Now that the Ba’atist regime in Syria has just fallen
(I’m getting this down on December 11th, 2024), it seems appropriate
to have reached the final pages of Christopher Hitchens’s “Arguably” - a
collection of essays and reviews written in the rough decades either side of
the Second Gulf War. As a guy who started out as a late-Sixties Marxist, and
who spent the next thirty years crab-crawling his way into a more-or-less
opposite political stance - while still managing to call many of his close
friends “Comrade” – Hitchens was ever a figure of controversy. Skipping his
early days at the (left-wing) New Statesman, and gigs at the (right-wing)
Spectator, what we get here is material printed in the coffee table/waiting room
mags “Vanity Fair”, “The Atlantic”, “Tatler”, and the online zine “Slate”. His
emigration (though he would have it “immigration”) to the USA in 1981, then,
had long been a major feature of Hitchens’s profile. An “Oggsford College man”
gone native in the land of the free (like some latter-day Alistair Cooke) he
was nevertheless read on both sides of the pond with eyebrows - if not hackles
– raised. Because some kind of stance was expected from him, he had the
following of a pundit, with the hint of rockstar-like celebrity that comes from
frequent appearances on the box (starting out on University Challenge!). He
brought the self-assurance of an enfant terrible couched in donnish tones.
Included here are two of his most famous pieces, and the
shift in juxtaposition is strangely rewarding: like a ping-pong ball crossing
the net of 9/11, the essays and reviews dart between right- and leftist
apologies. “Why women Aren’t Funny” and “Believe Me It’s Torture” (Vanity Fair,
2007 and 2008 respectively) could hardly be more different in subject matter or
political correctness. Cringingly, the first plays footsie in its condescension
towards feminism, while the second is a gagging of those who might say Hitchens
had sold out. He really did undergo voluntarily waterboarding to prove the
point that the USA at its worst was no better than a rogue state. But at the
same time, the brogue of a conservative world-view stains even his most
comradely statements. When says that “…women, bless their tender hearts,
would prefer that life be fair…” (my italics) Marxism lies in un-deconstructed
tatters on the debating room floor.
And yet here is a guy who can almost always be
forgiven because: a) he must have been a wonderful dinner guest/host - his
writing exudes an easy, enviable erudition. You can just hear him charming the
pants off opponents, even while his voice rises with indignation. And b)
because someone as well-read as all that will surely always have something
worthwhile to say, whether you agree with them or not. In this volume you will
find the low-down on many glittering names: Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, the
Amises Martin and Kingsley, Isabel Allende and Anthony Powell - to name just a
few of the writers he had in his circle. And then some – George Orwell,
Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Jessica Mitford and Rebecca West – with whom his
intimacy was necessarily posthumous, but still alive and kicking.
I should add that this book isn’t only a collection of
literature about literature; there are articles here that stem from his
part-time career as a foreign/war correspondent; for example, a 2005 piece from
the on-line “Slate” criticising the New York Times (and other publications)
over their WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) coverage before and after the fall
of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens had shoes-on-the-ground experience in a wide range
of theatres, through the Middle East, Central America South Asia and the Far
East; and from which, he would ride his desk with both barrels blaring.
Comedy is
subversive. Political, too; though only jokes that pack a small “p” actually make
anyone laugh. Decidedly apolitical (with a capital A) was ITMA – It’s That Man
Again – the BBC radio show which débuted in 1939, just before the second World
War kicked off, and went on until Handley’s sudden death in 1949. “That Man” had
already been a catchphrase, referencing Adolf Hitler (on American radio, it had
been used of President Franklin D Roosevelt). Pretty soon, Tommy Handley would prove
everyman’s “That Man Again” - as the show’s eponymous star. Catchphrases - like,
“Can I do you now, Sir?” meant everything in those days, meaning comedians kept
a jealous eye on their own. And everything has a precedent, ITMA’s being
Bandwagon – the prewar vehicle of Arthur Askey and Richard “Stinker” Murdoch. In
fact, it was Bandwagon, with its crazy house format (set in a flat above
Broadcasting House), that created radio’s first comedy superstars. Incidentally,
fellow Liverpudlian Askey had some years earlier been upbraided by Handley for
purloining his opening line, “Hello folks!” Arthur, not put out by his pal’s snotty
attitude, simply coined his own: “Hello, Playmates”. Now Handley himself, filching
the Bandwagon milieu, became synonymous with a phrase not his own: thus ITMA (contracted
from It’s That Man Again in the initialspeak of the day) became to British
Broadcasting what Hoover was to vacuum cleaners.
Class and regional accent were to determine
success on radio during The People’s War. Whereas the rest of the BBC remained
dominated by the cut glass voices of upper class Southerners; to make them laugh,
people demanded something they could identify with. In the cinema, they flocked
to see George Formby - The Emperor of Lancashire. To concert halls, it was Vera
Lynn who drew the biggest crowds. While on the radio, audiences made their
views known via the postbag. So it was that at the outbreak of war, the BBC - looking
for a spot of topical light relief - realised that ITMA’s popular appeal trumped
the nay-saying critics. And within weeks the publicr got what it needed: a
sending up of the often daft - frequently annoying - emergency measures then
being imposed on everyday life. Subversive? Yes, but not in a treasonous way.
ITMA hardly challenged the rights and wrongs of the war effort, but it leant
voice to the anti-bureaucratic, somewhat anarchistic response of the British
people to their perennial lot in life: as cogs in an out-of-control, hypocritical,
Heath-Robinson war machine.
The author of this biography, which came
out within a year of Handley’s sudden death in 1949, was Ted Kavanagh – a long
time friend and the main ITMA scriptwriter throughout its 10 year history. That
he knew his subject well is beyond dispute. But did he tell it all? Certainly
the whole unadulterated truth is often only hinted at. The early chapters sound
like a eulogy that respectfully avoids speaking ill of the dead. National
treasure that Handley was by 1949, it would hardly have done to have raked up
muck to fertilise the flowers where his ashes were sprinkled. Yet, it seems the
man really was a minor saint; and saints - as we know - tend to lead quite boring,
worthy lives. Generous, loyal, ambitious (not overly-so), hard-working, clever
(though no clever-Dick), and self-effacing, Handley is portrayed as a somewhat
stereotyped working class lad from Liverpool who makes good treading the
boards. It takes several chapters to get through the interwar years, and the
book begins to cloy long before even the “phoney war” sets in. But the coming
of September 1939, and a long excerpt taken straight from the script of the
first wartime ITMA, suddenly gets the narrative fizzling. As a biographer, Kavanagh
is no Boswell. As a purveyor of radio scripts, and as a commentator on the
production of which, the hack’s sense of drama and timing finally shines
through.
Kavanagh’s censored, horse’s mouth account
avoids delving into Handley’s psychology, and neatly skirts around the
phenomena of comedy in wartime. I need to do more research, because I don’t
know of anything out there that does. But for enthusiasts and students alike,
it is a valuable document to add the stock of knowledge. Look at it this way,
if you will; without ITMA, there is no Goon Show; and without the Goons there’s
no Monty Python’s; so kiss goodbye to half your post-modern comedy sector. Returning
to the wr year, though, without Handley and Kavanagh’s Tomfoolery, I am sure
the Churchills and the Roosevelts of the so-called free world simply have got
off scot free. For who better to snipe at the heels of power than the Fool? Not
long after being lauded by Handley for his wartime leadership, Churchill was
voted out of power by the public in the “khaki election”. Now, how’s that for
subversion?
Despite this rich
source of blarney, I failed to write a review of The Aeneid; and I say that with
some regret, because such reactions are best recorded while fresh in the mind. I
clearly recall, however, my affront. The pome was an obvious - nay flagrant - justification
of monarchy; and a parable of the subsequent efforts of Octavian to pull the
empire that Julius Caesar had done so much to extend – and then disrupt - back
together. Aeneas was Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian/Augustus all rolled into
one. And if Dido of Carthage wasn’t Cleopatra Ptolemy, then Romulus and Remus
were just a couple of reservoir dogs hardly worth the historical footnote. This
much, mea culpa, I failed to state at the appropriate time. But then along came
Herman Broch’s book.
