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Thursday 30 July 2015

The Write Advice 068: JULES FEIFFER


With only a topic in mind (and sometimes not even that), I would beginwith an opening line –– almost any line would do.  Without a conscious clue as to where I was headed, I began to riff off my opening, automatically putting words in the character's mouth, curious to see where this would take me –– if anywhere.
     And just as in improv a second character might decide to enter and, unexpectedly, I was writing a scene.  If the second character didn't work, it was a monologue.
     The words my characters spoke decided for me, by the third panel, where the cartoon was going, and by the fifth or sixth panel it was headed home.
     I seldom knew in advance where this process was taking me.  Any number of times over the years I'd be humming along nicely –– and then I'd arrive at what should have been the last panel without a thought in my head.  I didn't know how to end the thing.  So I'd stash the idea in a drawer and forget it.  A year or ten or twenty-five went by and, searching for something else, I'd come across the unfinished idea.  Thirty seconds later the ending would announce itself.  I'd draw it and send it in.  Twenty-five years in the making:  a comic strip.

Backing into Forward: A Memoir (2010)



Use the link below to read a 1988 interview with North American cartoonist, playwright, novelist, screenwriter and social activist JULES FEIFFER:

 

https://www.tcj.com/the-jules-feiffer-interview/

 

 

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Thursday 23 July 2015

Poet of the Month 030: AYTEN MUTLU


AYTEN MUTLU
c 2005







PEOPLE



 

between the earth and sky tiny houses
murmuring rooms, half-open windows
utensils, chairs, a weary table
small habits, worn-out tastes
a handful of dust, an afternoon shadow
and time sitting proudly in a corner seat
 

 

between walls familiar to one another
so many belongings, so much anguish, so little love
a little bit of salt taken from the sea, a light-hearted feeling
from the sun, a kiss, a laugh
whispers, the mist on the flowers in the vase
and the smell of death
pervading the moment's haste
 

 

between the earth and sky a gathering of souls
a cup of wrath, immense grief
screams, entreaties, deep silence
and this thirst for life
which keeps flowing
and flowing
hitting against the veins of tiny houses
 

 
 
 
1998




Translated by
  
SUAT KARANTAY
  
(Member of Turkish PEN)




 
 
 
 
Ayten Mutlu was born in the western Turkish port city of Bandirma on 6 October 1952 and began writing poetry and stories at the age of ten.  She has been politically active since 1967 when she became a vocal proponent of the Womens' Rights movement in her homeland.
 

Mutlu was educated at Yilidiz Technical University and Istanbul University, from which she graduated with a degree in Financial Management in 1975.  After gaining her degree she took a position with the Central Bank of Turkey, from which she recently retired in order to devote herself exclusively to writing poetry, prose, short stories and works of literary criticism in addition to translating modern English poems into Turkish.  She has also translated many poems by various female poets of antiquity into her native language.
 

Her first collection of poetry, titled Dayan ey Sevdam [Resist O My Love], appeared in 1984 and she continued to publish regularly throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium with a volume of her selected poems, titled Atesin Köklerinde [In Roots of Fire], appearing in 2006.  'Her poetry,' one critic wrote of her work, 'reflects a struggle within herself, as well as a view of the world in which all horror and beauty are seen at once and often intermingled.'

 
 
 
 
Use the link below to read more translated poems by Turkish poet AYTEN MUTLU:
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 13 April 2021  
 

Thursday 16 July 2015

J is for Jazz 013: ROY HAYNES


ROY HAYNES
c 1966



 

I am constantly practicing in my head I'm always thinking rhythms, drums.  When I was very young I used to practice a lot; not any special thing, but just practice playing.  Now I'm like a doctor.  When he's operating on you, he's practicing. When I go to my gigs, that's my practice.  I may play something that I never heard before or maybe that you never heard before.  It's all a challenge.  I deal with sounds.  I'm full of rhythm, man.  I feel it.  I think summer, winter, fall, spring, hot, cold, fast and slow –– colors.  But I don't analyze it.  I've been playing professionally over 50 years, and that's the way I do it.  I always surprise myself.  The worst surprise is when I can't get it to happen.  But it usually comes out.  I don't play for a long period, and then I'm like an animal, a lion or tiger locked in its cage, and when I get out I try to restrain myself.  I don't want to overplay.  I like the guys to trade, and I just keep it moving, and spread the rhythm, as Coltrane said. Keep it moving, keep it crisp.

