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About Richard Beard
I figured out the software by translating a very short book by Andre Maurois, now available under the Translation tag above. This means I can move on to whatever else is on my mind. If I run out of ideas, the next pre-computer age blog I plan to translate is another very short book, this one by Henry Miller, also in French, entitled I’m No More of an Idiot Than Anybody Else.
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 My new novel, Lazarus is Dead, is due out on August 18. That’s seven years since Dry Bones. What have I been doing? The non-fiction, the stories, the living. But it’s not living that eats up the time, it’s writing novels.
In 2004, when Dry Bones came out, Harvill Secker was Secker and Warburg, and I didn’t have a website. This time round there are suddenly things to do. I should add something about Lazarus to the books pages here, and I will. I should keep track of what Harvill Secker are doing over at Vauxhall Bridge Road.
This is what they’re doing first. The publication of Lazarus is seven weeks away, and once a week until then the Vintage website will post a short reading from Lazarus is Dead as a countdown to publication day. Seven is a significant number in the story of Lazarus, and so it is in Lazarus is Dead. I’ve always been a fan of number-plots, ever since X 20, and the gospel of John, in which the story of Lazarus is first told, has a plot that calibrates to the number seven. There are seven miracles, seven signs that measure the journey of Jesus from provincial carpenter to capital Messiah.
Seven is a great number. In fact, god himself is a fan, the creator of the seven-day week and the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven branches of the menorah, the seven archangels and the seven vengeances of the murder of Cain. God’s deputy, Shakespeare, has seven ages of man because seven is a number for stories, for the seven voyages of Sinbad and the seven wives of Bluebeard (no relation). Unfortunately, seven is a rounded number, and should always be approached with caution. There are seven sins for every seven virtues, and only rarely seven brides for each of the seven brothers.
And psychologically, seven is approximately the number of different thoughts we can hold in our short-time memories at any one time, a fact I owe to the addictive Book of Numbers (1997) by the IM chess-player William Hartston. Which means I’ve now forgotten everything except where I started, which is that Random House are counting down here from the number seven. Six more weeks to go.
 'Let's Google him.' There aren’t many upsides to being a regular visitor to hospital, especially if you work there. This is the message I sometimes received from the nurses last year when I was in the Oxford JR to have my knee sewn back together.
This year, I ensured my regular summer bed on Ward 2A by breaking apart the other knee. I thought after a year of economic stagnation the situation might have deteriorated. Maybe the curtains hadn’t been washed since last July (my enduring memory of a year 2000 birth at RUH Bath was of bloodstains on the curtain. Not the one round the bed. The one at the window).
In fact the John Radcliffe Trauma Ward had been restaffing in Portugal and Ireland. Both nurses (one male, one female) were lovely and young and, I felt, wonderfully kind because they knew no better. Whatever has stood still in the UK over the last year, the equivalent has been going backwards fast in Portugal and Ireland – they’ve been manufacturing nurses they can’t afford to employ. The UK is taking advantage, especially as the UK salary of a first-year nurse is less than the same nurse receives in training while over the Irish Sea.
Staring at the clean curtains, and then the view towards North Oxfordshire and Chipping Mordor, I was mostly in sombre mood. Back so soon a second time, I wondered if there was something I hadn’t learned properly the first time. It might have been the inadvisability of applying logic to surgical situations. Calculating, for example, that every surgeon has his first solo job.
So thank god for anaesthetists, who take away all responsibility for rational thought. They apply the heavy medicine, and then make smalltalk until the anvil falls.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Are you famous?’
I have a stock answer to this not unfamiliar question. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Especially among people who know who I am.’ This has the advantage of being both clever and true, and avoids the embarrassment of getting into actual numbers. (‘Hundreds? Thousands? Have you been on the telly?’)
But no, on this occasion oblivion was imminent and I thought blow it. I’m about to go under the knife, I may never wake up, so what is the value of elegant deflection at a time like this?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Yes I am.’
Which were, probably, my last words, and contented I fell asleep.
Two hours later, when I woke up, the anaesthetist made a point of coming over.
‘We googled you while you were under,’ she said, and not in an unimpressed kind of way. I smiled. Probably the soulful morphine, but also because I did learn something the second time round. Self-deprecation is rubbish.
 but with cricket pads on Eleven months ago, I jumped high into the air to catch a cricket ball. When I landed, without the ball in my hand, I ruptured the patella tendon in my right knee. This meant that the top half of my leg was no longer connected, in any active sense of the word, to the bottom half.
I had an operation, and wore a leg brace for twelve weeks, but as a keen sportsman I know the strength to be gained from cliché. It’s how you bounce back. I could return stronger than I ever was.
Yes and no. After Christmas I got myself fit – a bit of running, a spot of cycling. I started the cricket season at the end of May and have been averaging a mundane but not unsatisfactory 30 or so. Yesterday, towards the end of the innings, I set off at a fair clip for my 45th run of the afternoon.
I ruptured the patella tendon in my left knee.
It was no consolation to recognise the drill: the ambulance on the field, the friendly paramedic called Kirsty, the ins and outs of Accident and Emergency before the taxi home at eleven pm after six hours on a trolley with a copy of Grazia magazine.
Rupturing a patella tendon, so the doctors and nurses said (again), is a very rare injury. In seven years the registrar hadn’t seen a single instance, until yesterday when he saw two in the same pair of legs. There is no accepted reason for the snap to happen, so inevitably the brain scrambles for connections – coffee not tea before the match; the ball I should have hit differently in the over before; the greater disaster from which this providential injury, in ways that I can never hope to comprehend, saves me. In six hours, Grazia long finished and forgotten, I imagined many alternate universes.
