The Connection Between Life and Literature

In this special, double-length episode, Sally leaves her boat to seek refuge at a friend’s house on another island in Oxford, as the rains have flooded the meadow of her narrowboat community. Returning to the boat as the waters subside, she reads a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, then settles down to study a collection of essays by Will Self. The essays lead Sally to reread a chilling short story by the surrealist writer Franz Kafka - and a striking phrase reminds her of one of her favourite sentences in all of modernist literature. Sally’s musings are interrupted by a visitation from her seven-year-old neighbour, Maeve Magnus. They discuss why we read, the value of sad stories, and reminisce about trips to a local café for communal reading and ice cream. Sally's reading makes her think of her own medical treatment, and she announces plans for the future of the podcast.

Further Reading:

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 –1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was effectively orphaned in early childhood and suffered all her life from ill health. In reaction to the then-prevalent confessional style of American poetry, her works reveal very little of her private life. She published the poem Crusoe in England in her collection, Geography III, in 1979.

In the poem, Crusoe has left his famous desert island to return to his home island, but ironically feels more displaced and lonely than when he was a castaway.

Robinson Crusoe is of course the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 eponymous book,  often claimed to be the first novel published in English. It’s probably based at least in part on the story of the real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, and was a huge success in its day, with many readers initially fooled into believing that it was a work of factual autobiography.

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) lived most of her life in virtual seclusion. She wrote deeply private, radically experimental poems, which she hid in her room and were never published in her lifetime. After her death, her sister found her cache of poems and she’s now considered one of the greatest poets in the English language

The Dickinson poem which Sally riffs on was published posthumously in 1891 in a collection entitled Poems, Series 2. The poem seems to celebrate her position in life, estranged from society and fame, finding communality with similar outsider figures. It reads in full:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Will Self’s collection of essays, entitled Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 – 2021, was published in November 2022 by Grove Press UK. It’s packed with advice for readers - what to read, how to read, and discusses why we read; it also features insights into some of his favourite writers, including Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald and William S Burroughs.

A Country Doctor was written in 1917 by the German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died in 1924. His best known works are The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle; his writings are frequently surrealistic, bizarre and unsettling, exploring themes of  existentialism, absurdity, alienation and guilt.

To The Lighthouse was written by Virginia Woolf in 1927 and is perhaps her most highly regarded and radically innovative novel. It deals with loss, subjectivity, the encroachments and damages of time, the nature of art and the problems of perception. The sentence Sally discusses is a pivotal moment in the middle section of the book, as Woolf speeds up her account of her characters' lives as if they are caught in a fast-forward film; so the death of Mrs Ramsey, a central character, is dealt with in one almost-throwaway sentence.

Maeve Magnus is reading Michael Morpurgo’s collection of short stories, Best Mates, published in 2015, which includes the story The Silver Swan. Beware spoilers!

Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913 - 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and priest. Throughout his life, he moved to increasingly isolated parishes to escape what he considered to be the materialism of the modern world and the creeping influence of English culture. Throughout his life, he wrote poems of breathtaking spirituality and insight, combining a love for the Welsh landscape with a grittily realistic portrayal of the people who inhabited the landscape. 

The Sick Rose is a "poem of experience" which William Blake published in his extraordinary collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake (1757 – 1827) was born into the London working classes and worked as a printmaker, set apart from the literary establishment of the time, composing, creating, illustrating and printing his works himself. A visionary and wholly unique figure, considered by some to be verging on the insane, he was largely unrecognised in his life, but is now seen as a trail-blazing figure in the Romantic movement, celebrated both for his poetry and his visual art.

The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com

The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding.

We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397

Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus, who makes her debut appearance in this episode.