ROY HAYNES
From the liner notes for Praise 
(1998) 




 

 

Some jazz musicians burst on the scene in a blaze of glory, instantly capturing the public's attention as though this, and this alone, was what they were put on earth to do.  Others can take much longer to receive the recognition they deserve, their genius eclipsed –– at least temporarily – by musicians who, while no less brilliant or inspiring in their way, are more representative of the prevailing fashion for this or that sound, this or that 'school' or method of interpretation.  The problem can be compounded to some extent if the undervalued musician in question happens to be a drummer.  In jazz the rhythmic element is often something the listener takes for granted, without fully appreciating that a drumkit can be every bit as expressive as a trumpet, a saxophone, a piano or a guitar in the right hands.  Drummers drive the sound.  Without them, jazz as we know it would not and could not exist.

 

In a career spanning more than six decades, Roy Haynes has proven time and time again what a gifted and irreplaceable musician he is and how he fully he deserves his fondly bestowed nickname 'Snap Crackle.'  Even a cursory glance at his resumé reads like a Who's Who of modern jazz, with names like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Sarah Vaughan appearing alongside those of the next generation of iconoclasts including John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, Andrew Hill, Chick Corea and Roy Hargrove.  With his idiosyncratic approach to melody, focusing on creating new cymbal patterns over a consistently crisp and driving snare, his playing has become the yardstick by which all other drummers –– jazz and rock alike – are frequently measured.  As his grandson and fellow drummer Marcus Gilmore explained it in a 2013 interview recorded for National Public Radio:  'What people don't realize, when they talk about people like Roy Haynes as one of the great jazz drummers, is that really he is one of the original drummers creating the language for everybodyBut people don't think about it like that; they think of him as a jazz great. But the thing is really the drum – the trap set –– is pretty new, maybe like 100 years. If you're playing that much drums in 1945, that means you're one of the pioneers of the instrument.'

 




  REFLECTION
PHINEAS NEWBORN JR [piano]; PAUL CHAMBERS [bass]
ROY HAYNES [drums]
Recorded 14 November 1958
From the New Jazz Records LP  
We Three 
 
 
 
Roy Owen Haynes was born on 13 March 1925 in Roxbury, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the Massachusetts city of Boston.  His parents had come to the United States from the Caribbean island of Barbados and Haynes and his elder brother grew up surrounded by people of other races and cultures.  'We had an Irish family on one side of our home,' he remembered in a 2008 interview he gave to jazz journalist Marc Myers, 'French-Canadians on the other and a synagogue in front of our house.  It was great growing up with all different kinds of kids.'  His earliest musical influence was 'Papa' Jo Jones, drummer for the Count Basie Band and someone he actually met – by telling the doorman at the venue he snuck into that he was his hero's son –– when the Basie orchestra passed through Boston in the late 1930s.  It was through his brother, however, that Haynes obtained his first pair of drumsticks which, he explained, had been lying '…around the house' for some time. 

 
Largely self-taught, Haynes was playing semi-professionally by his mid-teens and was famous enough in and around the Boston area to receive an offer to join the eighteen piece big band of pianist and arranger Luis Russell –– an offer made on the recommendation of a mutual friend because, at the time it was made, Russell had not yet heard him play.  One of his first gigs with the bandleader, whose organization he joined full-time in 1945, was at New York's legendary Savoy Ballroom.  'You learn a lot keeping time for a big band people are dancing to,' he told Myers, 'especially one that had to be on top of its game at the Savoy.  I found out after I got back to Boston that I had changed the sound of that band after playing with them for more than a year.  Luis didn’t tell me.  Musicians had told my brother.'  Being based in New York also allowed him to explore the emerging be-bop sound being explored at that time in Fifty-Second Street nightclubs like Minton's and Small's Paradise and to participate in some of the after-hours jam sessions that would prove crucial not only to its development but to the development of what, by the end of the 1940s, was being defined as 'modern jazz.'