And funny how that
showed up. My wife Solmaz had joined a
reading group that, eighteen months ago, chose The Death of Virgil as their
next project. It was available in Turkish translation and she bought a copy. I’d
never even heard of it, and chatting to one of her friends was chagrined, unable
to conceal my utter ignorance. So, being anxious to plug this gap, I searched
on-line - only to find it had been out of print for decades and there were no
reasonably priced copies available at any of the usual sources. Surely I should
have smelled a rat? But a few months later, I was in London and spotted a copy
of the 1983 OUP paperback going for a quid in a charity shop. Introduction by none
other than Bernard Levin. A “no–brainer”- right? Hideous expression but entirely
appropriate here. Feeling jolly lucky, I slapped my coin on the counter. The
book’s front cover boldly proclaims, “Broch is the greatest novelist European literature
has produced since Joyce – George Steiner”. Egad! It is like being
suddenly, reliably informed that the greatest pop music of the 1960s was made
in Belgium.
OK, so that’s what
launched me into the 400 & odd page assemblage of serious gobbledygook that
is The Death of Virgil. Stream of consciousness this ain’t. Virginia Woolf and
Jack Kerouac, you may rest secure in your graves – for no one has pegged it,
then come back to write a book about the experience. Nor could anyone write as
though they were there in effigy, like Hercules or Dionysius. Somehow or other,
Beckett got pretty close, of that I am convinced. While his trilogy, veering in
& out of reality, was not – as Martin Amis would have it – the output of a mere
charlatan. Beckett’s were books written by a guy incapable of leaving his room
for days, weeks, months on end. And no, I have not read a biography of him. I
read the trilogy with comparative ease as a sixteen year old, then two or three
pages a night at 67. But I never lost sight of the subject at hand. Beckett led
me though his comic nightmare by the hand. Like the Irishman who urged Spike
Milligan into a hotel with the words, “Follow me, I’ll be right behind you!”
Shame on Amis for his lack of empathy, he was ever the snob. But getting back
to this travesty of Virgil … this Broch… god knows where his head was at. The
man tortures the reader. Like Moby Dick, he pulls you down, deep down, and
never lets you up for air, drowns you over and over, until it’s not a bit funny;
and you are literally counting the pages forward to the end of a paragraph. Oh,
I know Beckett can even do that with a sentence. But what a sentence! No, both
of these writers expect the poor reader to accompany them into a personal hell.
At least with Beckett you are in company. I mean with a fellow human. With
Broch you are saddled with a demigod of a man for companion. Virgil is so – is there
another way of putting it? - bloody vain, there hardly an ounce of self
awareness about him.
I don’t care if he
was the greatest poet of his age, though I suspect he probably wasn’t all that.
Anyway, this isn’t Virgil, just Broch’s view of him in his last handful of
days, dragged by Octavian/Augustus from an extended visit to Athens. The
emperor intends to put him - and presumably his work - on display at Rome, as
though he were a captive foreign chieftain. But instead of having the life ceremoniously
garroted out of him at the Forum, he contracts some awful disease (he’s only
about 50) and will die of fever at Brundisium. Meantime, convinced his days are
over anyway, he’s determined to take his poem of Aeneas with him. Why he hasn’t
just thrown it into the Adriatic on the way over is plain vanity. He has to
make a song & dance of it; which means that at least the Emperor must make
an appearance.
Thank god for
Augustus. He comes on after another couple of poets do an extended Laurel &
kiss-me Hardy act at the bedside. Did I say extended? Everything in this
infernal book is drawn out to its illogical lack of conclusion. Having said
that, at least Augustus/Octavian’s long delayed appearance does actually work.
At first, that is. You do get the feeling during the first dozen or so pages
that you are in a novel with characters, dialogue, even – fgs- a hint of drama.
But credibility is soon stretched as the visit drags on. It’s almost a relief
when the Emperor finally exits and we’re back to the man in bed narrative.
I won’t spoil it
by revealing whether or not The Aeneid ends up on his funeral pyre, or is used
to wrap late Egyptian mummies (and hence has survived). It’s just that when you
go running a double marathon wearing scuba diving gear, you may not get
anywhere near this far anyway. I haven’t read Bernard Levin’s introduction yet.
No doubt he will explain it all for me - and everything will be well again. Until
then, I will say that what Herr Broch hasn’t done is to kill the blighter off
with remorse for the abomination he created. And meantime, anyone who cares to
follow where I have gone, don’t say you weren’t warned.
My second outing with Beckett’s trilogy; the first being
half a century back with the spotty Sixth Former borrowing its single white
tome from the Upper School library. In 1973, I read it at cruising speed - thirty
pages an hour - ploughing through the densely packed text in about a week. Now I’ve
taken about three months, often only managing five or six hundred words a night;
what’s more, often having to turn back a page or two to remind myself what on
earth Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mahood or Worm had got up to. Though I may have taken
it in better this time round, I think there was just as much enjoyment reading with
the autopilot skipping the denser bits. Don’t brood, as Winifred Robinson would
urge me at The Playhouse. So why bother again, eh?
All the while I was thinking he could have written this
faster than I’m managing to read. And I kept picturing an impoverished Beckett being offered a
three-book deal, which the trilogy is the story of him writing down. Even Moran
- the detective sent out to find Molloy - is self-referential: Beckett’s Ego,
just as Molloy and Malone are facets of the poor man’s Id. Not that I know
anything much of Freud. Or of Entropy. Yet as the titles of the three “books” go,
there is a steady decline going on as the characters experience progressive
mobility, nutrition and mental health issues. Steady or steadfast? Yes, there
is a steadfast decline in progress. Hunting the Great White Snail - eyes tied
behind your back - is the work’s modus operandi.
When he can, Molloy gets around by bicycle, looking for his Ma;
though with one stiff leg his riding technique is dubious. I don’t think he
actually ever finds her, though he shacks up with a woman along the way. A Madame
de Warrens she is not, for there is misogyny here aplenty. No female really
counts as a character, full, rounded or even flat. And the occasional obscenity
cast their way would do little to endear a Millet or a Greer to his oeuvre.
These are men without women, though Malone is nursed on his way towards death
by one. That he is not suffocated with a pillow (by her, or anyone else for
that matter) shows he has some worth as a patient. Is it human kindness that
ministers to these mainly bedridden wretches? Or do the publishers prize the notebooks
so much they are prepared to fund their care? In the end – which may not come
(spoiler alert) – The Unnamable hardly keeps up the pretence that any of this
could have been recorded at all. Although, perhaps there’s a microphone under
the gurney? But enough of this (to paraphrase words they are apt to use).
I suppose like many people of my generation I came to
Beckett via his play Waiting For Godot (Liverpool Playhouse again). Dallmeyer
directed it in a studio production. There was a kind of trilogy there, too. At
the end, Vladimir and Estragon formed a tableau with the dead tree, the three
holding up their upper limbs like the Crucifixion. The cold embers of a Roman
Catholic upbringing linger on at the foot of this triptych, though there’s little Holy Writ to the ghosts of ideas that are Mahood or Worm. Godot was a laugh, played
for laughs, and believe it or not there is plenty of Irish humour here, if you’re
prepared to stick it out. Vladimir and Estragon clowning around with hats there,
Molloy wryly sucking pocketfuls of stones here. But sticking it out is point.
As the text gets progressively denser, the subject matter getting more and more
subjective, it becomes difficult to organise your reading. By the time of The
Unnamable, there are no paragraph breaks at all; and some sentences go on for pages.
Of course, the writing never completely breaks down. This is not a William
Burroughs book. But I was never tempted to read it in random goes, as I was
wont to with The Ticket That Exploded or Dead Fingers Talk. It just defies
reading itself by screwing you over as a reader. You schmuck. It’s a stand-up
but it’s lying down. Perhaps I should try the Audio Book? Could there even be
one? I’ll go and look. I won’t look.
by Virginia Woolf
My only qualm is that - like most things Bloomsbury - Orlando
is Worthy, Deserving and very much under the old aristocratic wing. On their
sojourns, for example, they always have a handy string of pearls to flog and
get them out of trouble. But I appreciated the decade or so spent in Turkey,
and especially under Mount Olympus (where I have lived for the past three).
Again, neglect is highlighted, this time of the East.
Exoticism (is that really a word?) can be safely sexploited
without chancing the censor. But I am amazed how much she has got away with. An
experimental novel that actually works. I’m not surprised now to know how
nervous Woolf felt as she completed her books, this one must have been a shocking
headache for her. I daresay she invented magical realism with it. Perhaps it
was magical history?
Orlando are also the original Zelig, and what would
Pope be without them to excite our curiosity? Of course, they can’t buddy every
literary celebrity in the history, but the likes of Swift and Tennyson do get a
look in. They must reflect Woolf’s taste or anti-taste, and the taste of her
Age. Thus, Mr Pope really does cone alive here, in away he does not in Eliot –
or was it Goldsmith who wrote Lucretia? So what! I quote Orlando’s biographer, “...
where Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance,
Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.” (Capitals theirs.)
