Backlisted - Corregidora by Gayl Jones

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Professor Sarah Churchwell introduces Andy and John to the phenomenal Corregidora by Gayl Jones, a book steeped in the blues and the American slavery legacy. Other books they've read are Rain on the Pavements by Roland Camberton and In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)13'00 - Rain on The Pavement by Roland Camberton19'31 In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas24'30 Corregidora by Gayl Jones* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. And now I'm well into scrambled eggs for breakfast every day. So pushing my cholesterol up through the roof. Tell me, what have you changed? More butter. Oh, it's the...

More butter. They're a vehicle for butter. I was always using butter, but now... They're a vehicle for butter. Yeah. They'll keep cooking once you take them off the stove. People serve you this granulated kind of egg, kind of like sand, which is not, it's just not scrambled eggs.

Scrambled eggs have just got to be. Simon Sharma says cook it in a saucepan. He says the great mistake everybody makes is cooking it in a frying pan. Oh, totally. I've never tried this. He says cook it in a saucepan. Nobody cooks scrambled eggs in a saucepan, frying pan, do they? But I cook it in a saucepan.

What do you have with them? Do you have salt and pepper, obviously? No. Wait, wait, wait. We're doing the Dylan Baker. Do you have red sauce, brown you have salt and pepper, obviously? Wait, wait, wait. We're doing the Dylan Baker. Do you have red sauce, brown sauce, or no sauce at all? What do you think I have? Red sauce, brown sauce, or no sauce at all with my scrambled eggs?

What do you think? Well, I hope you don't have ketchup. I think you're a brown sauce kind of a man. I hope you might have Tabasco because that really cheers a man up in the morning. I'd love to think you have ketchup. I do have ketchup. There's a fascinating insight into my personal hair. No, there's nothing wrong with ketchup. There's nothing wrong with it.

You call it catsup then. I don't call it. I was just saying catsup just to be a twat. I hope you didn't catch that. I'm trying to speak slowly and carefully this week because last week apparently some listeners couldn't hear me talking. Oh dear, oh dear. I think ketchup is

and also, can I say something? The point about ketchup is unjustly despised by a lot of people as being common, ridiculous. And Heinz, beyond any shadow of a doubt, delivers time and time again. I'm sorry it does. I mean, I've made my own, and the boys quite like it, but they will always say, yeah, it's quite good, Dad,

but it's not as good as Heinz. I used to like tomato ketchup so much when I was a child that Father Christmas would bring me the biggest industrial-sized vat of it that he could find every year. And I would have it sort of on everything. And the only reason I don't have it on everything now is because I know I'm an adult and I'm not allowed to. We could go for hours.

We could on this. We could go. Thanks for coming, Sarah. Yeah, exactly. I seem to be to troll. Shall we just stop now? We can talk about the spring in a minute. We're going to talk about the spring in a minute.

So we should just say at this point that because Corregidora is a book that deals with quite explicit themes to do with sexuality and abuse, that some of the stuff that we're going to be talking about in this episode is probably things, I don't know, you're probably quite forward thinking and you're child rearing, but if you do have children around, you might want to send them out to play in the sand pit for the next 45 minutes. So please carry on listening, but don't say

we didn't warn you. There is quite strong adult content in this episode. Yes, Sajid? I'm having a nice chat. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in Happy Spa, a blues club in a small Kentucky town. It's 1948 and a young, beautiful, distracted looking woman has just taken the stage and is about to sing.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today for her third time as a guest on Batlist is... Please tell me that's a record. Almost. Almost. Erica Wagner. Sarah Church, Andrew Myne, Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding

of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study in the University of London, and regular panellist on BBC's Question Time. Press the red button now. Take that, Erica Time. Press the red button now. Take that, Erica Wagner. Press the red button. Press the red button now to hear what we were hearing about behind the scenes of Question Time earlier.

And as well as working as a critic, prize judge, TV and radio pundit Sarah is also the author of books on Marilyn Monroe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and just out from Bloomsbury Publishing, this brief pamphlet called Behold America, A History of America First and the American Dream. Now, Sarah, I saw that when this book was commissioned, when you announced you were writing this book,

that it was supposed to be like, how long was it supposed to be? It was supposed to be about the length of the Great Gatsby. 45,000 words. About 45,000 words, and it's doubled that. So it's my little fat baby, and I love my little fat baby, and nobody can call my baby fat. It needed to be fed. So, no, it turned out, as I was working on this history

of the phrase America first, I discovered rather to my distress that I had undertaken without really thinking about it a history of the United States in the first half of the 20th century. And I kind of went, how did I get myself into this mess? But so it took a little bit more length to explain to people what the background was, what the context was, to make it all make sense. And did you start from a position of,

what I'm interested with this book is, did you start from a position of, what I'm interested with this book is, you started from a position of justifiable rage, right? With what's happening in America, what's happening in the world. Was the rage enough to carry you through or did you discover stuff you didn't know about and therefore it became far more of a process of discovery as you were writing? Both of those things are true. So the rage was absolutely propulsive. And I wrote the book very fast, much faster than I've ever written anything before. And I absolutely said that during the time. It turns out rage really does drive you. But also, I realized that although it felt like a labor of rage in that sense, it was also a labor of love. It is also a story about the America I'm sorry to say I still believe in. And the America

I still want to rediscover, that value system that I still think is there. And then it was also true, as you say, that it was a process of discovery. So I was researching as I wrote, and I kept throwing up things that surprised me. And I kept thinking, well, you know, I already knew a little bit about this. And if they're surprising me me I think they might surprise other people as well and that keeps you going I mean I've only I only read the first first uh sort of quarter but and it's it's a lot less rage-filled than I expected in a way but you're doing your usual thing of taking an idea this idea of America first and and figuring out tracing the genealogy all the way back to the beginning and why when the president of the United States tosses off a phrase, I use my word advisedly, like

America first, that's not so much a dog whistle. That's a full blown poster with a swastika on it. It absolutely is. And it's certainly a dog whistle at the very least. But exactly. For people who are aware of it, it's a blood and soil kind of a slogan. And there are plenty of people who are still aware of that. So I'm also trying to get them dead to rights on that.