 
By 1947 Haynes was a member of saxophonist Lester Young's band – a position he would relinquish in 1949 to work briefly with pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Miles Davis before joining the Charlie Parker Quintet.  He recorded with all these artists on several occasions and also played on recordings by saxophonists Wardell Gray and Stan Getz.  In 1953 he joined the band of vocalist Sarah Vaughan, touring with her for the next five years and appearing on many of her most outstanding 1950s EmArcy LPs including Images (1954), Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi (1955) and the breathtaking Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (1955).  In 1954, the Emarcy label also released Busman's Holiday, the drummer's first album as a leader featuring pianist Adrian Acia, saxophonists Sahib Shihab and Bjarne Nerem, trombonist Ake Persson and bassist Joe Benjamin.  This was followed later in the year by The Roy Haynes Sextet on the Vogue label, another 10 inch LP featuring the French pianist Henri Renaud and his guitarist countryman Jimmy Gourley.

 
The late 1950s saw Haynes consolidate his position as one of the most influential and in demand drummers in jazz, his 1959-1960 work as a member of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk's band leading to a two year stint with groundbreaking saxophonist Eric Dolphy which in turn saw him work again extensively with Stan Getz and then with improvisational saxophone giant John Coltrane between 1961 and 1965.  The 1960s also saw him contribute as a sideman to many of the most memorable jazz LPs of the decade, including The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961) by saxophonist/arranger Oliver Nelson, Domino (1962) by saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and Black Fire (1963) and Smokestack (1963) by underrated pianist/composer Andrew Hill.  Nor did his own work as a leader fall by the wayside, seeing him release four albums under his own name including 1962's Out For The Afternoon featuring the stellar playing of Roland Kirk, pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist Henry Grimes.

 
In 1968 Haynes began what was to become a long, fruitful but intermittent working relationship with Chick Corea, with the release of the LP Now He Sings, Now He Sobs – an album which also featured the solid bass playing of Czech musician Miroslav Vitous – in March of that year marking a watershed in the development of trio jazz and a major leap forward in the pianist's compositional technique.  This session also marked the first appearance on record of the flat ride cymbal created by the Paiste cymbal company, offering drummers a 'tighter, brighter sound' that seemed tailormade for Haynes's fluid and by now legendary snappy style of playing.

 
The final two years of the decade were busy ones for Haynes, seeing him tour extensively with Stan Getz and as a member of the working band of vibraphonist (and former Getz alumnus) Gary Burton.  The 1970s saw him release nine more albums as a leader and appear as a sideman on recordings by pianists Dave Brubeck and Tommy Flanagan, Jamaican born trumpeter Dizzy Reece and many other artists.  In 1983 he reunited with Chick Corea, appearing on three different albums and remaining a member of the pianist's working trio until 1987.  Two years later he performed on Question and Answer, an LP by Pat Metheny which marked the beginning of another important collaboration that was to endure well into the 1990s and eventually see the guitarist appear as a sideman on Haynes's 1996 LP Té Vou.  That year also saw Haynes win the Best Drummer category in the annual DownBeat Readers' Poll Awards and receive a prestigious Chevalier des Ordres des Artes et des Lettres decoration from French President Jacques Chirac.




SCRAPPLE FROM THE APPLE
STAN GETZ [tenor saxophone]; GARY BURTON [vibes]
STEVE SWALLOW [bass]; ROY HAYNES [drums]
Recorded live for BBC TV UK, 1966



 
Other awards were to follow as the new millennium saw Haynes formally recognized as the artistic giant he is in his native land, with his 2004 induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame followed by a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award presented to him by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (better known as the people who hand out Grammy Awards each year).  This was followed in September by the release of Roy-Alty, his first LP as a leader since the 2006 release of Whereas and the 3 CD/1 DVD career retrospective A Life in Time: The Roy Haynes Story 1946-2006.  Haynes, who turned ninety in March 2015, was still performing as recently as 2013 as a member of Fountain of Youth, the new band he formed in 2004.