Many gems like this. But I think you must be In The Mood to read Orlando, which
I finally was.
Monkhouse Encore
by Bob Sinfield
“Kar” is magic realism without the magic,
which is not to say it isn’t magical, nor that it’s a slice of life in the
kitchen-sink sense. The plot is weighted rather than heavy, the going moreish
not mealy. Ostensibly the story is of a washed-up Turkish poet, living as an
exile in Frankfurt; addicted to porno, existing on state benefits and the
occasional reading; and given an assignment in the easternmost city of Kars. He's
to cover the suicide girls – not a music group, but young women forbidden to
cover their hair. In fact, the poet no longer considers himself a Muslim, and as
a middle class liberal from a prosperous part of Istanbul, has little
connection with the city that almost bears his name (Ka is not his real name,
anyway). “Kar” – the novel’s title – is the Turkish word for snow. There is a blizzard
that cuts the city off while he is there; also a coup that takes place, in
which a troupe of actors take over the cut-off city in the name of secularism,
and with the apparent backing of the army.
Meantime, Ka is staying at a hotel where
his former heart-throb lives. Now she’s divorced from her devout husband, Ka
has the chance to win her and turn his life around. Also, by the way, his muse returns;
and as he wanders about the former outpost of the Russian empire, he fills his
notebook with long prose poems that comment on the various predicaments of his
visit. He makes notes on the poems, but the originals are lost, just leaving
the notebooks. Orhan Pamuk casts himself as Ka’s old friend, trying to locate
these lost testaments.
The novel has a portentous quality, that
would be borne out by 911; and by the rise of a religious party in Turkey,
which won control soon after it was published (and remains the dominant force
to this day). But this is by no means an anti-religious book; if anything, by
its sympathetic treatment of some women’s desire to cover up, it upholds the
right to wear headscarves. I think it’s one of the reasons why there are people
here in Turkey that don’t approve of Pamuk’s work. As he was writing it (at the
turn of the Millenium), female civil servants were still fighting for the right
to wear trousers. While cleaners and other less qualified staff were free to be
covered, uncovered professionals were still subject to prejudicial dress codes that
went back to the early republican era.
But what the book is really about is how
individuals are insufficient even to carry out their own destinies. Transformations
need to take place. Ka is a poet, but Kars is a city and kar is snow. And what
is snow? It’s a transformation of water from its natural fluid state into a
temporary crystal with many points.
The book is full of characters, of real
people and things that move from one state to another. Key characters are
paired, which blurs identity to some extent. As I was reading, I wondered if
the purpose of this was to alienate the reader’s involvement? But this is not Modernist/Brechtian
piece of deconstruction. The Islamic students Necip morphs into Fazıl (both
write Islamic science fiction), Ka the poet morphs into Orhan Pamuk the
novelist; while Kadife and Ipek are sisters who share the same taste in men,
but follow different traditions. Then there is Melinda the porn star and
Marianna the soap actress, both of whom induce obsessional interest. In 1992,
when I first arrived in Turkey, everyone was watching Brazilian soaps, not
Mexican ones. Even the book itself is transformed, not lost in translation. My
Turkish friends says Orhan Pamuk is difficult to read. But not in translation. Because
I spend some of my time re-writing translations of Turkish into more readable
English, I know what involved here. Some Turkish sentences absolutely refuse to
fit into the English straitjacket!
The way reality is transformed, though,
conforms to the trope that truth is stranger than fiction. For example, the way
an army operation to shoot one character is ignored by neighbours, who are so preoccupied
watching the TV soap they’re oblivious to the gunshots. Another incongruity
(for me) was how in no one still had black and white TVs at that time, even in the
high plain city of Muş where I was teaching in 1992 (and which
I think was even poorer than Kars). In Kars, which had no secuity cameras back
then, secret eyes were always observing every move made by everybody.
Much of the story is told in breathless
recitative; eg,
“Her account effectively reduced the
affair with ***** to a mistake that was already buried in the past, and Ka
might have believed her, until she suddenly succumbed to some childish impulse
and blurted out, ‘The truth is, **** doesn’t really love ****. He loves me!’
[my asterixes]
The artificiality of his writing a novel -
a ‘Western’ form - is parallel to that of Turks and Turkey being somewhat
unreal too. So there ARE elements of deconstruction here. And there are bits of
unconvincing business, such as with the landline when İpek is locked in the hotel
room (no one had mobiles in those days). But there’s a tendency to ignore
these, just as you wouldn’t dare criticise the hospitality of your host.
Because, as you will become aware, some barefaced folks would dare to do that
very thing (eg, to walk into someone’s house in your shoes, as folk do in
Turkish soaps). You often get the sense that none of this matters anyway, as
with deeply religious people who chain smoke cigarettes, or who can dismiss any
kind of impropriety as a mere distraction from some Almighty Purpose. And
there’s a sense in which being around any Turkish acquaintance at any time is
like being admitted into the presence of the Padişah (the Sultan) at the
Sublime Porte. You become overawed and it isn’t until hours later that you are
able to recover your wits and realise you have just witnessed the equivalent of
a domestic brawl or tantrum.
Then there’s the deliberate use of
spoilers, for example pre-telling the death of key characters (which I shan’t go
into here). And the names out of Dickens: Ka (which is simply made up), and Muhtar
(a local elected official, never a personal name), Blue (“Mavi” is never a name
in Turkish, at least not to my knowledge, though in Liverpool any stranger in
the street can can you Blue), then there’s the soldier Z Demirkol (Ironarm),
and even place names, such Nisantaş in Istanbul, not Nisantaşı
(its real name).
The book is a great patchwork of ideas and
themes. It has shifting POVs, weird speculation of thoughts and motives, it
harps on the themes of classic Turkish film (the so-called Yeşil
Cam movies so beloved of World Cinema); it has repeated deaths on stage (with echoes
of the Çavuşeskus’ public execution); and
then there’s Pamuk’s role as novelist/clerk – isn’t he a poet, too? Arguably
the Turkish Republic’s greatest writer, Nazım
Hikmet, got away with writing a whole novel in verse (and a pretty good read it
is, too). And so yes, I think this book well deserves the accolade it’s been
given; and now I’ve finally got round to Pamuk, I’ll certainly be reading more.
by Nigel Nicolson
I got a quarter
of the way in before resolving never to read another book about the upper class
between the wars. Although Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage wasn’t
published until 1973, it contains an autobiographical account of his mother’s -
Vita Sackville-West’s - attempts to elope with Violet Trefusis in 1919. The other
three-fifths of the book are his somewhat rose-tinted efforts at filling in the
gaps, and beefing up the part Harold, his father, played in the marriage.
Vita Sackville-West’s
same-sex affairs have become iconic for feminists, particularly those most
concerned with lesbian rights. There can be little sense of liberation, though,
in these accounts of Vita’s failure to break away from her place in the
Nicolson family. Her affairs, first with Rosamund Grosvenor, then Violet, are confessed
in her own words, then contextualised and commented on by her son (who, btw,
was too young to have witnessed most of their goings-on). But – lesbians beware
- Vita’s dalliances weren’t only with members of her own sex. Her affair with the
writer Geoffrey Scott came directly after she had broken with Violet. And
though that infatuation quickly segued into an extended involvement with Virginia
Woolf, their love appears to have been mostly platonic.
My near
book-hurling moment, when I realised I’d read enough Bridesheads for a lifetime,
was quickly followed by the urge not to be judgemental. I’m afraid Virginia
Woolf has irritated me since reading a biography of her many years ago, but I
think it’s generally accepted she’s Marmite: people either swear by or about
her. I read Mrs Dalloway without ‘getting it’ in the least. Disclosure: I’ve
never read anything by Vita Sackville-West, apart from the two sections of this
book. I wasn’t very impressed by her writing, in fact it appeared a little
slovenly; but that may be because she wrote without editing, never intending it
for publication (at least, not in her lifetime). Note that Nigel Nicolson says Virginia
Woolf was not very complimentary about his mother’s work. So, here’s my partial
ope: This account of Vita’s affairs is pretty much the arch end of the genre (with
Brideshead playing chicken on the tower, and PG Wodehouse staging a bunfight in
the crypt).