Well, so when did you when did you hand when did you hand the manuscript in for this? How long how quick do they turn it around? Well, I only want to reveal this if the book gets good reviews, because if the book is badly reviewed, they'll go, well, obviously she wrote this in a couple of months because it's a piece of crap so i um i started writing it in june last year this time last year i had not started writing it and um i delivered it and i delivered at the end of november and bloomsbury was amazing and they turned it around incredibly fast with a wonderful editorial team. And yeah, the whole thing was done in less than 12 months. And I researched and wrote it in about five months.

I feel the shame that I feel. Well, you know. Well, but as I say, if I got it all wrong, everybody's going to go, well, that was obvious. Spend longer next time, Churchwell. We dwell on it only because I think there will be, in the book that you're here to discuss today, Corrigidora by Gail Jones, which was first published in 1975, an acquisition by a commissioning editor working at Random House

called Tony Morrison. There are, I guess, links with some of the themes, certainly the themes of racism and of what America stands for in that. And the civil rights struggle. And the civil rights struggle in that book. I just want to interject one other thing before we move on to the next thing, which is to say I did a quick straw poll yesterday on Twitter and this was retweeted several times.

So it probably got out to about 20,000 people altogether saying, who here has read Corregidora by Gail Jones? And in the space of 24 hours, two people came back to say they'd read it, okay? Which was my instinct. My instinct was that it was not well known, even allowing for, as you say, the fact that it was edited by Toni Morrison.

And what I want to say is finding that out, if anything, that makes me even more enthusiastic that we have the great good fortune to not have discovered this book, but to have the opportunity to talk about this book on the podcast. Because the thought that so many of you listening to this have the opportunity to discover this book and read this book, it absolutely blew me away. And it's totally what we're here for. And it was a great choice of yours, Sarah, because I hadn't read it, you hadn't read it.

I mean, I never heard it. Neither of us had heard of Gail Jones or Corregidora. And as you'll see, we have plenty to say. There is a lot to say about it. Now, I should say also, and I have no idea what, I don't speak Portuguese. It is a Portuguese name, Corregidora. Well, so I was trained Corregidora. So I think we should just say it the way we say it, all of us.

Okay, fine. Because I don't know that anybody knows. So it's an anglicized version of it. But I'm going to say Corregidora because that's what I'm used to saying. And we can all say it the way we're comfortable with it. Because it's anglicizing a Portuguese family name is the title of the story. Okay, we should just clarify. There's already been.

And some Portuguese person will come in and say, this is the correct way to say this. Look, I went on the online, as I do, pronunciation. And they said Corregidor. Yeah, they pronounced it soft G, but I'm not Portuguese. It might even be Corregidor, I don't know. Corregidor. I think in Spanish it would be. The Americanised version was always Corregidor.

All I'm saying is I don't want to second-guess the way I say it all the way through. So we'll just have a differentiation in pronunciation. It's a name. It's a name. It's a name. It's a Portuguese name. We've been here before with Tuve Janssen, haven't we? Yeah, Tuve rhymes with duvet, let's name it.

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Anyway, from sharp strides to mean streets. Andy, what have you been reading this week? Well, last time on the podcast, we talked about Alexander Barron's novel, The Low Life. We did. And we mentioned in passing other novels about London that had been recommended to us by podcast listeners. Can I just say, everybody who's been on Twitter this week,

we've had a great, a lot of fantastic recommendations. And we've discovered a whole new website, the London Books website, which has got novels set in London. One of the books that we'd been recommended, kind of in the Patrick Hamilton bracket Things like Of Love and Hunger by Julian McLaren Ross But we'd also been recommended a novel by Roland Camberton Called Rain on the Pavements

And I thought I was sufficiently enthused By our discussion of the low life That I thought, you know what, before I lose that enthusiasm Before we move on to the next thing I want to read Rain on the Pavement. So I've been reading that. It's terrific. It's a sort of Jewish coming-of-age novel in the East End, Hackney, London.

And it is really a lesser novel and more a series of short stories and pen portraits of a young lad growing up and from his early childhood through to adolescence and leaving home. It's plainly very autobiographical. Roland Camberton, real name Henry Cohen, only wrote two novels. The first was called Scamp. The second is this one, Rain on the Pavements. Never wrote anything of significance

again, partly as far as we can work out, thanks to Innocent Clare's sleuthing, because he fell in with a crowd of Soho habitués, including Julian McLaren Ross, and sort of boulevardiered the rest of his time away. I like making boulevardier a verb. That's fine, right? That's totally fine. I love it. And so if you are interested in novels about London or novels about the Jewish experience in Britain, this is absolutely terrific.

And certainly there are sections in here which, as Ian Sinclair says, you can see have strongly influenced what he would call his method, the idea that you would walk a street, you would walk an area, you would attempt to soak up, to the best of your ability, every shop, every person, every passerby, every house, every family, and then try and turn it into something lyrical. What I call writing and what other people call

psychogeography yeah but he but so i'm just going to read a little bit here um the hero is called david his best friend when he's a teenager when he's about 15 he's called stanley and they decided they're poets and what they do is they leave the east End and on Friday nights and Saturday nights they travel to Soho. And they sit in a Soho cafe called the Cafe Mirandella. When was it written? It's 19... I don't know. 51.

Okay. So it's like Scamp is 50, this is 51. So Soho in 51 is what I'm picturing. And the descriptions of Soho are beautiful. I was going to read a bit which is a description So Soho in 51 is what I'm picturing. And the descriptions of Soho are beautiful. I was going to read a bit which is a description of Soho, but then I thought we've done that before on the podcast with absolute beginners. So instead I'm going to read a bit about David and Stanley

and how they live as poets when they're 15 in Soho because it really made me smile. So here we go. David and Stanley made the Café Mirandella their headquarters and began to drop in, as they put it, whenever they were within three or four miles of Soho. So they travel, they specifically travel to a café in Soho where there's no one apart from them and one other old man.

And they kind of, they read one. So they came almost every Saturday night. So that though they lived in neighbouring districts, a long bus ride was necessary in order to bring about such a chance meeting that they might, quote, run into each other at Mirandella's. The stale Moribund Cafe was brought to life

by the entry of Stanley. The door opened and slammed to violently. Excited steps sounded over the wooden floorboards. Stanley flopped into the chair opposite David and stared deeply into vacancy. Chin on left hand, right leg sprawled out beyond the table. What's the matter, said David. Where have you been? Stanley said nothing.