 
Thankfully, the legacy of Roy Haynes will not die with him when he's eventually forced to leave us.  His son, trumpeter Graham Haynes, still plays and records regularly, as does his twenty-seven year old grandson a no less formidable drummer who has played on albums by trumpeter Clark Terry, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and, for a time, filled the drum chair in the Chick Corea Trio.  When asked to provide a reason for his grandfather's incredible longevity, Gilmore was quick to point out that it is his musical open-mindedness that has allowed Roy Haynes to remain at the forefront of jazz for more than sixty years.  'Another reason,' he added, 'is that it was just something he was born with, because in some ways, his playing hasn't changed that much.  It's evolved, but in some ways he was playing all that same bad shit in the 40s.  I don't know where he got it from.  To have him is a treasure.  A treasure to the family, but also as a national treasure, too, actually.'  While no one who has heard him play would argue with this, it is no exaggeration to say that Roy Haynes personifies jazz in many respects –– a trailblazer whose recorded works will remain the yardstick by which drummers will be measured for as long as human beings continue to compose, perform and record music together.  
 
 


ROY HAYNES
2005




 
 
 
To read the full 2008 ROY HAYNES interview conducted by jazz journalist MARC MYERS visit his website JazzWax.

 
 
 
 
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 2 October 2021 §     
 
 

Thursday 9 July 2015

Think About It 004: LENNY BRUCE


People should be taught what is, not what should beWe're all taught a what-should-be culture.  Which means, a lot of bullshit.  Emmis.  Because instead of being taught, This is what is –– that's a beautiful truth, what man always has been –– we're taught the fantasy, man.  But if we were taught This Is What Is, I think we'd be less screwed up 

Quoted in The Essential Lenny Bruce (1967)


Use the link below to visit THE OFFICIAL LENNY BRUCE WEBSITE where you can read more quotes from this great North American comedian and social philosopher:

 

http://www.lennybruceofficial.com

 

 

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Thursday 2 July 2015

Poor Cow (1967) by NELL DUNN


Virago Press UK edition, 1988


 

 

 

There's another side of life, where the husband and wife are very happy. My mate, Jackie, she's thirty something, they have it every night, they've got nothing at all.  They haven't got a home, nothing, they've got four kids, but they're so wrapped up in each other.  When I look at them I laugh, they have their ups and downs but they're so happy.  And they'll tell you themselves, they can still have sex and enjoy it, they don't have to dabble in what it's like with other people.  This is really what I want, a close intimate life and if I leave Tom –– I'm frightened.  I'm frightened of being on my own –– s'posin' I don't find anyone else and ninety-nine per cent of the men I've been with are married and with their wives anyway –– so I'd be the odd one out –– I can't live on me own and Auntie Emm, well she drives you mad, it's no good living with a woman otherwise it would be one room and National Assistance and Jonny in a day nursery.  Drive you up the wall and all she talks about is herself –– if I say I think I'm pregnant she lifts up her jumper and says, 'Well, look at me –– I think I am too' –– at her age, fifty-two.  I think the world of my Auntie Emm but not to live with.  I've got my Jonny and what I feel for my Jonny I could never put into words, but a kid, you want to share a kid, you can't live with a kid alone.



 

 

The Novel:  In 1963 the young English writer Nell Dunn published Up The Junction, a collection of interrelated short stories (some critics described them as sketches) which dealt candidly and unflinchingly with the lives of feisty working class women living in the South London suburb of Battersea.  The book was greeted as a revelation when it first appeared, presenting these rough talking, fiercely independent women exactly as they were with no effort made to sentimentalize, romanticize or sanitize what were their drab, funny, promiscuous and occasionally brutal lives.  The book became a bestseller and went on to win its twenty-seven year old author the 1964 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Literature.

