2008 Is The Year in Which Liverpool - This Magazine'S Home Town - Becomes European Capital of Culture: Good On Us!

“2008 IS THE YEAR
IN WHICH LIVERPOOL
– THIS MAGAZINE’S HOME TOWN –
BECOMES EUROPEAN
CAPITAL OF CULTURE:
GOOD ON US!”
editorial
tell me!
Philip Davis
S omething happened to me during this year’s Penny

Readings. The Reader stages this event every Christmas
at Liverpool’s magnificent St George’s Hall, in memory
of Dickens’s own appearances in the city – costing (in
folklore) one penny. For Dickens, the loneliness behind a
desk gave way to vocal drama, live at the lectern, where he could mes-
merise his audience into being one whole family of feeling.
This year we were doing something from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale – the arraignment scene in which the innocent Hermione is brought
before the court of Sicilia on account of the mad sexual jealousy of her
husband, King Leontes. It was informal, a reading with the texts in
front of us, and my role was simply that of a foil. I was to stand there,
Leontes himself, in confrontation – whilst our star guest, the actress
Annabelle Dowler, spoke Hermione’s great words of injured rebuttal.
In his terrible delusion Leontes threatens her with ‘justice’. Hermi-
one tells him to spare his threats: what does she care if she dies? She has
already lost his love; she has had her daughter taken away from her; her
new-born baby boy, deemed illegitimate, has been torn from her breast;
and she, Hermione, has to stand in open court accused of being a whore!
Then Annabelle said this to me, direct, looking up from her copy:
Now, my liege;
Tell me what blessings I have here alive,
That I should fear to die?
And then she stopped. For a moment I thought it was my turn and I
had missed my cue. Whether the audience registered it or not I don’t

editorial
know – but for that split-second I was Leontes, physically shaken, un-
manned and unable to answer. What deliberately wasn’t there in the
text – Leontes’ failed response – actually happened. Then Annabelle went
on, telling Leontes to do so too:
Therefore proceed.
But yet hear this: mistake me not…
I think now that I had already been upset by a line or two earlier in
the speech. This also was almost to my embarrassment, even though
I know the play well, knew I was on public display, and thought I was
just trying to be professionally useful. It was when in the very midst of
her indignation, Annabelle spoke of Leontes’ love for her:
The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went.
It is suddenly almost unbearably moving that even now when she

cannot see in front of her the man who loves her, she still vulnerably
loves him or his memory.
I am about to discuss future research with the brain scientists who
have been working with me on Shakespeare (I wrote about this in The
Reader 23). What I want to talk to them about is the way that Shake-
speare uses poetic lines as though they were brain waves. I mean: in one
line he has the woman say ‘I do feel it gone’ and in the next ‘but know
not how it went’. It is very important that ‘gone’ and ‘went’ are on two
lines and that the shift from one to the other (forward on the page, but
backwards in mental time) almost physically seems to change the wiring
and route of the brain itself. I could hear and feel it, trapped there on
the stage of St George’s Hall.
So: what I am talking about here is the effect of voice – the almost
physical effect that a person can leave in us. I remember the first time
this happened to me, in terms of poetry. It was 1974 and I was a lonely
undergraduate who, with little else to do this evening, decided to go to
a poetry reading. I didn’t normally like these things: the poets rarely
read their own work well, it being sufficient to them, it seemed, that
they had already written it; and I often restlessly lost track of what the
hell they meant. But this was a poet called Douglas Oliver, reading from
a long poem of his called ‘The Cave of Suicession’. It was about a bereft
seeker who took himself and his typewriter into an old abandoned lead
mine in the Derbyshire Peak District, called Suicide Cave, and worked
and thought and slept there in the dark. I didn’t know what exactly
was coming out of this cave, but the voice and its range was electric
and daring and risky, on a sort of mental journey. Oliver didn’t recite his
poem, he made the poem in front of us again.

editorial
All I can remember is the voice. But the next time I heard him, years
later, he read a short poem on a connected subject-matter, the death of
his son Tom in 1969, a child with Down’s Syndrome. I don’t want to
look it up, only remember it. So I will say to you that it began with a
refrain from a negro spiritual, ‘Lay my burden down’, ‘Lay my burden
down’. And as the poem went on, deeper into the child’s death, the
refrain went into becoming finally: ‘Lay my bird in down’. It didn’t feel
like a pun, it wasn’t merely clever; but it was a sort of magical transmu-
tation of voice, and a gentle putting of the child to sleep.
A few days after that first reading in 1974, I saw Douglas Oliver
in the library but was too shy to go up to him to say, as I wanted, how
great his reading had been. Eventually, I met him on three occasions.
He died of cancer in 2000, at an unbearably young sixty-two. Though I
hardly knew him, I knew his voice and something of what his presence
stood for, and regularly, at odd times since, have felt something missing
in the world.
This isn’t just about poetry or drama, but what they themselves are
about. That is to say: in life, you know that people who get close to you
have a particular and distinctive blind feel to them in your mind, in your
heart. Or as Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop, even deep
in your brain: ‘People, no less than objects, are represented by symbols
in the brain… the extent of each one depending on the degree to which
you faithfully represent, and resonate with, the individual in question.’
I love that ‘resonate with’: the internal echo of the living ones, or of
voices from the page, or of loved ones dead.
The Reader is always in search of those individual voices we need to
hear. But this particular issue is dedicated to them – to David Constantine,
to the novelists A.S. Byatt and Howard Jacobson speaking outside their
novels, to the older voices of Wordsworth and Joseph Conrad. I began by
talking about a reading in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. But 2008 is the
year in which Liverpool – this magazine’s home town – becomes the Eu-
ropean Capital of Culture: good on us! This will culminate in a literary
festival, between the 7th and 9th of November, put on by the University
of Liverpool and its School of English, with Reader events before, within,
and around it. Some of the writers who will be appearing – Howard
Jacobson, Seamus Heaney, Melvyn Bragg, Doris Lessing, Philip Pullman
– will be giving us work to publish in forthcoming issues of this maga-
zine we hope, as a taster for those of you who can come to hear their
voices live and as a compensation for those who cannot.
In the remote Highlands Wordsworth heard a young woman in the
fields singing in a language he could not understand. Yet he felt it was
like something ‘breaking the silence of the seas / Among the farthest
Hebrides.’ We do our best by the waters of the river Mersey.

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“2008 IS THE YEAR

S omething happened to me during this year’s Penny

It is suddenly almost unbearably moving that even now when she

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