Culture

The inspiration for the latest challenge — to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned — was puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is a sperm like a whale?’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Dreary Hot Pork’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘I will alarm Islamic owls’. The anagrammatic titles that caught my eye in a vast and stellar entry included ‘Naughty Nude Wash’ by Wystan Hugh Auden (David Shields) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ode to a Large, Slimy Ulcer’ (Max Gutmann).

My guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. We talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an Aristotelian plot, and the unusual way his psychic second wife sends him off to sleep.

The call for the comically appalling first or final paragraph of the memoir of a well-known figure was one of those challenges where we raise a glass in memory of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian novelist and patron saint of purple prose. The oft-cited example of his florid style is the opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford — ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — which was used by Charles Schulz as the first line of Snoopy’s novel, and by Brian Murdoch in his winning entry below. You didn’t quite hit the spot this week and the standard was patchy. Some creditable entries were disqualified because they didn’t strike me as plausible beginnings or endings.

I’m joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him as a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the new book Down In The Valley: A Writer’s Landscape — and who’s here to talk about the pleasures and difficulties of coaxing reminiscences out of this laureate of English rural life. Essential listening for anyone for whom Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning formed part of a literary education.