He had a taste for the dramatic and prolonged the silence and the posture. He seemed all right, however. His eyes shone with news and sensation rather than catastrophe. Got the cigarettes, said David, preparing to savour the situation in its appropriate Turkish aroma. Stanley brought out the packet with his right hand, leaving his position undisturbed, and shook out a cigarette.

There were only four left. What on earth have he been up to? Still using only one hand, he lit himself a cigarette too and finally looked at David with drooping eyes. Listen, he said. He recited several stanzas. Now I leave you and I kiss you. This night is over.

I must wander slowly homeward by the river. I shall linger so in memory forever. David remained for some moments, as usual, with his ear cocked attentively towards Stanley. I like it, said David finally. I made it up just now, said Stanley significantly. You mean, yes. Stanley told David what had happened. He had been standing in the gallery queue for his customary Saturday afternoon visit to the theatre. A girl had been standing next to him. They had talked. They had sat next to each other in the gallery. Afterwards, they had had tea together. And after that, they had gone for a walk for hours and hours, up and down the embankment from Blackfriars to Chelsea.

He knew only her first name, Louise. She was French and on a visit to England. She was 15, just a year older than Stanley. Beneath Big Ben, as the clock struck 11, she had said she must go. Stanley had wanted that they should correspond and meet again, but she had said no. It was better their evening together should be unique, that they should know nothing further of each other,

in the past or in the future, that they should retain only a single memory of an evening when they were young. So they had kissed very quickly on Westminster Bridge and walked off in different directions as fast as they could without turning round. Westminster Bridge and walked off in different directions as fast as they could without turning round. That, said Stanley, was why he had failed to arrive at the cafe and that was the explanation of his poem. The encounter was placed in a special category. It was put at David's disposal as though he too had been present and they often referred to it when discussing girls like louise for instance one of them would say to illustrate a point yes for example like louise so that's uh that's rain

on the payments by robert campton that is a lovely little book so that is in print everybody you don't have to go uh scouting or scal for a copy. Rain on the pavements. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, sort of a classic. I just was reading it because I got to the point where I was so despairing of spring. And I've had Edward Thomas' In Pursuit of Spring next to my bed for about a year. So I picked it up when it was still cold,

when everything was not looking good. Two days ago. Yeah, not that long ago. And read it. And it's a classic. It is a road trip on bicycle made by Edward Thomas from London, the London suburbs, Easter 1913. Leaves London and ends up going all the way down

across the Quantucks and the Expo and down onto the Somerset Coast. It's an important book because at this point he's 35, known as a literary critic, hasn't published much poetry. You cannot read this book without the shadow of the First World War hanging over it. Thomas obviously famously killed in 1917. But between 1913 when he writes this book and this is an explosion of creativity it's a great journey book i mean if you like traveling by bicycle if you want to know what

what the state of rural england and suburban england that that's sort of more almost why i read it because i kind of intrigued by his riding through the sort of streets of South London. It's exquisitely done. He writes beautifully, obviously, about landscape, about weather. He's steeped in John Clare, in Hardy, in the literature of the countryside. He's known as a country writer. But you can begin to feel a kind of a darkness and a strangeness creeping into the narrative,

which prefigures the poetry that is to sort of explode over the next couple of years. The book is inevitably published by the wonderful Bittle Toller, who bring these books to public attention. They have done an amazingly beautiful thing. They have put in Edward Thomas's own photographs in the book, which he had a sort of little camera that he had. And it is sort of, it is prelapsarian, but it's also, there's weird, you know,

the storm clouds in the culture that it feels doomed, the journey of hazards of doom. Anyway, here we go. Inside a bird shop, linets at half a crown were rushing ceaselessly against the bars of six-inch cages, their bosoms ruffled and bloody as if from the strife, themselves like wild hearts beating in breasts too narrow. House-malted goldfinches, price five shillings and sixpence,

were making sounds which I should have recognised as the twittering of goldfinches had I heard them among thistles on the down tops. Little, bright foreign birds that had been hardly more at home here than there looking more contented. A goldfish six inches long squirmed about a globe with a diameter of six inches in the most complete exile imaginable. The birds at least breathed air not parted entirely from the southwest wind which was now soaking the street, but the fish was in a living grave. The place was perhaps more cheerless to look at than to live in, but a short time three more persons took shelter by it, and after glancing at the birds stood looking out at the rain, at the dull street,

the tobacconists, news agents and confectioners shops alone being unshuttered. Presently one of the three shelters entered the bird shop, which I had supposed shut. The proprietor came out for a chaffinch, and in a minute or two the customer left with an uncomfortable air and something fluttering in a paper bag, such as would hold a penneth of sweets. He mounted a bicycle and I after him, for the rain had forgotten also. Not far up the road, he was apparently unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer. He got down and with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among the lilacs of a garden saying, chink, the deliverer was up and away again. Yeah, just sort of book is full of these strange

little odd moments. I mean, who knew that you could buy chap inches and put them in paper bags. That idea of the gentleman's bicycle tour and that really reminds me of, I think it was a play for today or it's a film in the early seventies by Alan Bennett called A Day Out. Have you ever seen that?

Directed by Stephen Frears. It's one of the first things that Stephen Frears directed himself. And it's exactly that. It's a gentleman's bicycle club take a tour round the, I'm going to say the Yorkshire countryside in the summer of 1913. It's fascinating that, isn't it? It's very subtly done. There's no heavy-handed moment of saying,

and then this would all be swept away, and yet you feel underpinning it all is the idea that this is the end. Sort of blood and kind of blood sacrifice on the kind of horizon. I mean, if you like books about the English countryside, it's an absolute classic. It's main event time, isn't it? All right. Drum rolls.

