New from Five Leaves, London E1 by Robert Poole

I have yet to find out who suggested this book for our New London Editions series. All the usual suspects say it was not them, so who was it who found this otherwise completely forgotten book? London E1 was first published by Secker in 1961. There was one review as far as we know, in the Yorkshire Post by Anthony Burgess, taking time off, perhaps from writing A Clockwork Orange. Did the book sell well? We don't know. But two years later Robert died, probably from an accidental overdose of painkillers. There had been talk of another book but all trace has vanished and Robert and London E1 slipped from public memory. Robert Poole was born a few yards from Brick Lane, the setting of this novel. He described his education as "practically nil". His later life included service in the Navy, various dead-end jobs and the Merchant Navy. He jumped ship, changed his name and became a broadcaster in New Zealand before being caught and deported. His last known job was running a Bingo stall in Margate.
What makes London E1 interesting is that the book was set in Brick Lane before, during and after WWII. The Jews were leaving and new settlers were moving in, "the Indians". The young "Jimmy Wilson" had an awful life of poverty and violence, but was fascinated by the white woman Peggy, a prostitute who worked with the Indians, and her mixed race daughter Pinkie who show him the possibility of escape from his family and his limited horizons. I can't think of any other novel that describes that changing world, written so close to the time by one who was there.
As a result of a couple of earlier blog mentions of Robert Poole Five Leaves is now in touch with some of his relatives and we expect some will join the broadcaster Alan Dein and Rachel Lichtenstein (who has written a foreword to the book) in discussing the book on Tuesday January 29th, 6.30pm at the Brick Lane Bookshop. Everybody is welcome. There will be refreshments from 6.30 with the event running from 7.00-8.30 or so. Please email info@fiveleaves.co.uk if you would like to attend. In the meantime copies of London E1 are available from www.inpressbooks.co.uk/london-e1/ now, or from Brick Lane and other bookshops later this week.

We are the Romans...

Five Leaves' Roman Nottinghamshire by Mark Patterson is up for the cup, or, to be more exact, has been shortlisted for the Current Archaeology Book of Year. This is one of those awards that depend on public votes. We disapprove in general as it depends on the Mark Pattersons of this world having large families and larger fan clubs. But there you go - we've voted, and we ask you to vote as well at www.archaeology.co.uk/vote. . There's an interesting research project of the year award too, involving the Iceni run by some folks from Nottingham University. Feel free to lob them a vote too.

Roman Nottinghamshire has turned into something of a hit for us. The book was reprinted a few weeks after publication and has been reprinted again, with a short afterword. We've also been able to correct a quote wrongly attributed... we had not realised there were at least two people working in the same field here with the same name, a bit like the two Duncan Campbells who used to work for The Guardian, with the same writing interests. We'd love to do a full new edition as there has been a glut of new information on Roman Nottinghamshire. People connected with some of the interesting characters involved in local archaeology mentioned in the book have also been in touch. That will have to wait until 2014, and come out alongside a book on Roman Derbyshire, currently being written by Mark. You can order the book here:
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/roman-nottinghamshire/. Dinarii accepted.

Foreign Office, Peter Mortimer, Camp Shatila and Five Leaves

I can't say that I'm a great fan of British foreign policy on the Middle East normally, but I was very interested in this blog entry by Tom Fletcher, Britain's Ambassador to Lebanon. Our books and our authors don't usually reach such levels of course. Wonder if William Hague is reading Camp Shatila.

FCO Blogs > Tom Fletcher > SOLIDARITY AND SHATILA

SOLIDARITY AND SHATILA

November 29, 2012

I’ve blogged previously about our work with the Palestinian veterans who fought with us in World War II, and questions of history and justice.

Today is the Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Attention will rightly be focused on New York, where – just as Israel did in 1948 – Palestine is making its case to the UN for statehood. Whatever Ministers decide is our position, some will be disappointed. The key point though is that the UK approach has been guided throughout by the principle that we want to maximise the chance of the creation of a viable Palestine, living in security alongside Israel.

But far from the halls of the UN, I wanted to use Solidarity Day to highlight the Shatila Theatre Trust’s programme of artistic collaboration between British artists and the Palestinians of Shatila camp in Lebanon, and their artistic director Peter Mortimer’s new book ‘Camp Shatila’, which is full of insights from his time spent living and working in the camp. I met Peter and his ebullient and talented colleagues today. They are Brits doing brilliant work on the ground, showing real solidarity with camp residents whose story is as troubled as any in the region.