 

Dunn followed Up The Junction with Poor Cow, her debut novel published in 1967.  Like its predecessor, Poor Cow was a startling and sometimes arresting piece of work, as blunt as it was compassionate in its depiction of the trials and tribulations of an ordinary working class girl whose dream of settling down into a 'respectable life' is continually thwarted by her upbringing, her environment and her unabashed love of sex.  

 

The story opens with twenty-one year old Joy walking home from hospital with her week-old baby, 'her maternity dress hitched up with her coat belt' because her husband Tom has not bothered to come to pick her up.  Joy wonders how she ended up with a baby –– a boy named Jonny –– and wonders what their future will be like given that Tom is a professional thief who could 'get done' by the police and carted off to prison at any moment.  But Joy is neither frightened nor depressed at the prospect of suddenly being deprived of her sole means of support.  A survivor and a realist, she sees no point in worrying about might happen until it actually happens and remains determined, in the meantime, to enjoy as much of her life as she can while she remains young enough to do so.

 

On Joy's twenty-second birthday Tom comes home and dumps a bag full of cash on their bed –– the proceeds from his latest robbery.  Suddenly they're rich, so they buy a Jaguar and rent a luxury flat in Ruislip where Joy spends her days pushing little Jonny round in his pram and watching her snooty middle-class neighbours go about their business.  Of course, this period of prosperity cannot and does not last.  Tom soon finds himself arrested, with their newfound wealth soon being gobbled up by lawyers' fees –– an expenditure that ultimately fails to deter the presiding judge from handing him a four year gaol sentence.  

 

Now homeless, Joy moves in with her half-mad Aunty Emm, only to find herself trapped in a social and psychological rut, missing sex and her husband (in that order) and spending most of her time daydreaming about meeting a rich older man who will love her little boy as much as he loves and fancies her.  But the man she eventually hooks up with is neither rich, old nor particularly clever.  His name is Dave and he is Tom's former partner in crime, another thief she is happy to share her life with if only to be free of her aunt and get the sex she needs on a regular basis to prevent her from becoming, in her words, 'very perverted.'

 

 

Pan Books UK edition, c 1975

 

 

Dave is, in many ways, the one true love of Joy's topsy-turvy life.  He promises to look after her and tries to do so to the best of his ability, giving her what she needs sexually and financially and even taking her and Jonny on what proves to be, for all three of them, an idyllic and memorable picnic in the country.  They promise never to abandon each other –– a promise broken when Dave, just like Tom before him, is arrested by the Flying Squad after stealing £100,000 worth of jewellery from the home of an elderly woman.  Because his offence is more serious than Tom's –– robbery with violence –– Dave receives a twelve year sentence for it, a sentence that will not see him become eligible for parole for at least a decade.  Although Joy doesn't think she will be able to stand being apart from him for twelve days let alone twelve years, stand it she does, moving back in with Aunty Emm and writing Dave heartfelt love letters every other day in which she promises to divorce Tom and wait, no matter how long he's inside, so they can be married the moment he is free again.  

 

In the meantime, needing an income of some kind and something to keep her busy, Joy takes a job as a barmaid at The White Horse, 'a big modern pub with a lot of well-to-do customers.'  Her youth and attractiveness soon make her the favourite of the pub's regular patrons, earning herself the nickname 'Sunshine' while her fellow barmaid Beryl advises her not to sleep with any of them unless she can be certain of 'getting something out of them' in return.  Despite her unshaken love for Dave, whom she continues to write to and visits in prison as regularly as she can, Joy finds herself becoming irresistibly attracted to a stocky bread delivery driver named Petal who sneaks into her flat each morning to bring her fresh rolls while she's still in bed.

