Brian Turner - Somebodies and Nobodies

In some cases it was necessary, as well as polite, to obtain permission to use quoted material that appears in various places throughout this book. And while Ive not been able to track down the source of every quote, Im pretty sure that Ive attributed them to the right people; in other words, I havent made them up.

But I need to acknowledge permissions received gratefully from Faber and Faber Ltd for four lines from O what is that sound? from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden; sixteen words from The Hollow Men from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot; two lines from Talking in Bed and two from Annus Mirabilis from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin; The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield for lines by Masefield; The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and the Society of Authors for work by de la Mare; the publisher J. M. Dent for lines from In my craft or sullen art in Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas; the late V. S. Pritchett and Chatto and Windus for the extract from ACab at the Door.

My thanks to Jacquie Baxter for permission to quote from James K. Baxters poems Winter Sea, Pig Island Letters, The Waves and A Wish for Berries, from Collected Poems, Oxford University Press; to Alan Roddick for the paragraph from Indirections by Charles Brasch, Oxford University Press; to Bill Sewell for lines from Above Outram in Making the Far Land Glow, John McIndoe; to Alistair Campbell for his lines from Elegy; and to Vincent OSullivan for lines from Dont Knock the Rawleighs Man in The Rose Ballroom, John McIndoe; from Still Shines When You Think of It in Butcher & Co, Oxford University Press; and from Each Moment May Open Then as a Fan, Then Fear in The Butcher Papers, Oxford University Press. The painter, W. A. (Bill) Sutton spoke of his wish the capture the essences of the forces of nature when I visited him at his home in 1997.

Eudora Weltys quote beginning Part 3 is from Places in Fiction. The quote Most youth, unless youre very smart or very lucky, is spilled by Stanley Elkin is taken from his essay My Shirt Tale in Harpers, April 1987; his pithy Decorum is the natural enemy of autobiography comes from his essay Out of Ones Tree, Harpers, January 1993. A man needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink comes from William Kittredges essay Who Won the West?, Harpers, April 1988. John Banvilles, it is a natural delusion that life elsewhere must be different, comes from his review of J. M. Coetzees Boyhood in the New York Review of Books, 20 November 1999. The F. Scott Fitzgerald quote is the lyric crescendo at the end of The Great Gatsby. Ive been scratching around looking for where Flannery OConnors If you want to be a writer then youd better come from somewhere, comes from. But its there somewhere, apart from in my notebook; the same applies to Jim Harrisons bold claim, Everything is possible on earth love, sanity, enormous fish, fame.

As for Russell Baker, my quote from him in my Authors Note is taken from his essay, Life With Mother, in Houghton Mifflins collection Inventing the Truth edited by William Zinsser. Bakers view, in response to my request for permission to quote him, is one that most writers share. One does not need formal permission to use a short quote like the one in Zinssers collection . But I thank him for such confirmation.