No, what really
dismays me is the unashamed privilege of folks sending their sons to Eton and
Balliol as a matter of course; their involvement in English fascism (Nigel
Nicholson acknowledges his father played a major role in Moseley’s New Party);
their avowed racism and antisemitism; and their snobbery. Both Vita and Harold,
we’re told, believed they belonged to a superior class of people. Set all that
against the scandals the Sackvilles were involved in, and some pretty low
comments are begged. As I said before, I really don’t wish to be judgemental,
but there is such hypocrisy here. For example, when Vita’s grandfather (the second
Lord Sackville) was appointed British ambassador in Washington, he took his
illegitimate daughter Victoria with him as hostess. Pepita, his Spanish gypsy
mistress, had died after bearing him five children. The fact she charmed the
American public and was very successful is a) not insignificant and b) a slap
in the face of Victorian values! But hey, isn’t it about time I ceased to be
amazed how the British ruling class manage to get away with everything?
There has been a lot of controversy recently about press interest in the lives of famous people, but the 1910 Sackville legitimacy case, followed by the Scott inheritance case in 1913, were far more sensational than Meghan and Harry’s court cases of today. I don’t think Vita Sackville-West’s later career as a novelist was harmed by the publicity these scandals generated; nor the way press scrutiny of their private lives continued: there is, as the trite saying goes, no such thing as bad publicity. This book merely reinforces the suspicion that success in writing is at least as much down to hype as the writers’ efforts.
Sometime in the mid-Seventies, my father put up a shed in the garden of the house he built in Anglesey. The roof and the floorboards were made of Canadian pitch pine planks, which had been salvaged from the cladding of cranes at Liverpool docks. I don't know which dock they came from, but his brother Allan had been a crane driver for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. The tip-off probably came from him. Anyhow, Dad swore by these resin rich planks - according to him they'd last a hundred years; and it's entirely possible they did. The shed wasn't pulled down until 2018, and they were still going strong. Who knows if someone else didn't salvage them from there.
I introduce this short review of Masefield's “The Wanderer of Liverpool” - a book about a sailing ship – with this anecdote because of the possibility that those very planks are mentioned within its pages. Masefield, who these days is mostly remembered as a poet, was the the author of the lyrics to, “I must go down to the sea again”, a song I heard Bryn Terfel sing on the radio only the other day. “The Wanderer of Liverpool” contains a lot of verse, too; quite a few photographs, a voyage-by-voyage account of the ship's personnel, cargoes and itineraries, many yarns (some perhaps truer than others), and the story of how this magnificent sailing vessel came to be built.
Ship building on the Mersey still flourished over the water when liverpool's Pier Head was built. My father worked at the Cammell Lairds yard at Birkenhead. Fitting out the captain's cabin on the submarine HMS Conqueror was one of the many jobs he did on his two stints there. The Wanderer was a four-masted barque built during the 1890-92 slump. At about 3,000 tonnes, she was a huge vessel, one of the biggest of her class. The owners, the builders (who had kept workers on when there was no other work for the yard) operated her on round the world routes. This meant she was often seen in Shanghai and San Francisco, mostly crossing from the South Atlantic round the Cape of Good Hope into the Pacific and then riding the Trade Winds favoured by the even larger Windjammers. She was graceful on the High Seas, but not good at inshore sailing; frequently she would be tugged by paddle steamers in and out of harbour, and sometimes even between Liverpool and ports in Northern Europe.
I don't know how much interest the general reader would take in a maritime pot-pourri such as this, but I found it rewarding on many levels. The verses are neither Masefield's most inspired nor polished, but they read easily, belonging to an era when poetry didn't have to be all high-fallutin', vain and arcane. The salt-crusted tales recorded here, whether in tum-te-tum or straight-talking prose, collect together a sort of legend. There's tragedy, some humour, lots of action, and the account I've referred to above. On one occasion, The Wanderer, having discharged her cargo at San Francisco, moved up the coast to be loaded with timber. Such was the quality of the wood she brought home with her that year, that three decades later Liverpool people were still talking about it. I can't help wondering if any of those planks found their way - via six or seven decades cladding dock cranes - into my dad's garden shed?
By
W Somerset Maugham
Discounting the secret agent Reilly (who was no more British than Joseph Conrad was a Dutchman), readers of Willie Maugham’s short stories will know that Ashenden - the author-narrator of “Cakes and Ale” - was the original, urbane James Bond. Not that Willie's dispatch to Russia by the UK Government in the early days of the Kerensky Revolution would have any bearing on the novel he would subtitle, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard”. With “Cakes and Ale” all intrigue is centred on domestic arrangements, so that every “Secret” with the designation “Top” would have a moral rather than a political significance. On its surface, the story has as much to do with class and status snobbery as anything else; Ashenden keeping his wartime exploits to himself while, little by little, revealing the details of historic, illicit love. The way the truth comes to light, and whom is taken into his confidence (the reader), lies the substance of the plot. This gives the book a whodunit quality, though the only crimes committed between its sheets are petty, outmoded, and terribly British.
Three of the central characters, including Ashenden himself, are successful fiction hounds. Edward Driffield, the oldest, has not long died when Alroy Kear decides to take a professional interest in his legacy. But it's Ashenden, who spent periods of his youth in the old man’s company, that has the beans. How should he spill them when he knows the truth may neither be understood or accepted? Throughout the book, a sense of what is appropriate dominates everyone’s behaviour; apart from Rosie Driffield, who at one point is described as a white “nigger”. Shocked and surprised, it later struck me how the literal meaning of the N word could explain her otherness from everyone else; especially since not much else is offered. Her colouring is frequently described as silver and gold; and even if her nose is somewhat broad, she is presented as a great, if slightly unconventional, Victorian beauty. Most of the action takes place around the period the book was published – 1930 – though the relevant chapters are set in the final years of the nineteenth century: the so-called “gay nineties”, when Ashenden was a youngster out (as John Cleese might have put it) to break his duck, and when Ted Driffield was struggling through the early, unrecognised phase of his writing career.
The book’s only moderately longer than a novella, and came out at the end of a decade when Maughan wrote mainly short fiction. He says himself in the forward that it was originally conceived as a short story. Also, it's distinguished from the other Ashenden pieces by its first person narration. In this context, several times our host breaks off to discuss, amongst other things, the appreciation of beauty (picking a bone with Keats there); and the facetious notion that all creative writing should be handed over to members of an otherwise abolished House of Lords! Another time – just as it’s touch and go if a sex scene is about to light up the page - Maugham shunts the wide-eyed reader off into a discussion of first person narrative in fiction, and whether certain critics are right to deplore it. Actually this works rather well, even while it reeks of authorial manipulation. Of his own books, the author is said to have liked “Cakes and Ale” the most. Perhaps he wrote it in riposte to those very critics as much as anything else.
Strong female characters keep the balance of the sexes fair-to-middling, while the upstairs-downstairs to-ing and fro-ing is quite unforced. Ashenden’s own snobbery runs riot for much of the time, and he hides in plain sight the true extent to which his contact with landladies, domestic servants and the Driffields frees up his coming of age. Maugham can’t paint a full impression of himself in Ashenden when his own early books were closer to Driffield’s imaginary works. But, of course, the real skeleton in the closet was Willie’s “three-quarters” homosexuality. One day, I wonder, will the 007 franchise offer up a gay secret agent who dabbles in fiction and the theatre? Willie's books were instrumental in forcing the honest portrayal of heterosexual relationships into the mainstream. But there is also something to be said for the revels of a clandestine world that between-the-wars homoeroticism enjoyed. Noel Coward, a junior contemporary, also shunned the opportunity to “come out” when the coast was clear. Literally no one broke ranks and did the dirty on themselves or any of their mates. Ashenden's revelations here, though they break his word of honour to Alroy Kear, are a pretty poor substitute for that.
On the whole, “Cakes and Ale” is a steady - if not staid - tricycle ride through the calmer days of a tumultuous era. As a read, it's hardly great, but I shouldn't say bad, value.
It's probably best if I disclose from the outset that I only read this book after wondering why Catherine Morland – the self professed heroine of Northanger Abbey - was reading it.
Published in four volumes, 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho was Ann Radcliffe's fourth and best - as far as posterity goes - known novel. The 19 year-old Jane Austen would have read it, along with thousands of other young women (and not a few men) to bask in Radcliffe's brand of Gothic romance. Set in Southern France and Northern Italy during the late Renaissance, it predated the pre-Raphaelite craze by a good fifty years. But surely something in this landscape-driven tale from the dying age of chivalry helped to touch off the Victorian obsession with eerie mountains where adventurers roamed, troubadours mused, evil aristos held maidens captive and ruthless banditti preyed? Ms Austen, herself an aspiring writer of romances, would heavily reference the book in her own first completed novel. Two hundred years on, the question must be, how does Udolpho - like Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice - stand up as literature?