 

After Petal it is only a matter of time before Joy finds herself sleeping with other men –– first a butcher, then a hairdresser in his sixties who gives her five quid each time she removes her knickers in front of him, then an 'art professor' with a wife and four children who prefers not to talk much afterwards.  While the sex is interesting, sometimes even satisfying, Joy is smart enough to realize that it is basically a hollow experience, as meaningless in the long run as she imagines it must be for a full-time (as opposed to a part-time) prostitute.  'You've got to be careful sometimes,' she tells herself after one of these encounters, 'it's as if I'm hanging on all the time –– just clinging on telling meself –– life's all right –– it's a great experience living –– you really are living and then I think, Poor Cow, who are you taking on?  Let's face it, it's just escaping from one misery to another.  Who really enjoys life?  Kids when you get down to it –– kids are the only ones who really get a kick out of being alive.'  Despite her feelings of unhappiness and disconnection, Joy continues to sleep with the men she has come to identify as 'her men' even as she continues to pine for the absent, still sorely missed Dave.  In her heart of hearts she recognizes that it is Dave she really wants –– a vow she repeats each time she writes to him, along with the promise that she will wait for him forever if waiting means they can truly be together some day like a 'normal' married couple.

 

But Dave's parole is still a long way off, so to make ends meet she follows Beryl's example and becomes a photographer's model, earning £2 a hour for posing nude for the exclusively male members of a local photography club.  This job and the not unwelcome male attention it gains her begin to change Joy, making her more aware of her beauty and the power of her sexuality.  'Her body developed into a highly sensitive machine; she noticed the colour of leaves and felt her bare thighs touching where she wore no stockings.  She noticed the faint dust on men's bare backs on building sites.  When stripped before the cameras she was a queen.'  Yet she remains unsatisfied, longing for Dave even as she dreams of meeting 'a man of position' who will give her the type of steady settled life she wants to start living as much for Jonny's sake as for her own.  

 

It is from Jonny, not from her incarcerated and increasingly depressed lover, that she gains the strength required to keep prostituting herself night after night to men she can barely tolerate the sight of.  'I try to forget there's anything to me –– I listen to his problems, his moans and groans then he gets undressed and I look at his body and smell the smell of his skin and I think suddenly what am I doing here with this horrible old bastard –– why aren't I at home with my little Jonny and his lovely limbs and hair and feet and sweet smell?  Here I am touching up this dirty old man for a couple of quid when my Jonny's at home with his cod-liver oil breath.'

 

 

Optimum Classics/Studio Canal DVD, 2008

 

 

Things go on this way until Tom, newly released from prison, arrives on her doorstep one morning and asks to see his son.  He also asks Joy, who is technically still his wife, to come and live with him in a flat he has found in Catford, promising to give up crime and 'to never lay a finger' on her if she agrees to the idea of her, himself and Jonny becoming a family again.  Believing she has nothing to lose by accepting this offer, Joy moves in with Tom, redecorating the flat to make it more homelike and, for a time, seriously considering his idea that they should have another child.  She convinces herself that things are all right, that she can stay with Tom and find some sort of contentment with him, but the reality of her situation and the drabness of her surroundings gradually combine to disabuse her of this notion.  Tom finds it hard to adjust to life on the 'outside' and Joy wishes that Dave had been there with her on the morning he showed up on the doorstep, ready to fling him out.  Nor can she stand to have Tom touch her now that the letters from Dave –– her only source of contact with him and her only consolation for being deprived of his body and his company –– have stopped arriving.  'I can't stand it anymore,' she admits to herself one day, 'when he tried to have it this morning I felt quite dizzy –– I screamed at him "Let me go –– let me go you dirty bastard."  I can't abear him to touch me –– it's the four walls, the kitchenette, each day the same, I think I'm going round the bend.'  Unfortunately, the situation deteriorates rather than improves, Joy's disaffection and frustration increasing to the point where she seriously contemplates seducing the local estate agent as a means of escaping what has become a bleak if not hopeless situation –– a plan she sets in motion by paying the agent a visit in his office one afternoon, little Jonny in tow, and openly flirting with him.  

 

This is, of course, too much for Tom, who accuses her of being a tart and hits her, regretting it almost as soon as he does.  Joy, however, refuses to forgive him and leaves their flat, advising Jonny, who is playing with a neighbour's child at the bottom of the stairs, that he should 'see yer dad if you want anything.'  Arriving home hours later, she finds Tom lying on the settee eating cake and no sign of Jonny anywhere.  Frantic at the thought that her son –– the one legitimately 'good' thing in her life –– might have been abducted, raped and murdered by some psychopath, she rushes out to search for him, unable to stop imagining the worst until she hears him call out 'Mama' and forces her way into a dilapidated building, only to find him sitting in the dark with a black cat nestled in his lap.  'And she thought then that all that really mattered was that the child should be all right and that they should be together.'  And they are together, come hell or high water, Jonny's presence in her life the only thing that gives it any sense of substance or meaning.

