2018

Iain Bamforth (b. 1959) grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. Carcanet published Sons and Pioneers in 1992, and his fourth collection, The Crossing Fee, in 2013; also his essay collection The Good European in 2006. He has been a regular contributor of reflective and erudite reports and articles to PN Review since the late 1980s. Reviewing The Good Place (2005), David Morley wrote: ‘From his level place, Bamforth surveys the circles of European culture, searching for ethics and civil society within its changing order. His poetry brims with its pasts, potentialities and connections.’1

FROM IAIN BAMFORTH

19 avril 2018 at 11:38


Dear Michael,

Good to hear from you. We were last in touch before Christmas, and now Easter has come and gone. Fugit inreparabile tempus. Much has happened in between, not least the death of my much admired ex-environmental journalist father-in-law Christian, who celebrated his 90th birthday in December in a frailer condition than I had seen him before, and then decided when faced with the prospect of renal dialysis in February that it was time to die. We provided the palliative care, and he died about ten days after making his decision, lying on the sofabed in his study, free of pain or anxiety, quoting Heine and Hamlet – a very moving occasion for all of us. Oddly enough, I was in Heidelberg only a few days later to study ‘consultancy skills’ for a fortnight at the university: it was where Christian had studied after the war listening to Gadamer and other professors who had made it one way or other through the Nazi years.2

      I ought to tell you that the medical ‘dream book’ manuscript (Scattered Limbs) which you turned down in November 2016 has been picked up by Robert Hyde at Galileo: he is even coming over to meet me next month on his BMW bike.3 I spent a lot of time looking at it from various angles as you suggested, but decided in the end that its scrapbook shape is the right one; I’ll have to discuss with Robert whether we ought to bring some illustrations into the text (and who might be responsible for hunting them down). It’s a relief that it has a house, even if Galileo is even more obscure than Carcanet (same distributor, he tells me!).

      Meanwhile, I’ve been busy editing other material. I’ve put together a collection of essays (mainly freestanding stuff plus a few reviews that seem germane to the theme) which ventures into the engine room of culture and fuels it with this remarkable substance called zest. What I’ve sent is only about half of my planned contents: this has to be a bumper book, around 100-120,000 words in length, in order to justify its subtitle. Some of the key items to be added include a look back at my Brethren past (and how I survived it) and also a short account of emerging from the shipwreck of closing my practice twenty years ago. The notion of ‘the art of living’, philosophy in the practical sense or leisure in the Greek sense, will need expanding, and I would hope to do that in the introduction. I suspect you won’t be thrilled by the notion of such a large work (although Craig Raine pulled it off with Haydn and the Valve Trumpet), but let me know what you think of the proposal

      I also attach a little treat for PNR: I meant to review the new (German) film on Lou Andreas-Salomé which appeared in the cinema here last year but was so disappointed in it that I mention it only in the addendum.4 The events of 1882 are of some interest though, not least owing to Nietzsche’s very high-minded attempt to sweep the young Lou off her feet. She wasn’t having any of it.

      Regarding PNR, I didn’t continue my subscription because the usual reminder slip never arrived in the post: I usually send on a cheque (old-fashioned, I know) every September. Perhaps somebody in the office can remind me how much it is.

      I read Philip Terry’s Gilgamesh at Christmas.5 It is certainly a strikingly novel approach to the poem, but I had some reservations about the ‘powerful and logical’ assumptions governing the use of ‘Globish’: if anything, early languages tend to be far more complex than modern ones, and the notion that Globish is somehow a neutral vehicle has been disproved by Anna Wierzbicka among others.6 I would certainly agree however that the fragmentary and jagged nature of the original is an integral aspect of its fascination, and that Terry’s version is really startling. One name he might usefully have dropped in his talk is that of Viktor Shklovsky, whose ruminations on literary forms would certainly have provided some justification for his clipped idiom.7 I could turn in a good review of the book when it appears.

      I hope your own writing on the subject has advanced from Rilke’s enthusiastic blowout in 1916.8 I’ve been reading a dual biography of Rilke and Rodin called You Must Change Your Life: the more I read about Rilke in the early years of last century the more puzzled I am that such a neurotically dependent person (especially on Lou) could regard himself as a font of wisdom, handing down instructions on how to live more authentically to others (especially in the Letters to a Young Poet). Just look at that famous phrase which ends the archaic torso poem!


Warm regards,

Iain



FROM IAIN BAMFORTH

3 May 2018 at 17:45


Michael?



FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

3 May 2018 at 18.49


Dear Iain


Thank you for your really wonderful letter to which I want to reply in full. I cannot at present due to the pressure of work: writing another catalogue, editing PNR 242 (with you in it I hope!) and doing a great deal of editorial work.

      Maybe over the coming weekend which is supposed to be extended.

      What you wrote about your father-in-law was deeply moving.

All best, dear Iain

Michael



*

As a publisher and editor, I love the essay form as much as Herb Leibowitz, editor of Parnassus, does. PN Review is the place where essays can be published and where they will be read. Books of essays are quite another matter. It is possible to publish an excellent volume and to sell fewer than 300.