Drum rolls. Now it's commercials. We've already shown our hand. We hadn't heard of this book. John and I were both blown away by it. Personally, I think this is one of the great discoveries of doing Backlisted for me. You know, a lot of the time we'll do a book where you think I've sort of heard of the book or I might have heard of the author or this one. Absolutely no trace. I hold

my hand up and no trace of it. Where did you first come across Gail Jones or this novel? Well, both at the same time. I came across this novel and Gail Jones at the same time as you did. And I'm actually really happy to say, in defense of education, as a now a university professor, I encountered this book in graduate school. And I was taking a course in African American literature, and I was in my mid-20s, and I had never heard of her or encountered this novel. And a very wonderful professor called Wanima Lubiano, who is still teaching and is still a genius. And she put this book on the reading list and we were all blown away as well. And I've been teaching it ever since. That was probably 1994. I moved to England in 1999 and I taught it for a good 15 years here. So some of your listeners might be my former students and they'll know it

because of that. But so, you know, it is sometimes it is as simple as that. That's so we hear a lot about how the canon is bad and how the canon is exclusionary and how the canon is. But actually, part of what the canon can do is in a very simple level is for a teacher to say, this is a book I'm passionate about. And I want to share this with 20 young people and see if they're passionate about it, too. And I've been doing that with this book forever. And I realized when John and I were talking a little while ago that I was remiss in not having brought this book to your attention sooner, frankly.

I did feel sort of like, what was I thinking? I've been teaching this book forever. And it is an absolutely extraordinary novel. And as John said, it's a novel that Toni Morrison was very actively involved in bringing to light. So there's an incredibly rich and complex history. She famously said that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after Corregidora. And, you know, and I feel very strongly and I think Toni Morrison is a very great writer and I'm not taking anything away from her when I say this.

But when you read Craig Adora, you see the ghosts of Beloved, if you know Beloved well. I utterly agree with you. I totally agree with you. She's standing on the shoulder of a giant. We're not saying Toni Morrison ripped Riz Ripon off. Not at all. She's standing on the shoulder of a giant, but nobody gives credit to the giant.

I don't think I've read a first novel as accomplished as this. It's extraordinary. I mean, you know, Dubliners maybe, you know, which isn't really a novel, but I mean, it comes out of nowhere. For me, it came out of nowhere. And I have read various books about, that have described themselves as, I mean, we should say that the book is a first person narrative. Let's do the blurb.

Let's do the blurb. Okay, so the blurb. I'm going to judge the blurb. Okay, so that's good. That's why we do it. It's a difficult book to blurb. There isn't a blurb on this one, really. So the Beacon Press edition is all quotes.

Yeah. And they're great quotes. They're amazing quotes. We'll read some of them in a minute. But here we've got Nicky brilliantly sourced a Camden Press edition from 30 years ago this is the only time

this book's ever been published which I think was the last time it was in print in the UK so it's from 1975 we should say if we haven't said that yeah and this edition comes from the late 80s

it was published by the Camden Press which was based in Camden Passage which is about five minutes walk from where we are now don't look for it it's not there anymore. And so this is what it says on the back of this edition, Corregidora by Gail Jones. Blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora,

the 19th century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother. Charged with, quote, making generations to bear witness to the abuse embodied in the family name, Ursa Corregidora finds herself unable to keep alive this legacy when she is made sterile in a violent fight with her husband. It's not a comedy. Haunted by the ghosts of a Brazilian plantation,

pained by a present of lovelessness and despair, Ursa slowly and firmly strikes her own terms with womanhood. That's a pretty fair description. It's a difficult novel to encapsulate, and I'll give that a very strong A-. I think that's pretty good. So one of the things that this book is about, there's all sorts of things, we're going to cover a lot of ground, but one of the things that this book is about, there's all sorts of things, we're going to cover a lot of ground,

but one of the things that this book is about is the blues. Yeah. And we have no audio of Gayle Jones, but we do have, I chose a couple of bits of audio that we could dot in because they felt appropriate. Have we got Nina Simone singing Trouble in Mind? We have got some Nina coming up. There's a little bit near the end of the book here

where where is in a bar in 1969 it's the bar where she works and she's in her late 40s she's late 40s and a guy comes into the bar and he says he's just got a first job

singing over at the Drake Hotel he's an older guy and he says he's just got a first job singing over at the Drake Hotel. He's an older guy. he says, I'm 58 years old. You know, I don't like that word discovery. Ray Charles is a genius. You know that? But let me tell you something and I don't have to spell it out for you because you know what I'm talking about. Sinatra was the first one to call Ray Charles a genius. He spoke of the genius

of Ray Charles and after that everybody called him a genius. They didn't call him a genius before that though. He was a genius. He spoke of the genius of Ray Charles. And after that, everybody called him a genius. They didn't call him a genius before that, though. He was a genius, but they didn't call him that. You know, I'm trying to tell you, if a white man hadn't told them, they wouldn't have seen it. And then he goes on to say, you know, the only time I felt good was when I was in the Apollo Theater. That was a long time ago because I hadn't been back to New York in a long time. But the lady was singing, Billie Holiday. She sang for two solid hours

and then when she finished, there was a full minute of silence, just silence. And then there was applauding and crying and she came out and was nervous for a full 32 seconds. And then she sang. And you saw what they'd done to her, don't you? I said, yes. So the novel is about the blues, but there's also, it seems to me,

in her writing, in who she is, in who she's trying to give voice to, the novel is the blues, right? In the rhythms of it and what it's trying to express, right? Absolutely. So I have, as I said, I've taught this novel for many years now, and I teach it as a blues narrative. And that's the kind of metaphor that people like to throw around. And they say, oh, this book is very bluesy, or it's very jazzy. And this is a book that stands up to that. It is structured around the blues. It's even structured around women's blues, not even men's blues. blues, not even men's blues. So whereas men's blues is I got to hit the road. I, you know, I got to hit a freight train because I've got the blues in this town and this woman wants to hold me down and she's the old ball and chain. This is women's blues, which is I'm stuck here. I got

trouble in mind. I need to get my rocking chair. And one of the things that Gail Jones does is she, is she layers lines from classic blues songs all the way through Ursa's narrative because Ursa, she layers lines from classic blues songs all the way through Ursa's narrative. Because Ursa, what we haven't said yet, is that the novel takes place over 20 years, give or take, about 1948 to 1969. And it is all in Ursa's head. It's her memory. It's her reconstruction.