It was well into the Twentieth Century before Gothic began to be taken seriously by bigwigs of high end lit-crit. Even in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen appears to dismiss Udolpho - and half a dozen other “horrid” books – as dangerous twaddle. The putative heroine, Cartherine Morland admitting she has let her imagination run away with her over the death of General Tilney's wife, seems to accept the folly of taking Udolpho seriously, or too literally. And yet to cite another novel as extensively as all that must be to pay tribute, else her own would be in denial over the value of its source material. Even the title - Northanger Abbey – rings up two tokens of horror. But this still leaves Udolpho flogging itself on queer street.
In her day, Ann Radcliffe was actually taken a little more seriously than contemporary purveyors of Gothic writing, because in the closing pages she would reveal the sources of the mysteries that had baffled her characters. By the end of Udolpho, all traces of supernatural phenomena have been cleared up by revelations of their human origins. So the moral content of the novel could be read with scientific closure. Her work can be seen as part of the intellectual shift from the Age of Reason – through the French Revolution – to Romanticism's reverence for the chaos of nature.
The novel itself, is not so much marred by its feet of clay as by the level of repetition it contains. Nowadays serials on Netflix tend to include regular “Previously on...” recaps. Radcliffe doesn't so much pad the work out with round-ups, as recycle her own tropes. By vol three, there's a groan of déjà-vu when we find ourselves in yet another rambling old mansion/château with endless spooky corridors, ghostly voices coming through the walls, and music wafting in from moonlit gardens. Older people are either saints or sinners, the young mostly dewy-eyed and apt to burst into tears or hysterics. But her worst trait – as far as the actual storytelling goes - is the deliberate withholding of crucial information with little object other than suspense. In my book, if the main character learns something crucial, there has to be a plot-based reason why the reader shouldn't learn it too.
Clearly landscape fascinated Mrs Radcliffe, but we know her geography of Southern France and Northern Italy was received from maps, travel writers and painters - rather than her own eyes. Writing at a time when the French Revolutionary Wars would have made The Grand Tour virtually impossible, it's reasonable to imagine that here was the perfect substitute. But in her work, we get less identification with landscape than with a Romantic poet such as Wordsworth. Radcliffe employs wilderness more for its theatrical effect. She incorporates rivers, forests and mountains into her writing in the way Botticelli sometimes put them into the background of his pictures. Take this sudden shift in POV,
“St. Foix stopped to observe the picture, which the party in the cave presented, where the elegant form of Blanche was finely contrasted by the majestic figure of the Count, who was seated by her on a rude stone, and each was rendered more impressive by the grotesque habits and strong features of the guides and other attendants, who were in the back ground of the piece. The effect of the light, too, was interesting; on the surrounding figures it threw a strong, though pale gleam, and glittered on their bright arms; while upon the foliage of a gigantic larch, that impended its shade over the cliff above, appeared a red, dusky tint, deepening almost imperceptibly into the blackness of night.”
- The Mysteries of Udolpho, Vol. 3, Chap. 12.
The poems boasted of on the title page - especially those attributed to the heroine Emily St Aubert - are often addresses to abstract objects, Melancholy for instance, or wild beats like The Bat, or creatures of mythology such as The Sea Nymph. They serve as interludes that comment on the situations characters find themselves in. Though their composition appears inopportune at times, there are more integrated examples: those etched on buildings by the chevaliers Valancourt and Du Pont (Emily's rival lovers). Long embedded poems may be a distraction from the narrative flow, but most chapters are headed up with shorter verses by other authors; Shakespeare, for example, and Grey or Goldsmith. Quotations from Macbeth, with its themes of betrayal and the supernatural, are on the money; others may appear less cogent to the general reader. In the end, it's a question of taste; for some, Mrs Radcliffe's efforts at versifying will work as quaint or piquant outbursts of feeling. Other readers will be less favourably impressed by efforts that cannot compare with original works from the troubadours of Languedoc. This is the first quatrain of a 12 stanza poem:
THE GLOW-WORM.
How pleasant is the green-wood’s deep-matted shade
On a mid-summer’s eve, when the fresh rain is o’er;
When the yellow beams slope, and sparkle thro’ the glade,
And swiftly in the thin air the light swallows soar!
- The Mysteries of Udolpho Vol. 1, Chap. 1.
Most modern readers will concur that Emily's frequent recourse to tears becomes annoying, especially when contrasted with her stubborn resistance to the stern but silly Madame Cheron (her aunt), or to the evil Montoni. True, her weeping is several times portrayed as a self indulgence by her father - the saintly St Aubert – who did try and wean her from them. Her tears become less and less creditable, and indeed by the final volume the device is increasingly dropped. And the contrast is even starker when Blanche (who comes in as a sort of stunt double for Emily) is hardly prone to weep, though at one point she is actually captured by banditti and comes within an inch of her life (but I shouldn't say quite what befalls her in the end).
Working class characters like Annette, Ludovico, Dorothée and Old Theresa play important supporting roles. Comic in the case of Annette, who coins a rather garrulous stereotype. Heroic in the case of her lover Ludovico, though why he isn't simply bumped off at the obvious moment is a trifle convenient; I suppose a century of whodunnits leaves his fate too pat for modern fiction. Annette gets ignored during his absence which, given the earlier prominence given to her unjustified fears, just seems careless. When the old housekeeper Theresa tries to bring things down to earth by talking some sense into Emily, she is petulantly rebuffed. But all credit to Radcliffe for introducing a smattering of Upstairs Downstairs to an otherwise tale of intrigue amongst the noblesse and gentry. Perhaps the popularity of Figaro, Papageno and Papagena had reached London by 1794? Jane Austen rarely did so much for the serving class in her novels as the treatment – and the settlements - given here.
Valancourt's generosity does him no harm in the first two vols, but his proud inability to defend himself is the principal source of Emily's distress in the latter part of the novel. This device, and Radcliffe's frequent deployment of non-disclosure are the plot's main weaknesses. The slow pace seems to beg the reader's indulgence, which no doubt was welcome enough to contemporaries with long evenings to get through. But the sudden, unexpected appearances of Valancourt are repeated so frequently they become reassuringly predictable. It is as though a hunting horn is blown and, two pages later, the hero is back on stage. Applauded, no doubt, by those being read to in the salon, but cloying to the modern reader.
Is Udolpho, with its fairy tale castles in the mountains, its offstage swashbuckling, and faux fantasy dreamscape just a curio? I'm pretty sure few modern readers will want to plough through its four volumes, and not a few of those that try will give up before the end. But as a piece in the great jigsaw puzzle of the English Novel (or The Novel in English), it's a worthy go-to. Compared to Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (see below), where a star-crossed girl becomes the anti-heroine, it is pretty tame. But wildness needs to grow before it can be tamed. Herein lies some of the source material that fuelled early Romanticism.
The idea of woman as hero – as heroine – is central to most of the early Gothic novels. But is this simply because most were written by women? The world at the turn of the nineteenth century was a time when girls had little to look forward to besides marriage, and thereafter a legal status as chattels of their husbands. Becoming a successful novelist, and therefore earning a private income, was one of the few alternatives open to women. In Udolpho, the fate of Madame Cheron is held up as an example of what could happened in a bad marriage; and Emily's fortunes are literally central to the plot. It's not at all clear if Jane Austen's assertion of women's choice in Northanger Abbey is so very different from Emily's in Udolpho. Both books seek to circumvent male dominance by insisting on superior moral standards; Valancourt's in Udolpho and General Tilney's son Henry in Northanger Abbey.
What distinguishes Jane Austen's work is the respective writers' abilities as artists. Whereas the Radcliffe text diverges into landscape and sub-Romantic poetry, geography is deployed much more subtly by Austen. Also she uses close first person much more effectively and consistently. Radcliffe has the habit of switching to an unexpected POV - as in the St Foix passage quoted above. Austen, moreover, doesn't employ non-disclosure to manage effective turns of plot. It's perhaps because Austen chooses to deal with her own time and place rather than a fantastic Other that the reader becomes more engaged in the heroine's struggles. But as an exercise in what can be done with guidebooks, maps and a prints of Old Masters - the landscapes of Udolpho are worthy examples of the Sunday painter's oeuvre!
by Jane Austen
In 1817, when Northanger Abbey was finally published, writing inside the title page “...thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes...“ Jane Austen had only months to live. It was her first full length work, and should have been the first to be published. Instead of which, it became more or less her last. Three decades of continual warfare had raged back and forth across Europe in the years from the novel's conception to its presentation to the public. And Ms. Austen had gone from being the seventeen-year-old heroine of her own story, to the confirmed spinster, mother not to a brood of soon-to-be orphans, but of six-point-five mature love stories that have resonated down the years.
