Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Write Cut Rewrite" Exhibition at the Weston Library

"Kill your darlings," enjoined Stephen King, talking of the need for writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers' editing processes at the Bodleian's Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what "darlings" do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth-century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. "For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages," says the label.

Yet why do crossed-out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley's notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, marked off in pencil after being used. Unused was "I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won."

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks allow Alice Oswald to do the swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one large manuscript page with just one correction. Were the robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed?

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? A digital display shows "Cuttings," a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – "every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned." This is a fascinating exhibition with an excellent mixture of writers.

Write Cut Rewrite is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025.

Photo by Ian Wallman

About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds has worked as an English Language teacher and as a museum educator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Reading University museums. She completed a Research Masters in Literature at Liverpool University in 2023 and is considering undertaking a PhD in either Literature or Creative Writing. She blogs here.

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Otherlands: A World In The Making" by Thomas Halliday

Thomas Halliday’s book is a biography of the Earth, told backwards. He starts 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of the decisive thawing of the mammoth steppe, which rings the top of the world and is home to horses, bison and the now-extinct cave lion. 

The book then travels the Earth, landing at different times and places. So there are abundant giant penguins 41 million years ago; a gorgon 253 million years ago with a painful mouth tumour and a leg which has never been the same since she fractured it hunting Bunostegos (a creature looking like a stumpy, tall crocodile); and rock-eating bacteria in the Devonian, 407 million years ago, which make the surface of the water in which they live, intolerably hot to every other lifeform, shimmer with bubbles. The climate and geological processes are given as much space as plants and animals. 

The book ends in the pre-Cambrian 550 million years ago, with no life on land, a 22-hour day before friction slows the Earth’s rotation, and the closer moon shining 15% brighter.

How does Halliday add drama and interest to processes that happen over huge timescales, mostly with no humans involved?

Firstly, he picks varied moments — differently configured landmasses and oceans, with different climates and ecosystems, for example before or after mass extinctions. Secondly, he focuses on movement. Movement of wind, waves and water and therefore of land; communities of animals migrating; individual creatures on the move. Thirdly, he mixes together disparate information — so as well as watching a short-faced bear rummaging in a mammoth carcass, we learn about Korean, Russian and European bear mythologies.

Lastly, he embraces human-centred ways of description. Literary quotations head each chapter (including Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ — ‘Yet portion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge forever be’). He chooses anthropomorphic language such as ‘cyanobacteria discovered the magic of photosynthesis,’ and is happy to translate from the academic to the literary; so the academic term ‘index fossils’ (fossils which are so abundant they can be used to date the rocks they are in) becomes ‘fossil timepieces’ later in the same paragraph. The book ends with a plea to work together to stop climate change. 

This book tells us the world will never stop being in the making, or in the unmaking.

About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds is an English language teacher and editor. She has just finished a Research Masters at Liverpool University looking at differences between reading, speaking and listening to poetry. She published her book Curiosities from the Cabinet: Words and Objects from Britain’s Museums in 2017. Website here. X: @rebrey. 

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Walking Home" by Simon Armitage

Friends sent me Simon Armitage’s Walking Home, saying they hoped this tale of walking the 256-mile Pennine Way would help ‘lift your spirits and fix your eyes on the far horizon’ during lockdown. By chance I had just read Crossing the Sands by Wilfred Thesiger, whose horizons were rather wider than Armitage’s. 

Thesiger crossed the southern Arabian desert twice with Bedu companions just after the Second World War, before cars and oil riches, when Abu Dhabi was a town of about two thousand people. They had very limited food and depended on brackish wells whose water they once had to forcibly pour down the camels’ throats since the animals would not drink it.

He reflects afterwards: ‘I would not myself have wished to cross the Empty Quarter in a car. Luckily this was impossible when I did my journeys, for to have done the journey on a camel when I could have done it in the car would have turned the venture into a stunt.’

So does that make Armitage’s journey a ‘stunt’? What’s a poor poet to do on a well-waymarked path with Mars bars, welcoming committees, and his suitcase transported to the next B&B each day? Find dramatic historical episodes, or focus on his inner landscape, or write something funny and homely?