Some of it's in real time, but you're not really sure. It might be memory. It might be reconstruction. But she's a blues singer. So her dreams, but her love of the blues inflects how she sees the world and it's the language that she understands the world through. And so the words and the lines of great blues songs make their way into the novel,

which is an obvious way in which the blues structure the novel. But also Gail Jones chooses in some of those memory and dream sequences, you're not sure, is it memory? Probably a dream. But this kind of unconscious internal monologue where she is reliving a trauma, and the trauma, as you said at the beginning, is that her husband threw her down,

who she loves very much, and she really never gets over the loss of their relationship, that he threw her down the stairs and she was rendered sterile after that they she had had a forced hysterectomy and she's trying to come to terms with this family legacy that says you have to have make generations you have to bear children to bear witness and i should say her name is ursa and that's a very very specifically chosen name

ursa of course the word that means bear. She is there to bear witness, to bear generations. And the novel is about what's the difference between bearing witness as an artist, as a singer, as a speaker, and bearing witnesses as a woman forced to bear children. And all of the pressure of the book hinges on this idea of bearing, bearing the pressure, bearing the burden, bearing all of that stuff. So she sets up these amazingly metaphorical patterns that detonate through the book. And then these blue structures that you're also registering. So there's, if I may, there's a remarkable moment about midway through the book where she is remembering a, well, remembering well remembering imagining she might be doing that

esprit de scalia thing in her head of imagining a fight with her husband that she wishes she had had yeah it's never clear that those those passages would mark whether they memories or dreams you were saying that nikki weren't you you were saying that you you you've been reading the book i think i found it quite hard to be certain who I was listening to or what was happening at various points. Yeah, sometimes I was reading it thinking, did that just happen? I had to kind of rewind a bit. Absolutely.

And I wasn't really sure. But I think it's deliberately destabilising, right? That's what she's trying to do is to say this is part of what trauma feels like. I think we have to say there is not one syllable in this book that hasn't been thought through, worked over. This is as artfully constructed and not a novel as I've ever read. It's the most patterned book I am aware of. But again, the patterns, as I said earlier, they detonate, right? The patterns, they create this kind of propulsive motion and suddenly all of this meaning starts to just charge through, and it all just explodes.

And genuinely, I mean, music is used as a crappy metaphor quite often, but this is the real thing. Exactly. And so this is a long passage, so I'll just read a bit of it, and then we'll decide where to stop. There are italic passages that are clearly not real time. They're either memory imagined, reconstructed, some version thereof. But this is some kind of internal dialogue that Ursa is playing out between her and the husband,

who she can't get over. And it's at some point as she's trying to work through the trauma of having lost her ability to have children with him. And it's clearly meant to be his voice that begins this dialogue. So he says, Ursa, have you lost the blues? Nah, the blues is something you can't lose. Give me a feel, just a little feel. You had your feel. And we should say it's a very sexual book. Unbelievable.

It's a very explicitly sexual book. So when he says, give me a feel, just a little feel, that becomes clear in this context is very, very sexual. Give me a feel, just a little feel. You had your feel. Are you lonely? Yes. Do you still fight the night? Yes. Lonely blues. Don't you care if you see me again? Nah, I don't care. Don't you want your original man? And this is the last time I'll stop and then I'll let the rhythm build. But it's important here to say also for people who haven't encountered it yet, this notion of Corregidora, the slave owner, he's the original man as well.

And one of the great political fights in the novel is about the fact that she wouldn't take Mutt's name even in 1948. And he says, are you mine or theirs? And part of the novel is about a woman saying, I'm neither one of yours. It's about escaping patriarchy, right? I'm neither one. So when he says, don't you want your original man, there's a real valence by this point in the novel that it means.

Because, I mean, you've got to restate that Corregidora fathered, I mean, the incest with the, so the whole. And he whored out both her grandmother and her great-grandmother. So he not only fathered them, but he whored them out for money and pimped them out. And so did his wife. And created this tension because the generations are lighter skinned. Therefore, they're rejected by their own community as well. So one of the things that the novel exposes, and this is, again, something I talk about when I teach the novel, is that institutional American slavery.

And this is actually about South American slavery, but slavery in the Americas, I should say. This is actually about South American slavery, but slavery in the Americas, I should say. The way in which institutionalized slavery incentivized rape is something that our history does not take seriously. And yet, if people are capital, then raping women gives you more capital. That's what Toni Morrison meant when she said you can't, you'll not be able to write a novel about a black woman in the same way. And this is, to me, the genius, the tension in the novel, which drives the novel forward, is the tension between how do you bear witness, but how do you escape?

How do you escape it? And that's exactly what the whole novel is about. Because as Mutt keeps telling her, as her memories of Mutt keep telling her, that's a slave breeder's way of thinking. You've got keep telling her, that's a slave breeder's way of thinking. You've got to bear children. That's a slave breeder's way of thinking. So how does she, it's a catch-22. How does she escape it? She's got to bear witness to the trauma that happened to her ancestors, but she also has

to not be turned into a baby farm. And how does she escape that? And it's through the blues. And that's why this becomes so important. So when he says, don't you want your original man by this point about halfway through the novel that's already built up a lot of tension where it's not clear whether the original man is corregidora her great-grandfather who she never met or mutt her husband or what is the original man and it's got all that bluesy inflection of

original man um so he says he's my man. Yeah, exactly. And what I, so now, cause I promised not to intercede again. I'm now suddenly becoming aware that I must be a terrible teacher because I interrupt this stuff all the time. So what I want you to hear is how, how often now in the dialogue that follows, all she can do is say no. And I think that's part of the blues dialogue in the way that this plays out too. So he asks the question and then she says no, and then it plays out. Okay. So he says, don't you want your original man? Nah, I, I know what he did to your voice, what you did.