 

In her introduction to the 1988 Virago edition of Poor Cow, Dunn's friend and fellow novelist Margaret Drabble makes the point that her work 'has a freshness, a firsthand observation, that is very different from its slick commercial copies, from the standardised versions of soap opera and sitcom.'  Drabble goes on to suggest that this offers both Joy and the reader a way to believe in the 'myth of escape and liberation.'  It is Joy's sense of her own freedom, her unwillingness to be or even try to be anything apart from the naïve, thoroughly impractical woman she is, that makes her such an appealing figure and one that cannot be glibly dismissed as simply another 'fool' or 'tragic victim.'  Joy is not a victim.  She is self-aware and also fully cognizant of what her surroundings and her life have done to her and will continue to do to her, no matter if she chooses to become married and 'normal' or chooses to remain single and 'perverted.'  The love she feels for Jonny is genuine and even admirable, as is the love she feels for Dave despite what proves to be her self-defeating willingness to sleep with other men for both the money it can gain her and the physical relief and fleeting sense of comfort it may occasionally provide.  While her story is sad –– heartbreakingly so at times –– it is also a funny, gripping and all too common one in the most positive, non-pejorative sense of the word.  

 

Dunn's style, which alternates between first-person confessional and detached third-person reportage, is exactly the right one required to capture the subtle nuances of Joy's character, giving you direct access to her thoughts even as it places them in the wider context of what are, for the most part, the unpromising realities of her day-to-day existence.  You like and admire Joy, not because hers is a particularly clever or unique personality, but because she refuses to pretend on any level and remains, despite everything, a warm, human and very courageous woman trying to retain some measure of autonomy in what, strictly speaking, is and will remain –– for her at least –– very much a 'man's world.'

 

 

Bloomsbury Publishing first UK edition, 1996

 

 

Fortunately, Joy's story does not end with Poor Cow.  In July 1996 Dunn published My Silver Shoes, a sequel which sees Joy living on a council estate twenty years later in a house next door to Gladys, her elderly demented mother.  Like its predecessor, My Silver Shoes is an entertaining if sometimes confronting mixture of the comedic and grotesque which successfully dramatizes the problems of children caring for their elderly, mentally unstable parents while struggling to maintain lives of their own.  The book asks many important questions about morality and the issue of personal responsibility and what role, if any, these have to play in what has now become a familiar predicament for carers whether they be poor, rich or somewhere in between.   

 

 



NELL DUNN, c 1967

 

 

 

The Writer:  'I never, ever wanted a conventional life and big house,' Nell Dunn stated in a 1996 newspaper interview.  'I always wanted a lot of freedom.'  What makes this desire, hardly an unusual one, so remarkable in her case is that a conventional life and a big house were well within her grasp as the daughter of Sir Philip Gordon Dunn, the Canadian-born Second Baronet of Bathurst, one of whose ancestors had gained worldwide fame as 'the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'  Dunn's childhood was one of wealth and privilege and, like her elder sister Serena, might easily have led to her bagging herself a Rothschild or someone equally 'suitable' had her heart been set on doing so.  Instead, she married fellow writer Jeremy Sandford in 1957 and, two years later, moved with him from their Chelsea flat to the decidedly unfashionable suburb of Battersea in the South London borough of Wandsworth.

 

Dunn was born 'Nell Mary Dunn' in London on 9 June 1936, the second daughter of Baronet Dunn and his wife Lady Mary Sybil Saint Clair-Erskine.  She was educated at a convent which she left at the age of fourteen, no doubt expected to follow the same 'debutante-fiancée-society wife' path her sister chose to follow.  But the 1950s were a time of great social upheaval in Britain and Dunn, always a free spirit at heart who found in books a solace for what had often been a troubled childhood despite its ostensible luxury, never really felt comfortable with her wealth or the exalted social position which accompanied it.  Her marriage to Sandford –– a genuine eccentric who, in later life, became an outspoken advocate for gypsies and the homeless –– came as a welcome opportunity to permanently break away from her family and its, for her, smothering expectations.  