Catherine Morland is the seventeen-year-old heroine of a novel widely said to satirise the Gothic genre. I don't mean to belittle other commentators' opinions, but that seems a somewhat narrow view of the novel's place in the canon. Yes, Mrs Radcliffe's “Mysteries of Udolpho” has a role in the story; it sets up Catherine's romantic view of old buildings, and her fantastic suspicions around the death of General Tilney's wife. But Catherine's situation, either in the leisured, fashionable atmosphere of Bath, or as a guest in the ancient Abbey of Northanger, bear only superficial resemblance to Emily St Aubrey's sojourns in Venice or her incarceration at the castle of Udolpho. I think the point Ms Austen is making is that a young woman's romantic struggles do not need to be set off by fantastical Botticelli landscapes. Nor is it necessary to have her be the victim of dastardly aristocrats or mountain bandits. Nevertheless, Catherine's thinking of herself as a heroine, is not so far-fetched, as in several senses this is what she actually she is.
As a young woman, the narrator tells us, society – embodied in the world of the novel – has to wait for a man to fall for her. But holding out for Henry Tilney, the young vicar she has fallen for almost from the moment they have met, is genre-breaking heroism. And her forbearance of the treatment she receives at the General's hands is another kind of social heroism. It's her moral heroism, in fact, that gives her an edge over the untrustworthy Isabella Thorpe; that enables her to endure the silliness of Mrs Allen without ever resorting to unkindness; and the admiration of Eleanor Tilney makes her yet another kind of hero, boosting the profile of a charming but otherwise low-prospects debutante.
Another reason for refusing to class Northanger Abbey as a genre-bashing cheap-shot is: herein lies many of the prime elements of Austen's greatest work. The sassy but reserved heroine. The hard-to-get play of the mark. Sudden shifts of location that drag people in or out of comfort zones; a twist of plot that creeps up like deja-vu. A flirting with comedy that often stoops, but never too low, and isn't shy of social commentary. The underlying theme of a lower female status set against male coquetry and/or bigotry. And when you take its originally intended publication date into account – 1803 – can it really be said that the Gothic novel, which still had a very long way to go, was even ripe for parody?
Yes, as someone obsessed from an early age with making a career in writing, and clearly someone who enjoyed literature enough to have read and appreciated the work of Mrs Radcliffe and Charlotte Dacre1, I don't get any sense of Austen wanting to throw away her first publication on a sly dig, no matter how well written it was. In 1817, whereas the Gothic novel had many uncharted peaks and troughs still to go – Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein” would not be published until the next year, and it would be decades before an eager public had Edgar Allen Poe or Bram Stoker to devour - the human landscape of Jane Austen's fiction had really only just been discovered.
1 See my review of Zofloya below
The story of The Doctor's Family is a short novel1 in this volume, which also contains two other fairly brief accounts of The Executor and The Rector. They're all components in Margaret Oliphant's Carlingford series, which I suppose might be a sort of saga, though not in a consecutive way, because (as in this one volume) intertwined relationships are played out from different points of view; though the author's canny, Presbyterian viewpoint seems to remain the same. Oliphant, in these stories at least, is neither a satirist, a moralist, nor a romantic. I would classify her as a realist that tends to see the comic/ironic side of life, rather than dwell on its tragedies. Though she does dwell, drawing out her action somewhat, and I think betraying the writer-for-money she reputedly was for most of her life. But the realism is heartfelt, especially when compared to some of her contemporaries I've read. Without the send-up of lawyers, doctors and priests, or the violin accompaniment to poverty and bereavement that you get with other writers, here there are portraits of real middle-class struggles in mid-Victorian times. True, with a Dickens you can often smell the food and drink, see the tumult of roads and gatherings, and hear the different voices of police and thieves. But with Oliphant - to a background of New Town optimism - there's self-delusion, then the cold draft of disappointment, followed by anger or frustration and – in two out of the three tales here – a rather narrow triumph. Plus there's no authorial, auto-backslapping on the final pages. I'd like to try one of her full length novels and see if the fried porridge viewpoint really pans out. If it does, Oliphant should be more read, despite the plethora of her lesser opus.
1 I'm not classing The Doctor's Family as a novella, though if were titled “Nettie's Turn” or some such epithet I might have.
I'm tempted to cry, He's done it again! - except that in this, the second of the John Fowles novels I've read so far, the number of twists and turns is far less than he pulls off in The Magus. The method here is somewhat different, too: instead of the Fifties set against an ancient background, here we have a Victorian drama deconstructed before our very eyes. That's not to say Fowles doesn't keep us guessing right up to the last minute, but this is a story that comes to an end... without really ending. No spoilers, of course, but it's fair to say that not everyone will appreciate the approach - which skillfully veers from straight narrative to post-modernist dialecticism; and which may, before you reach the last page, have you reconciled to the let-down, or screaming at the author's smart-arsed cop-out. Days away from letting book go, I'm still bewitched by the parallel universe he creates, while kicking impotently against all the follies he has laid on.
Just as The Magus steeped us in a pot-pourri of archaeology, magick, psychology and sexual liberation; here we have late Chartism, early Marxism, a society struggling with the determinisms of Malthus, palaeontology and poetry (lashings of that), plus the heights (or depths) of prudery – when the Victorians were at the volta or rebound between the excesses of Regency and Gay Nineties. As well as ideas, we also have landscape; perhaps not quite so important here as in the to-ing and fro-ing between London and the Greek island of Spetses). London in the late 1860s is portrayed in unromantic verisimilitude. But mostly we're in Dorset, in Lyme Regis – on the Jurassic Coast – at The Cobb, made famous from the film of this very book, but also featured in Jane Austen's Persuasion: that ancient breakwater, and location of the opening chapter.
On one level, the book is another will-she, won't-she saga, with a weak/strong male character lead. Here, though, we're in third person, and the unfaithfulness of the narrative is transferred to authorial dialectic. I can't convey how engaging Fowles's writing is. This book was very hard to put down; and it being on the short side (though not brief in itself), it's more of an extended fairground ride than a full series of The Island (not that I have the faintest idea what I'm talking about there). It got my heart pumping plenty. If that's one of the thing you might wish for in a book, then start scouring.
In terms of character and trope, there are deliberate references to Dickens and other Victorian writers (and artists); plus regular quotations from Marx and a repertory company of Victorian poets. I wondered if Fowles hadn't just left these behind from his research notes, as they do hold up the narration; whereas his authorial interventions do not. Very occasionally, this master of the English language does come up with sentences that threw me. The opening lines of chapter seven pulled me up when I first read them, and having just re-read them, I'm afraid I must beg my readers (if I have any readers AT ALL) to see if they agree,
“That morning, when Sam drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs Poulteney—then still audibly asleep—would have wished paradise to flood in upon her, after a suitable solemn pause, when she died.”
Charles is the central character, Ernestina's 32 year-old fiancé, whereas Mrs Poulteney is the stock Lady Bracknell-type female ogre. I had to read this four times before I was satisfied that my overall first impression HAD been correct, despite intimations to the contrary (ie – How come Charles pictures – and imagines snoring – Mrs Poultney in bed? Why do I need to know – mid sentence - that the horrible old lady would experience “a solemn pause” at the moment of her death? And why, as I read the final clause of the sentence, am I sent dizzying back to the beginning, wondering what exactly is going on?
It may may seem churlish (or dopey) of me to have picked this out when the rest of the book is so polished. I should say that the sentence did work on my fourth reading, and was fully in keeping with the story and what we know of the character. There's even a reprise of Mrs Poulteney's death in chapter forty-four, when, like in the jokes we used to tell as children (I suppose they were popular in the 60s), she goes up to the Pearly Gates and gets her just reward. But I also think Fowles had feet of clay, while his editors may have been a tad too reverential.
Now Sam, the Dickensian manservant who draws the curtains above, is the reconstructed corollary of Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers. So, don't expect him to follow his master to prison, or wherever it is Charles Smithson is headed. Not that all the tropes of what Oscar Wilde referred to as The English Novel are here reversed. What tends to happen is that the squalor of human folly is gone into somewhat, rather than glossed over, parodied or sentimentalised. There's a bit of sex, too, though nothing approaching the erotic – apart from one passage completely lifted from a tome of eighteenth century gallantry (which by Victorian times could surely have only been sold under the counter?). Picture a truncated David Copperfield (without Micawber or Heep), a Betsy Trotwood that would scratch the hero's eyes out, if she could) plus a few brothel scenes thrown in between discussions of Marx and Darwin.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is, in fact, a riposte to the overweight, prudish, autobackslapping bildungsroman that dominated The English Novel for two centuries. I'm latterly becoming a John Fowles fan. I just hope the third of his novels I get to read isn't a bit of a let down. The Collector looks likely.
