Tommy C's Blog

Scottish poet and novelist Frank Kuppner has the knack of giving his books funny and original titles: A Concussed History of Scotland - perhaps corresponding to the mental state of most of that nation's inhabitants, one may be tempted to add; Second Best Moments in Chinese History - part one of which is named A Moral Victory for the Barbarians, a line I sometimes use to describe getting hacked to pieces over a chess-board; In the Beginning There Was Physics...; and (my favourite) The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women. And now we have A God's Breakfast, which I discovered yesterday in a bookshop, although apparently it has been around for over a year. The book is really three unconnected books in one - presumably on account of low sales figures for Kuppner's previous work, some of which is now out-of-print - two of which might have easily been omitted.

By far and away the worst of the books is Kuppner's crass, almost-50-pages-long parody of TS Eliot - West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil - which at best might amuse undergraduates struggling with Four Quartets whom also find flatulence *hilarious*. Beyond that, its bitter excess is probably well-explained by William Wootten's observation in his good Guardian newspaper review that: '"West Åland" is the sound of someone shouting abuse to stop themselves falling back under the mesmerist's trance,' given that Eliot was a strong influence for Kuppner in some of his previous work.

Of more ambiguous value is the final section of 120 poems, What Else Is There? Alongside some surprisingly tender autobiographical reflections on family and death, there are glimpses of the lightly-witty, neat, happily-paradoxical intelligence I like most of all about Kuppner's best work, such as the three-liner "A Cosmic Footnote":

Alas, a copyist has introduced a few errors
into this classic text about the unity of opposites;
making it seem to mean something else entirely.

But, really, I wish to dismiss this third book along with the second, in order to get to the first, best and most interesting part of A God's Breakfast: The Uninvited Guest. Here, around 800 supposedly found fragments of works from Greek and Roman civilisations are presented to us by a present-day fictional scholar, whose irritation and annotational interventions both increase as the book progresses. Here, epigrams, epitaths, insults, jokes, and philosophical play mingle along their themes of death, the lies of religion, the classical, uncertainty and incompleteness, writing and the fate of the cosmos. Some examples, to give you a sense of the work, to help see if you like it, or not:

56

The Temple of Jove destroyed by a bolt of his own lightning?
Hmm. Perhaps he has strong views on modern architecture?

106

Zeno held there was no real difference between a short life and a long one.
I wonder, Caesar, if the same might not hold true for penises?

214

Would we call the subtlest music 'non-musical'?
Yet the subtlest parts of the material world are called immaterial.

371

Everything is always changing, and we throw words after it.
A few of them stick; mostly in the wrong place.

463

If applause and philosophy do not mix, Lucillius,
Then perhaps you truly are a philosopher.

599

More happiness at one friendly breakfast than in the whole of Homer.
[Not by any means the conventional view of Homer, certainly.]

686

A billion ---- later, are we any happier?
[If I had the courage of my convictions, I would just cut this pieces of nothing out too. But, alas, scholarship has its mindless yet unshakeable conventions, like so much else.]

718

Someone is standing outside my house, shouting things.
[Not 'Someone is standing outside my house, shouting "Things!"', whatever stale jokes Occamb might prefer to make on such matters. But I suppose we all have to earn our professional reputations as best we can, each playing to our own particular stregnths.]

So, what's going on here? Very few of the lines are remarkable turns of phrases in themselves, and the rhythms that justify making line breaks are basic: just about poetry, very plainly so. Story? The fragments hint at many stories, in one big, ambiguous tangle, and whilst the editorial revelations accrue, there is no over-arching narrative relating to the skeptical, often-bored, critical, prudish and quite amusing observer. In fact, there is very little that is compelling about this mediocre character at all, and I suspect he was written lazily, too; in every way he is a poor cousin to Nabokov's creation of Charles Kinbote in the poem-centred novel Pale Fire.

Perhaps somewhat disappointing overall, nonetheless, parts of the sum are greater than some of the parts: the frustrated editorial annotations at the end of the book throw the reader back again into innocent early passages, nicely forcing us to experience anew but not afresh fragments that thus now have later light and mud poured over them. And the lines in the early 200's where it's revealed that the '----'s are intended to stand for the word 'anus' (or similar) are particularly hilarious. The effect of such moments is cummulative - like little doodles drawn in the corners of book pages, that when flicked through, dance themselves into moving picture; that is the best way that Frank Kuppner's sequences of plain statements work. So is this one whole poem, or 800 or so short poems? Neither; it doesn't fully add up, I would put it as about 3/4s of one whole poem, made up of 800 or so bits of sort-of poetry, with an alright title.

I wonder why it doesn't add up: why the character of the scholar is lazily padded out, why too many one liners are no more than flippant mentions of farting, why the The Uninvited Guest seems aware of its overall failure, inspite of its several greatly enjoyable successes? Possibly because Kuppner has done this kind of thing twice before and much better (see below) and that the party trick that's always requested and cheered creates a love-hate relationship in its performer: How the juggler dreams of smashing the plates upon his host's gaping head... (And certainly, with a dismissive poem about critics at the back, and a commentary on the faux-classical fragments from a contemporary, Kuppner would seem to be alert to the reception of his work nowadays, mediating that mediational event in advance. I think he's also teaching Creative Writing, or something, at a university somewhere, the extroverted self-consciousness of which I doubt suits him.)

Anyway, let's be honest. Chances are you're not going to buy this book, and you may be wondering, as a result, why I have bothered to review it, as indeed am I. I guess to recommend to you, and for me to think over anew, the two books where Kuppner employs a similar structure to The Uninvited Guest, but with much finer results: A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (now out of print) and its sequel/replacement Second Best Moments in Chinese History. These books consist of 500 or so 4 line poems, creating one whole poem each, too, written in, it seems, a Glasgow library as Kuppner leafed through a book of ancient Chinese prints. Symmetrically perhaps, hungover and signalling to a wine-girl, delegated to decide which poems should be kept, a scholar in A Bad Day tries to decipher the squiggly lines of some old parchment:

249.

Something something something something something;
Something something something smiling something;
Something smiling something something something;
The old scholar finds himself involuntarily smiling.

At his worst, Frank Kuppner is capable of suggesting something interesting and raising a smile. At his best, his books of distant, long-lost somethings are to be savoured, kept and reread; they create from flicked-doodles a universe of effects - if not great literature - written by a man twice able to lose himself thoroughly in a certain section of a Scottish library.