 

The couple's decision to move to Battersea would prove to be the right one for both of them from a creative point of view.  Working in the local sweet factory, where she wrapped liqueur chocolates for a paltry wage of two shillings and sevenpence an hour, allowed Dunn to meet and mingle with the women whose lives she would write about so tellingly in Up The Junction –– a book that began as a series of four short 'sketches' originally published in a London newspaper.  She and Sandford –– who would briefly find fame himself as the writer of the socially critical 1965 television play (and later film) Cathy Come Home –– remained in Battersea until they chose to separate in 1971.  (They divorced in 1979 after producing three sons together.)  By this time Dunn had published Talking to Women, a collection of interviews, and the critically acclaimed novel Poor Cow which she and director Ken Loach adapted into a popular 1967 film of the same name starring Carol White as Joy and Terence Stamp as Dave.  A film version of Up The Junction, not adapted by Dunn and directed by Peter Collinson, was released in 1968, while 1969 saw the publication of Freddy Gets Married, her only book for children.

 

Dunn's third novel, Tear His Head Off His Shoulders, appeared in 1974 and was followed two years later by I Want, her first work for the stage.  The 1980s saw her establish herself as one of England's sharpest and most successful dramatists, with her 1981 play Steaming –– about three women of different classes who meet at a Turkish bath where they are able to frankly discuss and compare their lives –– winning the Society of West End Theatre Award for 'Best New Comedy.'  Other plays followed –– including Variety Night (1982), The Little Heroine (1988) and Consequences (1988) –– as did the script for a television film Every Breath You Take (1987) and the novels Grandmothers (1991) and My Silver Shoes (1996).

 

 

NELL DUNN and her dog IRIS, 2011

 

 

In 2003 Dunn returned to the stage with Cancer Tales, a play inspired by the illness of her long-time lover Dan Oestreicher.  His 2009 death from lung cancer –– he asked to die at home, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse for her –– led to her becoming a patron of Dying In Dignity, a UK organization which campaigns to protect and promote the individual's right to choose the manner, place and time of their death.  Oestreicher's death, long expected and even planned for to a certain degree, did not go smoothly, with all five health professionals who visited him on the day he died failing to make his passing as easy or as dignified as it should have been for himself and his misinformed partner.  Dunn's anger at the way her lover was treated –– the morphine required to ease his suffering was unavailable because it was a Sunday and most chemist shops in the UK close on Sundays –– inspired her to write a new play titled Home Death which she declared soon afterwards would definitely be her last.  'It seems enough,' she told journalist shortly after the play's well-received 2011 premiere.  'There is no great drama about stopping.'

 

Nell Dunn, who turned seventy-nine in June 2015, still lives in London within walking distance of Richmond Park, the place where the ashes of Dan Oestreicher and their beloved dog Primrose are buried.  

 
 
 
Use the links below to read Is A Dignified Death At Home Too Much To Ask?, a 2011 article about NELL DUNN and her experiences as the partner, carer and enabler of DAN OESTREICHER and a 1996 article about her long friendship with fellow novelist MARGARET DRABBLE:
 
 
 
 

 
 


 
 
 
The film version of Poor Cow, directed by KEN LOACH and starring CAROL WHITE as Joy and TERENCE STAMP as Dave, was released in 1967.  It was re-released in a fully restored version for the home entertainment market by Optimum Classic/Studio Canal in 2007 and remains widely available as a Region 2 UK/Europe DVD and possibly on one or more digital streaming services. 

  
 

Many books by NELL DUNN –– including Up The Junction (1963), Poor Cow (1967), My Silver Shoes (1996) and the plays Steaming (1981) and Home Death (2011) –– are still in print and may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 15 March 2021