      PN Review has been blessed since 1983 with the collaboration of Iain Bamforth, easily the most civilised and broadly read among friends roughly of my generation, and one of the best essayists we have. The essays that he writes are very hard to publish in book form. The one success we have had was with A Doctor’s Dictionary, the title and alphabetical ordering enhancing – or masking – its true nature.

      Of the books of essays we have published, Idris Parry’s Speak Silence, Christopher Middleton’s Bolshevism in Art, C.H. Sisson’s Anglican Essays and In Two Minds, and Edgell Rickword’s Essays and Opinions are among those of which I’ve been proudest. Most of them are out of print: there was no continuing demand. Iain Bamforth’s The Good European: Essays and Arguments remains in print. Its themes remain news. This profoundly European (because Scottish?) intelligence, whose letters have instructed and delighted me with their insights, merits a wider readership. But his readers must be readers: we find him in the midst of thoughts, theories and arguments, and he is not a remedial teacher.

      Iain Bamforth is a physician, a man of action and of the world, and not an academic, not a writer in residence or a career poet. He sees things whole. He is one of the last of the letterwriters. His emails are carefully written, as if long-hand with a fountain pen, rich with completed thought and pertinent questioning. There is nothing old-fashioned about him, but there is a broad living culture still informing everything he says and does.


NOTES

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview21 (accessed 8 July 2019)
  2. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) took up his position at the University of Heidelberg in 1949, and published his most famous work, Truth and Method, in 1960.
  3. Scattered Limbs: a medical dream-book was published by Galileo Publishers (Cambridge) in 2019.
  4. ‘Lou and Fritz: sensible shoes meets starstruck’, PN Review 242 (July–August 2018).
  5. Philip Terry’s Dictator (Carcanet Classic, 2018) recreates the Akkadian epic Gilgamesh using Jean-Paul Nerrière’s 1,500word vocabulary of Globish. Terry has published four volumes of poetry with Carcanet, reworking Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dante’s Inferno, developing a form based on Raymond Queneau’s sonnet-like poems, and translating Queneau’s last book, Elementary Morality. He is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex.
  6. Anna Wierzbicka (b. 1938) is a distinguished Polish linguist and Emerita Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her book Semantic Primitives (1972) launched her influential theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage.
  7. Victor Shklovsky (1893–1984), who coined the term ‘defamiliarisation’ (ostranenie) in 1917, was one of the major Russian formalists, a theorist, critic and writer.
  8. Bamforth is referring to MNS’s work on Gilgamesh: the life of a poem, published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Several emails in 2017 relate to the poem, particularly Rilke’s reaction to it, which Bamforth was able to trace through correspondence for MNS He then mentions Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life: the story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (W.W. Norton, 2017).

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      John Ashbery, Collected Poems: 1991–2000, edited by Mark Ford and David Kermani

      Nina Bogin, Thousandfold

      Beverley Bie Brahic, The Hotel Eden

      Edmund Blunden, Selected Poems, edited by Robyn Marsack (new edition)

      Anthony Burgess, The Ink Trade: selected journalism 1961–1993, edited by Will Carr

      Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear

      Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Books of Catullus, translated by Simon Smith

      Miles Champion, A Full Cone

      Fred D’Aguiar, Translations from Memory

      John F. Deane, Dear Pilgrims

      Ned Denny, Unearthly Toys: poems and masks

      Martina Evans, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men

      Philip French, Notes from the Dream House: selected film reviews

      1963-2013

      Harry Gilonis, Rough Breathing: selected poems

      James Harpur, The White Silhouette: new and selected poems

      John Heath-Stubbs, Selected Poems, edited by John Clegg

      Oli Hazzard, Blotter

      A.C. Jacobs, Nameless Country: selected poems, edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf

      Gabriel Josipovici, The Cemetery in Barnes: a novel

      Fawzi Karim, Incomprehensible Lesson, versions by Anthony Howell

      Frank Kuppner, The Third Mandarin

      Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold

      Tim Liardet, Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: new and selected poems

      Gabriel Levin, Errant

      Christine Marendon, Heroines from Abroad, translated by Ken Cockburn

      Chris McCully, Beowulf, translated by Chris McCully

      Rod Mengham, Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

      Leonard Nolens, An English Anthology

      Walter Pater, Selected Essays, edited by Alex Wong

      Phoebe Power, Shrines of Upper Austria

      Sextus Propertius, Poems, translated by Patrick Worsnip

      Frederic Raphael, Against the Stream: Personal Terms VII

      Evelyn Schlag, All Under One Roof: poems, translated by Karen Leeder

      Michael Schmidt (ed), New Poetries VII

      Philip Terry, Dictator

      Charles Tomlinson, Swimming Chenango Lake: selected poems, edited by David Morley

      Julian Turner, Desolate Market

      Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rondo

      Andrew Wynn Owen, The Multiverse