The Magus
by John Fowles
A Brit who teaches English as a foreign language, who has lived for almost three decades within a few hours drive of the Aegean, who owns a small piece of a Greek island with an old house that overlooks the sea, I am surprised this book has eluded me until now. Having learned of it only a year ago, and finding it in the Bold Street Oxfam shop in Liverpool last year, I have waited till now, in the midst of the Corona lockdown, for the opportunity to read it without interruption. I am glad to say, the wait was worthwhile; and the book, far from being the let-down I had feared, has been an immense pleasure, as well as disturbing, and has left me feeling more than slightly wretched now that it's all over.
Although
it is not over, the aftertaste lingers and leaches into just about
everything I see and touch. “An astonishing achievement” declares
Anthony Burgess on the pale back cover. And I've just remembered, I
left off reading the author's Foreward. Better do that now!
There's
always been a Little Sixties lurking behind the Fifties, somewhere
between the first Goon Show on BBC's Home Service and Tony's
Hancock's film The Rebel. Peopled by misfits The War had failed to
iron out, Beatnics (not those Kerouakian road runners), the sometimes
bearded, sometimes sandalled, sort of Angry Young Mensch, and Wimmin
in slinky sweaters, tweed skirts, bare white legs and pumps. I
suppose Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath would do as facsimiles, for want
of an image to Google. This book, it seems to me, is the romance of
the early swingers. At one point, very near the end of this long
book, its unheroic narrator, Nicholas Urfe, tell us, “...London, a
city with more eager girls per acre than any other in Europe,
prettier girls, droves of restless girls who came to London to be
stolen, stripped, to wake up one morning in a stranger's
bed...”
It's
difficult to write one's impressions of The Magus without spoilers. I
can just front load the mix you're in for: Greek Islands (and Athens)
before the foreign tourist boom, Crowleyesque Magick, Sex (somewhat
graphic and prolonged, but neither crude nor gratuitous), Religion,
Nazi wartime atrocities (Capt. Corelli's Mandolin was first strummed
here, sorry, Mr de Bernières, but Johnnie Fowles got there long
afore Ye), detective work, psychology/psychiatry, pre-Python
Oxbridge, to mention just the obvious. It is a long novel, Dickensian
in scope, but tight enough still to be a Bildungsroman. The writing
does not suffer from being in the first person. Yea, the narrator is
unreliable, but consistently so. There are words you're going to have
to look up (unless you're a walking dictionary). I usually don't
bother because such things go in one side of my head and out the
other. But “osculation” got to me, and it must have got to him
too, as he boomeranged back to it later in the book. Not occasionally
Nicholas is a bit too clever for someone who only got a third at
Oxford. That's Maggie Thatcher territory, no? And you do have to
admire his amateur sleuthing (puts Dan Brown's characters to shame,
anyroad). Saying much more might give away elements of plot.
Just
this. It used to be acceptable to talk about black people as negroes,
even if you weren't a racist. However, in Fowles's 1977 revision of
the text (the one I have just read), he continues to have his
narrator do so without the least shame. This means it's impossible to
view the character of Joe through Nicholas's eyes without cringing.
To a large extent the novel relies on the narrator's barefaced
reaction to his shaming and therefore I can see why (even if it was
toned down from the 1966 original text) it was still there after
civil rights became mainstream. Similarly, and if possibly even more
shocking, is the idea that a man should slap a 'hysterical' woman in
the face. This happens no less than three times in the book. The
third time really upset me. Which is ridiculous, as it is only a work
of fiction. But it seems to me that the reader who isn't shocked by
this, and by some other scenes, would be complicit in them.
Please,
don't think that this isn't a gorgeous work of fiction set in
wonderfully familiar world, at least to me it is (and I'm one who's
hardly had anything to do with the occult). Even the idea that a
black/white magician should control peoples' lives in this way is no
stranger than what the NXIVM organisation has done to some people in
the US recently. In fact, The Magus is a major piece of feminist
writing that also manages to nail some common strains of racism. But
most of all it's deeply moving novel – the author himself shrewdly
describes it as adolescent in his Foreward! - and by all that's God,
I wish I'd read it forty odd years ago. If it's already on your list,
for your own sake don't put it off much longer!
Zofloya
by Charlotte Dacre
I
don't generally do Gothic as a genre. Basically, I don't do genres;
but I will sometimes try to fill a gap in my reading, especially to
rebalance a race or gender bias. Frankenstein was written by a woman,
Mary Shelley (married to the better-known Romantic and protest poet).
Charlotte Dacre was another of those, like Jane Austen, who managed
to penetrate the male dominated literary world with innovative
popular fiction. At this time, the ground rules for Gothic were still
being laid. Venice and the mountains of northern Italy were - it
seems - popular locations. Also common was the era, which would
become known as PreRaphaelite by British painters later in the
nineteenth century. Zofloya has shades of Shakespeare's Othello, if
that means anything to you. But here the eponymous Moor doesn't even
appear until about half way through. Actually, the book is about
Victoria, a young women consumed (as they say) by the twin passions
of love and revenge.
Wronged
at an early age by a wayward mother, Victoria's seduction by a
nobleman is delayed while her father is murdered and she is locked up
in a castle and guarded by a crone. Escaping, she returns to the
watery city to become concubine of Il Conte Berenza, but can never be
satisfied, even when married to her lover. She soon has eyes for his
younger brother, and begins to poison the count. Meanwhile, Zofloya,
ostensibly the servant of Henriquez (the brother) begins to assist
and even to provoke her crimes.
There
is also a sub-plot in which Leonardo, Victoria's estranged brother,
embarks (as they say) on the life of a brigand. If it sounds like the
plot of an opera by Donizetti, you wouldn't be too far out. But
Zofloya is not a tragedy, because there is no attempt at catharsis.
Evil is embodied here, though the shadowy figure of Zofloya himself
may even be a figment of Victoria's imagination (it seems to me) as
he has no role other than as her guide on the long pathway down into
hell. Perhaps it is an unholy alliance of Wagner with the Italians he
was trying to better with all his Teutonic pseudo-mythologising. But
Charlotte Dacre was writing in the first decade of the century, while
the Napoleonic Wars were still raging, and therein, I think, lies the
book's sparkle. With the pure evil redolent of a Lady Macbeth,
Victoria challenges the stereotype of female victimhood, and though
Zofloya is nominally male, he has none of the urbanity of a
Mephistopheles. His promises are pure incitement and his victim only
gets a fleeting enjoyment of them. There are no years of grace before
the tab has to be paid. Victoria's slide is relentless as well as
inevitable.
The
considerable amount of sex (all implied, nothing smutty, of course)
raises the status if not the moral strength of Victoria's feelings.
She will have what she wants and at all costs. As an anti-heroine ,
she is quite supreme; and I suspect was a role model for many
aspiring Becky Sharps in the early Victorian era. I suspect the book
was considered not nice, and suitable reading only for young women
and men in secret, as it were.
This
was a gap on my shelves, and as with the filling of all such, its
acquisition has widened the gulf. In other words, I shall read a bit
more of this steamy stuff as and when Opportunity presents.
Unfaithful Music
by Elvis Costello
Spoiler:
this isn’t much of a book review.
Trying
to remember how many Elvis Costello records I’ve owned over the
years, but probably three of us pooled our quids to buy his first. I
suppose Chris got in to see him at one of those early Clash concerts
that didn’t get cancelled; so when the album – My Aim Is True -
came out, he, Westy and I trudged up to this basement record emporium
off Tottenham Court Road (at the time, we were living in the last bit
of Lambeth Walk). I’d only heard him on John Peel. Or had I? Heard
OF him, maybe? We walked down these grotty carpet steps into the low
ceilinged fluorescent lit gaff, and there was this life-size
cardboard cutout of a Buddy Holly clone in a chintzy pink showbiz
jacket with the rolled black collar. Jeez, he was almost Butlins.
Where did they get those brothel creepers that you never saw in any
shop? Or were they shiny Chelsea boots? It’s too long ago to
remember anything for certain…
The
music wasn’t exactly punk, and coming out of my brother and Westy’s
Chad Valley stereo it couldna sounded half as good as it shoulda, but
this was something almost as original. For godsake, it was made up of
musical references, I mean like TS Eliot tinkling the keys on acid.
It was tuneful, it had beat, it was clever. And there was a mystery
to it, like it wozn just full of insane pogos, it was from outta
space, like Telstar, or I dunno, somewhere between The Twist and
Strictly Limbo.