Still, they can't take it away from you, but ain't nothing better for the blues than a good don't mutt. Come over here, honey. Nah, I need somebody. Nah, I said, I need somebody. Nah. I said I need somebody. Nah. I won't treat you bad. Nah. I won't make you sad. Nah. Come over here, honey, and visit with me a little. Nah. Come over here, baby, and visit with me a little. Nah. You got to come back to your original man. Nah. What you did. Just give me a little feel. You lonely, ain't you? I've been

there already. Then you know what I need. Put me in the alley, Urs. Something wrong with me down there. I still want to get in your alley, baby. No, I'm not. What you looking for anyway, woman? What we stopped being to each other. I never knew what we was. Something you gave me once but stopped giving me. I want to fuck you. That ain't what I mean. I still want to fuck you. What you stopped giving me, I want to fuck you. That ain't what I mean. I still want to fuck you. What you stopped giving me, I still want to fuck you. Nah. What he stopped giving you too? Yes. What you need? Yes. What you wanted from me? Yes. What you want from anybody? Nah. I still want to fuck you. Yes. Fuck me. Let me get behind you. Nah,

sit on my lap then. Nah, I don't want it that way then. Fuck you. Yeah. Right. And the thing I want to, there are two things I want to bring out of that, that passage, which I think is extraordinary. One is that it is a call and response blues structure, which is the blues structure is, you know, I want to go down to the river. I feel so bad. I want to go down the river. I feel so sad. I want to go down to the river and take my rocking chair and rock my blues away. So the way they describe it in musical terms is, you know, A with a variation and then B. And that's what she's doing here. I won't treat you bad. I won't make you sad.

The very simple rhythms and rhymes that are coming through this. But for her to tell a story about sexual power and sexual politics and to tell the truth about it, which is that it's partly about withholding. And without you in any sense becoming annoyed. I mean, the dialogue in this book is as good, again, as any I've ever, I mean, you know, you'd think with all that patterning that it would start to become a little annoying or, you know, sort of affected. But it's, it's, it, you have, you, I realized it's a short book, it shouldn't take long to read. But actually, you kind of have to read it in that rhythmic way.

You can't just skip forwards and sort of get on with the narrative because then everything is in poetry everything is everything is in that language i would like to say my observation about this book which i haven't seen um someone talk about sarah but you may have a view on this so i read this and i i'd seen that it had been edited by Toni Morrison, and as soon as you know that, there's a certain literary... I love Toni Morrison, but there's a certain kind of literary fiction I think I understand what it was going to be, right? And then I looked at her biography, and we'll talk a bit about her biography. She was born in 1949.

So when she publishes this novel... She was 26. She's 26. And as we understand it, she was writing it from late teenage into early 20s, that she had been working on this and Eva's Man, the book that follows it, and her short stories... And some poetry.

..in this kind of outpouring of precocious brilliance. She was top A student. So she is... She was a postgraduate student when she brought this to us. What I think about this is that it's a coming together of... And what I loved about it, right, is it's almost... It's the blues, but it's the electric blues. It's a young person's blues right

it's it's a young someone who doesn't know what they're doing or doesn't know how not to do it and is too brave is too bold and so just goes for it the the ambition of attempting to do what you were just talking about yoking the blues the blues with the historical nature of female black identity in America. That's a crazy project. But also, not somebody young, but somebody who was growing up in America, was a late teenager in the late 60s and early 70s. So this is like a really angry book. Seriously angry book.

It's Watts, it's Black Power. It's coming out of a very specific historical moment by a young person who is channeling this thing that they don't, so fascinating about it, over which they have control, but at the same time is the product of intuition. I think there's another really important context to put in there, which I think now too many people forget, which is the degree to which the black power movement of the 60s, at least by the late

60s, was explicitly misogynistic. So what Gail Jones does in 1975 is even more extraordinary to say within, you know, less than 10 years after Martin Luther King's assassination, less than 10 years after Malcolm X's assassination, to say there is a story here about black women that has been and black women's relationship to power through sexuality that has been completely overlooked. And this is her answer to the idea that rape is an insurrectionary act, and it is angry as hell. It is, and the great line that echoes through the book, everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning. And this book is an attempt to say that better. It comes out of oral tradition.

It comes out, she said, the story of Corregidora comes out of listening to her parents' conversations. In Kentucky, in segregated Kentucky in the 40s. So it comes out of the oral tradition. When she talks about this book, she actually later on in her career, she slightly disparaged. She feels that the black male characters were all too negative.

When she writes it, she said, I didn't do much thinking about them. I just wrote them down. And you think, for a 26-year-old, I mean, precocious doesn't come into it. She said, there's this report of her saying that when she was at school, she was 13 or something, and she had this precocious talent. And a teacher said to her, well, what kind of writers do you want to write like? And she said, I want to write like Henry James said i want to write like henry james yeah i know and yet you understand what

she wrote a james story in paris about a paris emigre when she took you know she she i mean she read she fluent in spanish so she became you know she i mean proper a student she did took a course in chaucer because she was really interested in the orality of Chaucer, you know, of tales and unreliable narratives. This is a book that's profoundly interested in what words can do, which is why I think that people who love language and love patterns and literature respond to this book. And the musicality of it isn't just the structure of it, but it's understanding the way you can riff on words, the way you can riff on a melody, or you can riff on a tune. Although we've disputed how to pronounce Corregidora, not really disputed, but we haven't actually talked about what it means.

And not as a Portuguese speaker, and I'm sure you've got listeners who will correct us, but I use that word advisedly because Corregidora does share the Latin root with correct, and it does come from correction, corrector. She riffs on the idea of correction, of rules, of magistrates, of what it means to be able to liberate yourself from the rules all the way through this.

So although we don't know how to say Corregidora, the concept of it structures the whole book. But also the idea that there is, is there or isn't there a kind of sisterhood within the book? It seems to me that, you know. Well, there's a sisterhood that's limited by homophobia, which is something we should talk about. Yeah.

Because it is a novel of its time. And I'm not saying that as an excuse, but it is very much of its time. And we're saying that she's ahead of her time in many many ways but there are a couple of ways in which she's quite clearly not ahead of her time and uh at least as I read the novel you might disagree with me but um there is a very strong anti-lesbian attitude that the character has now we might we might conclude that the novel is criticizing Ursa for her limitations. So after her trauma with Mutt, she's taken in by a couple of carers, and she kind of ricochets back and forth between a man named Tadpole,

who she eventually marries, and a woman called Kat. Kat is bisexual. But she don't like it. And she don't like it at all. She gets evil. She says, I about got evil when I found that out. But again, it's important to remember that, as you already said, the bulk of the novel takes place in 1948. And there is the amazing scene where she meets the girl again when they're grown up. I mean, one of the things that is so glorious about the book is there it's five sections of very different lengths but it has a

kind of a and at the fight the end section the language the early language is so it's so dense and clotted and and it's half dreamed and then by the time we get to the 60s, she's a confident woman. She's living on her own. And she sees the girl who she's had. Basically, the girl sneaks into bed with her and feels her breasts. And she's like a 15-year-old girl. And she throws her out of the bed. She says they're punching her to the floor.