Beyond this, our team here are part of a sustained wider effort with the Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Committee, the UN and Palestinian partners to improve the living conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, to prevent crisis and resolve conflict. As more and more Syrian refugees arrive, we should also remind ourselves that this situation cannot be permanent. After a wasted decade, we have to put our shoulder to the wheel of a just two-state solution. I hope that will be the real conclusion of the vote in New York, and of our solidarity.

Solly the elephant went to town...

For the best part of twenty years this postcard has graced a bookshelf in my office at home. The text, in Yiddish, reads "in vald" (In the forest) and it is the front cover of a book by Leyb Kvitko, the illustration by Isaacher Ber Ryback. Kvitko? Yes, the same Kvitko killed on 12 August 1952 because of his involvement in the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee that Five Leaves has been commemorating this year with a book and events. Only the other week did I realise who wrote the book. I like to think of the elephant looking down on me all the while I was working on the book, which was originally planned several years ago. I produced it yesterday at a well-attended talk at Glasgow Limmud, the Five Leaves platform comprising Heather Valencia (the main advocate for Yiddish in Scotland) and I. At the end of the talk, one of those attending, Henry Wuga, said that he'd been at the Glasgow meeting in 1943 when Solomon Mikhoels and Itsak Fefer spoke on behalf of the JAFC. He remembered their heavily Russian-inflected Yiddish. Suddenly these people we were commemorating were a lot closer in time.
Heather Valencia and (occasional Five Leaves short story writer) Ellen Galford spoke later in the day about the hundreds of Yiddish books they had found in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, once the Yiddish stock of the Gorbals Library which served Glasgow's working-class Jews. The books had date stamps reaching into the 1980s, with the earliest book in the collection being 1903. What did these Yiddish readers read? Primarily fiction, often by writers scarcely known now, memoirs - the most popular title by someone nobody had heard of, poetry. World literature in translation - Ibsen, Strindberg, Jules Verne, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and that well known Dickens' novel "A fire in a London prison". Perhaps the Yiddish translator felt that Barnaby Rudge  was not the right title for a Yiddish audience. The books - like The Rubaiyat of 1924 - were initially from publishers in Vilne and Varshe (Vilnius and Warsaw) and later from London, Buenos Aries, Mexico and America, following the spread of Yiddish publishing. Some were printed in Weimar Germany - a centre for Yiddish printing at the time. This small collection - about 400 books - told us so much about the generation of immigrants who read Yiddish, issues running down as people moved to English. But what was needed now was to meet some of those readers. More people popping up like Henry Wuga above. One woman said that her father used to go into the library to help the librarians with the books as they could not read the Hebrew script. The Scottish Jewish Archives are on the case.

Guardianistas and Five Leaves

Three in a week over at The Guardian. Firstly Five Leaves writer Seth Freedman blows his whistle on the Libor-like wholesale gas price fixing. Front page, inside page, big scandal. Seth has written two books for us (one published in association with the Guardian) - the first was Can I Bring My Own Gun? an account of his time as a volunteer, and ultimately dissident, Israeli soldier. The second book, written with his cousin Josh Berthoud Freedman, was a journey through the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Forty Years in the Wilderness. There is no truth in the rumour that a book on wholesale gas pricing is to become the third part of a trilogy.
Secondly, Saskia Baron wrote a wonderful piece about her family's history with autism as her father Michael Baron (editor of On a Bat's Wing, poetry about bats, and joint editor of The Night Shift, poetry of the night) was involved in setting up the first specialist school for autistic children and the organisation that became the National Autistic Society. His group has grown from ten people to 20,000 members. Michael is still active on autism, in poetry and in campaigning for peace in the Middle East, steadily compiling an Israeli Jewish and Palestinian poetry book.
Finally, our new book by the late Colin Ward, Talking Green, is Nicholas Lezard's choice of the week. The article is online now and will appear in Saturdays print edition. An excellent and well written review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/20/talking-green-colin-ward-review.