Of these, Armitage opts for the second two. The tone is often faux or real naïf, as when he walks with geologists: ‘Rocks, I’m happy to understand, are very old and very hard, and as long as they support my weight and don’t move around too much, like they do in Iceland and other untrustworthy portions of the planet’s crust, I’m quite content with that level of ignorance.’

Crossing the Cheviots makes him feel like Hannibal, and the stickiest moment is when he gets lost on Cross Fell: ‘Because when the clouds fold in and the horizon disappears, it’s not only the internal compass that goes haywire, it’s also the altimeter, the gyroscope, the chronometer, the sextant and the inclinometer.’ In the end they get out the GPS, which works fine. (I admit I sometimes found the dangers a bit talked up). 

After the trip, he reflects that physically he was up to it, mentally not (the opposite of what he had predicted), and thanks everyone who has given him food, shelter and company, calling this a ‘validation.’

What I enjoyed most was Armitage’s ability to make ordinary things special, so his daughter’s camp bed alongside the double where he and his wife sleep is ‘like a lifeboat tethered to a yacht.’

And what about the poetry? Here’s the first stanza of 'Cotton Grass,' the final poem in the book: 

          Hand-maidens, humble courtiers

          yes-men in silver wigs,

          they stoop low at the path’s edge, bow

          to the military parade

          of boot and stick.

By contrast, Thesiger never wrote poetry. But common to both men, as they emerge from the journeys, is a love and deep appreciation for their companions, and pride in a challenge overcome.

About the reviewer

Rebecca Reynolds works as a teacher and editor and writes non-fiction. She published Curiosities from the Cabinet: Objects and Voices from Britain’s Museums in 2017. She blogs here: http://objects-ofinterest.blogspot.com/

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "The Book Index": An Exhibition at the Bodleian Library

It’s hard enough to display books interestingly, but book indexes? This I have got to see, I thought, so I travelled up to Oxford last month and picked my way through the city’s shops, tour parties and bicycles to the Bodleian Library, where there turns out to be … one display case.

Still, it covers a lot of ground. First are early Bible concordances (from 1230 onwards) – alphabetical lists of key words together with the passages they come from. These were the models for all subsequent alphabetical indexes, we are told. The curators have grouped three of them with a ‘Goldilocks’ motif – one too small (the size of a smartphone), one too big and unwieldy, and one just the right size. 

Then there is a charming list of individual squiggles put together by early medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste, each of which he assigned to one of 440 topics such as ‘Imagination’ and ‘Existence of God’, then used in the margins of books when the writers mentioned these things. 

Next are the first known page numbers, in a book printed in Cologne in 1490, followed by playful indexes by Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. Lastly we have artist Tom Phillips’s concordance to The Human Document by W H Mallock, a 19th-century book which he picked up at random in a bookshop in 1966 and vowed to use as the basis for a long-term artwork. Since then he has brought out six editions of the book, calling it Humument (see http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/introduction) most pages worked over by him artistically at least twice. Here is one of the pages, the text now illegible under Phillips’s ink except for a few words picked out in white bubbles to make a nonsense sentence. Phillips’s concordance to the novel is a brown pocketbook with tiny lists of handwritten words.

The display is thus bookended with two concordances, the first a necessary accompaniment to a central text of the time, the last a private aid for an idiosyncratic artwork.

But have search boxes put indexes out of business? ‘Ctrl +F is not the same as a good subject index,’ claims the display text. Is this true? Well, a good index is not an automatically compiled list of words but the work of someone trained in choosing and ordering the most important ones, and thus should have some intellectual credibility. An index also offers chance discoveries – you may find things by accident when browsing through it, not so likely when starting off with your own search terms. An index is also I suppose a production in itself, like a noun-heavy summary of the book with wonky syntax and a non-chronological order. A search box, by contrast, is not a work but a tool, albeit a very powerful one. And of course you can’t use them with paper. 