She's 26. And she punches her to the floor. And the thing is that I love that they have this sort of exchange and then they don't talk to each other again. And the subtlety of that meeting again and the way that it's written, it's a character. So you feel that by the end of the book, she's less judgmental about that behavior

because she's learned a lot more as a character. I would say, Sarah, I was thinking about when you said that, you know, it had not occurred to me that that was authorial homophobia no it's an open question yeah for me i i feel there is stuff that we perhaps ought to talk about that seemed to me that the damage that the character has sustained absolutely by that point in the book already it's gone right and by extension the damage that has been handed down from generation to generation, it's not a specific kind of homophobic mistrust. It's a blanket mistrust.

Well, you can even make the case that in 1975, for her to bring in the question of black gay desire among women is already a radical choice. Yeah, okay. And to not be, you know be completely punitive about it. One of the debates that the book enters into very actively, which was a very active debate among feminists in the 1970s, was the Freudian idea that vaginal orgasms were somehow superior

to clitoral orgasms. And that that got reactivated in the 70s as a kind of backlash to feminism. And she's very actively engaging in that and making it very clear that she thinks clitoral orgasms are good and that's one of the things that i think is very feminist about this she's interested in pleasure it's the question of where do women get pleasure and what's the line between pleasure and pain and something she comes back to very explicitly all the way through it so a bit of biographical stuff i mean one of the things that is that a lot of

people who write about this book say who know and knew Gayle Jones is that they find it almost impossible, you know. Because they think she was a virgin. She was so virginal and scholarly. That's what I mean. That is kind of what I was talking about. And it's kind of the thing, how does she know

all this stuff about sexuality? Is it imagination? Is it coming out of her family history? And that sense of her sublimating everything into art, sublimating everything into it, in the way that a blues singer turns pain into. I've got a quote. Like a crucible.

Her brain was like a crucible. This is an interview that took place in 1978. She was speaking to somebody called Claudia Tate. And I think her description of herself here is... I mean, you tell me what you think. She says, I think of myself principally as a storyteller. Most of the fictions that I write that seem to come across, that seem to work,

have been those in which I'm concerned with the storyteller. Not only the author as storyteller, but the characters as storyteller, but the characters as storytellers, those who are very conscious of speaking either to a particular person or to a particular people. I think there's also that sense of the hearer as well as the teller in terms of my organising and selecting events and situations. At the time I was writing the novels, I was particularly interested and continue to be interested in oral traditions of storytelling, Afro-American and others, where there is always that consciousness and importance of the hearer, even in the interior monologue where the storyteller becomes the hearer. That consciousness or self-consciousness is important in terms of the selection of significant events.

It's in other words, it's in keeping with the blues, it's performance. Yeah, absolutely. It's all performance. Right? It's a performed... Can I just interject very quickly? Because you said somebody called Claudia Tate, and I feel the need to do a tribute shout-out. Claudia Tate was a professor of mine at Princeton who was part of the generation that introduced me to Gail Jones.

She wasn't the particular teacher who did, but she was part of that generation who did. And she died prematurely. So I would like to just do a hat tip to Claudia Tate, who was one of the generation of black women who brought these books to people like us. Thank God you were here to put me straight. No, I didn't. You know I didn't mean that in a fair direction at all. No, no. Major, I feel major elephant in the room here. Here is a, I would say, stone-cold classic of 20th century literature. It ought to be read and known alongside The Colour Purple and Beloved. With all due respect to The Colour Purple, it's in a different fucking class. Sorry, I'm not allowed to swear, am I?

Let me do that again. I totally agree. Sarah, I could not agree more. But what happened? This is a book that comes with encomiums from John Updike, from Maya Angelou. James Baldwin. James Baldwin says,

Corregidor is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred and is occurring in the souls of black men and women. and painful revelation of what has occurred and is occurring in the souls of black men and women. Daryl Pinckney, this is an important novel that is not in print in the UK and nobody knows who Gayle Jones is. What happened?

Maybe we should say a little bit about the biography. Well, okay, so Gayle Jones, she's born, as we said, in 1949 and she excelled at English. She was part of a graduate program at Creative Rising at Brown University. Can I interject and just say before then that her mother insisted that she not go to the black school in Lexington, Kentucky, that she went to the white school.

So she was one of the earlier. And Elizabeth Hardwick, writer and wife of Robert Lowell, was a pupil, and she was an early mentor of Gail Jones. I'm massively condensing what happens here. Yeah, it's a very dramatic life. Yeah, and if you want to read about this, you can do so online. But basically what happens to her is she has a tremendously successful

mid to late 70s when she is discovered by – In her 20s. In her late 20s when she is discovered by... In her 20s. Late 20s when she is discovered by Toni Morrison. Who was an editor and not a writer at that point, we should say. So when the novel is published, as you say, John, it garners a lot of praise. And then art predicting life. She falls in with a guy called bob higgins and bob higgins turns out to not be great for her life and um she would disagree but she would do it and she's still

live if she's listening we love your work and we trust why we're staying off this. But suffice to say, Bob Higgins dies under very unhappy circumstances in the late 1990s. She has just emerged at that point after 20 years' silence with a novel called The Healing, which gets on the National Book Award shortlist. So she's poised to make this big return with a novel called The Shortlist. She has another novel out called Mosquito. We should say the first two novels we've been talking about are short

these later novels are much longer and then these terrible tragedies happen in her private life that means she becomes a she's been a recluse for 20 years and she may well be writing she may well be

she won't give interviews. She was publicity shy even in the 70s. She preferred not to talk about her work, read from her work. So we don't know. And maybe there's one other detail worth adding there, which is that her relationship with Toni Morrison, her professional relationship with Toni Morrison, fell apart over this personal relationship with her husband.

