simply too much (“Ancient dutiful ants / hiding in the ceremonial / yak-tail fan / move towards and climb / her bone of ankle”); the English Patient would raise what’s left of his eyebrows. But the great majority of these poems are winsome and stirring, and Ondaatje’s reverent stance–“My path to this meeting / was lit by lightning,” “her fearless heart / light as a barn owl / against him all night”–allows for buzzed and empathetic reading.
And so, if the first section of “Handwriting” concerns an almost-buried time, myth, symbol and a sensory return to the childhood realm, “The Nine Sentiments” is a study in the geography of the body. It’s full of trysts, lovers’ breathing, the discovered truths of and underneath the skin. This section tells a complete tale of anticipation, connection and attendant terror, and ends with questions–“Where is the suitor / undistressed / one can talk with / Where is there a room / without the damn god of love?”–that are, alas, unanswerable, but still full of a kind of partisan allegiance to passion. In the third (untitled) section, Ondaatje exposes other devotions, as with the sentimental rush of memory for “the tears / I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving / the first home of my life,” and his identification with the 14th-Century poet-calligrapher Yang Weizhem, composer of an elegy for Zou Fulei, “almost unknown, / who made the best plum flower painting / of any period.”
In the lucid prose poem “Death at Kataragama,” Ondaatje leaves the human realm altogether: “There is a woodpecker I am enamoured of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood…. Can my soul step into the body of that woodpecker? He may be too hot in sunlight, it could be a limited life. But if this had been offered to me today, at 9 a.m., I would have gone with him, traded this body for his.” He captures perfectly a craving for escape without death or erasure – the violent gratitude for being alive coupled with the heartache of being oneself.
The poems in “Handwriting” emphasize narrative structure less than those in his previous books of poetry (collected into one volume, “The Cinnamon Peeler,” and very much worth adding to any Ondaatje library), instead lingering in spaces and pauses that sometimes cause more puzzlement than respite. Ondaatje can tell a story, but sometimes he chooses not to, and the result can be frustratingly glancing and elliptical.
Still, the stories he does tell–in longer lines, and occasionally in the form of a prose poem–are corkers. “The Story,” for instance–which begins with a king’s premonition to his pregnant wife of a war, a seven-man journey among dancing rope-makers and a fateful creep into a dangerous castle, and continues as his son becomes one of the seven – lives the story as a fairy tale adventure, rather than as abstract parable. There is wisdom here–“There is no way to behave after victory”–as well as the humor that glitters off many of his earlier poems. The story in “The Story” is tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon.
If there is a larger theme in “Handwriting,” it is the one its title suggests: Ondaatje longs for a less corrupted life of creation, one in which, for instance, “the poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf / to celebrate the work of the day, / the shadow pleasures of night,” or a stonecutter who has only one tool and uses it expertly. Just as essential is the humility required in these endeavors, recalling Robert Frost’s line in “The Woodpile” about the dignity of abandoning fuel “far from a useful fireplace.”
In each section, through the poets and artisans he invents or recalls, Ondaatje reveals his own methods and designs, failings and desires. Like Zou Fulei, Ondaatje is concerned with explicit accomplishment: making, in words, the best plum flower painting – rather than, for instance, the great Canadian novel. He celebrates craft, vision and intense concentration, even as he is lovingly, and constantly, distracted.
Certainly, there’s ambivalence inherent in this kind of life–evident in his reverie on the woodpecker, which ends, “This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone – I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings.” Yet his choice of “Last Ink” to end this book returns him to the company of the calligrapher, Fifth Century seals that contain multitudes, a time “before the yellow age of paper.” Ondaatje has inherited this century’s mediums for expressing the human condition, but he can be counted among those who “shared it / on a scroll or nudged / the ink onto stone / to hold the vista of a life.”
–Published in Newsday, March 21, 1999