The over-powering feeling, ultimately, is the dread. Not because of what happened last year, but what would have happened tens of thousands of years ago. My heart knows this (although my brain picked it up from an episode of Timewatch) – the weak and injured will slip to the back of the herd, and are the first to be eyed by panthers.
I’ve seen programmes solving the puzzle of Neolithic skeletons, young in the bone and dying with no obvious sign of violence. With modern forensics, the cause always turns out to be the teeth or the joints. The teeth are bad so the creature couldn’t eat (this also applies to dinosaurs). Look – the knee joint has wasted away. The nomadic tribe does not wait for the injured.
The lions, the tigers, they know. They see me slipping to the back. All they need do is wait, and sometimes they don’t even do that.
From I’m No More of an Idiot than Anyone Else
 I forget now which writers Lantelme liked best. Probably Flaubert, Racine, Balzac, de Maupassant, but I don’t remember any discussions about the great Russian authors – Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Gorky and the rest. And Lantelme wasn’t a chauvinist! But why travel when his own mental landscape was so rich and cultured? He preferred to talk about Homer, Ovid and the Greek dramatists.
I want to go back for a moment to the Cafe de la Liberte. The second book in French that I tried to read, and this one was much easier than the first, was New York by the author of Ouvert La Nuit and Ferme La Nuit – Paul Morand. I read those two books, in English, in New York. Everyone knew Paul Morand – a real best-seller. During my first year in Paris when I was really depressed, I wrote to Paul Morand, asking if I could be his secretary, his lackey, I didn’t care. No reply. Twenty-five or thirty years later, he send me a telegram inviting me to have dinner with him at the Pont du Gard. At the same time he wrote saying how much he admired my work. Still no reply to my earlier question.
Old Lantelme was well-acquainted with the classics. often he spoke of Latin writers like Terence or Tertillian, who were completely Greek to me. I hated Virgil, Cicero, Caesar and all those others we were obliged to read at school. Of Virgil, for example, I’ve only retained two phrases – ‘Rari nantes in gurgite vaste‘ [a few swimming in the vast deep] and ‘timeo danaos et dona ferentes.’ [I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts]
Much more important than the Latin was our teacher Bulldog Holmes. That was a man who should have been living in an asylum. He always dressed as a gentleman, with a bowler hat and even a monocle. And he was always angry. When he got mad his lips trembled, and the veins at the side of his head swelled up with blood. During these fits of his he looked like a monster. Then one second later he became a gentleman again, all smiles, all friendliness. He used to pull himself up to his full height, raise his fist, and shout into it as if it was a trumpet: Hic, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius, etc. etc. huic, huic, huic, and ordered us to repeat after him in an equally loud voice.
 In 2003, I went to Japan as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, a post that had evolved from the Professorship held in 1924 by the First World War poet Edmund Blunden. Blunden wrote the prose account of his wartime experiences, Undertones of War, in the shadow of the University’s grand Red Gate referring only to some trench-maps and his anxious unforgetting.
Blunden’s time in Tokyo was immensely productive, inspiring new poems, edited texts, critical commentaries. He also kept up with his beloved cricket (there is a separate chapter on Cricket in Barry Webb’s definitive biography). However, my own combination of interests meant that while teaching in his shadow I was presented with a literary scoop, or so I hope.
I had largely forgotten about this until now, but in one of my classes I had the pleasure of teaching Mr Iba, a mature student and former President of the Tokyo University Rugby Club. He had read Muddied Oafs, and enthusiastically introduced me to a spirited live version of the Tokyo University Rugby Club song. I was intrigued that it should be in English, and before long we were both researching its provenance.
We eventually discovered that the poem had been written in 1924 and presented to Mr Kayama, a rugby enthusiast who had written the first book about the sport’s development in Japan.
[A mini-extract, as kindly translated by Mr Iba:
1. We play Rugby to satisfy our Fighting Spirits sleeping in our blood.
2. But, We have to control it by our Gentlemanship.]
Blunden scholars will surely let me know if this lyric has surfaced in the past. If not, I hesitantly claim the rediscovery of a lost work by Edmund Blunden, two verses of poetry that remain a living force in twenty-first century Japan.
Up, Up!
I hear from winters long ago
Resounding to the frosty sky
The shouts of “Feet, feet, feet!” “Go low!”
The splendid roar that hailed the try.
I hear from winters yet to come
Those old glad cries from new throats hurled,
And feel, when you and I are dumb,
Still Rugby will refresh the world.
Friend, may this book of yours advance
This noble sport in old Japan
Till your disciples take on France,
England, New Zealand; when they can,
May we be there to swell the cheers
That loud and brilliant will proclaim
‘Japan’s first try!’ In after years,
Could your heart wish a happier fame?
I hope I can contribute to the happy posthumous fame of Mr Kayama, who was an apostle for rugby in the early days in Japan. The optimistic, global sentiment of the last line of Blunden’s first verse also seems fitting in a World Cup Year.
 The poem is still sung boisterously to round off Tokyo University Rugby Club functions, to the tune shown here (and Mr Iba intends to have it sung at his funeral). The music was composed by Mr Ryo Watanabe, in 1925, so the song (or Yell, as it is now known by the rugby club) was written soon after Blunden’s arrival. Perhaps he had a few hours to fill: later he would design his own cricket net, and set it up in the local park to await visits from anyone who had ever held a bat.
Edmund Blunden, sports nut, I salute you.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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My new novel, Lazarus is Dead, is due out on August 18. That’s seven years since Dry Bones. What have I been doing? The non-fiction, the stories, the living. But it’s not living that eats up the time, it’s writing novels.
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