So Toni Morrison exited that professional relationship when the husband became, from Toni Morrison's point of view, controlling. But one of the running themes in the novel is that after Ursa has her traumatic experience and has this forced hysterectomy and she can't have children anymore, which has been so central to her identity, people say to her that she was always a beautiful blues singer, but they say that now there's a strain to her identity, people say to her that she was always a beautiful blue singer, but they say that now there's a strain to her voice

and a deepness to her voice and an edge to her voice that didn't used to be there. And in the beginning, the novel begins, as we've said, with that point of trauma. In the beginning, she doesn't like that, but by the end, she's come to terms with that and she recognizes that it's deepened her art and it's

a big draw. And she's relaxed. I don't mean about the last the last thing that the first person narrative she's suddenly she's gained confidence and and relaxed so there look there are two things to say i mean i'm sure that we cannot go on for i could do this i have i have taught this novel at three hours and more so we could clearly go on at length. There are two things I would bring up before we finish. I'm going to go in reverse order. One is the ending, and it's one of the most extraordinary endings of any novel anywhere that I'm aware of. Possibly the greatest last page in any novel. I mean, it's an absolute, we won't say more than that, but let's just put that out there. So we will not give anything away. All we will say is that it is absolutely extraordinary ending. In literary studies, we like to talk about something called an open ending versus a closed ending, which is to say Dickens likes a closed ending where everybody knows where they are and everybody knows what the meaning is and everybody knows what the value is and everybody knows where everybody stands.

is not clear where we are, but it's extraordinary. So I'll just say that. And then the other thing that I think is that I that I feel with all of the ways in which we've ranged across the brilliance of this book, one of the things that comes through the story in Ursa's memories and in these interior monologues that she has is actually the story of her mother, her grandmother and her great grandmother. Her grandmother and great grandmothergrandmother were both in slavery, and as we've said, they were both the children of Corregidora and the children of incest. Her mother was not. Oh, no, her mother was, but her mother then marries somebody else.

So Ursa's the first one who breaks that chain and is not a child of incest. And she learns gradually over the course of the 20-year history of the novel the sexual history of each of those ancestors as well, which are incredibly important. So you get a legacy of slavery through the whole story, which we've suggested. I'm just worried that we've given the impression that the legacy of slavery is a background,

but it's very central to the story that Ursa is thinking about. And in fact, making the legacy of slavery, the daily pain of a contemporary character's life is what makes it one of the most, that's what made it such a revolutionary novel. And that women were equally culpable. So it's very much about how Corregidora's wife was also abusing women.

You hated him, but you... Where was the love and the hate? Where was the pleasure and the pain? It's a book about false binaries, right? That she's constantly given either or. Two humps on the same camel, yes. Hate and desire both riding them. You know what John was saying?

John was saying earlier about, you know, why is this not better known? It's difficult. Yeah, but also if this were published now, the historical moment we have the misfortune to be living through, which you have written about, Sarah, but also, you know, so many issues that are live issues in America and in this country at the moment. Why is this book not? If this book were published now, it would feel entirely relevant, entirely important, and new. It would feel like a new way of talking about a new subject.

I completely agree. I mean, I think anybody who's, as we all have, loved Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. I felt that jazz, Toni Morrison's jazz, could not exist without this book. Most of Toni Morrison doesn't exist without this book. And jazz is almost like a conversation. Well, here's Gail Jones's blues book. I'm going to find a way of writing around the blues with jazz. It's as if Gail Jones gave Toni Morrison everything she needed

to have her conversation and as if she's been writing to Gail Jones ever since. And when you only read Toni Morrison in isolation, you don't understand the other half of the conversation. And this novel, even alone, even if you don't read Eva's Man, this novel tells you the other half of the conversation. And it's 15 years earlier. And she was 26. And I mean, you know, for heaven's Man, this novel tells you the other half of the conversation. And it's 15 years earlier. And she was 26.

And I mean, you know, for heaven's sake. It is a novel that was so ahead of its time that it has finally found its time. Unfortunately, we have to end. But we want to say, I think we want to, there's something that we would love to do. Andy, do you want to say? Yeah, well, okay. So John and I were reading this, Sarah, and we were thinking for some time now well we've been thinking about you know it would be so nice to take one of these books and see if we can find a way to bring it to people

because you know often the books are are great when they're out of print and there are reasons why they're out of print but i finished this and i sent i emailed John and said, you know what, I don't know if you've read this yet, but I really think this book deserves to be out again if only we had some mechanism that we could access that could put books before people. You mean like crowdfunding? But seriously, I don't want people to think, what I don't want people to think is that we spotted the book

and then we're trying to push it out there. Well, you're not doing it with every book. This book is extraordinary. Well, I... On giant advert. No, no, no, no, exactly. I want to make the point that I don't feel moved often to say, you know what, wouldn't it be amazing if we could get this?

This book needs to be read. It should be on curriculums as I lay down. As I lay down. I mean, you know, it's that. We come across things all the time. It would be nice to see that back in print. But I feel, A, at this time when what is going on, as Andy said earlier, and I think there's a whole generation of people who would connect to this book.

To the power struggles in it. It's about power struggles. It's so, yeah, what we're going to do, we're talking to Beacon Press in America. Amazing. What we would love to do is to crowdfunding UK edition through Unbound, and we will confirm the details of that in due course. We have to talk to the American publishers first, but we'll be coming back to it.

So that's one thing we wanted to say. We also want to say at the end of this podcast, we've got a new website, which is launched today, backlisted.fm. It is both beautiful and useful, I think. It has show notes for all 65 of the episodes. It does. Yeah.

Including links to, to buy all the books that you discussed, all the added extra reviews and clips, and also a rapidly expanding program of live recordings at festivals over the summer. Backlisted comes alive. Live at Budokan intensity intensities. Yeahlisted comes alive. Live at Budokan. Intensity, intensities. Yeah.

It is the backlisted.fm. It's everything a backlisted fan has ever hoped for, and we know you'll tell us if it isn't. Andy? Yeah, so that's backlisted.fm. That is great. That means that apart from everything else, people will stop asking us if there's a list anywhere

of where all the books are. We have taken the list and made it a list. We've made it into a website. Okay, so thank you, Sarah, for choosing this book. Thank you to our producer, Nicky Birch, to Unbound, to our crisply ironed sponsor, Spoke, and to Joe Hodgson, who has heroically listened to all the episodes

and turned them into top-notch website copy that's why you couldn't look me in the eye joe okay and of course we're still on twitter facebook and boundless but this week you have only two jobs visit backlisted.fm let us know what you think and visit Unbound.com, I hope, and pledge, pledge, pledge for Gail Jones. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Goodbye. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.