Neil Fulwood on Alan Sillitoe's Seaton family

“You left England one person and came back another … " Meet Brian Seaton – Arthur’s older brother. Older and wiser? Probably. More sensitive? Comparatively. But a Seaton through and through. The fortunes, or otherwise, of the Seaton brothers are charted across four novels which punctuate the six decades of Alan Sillitoe’s literary career.
Before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been even been published in 1958, Alan had written a massive chunk of what would become his third novel, Key to the Door. Eventually published in 1961, Key to the Door details Brian Seaton’s childhood, his poverty stricken family background, his ill-advised marriage at a young age, and his service in Malaya as a wireless operator.
In 1989, Alan continued the saga with The Open Door, now reprinted by Five Leaves. A quarter of a century gap in writing, but this volume picks up almost immediately after Key to the Door. Brian’s about to get demobbed and he’s having mixed feelings about a return to civvy street. He’s pretty sure his wife’s found herself a new fella, and his experiences of travel have set the horizons of his world-view a tad wider than Nottingham. But a call back to the MO’s office sets Brian off along a different and unexpected path. An x-ray suggests a shadow on his lung.
And so Brian finds himself in a sanatorium, where the diagnosis is confirmed: TB. During his lengthy recuperation, aided by an affair with one of the nursing staff, Brian’s burgeoning intellectualism solidifies into an overwhelming desire to become a writer. Even the reader least acquainted with the facts of Alan’s life will know that he served in Malaya, as a radio operator, and received a disability pension from the RAF after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He lived abroad for about a decade, eking this money out frugally, and dedicated himself to writing. The Open Door takes Brian to the cusp of a similar lifestyle.
There’s an academic work to be written on the autobiographical nature of The Open Door, and it would be fascinating to parse out the actual from the invented. But it’s a mistake to redact any reading of the novel in terms of the equation Brian Seaton = Alan Sillitoe. Brian is as rounded and immediate a character as Arthur, and while there is something of Alan in both of them, Brian and Arthur remain very different.
Alan concluded the Seaton saga with Birthday in 2001, although A Man of his Time, published in 2004, can be seen as a prequel of sorts. Birthday reunites Arthur and Brian in their autumn years, Arthur still belligerent despite the family tragedy he’s dealing with and Brian’s literary ambitions diluted by his success as a writer of sitcoms rather than the world-changing novelist the Brian of The Open Door wants to be.
Birthday is a wry, nostalgic, mature work but it suffered from being marketed as “the sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” Just as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the definitive Arthur Seaton novel, The Open Door is where the story of Brian Seaton finds its fullest artistic expression.
The novel never loses sight of Brian’s working class background, nor is there anything arty-farty in the depiction of Brian’s journey towards the completion of his first novel. The novelist within a novel can often be a tedious device, but Brian’s experiences are grounded firmly in the reality of his experience overseas, his illness, and his difficulty in shaking off his past and the various mistakes that clutter it. The Open Door also contents some finely-honed perceptions on the nature and craft of writing.

“He only knew who he was when with other people … Confidence and enthusiasm led him to believe that he succeeded more times than not.”
If we carry over the autobiographical elements of The Open Door to its comments on the art of writing, then this passage is both a truthful reflection of writing as an onerous craft, and an exercise in self-deprecation. Alan Sillitoe succeeded more times than not; succeeded in understanding the psyche of his characters; succeeded in capturing the flavours and idioms that define a time and a place; and succeeded, again and again, in creating literary works that were honest and clear-sighted. The Open Door rightfully stands among the best of them.

Teenage Kicks report

Five Leaves/Derbyshire Libraries "Teenage Kicks" half day event on the 16th had a near full house of young adults and adults. My organising colleague Ali Betteridge said you need to have nerves of steel in this game as only a few days beforehand we were way below the number we need to run anything let alone a half day event with lots of writers. She kept her nerve while mine was failing. Good call, Ali. We had programmed a great line up of speakers, some being Five Leaves regulars, some occasional, some "friends of" while other sessions were run by teenage readers and, with Pippa from Five Leaves Towers, on the future of the book. Interestingly, the author Pauline Chandler reported that all the teenagers bar one preferred to read in a book format than in any electronic format.
The opening remarks were from Bali Rai. Bali's first book was written when he was nine, Bali and the Giant Peach, at which point he discovered there was more to being a writer than simply changing the name of the main character in a book to your own but otherwise copying it out word for word.
Given that Bali is a writer of an Asian background, it was interesting that his role model was Sue Townsend who also lives in Leicester. It is also thanks to his interest in her as a writer than he is currently doing some work with the RNIB. He told his audience that what everyone has in common is an imagination and the need to tell stories "because we all love gossip and we all tell lies.
Bali became a full time writer in 2001 and is in great demand in schools. He said "I wanted to write about people like me - brown kids, white kids, whatever, working class kids that people didn't used to write about.". He was damning of library cutbacks, reminding us that we need stories, stories about everyday life. "Remove stories about everyday life and you remove diversity [of experience]."
He also set the scene for the day by talking about the importance of reading for pleasure "which will always make you more intelligent. Just like 2 plus 2 will always be four."
From then, until the closing remarks from Paula Rawsthorne the day rushed by. Thanks to all who took part, as audience, organisers and speakers.