Still, indexes will have to argue much harder for themselves in the age of the e-book. This display, by showing that indexes have functioned for hundreds of years as ways of mapping reading and thought, is part of that argument.

The Book Index was at the Bodleian Library, Oxford from 28 May - 9 July 2017.


About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds is a teacher, writer and editor. Her book Curiosities from the Cabinet: Objects and Voices from Britain's Museums was published in February this year. She blogs here.

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Alive, Alive Oh! and Other Things That Matter" by Diana Athill

Diana Athill calls Alive, Alive Oh! "a report on what living for 97 years has taught one rather lucky old woman." In fact, most of that "report" appeared in her six previous memoirs, covering her childhood on a Norfolk estate and personal and professional life afterwards, when she was an editor at André Deutsch for 40 years. This volume contains some extra pieces – including chapters on having a miscarriage when she was 43, politics in the West Indies and life in a residential home.

This is no anguished coming-to-terms; Athill’s attitude to life is gently positive, and as a writer she is refreshingly unwilling to exaggerate the bad side of her own experiences for effect. (This is perhaps linked with having to be the sensible bystander when, as an editor, she sometimes had to nurse writers through personal or professional crises). And the book is quite as much about the outer world of travel, friends and rose bushes as it is about moments of sense-making – or rather, it is about both together. Here is where she starts to notice the poor living conditions of many black people in beautiful Tobago:

"But it was the very richness of what surrounded them that made the houses’ poverty so shocking, as though you split a glossy fruit to find only a little wormy dust. I met Europeans who had come to run businesses in Tobago who said of the people in the villages, 'they never do more than they absolutely have to' – and I heard black people say it, too: black people who had escaped. The closer you looked, the more you wondered that so many did escape, because simply becoming accustomed to a life so reduced, which a person naturally has to do if it’s the only life on offer, would shrink his mind and dry up his energy." (p.51)

I did fear the autobiographical material would be stretched rather thinly by this time though – already in her previous memoirs the same events are sometimes touched on more than once (and some are even within the pages of this one book).

So does she have anything new to say? Yes, she does. "The Decision" is about moving into a residential home – not so much a decision actually, but a gradual change in attitude helped by seeing one of her friends move there, another unwisely sticking in her own home, and the fact that she had people to support her and was able to consider the option slowly. "A Life of Luxuries" covers trusty bespoke tweed suits, ball dresses and a misjudged choice of green tulle in which to be presented to Edward VIII. "Beloved Books" is about the two writers she thinks about most often now – Boswell and Byron.

Athill shows an editor’s trust in the value of precise language and a Jane Austen-like trust in the ability of abstractions to express and define thoughts and feelings, for instance when she reflects on her feelings towards her partner (who is married to someone else) when she finds herself pregnant:

"If, when I told him I was pregnant, he were to offer to leave his wife and come to me, I would be quite as anxious as I would be happy. I would not, whatever I decided, try to make him do that. Perhaps this was cowardice – a fear of actually having to face a lack of success which I thought I could envisage with equanimity. Or perhaps it was vanity – a desire to go on representing freedom, pleasure, stimulation, all the joys of love rather than its burdens. Or perhaps it was really what I would like it to be: the kind of respect for another person’s being that I would wish to have paid to my own. But there was no doubt that, if I was pregnant, life would be a great deal easier if my lover and myself were otherwise than they were." (p.67)

So – not spread too thin, but a little fragmentary. It is a short book, and half the chapters have been published elsewhere in some form. But I can’t remember reading anywhere else a personal account of life in a residential home and can’t help thinking that books from the perspective of advanced age will become much more important as we all live longer (current average life expectancy in the UK is 81.5 years, according to the Office Of National Statistics). Especially if they are written in such a wise, positive voice.


About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds works as a museum education consultant and writes non-fiction. Her book Curiosities from the Cabinet: Objects and Voices from Britain’s Museums will be out in a couple of months. This looks at 36 objects in UK museums, using interviews with over 40 people who know the objects well – curators, artists, academics, users, makers and others. She blogs here: http://objects-ofinterest.blogspot.com.es/