By
the time the third album came out, my mind was otherwise engaged. I
couldn’t have told you what it was called, though I still heard him
on our stereo, I think sometimes he’d be on TV, but those were my
Peace Movement years and I didn’t buy records, or much of anything
else you could get at the shops. By 1981, I didn’t have access to a
record player anymore, not even someone else’s. It wasn’t until
1988 that I owned a box and Dozy gave me some tapes he’d made, one
with the album Spike on it plus extra tracks. Hands up, I didn’t
buy that one. I didn’t have any money at all by then, I spent
literally half the Eighties campaigning against The Bomb. So, anyway,
that’s when I got back into his sound, briefly, and I saw him live
again at Glastonbury.
Again?
I forgot to mention at Brockwell Park. This was the Rock Against
Racism rally in 1978. Chris, Westy and I, along with Irene Kappes and
Dave Parry, all joined the march at the corner of Brixton and Vassal.
When he came on with The Attractions he taunted the crowd, which I
thought was a bit of a cheek. Everyone was doing their bit, but we
weren’t militant enough for him, not making enough noise. I got the
feeling he wanted his money’s worth out of us. Anyroad, they got
through about fifteen songs in as many minutes in a set that was,
yeah, it was worth the march. I wasn’t at Victoria Park (Chris
was), but let’s face it, both Messrs. Strummer and Costello did
well out of their campaign appearances. And all this useless
protesting was before Thatcher got in, when the shit really hit the
fans. In those times, we used to spend a good third of our incomes on
vinyl. Whenever I got a day’s overtime, I’d celebrate by blowing
the proceeds on yet another piece of the infinite jigsaw collection.
I even paid good money for Between The Buttons, FGS! I forgot to
mention that no matter what our interests were, as creatures of the
70s, we just lived for music.
Of
course, Costello featured heavily on the tapes Dave and I took
hitching to the South of France that year.
By
the Noughties, I wasn’t listening much to the Armadillo regular who
had called Chris by name. There was just Punch the Clock, which I’d
bought in Riyadh; and the Glastonbury stage tapes, then still at my
parents’ house on Anglesey (even now they’re in the loft here).
Later on, deciding to catch up, I bought three albums and gave them a
listen. I enjoyed Brutal Youth and the Kojak Variety (though I didn’t
quite get it, still don’t); but I’m afraid Momofuku left me with
sore ears. The Imposters seemed just that. I thought, the guy should
be doing something different by now. I had no idea he did that very
thing with the Brodsky Quartet. And I had no idea of his Johnny Cash
connection, or that he’d insulted black people during a spat with
Steven Stills back in 1978. Or maybe I had, and then just forgot.
That’s how much of a true fan I’ve been.
Spike
will remain for me his masterpiece, though even in the day it felt
somewhat nostalgic. As to his book... You wanna review? Like all the
above, it’s one big spoiler.
Oh,
yeah, for devotees, there’s a ton of reminiscing here, and they’ll
surely warm to every year of this man’s progress. That is if they
can work out which year he’s on about, because he uses what becomes
an annoying trick of beginning each section with an out-of-sequence
scene. And they shouldn’t expect a linear approach, as the book
isn’t organised so. They’ll still be learning things from his
early life all the way through, and what he was up to at the time of
writing creeps in too. I seem to remember being told we were going to
find out what “a butterfly feeds on a dead monkeys hand” means.
Well I didn’t. But “little pitchers have big ears” I suppose.
And Jesus wept. Also, is McManus a frustrated short story teller? I
guess there’s always a paperback writer hanging about. At least he
doesn’t treat us to his watercolours, but he could have shown his
collection of guitars (maybe he doesn’t have more than the
one?).
The
cast, of course, runs into hundreds (not thousands, thank god). I
didn’t realise what a big influence Van the Man was on him (after
reading this, of course, I can actually hear it); but I did know he
was a regular walk-on for This is Your Life, as I have watched TV
from time to time. I never requested him to sing about Harry and Vera
(my parents). He’s always seemed like some extremely distant
cousin, talented but a Smart Alec with London ways. Chris and Gail,
of course, once went all the way up to see him play The Glasgow
Empire on a Saturday night; stayed in a hotel. See Chris, despite
himself, was a fan. I almost had Veronica played at Mum's funeral
last Monday. In the end it was Brian Ferry's version of These Foolish
Things, and Al Bowly's The Very Thought of You coming through on
Zoom. (30/04/2020)
It must have started out with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in the year 2000, I think the first big budget stars-in-sandals blockbuster since Spartacus, followed up by the television series, Rome. CGI lent authenticity, and classical scholars provided the blend of myth and historicity that could spin endless variations of plot. The BBC’s I-I-I-I, Claudius doesn’t count, nor Jarman’s Sebastiane; though the former was based on Robert Graves’s books, and the latter a cult movie on the gay S&M scene. I mean, for screen based entertainment to have sparked the popular craze for literary facts and fantasies Romano-Greek.
Whatever the publishers’ tipping point, the Noughties spawned enough classical themed best sellers to have Waterstone’s include a tome that should have been an obscure academic work in its 3-for-2 offers. Not that Rubicon is at all dull and dusty. It’s almost as well written, and just as neatly plotted as the Graves novels. Having read and reviewed another decent beneficiary of the screen versions – Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar (originally a military history title) – I was happy to skip through Tom Holland’a book in a matter of days. It is truly, as McKewan points out on the front cover, a fairly obsessive read. Rewarding, too. I now see the dictators Sulla and Julius Caesar (whose exploits more or less top and tail the period in question) in a more memorable light. Both crossed the Rubicon by seizing power and suspending the ancient democracy that distinguished Rome from its neighbours. There’s a huge contrast, however, between Sulla’s almost immediate retirement from office – who’s ever heard of a Mussolini winning power and then handing it back to the democrats? Which makes Caesar’s rule - post crossing the eponymous Rubicon - comparable with a Stalin or even a Trump. Indeed, the author starts out with that old chestnut of comparison: ancient Greece & Rome versus modern Europe & America.
And from time to time we are mired in the perennial problem of ancient history: too many names but not enough characters. Perhaps it takes a Shakespeare to make flesh of a Brutus or a Mark Anthony, a Cicero or a Caesar to blow their own trumpet, and a Kenneth Cranham or a Derek Jacobi to give us Pompey Magnus or Claudius? Names like Cato, Curio & Clodius - coming as they do in successive waves - crowd the narrative and suffer from a lack of familiarity. How obsessed with the ancient world do you have to be before you can pick out a Ptolemy or a Leo by their numeral? Or a Brutus or Catullus by their family name? Not even this popular historian has found a satisfying way of dealing with lists of their less well-known characters.
Mr Holland is cogent on his main subjects though, even those unfamiliar to the more dilettantish reader like myself. His principal theme is the decline (“the triumph and tragedy”) of the Roman Republic. His argument, never stated baldly, is that the city state’s growth from regional power into great empire was self-defeating. Romans, who prided themselves on their liberties as free citizens unbeholden to any king, were doomed by their own success. Tyrants had risen and fallen in the past; indeed it was one of the strengths of the Republic that it could resort to tyranny as a short-term expediency, then topple the Dictator when the time was right. But the consolidations of Julius Caesar’s military campaigning left the empire too big and strong for collective rule to work. Also – unike Sulla - he was good enough not to purge his enemies and rivals, nor to plunder their estates. But the spoils of empire were too much even for a Triumvirate to manage. The Roman Empire had to be run from Rome, and only one man could rule from there at any one time.
I think if there isn’t a name for the type of History writing that encompasses this kind of entropy, then it should be messianic. Deliberately mapping out the inevitability that, “Ein Mann wird kommen” goes hand-in-hand with a certain type of aggressive expansion is often subtitled “the Rise of... “ rather than “Tragedy”. But did the Romans really have to give up their precious freedoms in order to rule the world? Mr Holland doesn’t dig too deeply into the change in their psychology that ultimately led ancient Roman aristocrats to accept Julius’s adopted son Octavian as their supreme and perpetual overlord. Nor does he delve into either Julius or Augustus’s deification, but surely part of the evolutionary shift was religious?
Tom Holland’s principle aim seems to have been spinning a credible and informative narrative, and despite the fact that real life events cannot simply be reduced to story telling without losing much of their true character, there is something to be said for enlightening the general reader on this unique period. The last century before the Christian era began was a tumultuous time that had lasting consequences for what we call the West, and ultimately for the rest of the world. Rubicon is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the origins of democracy, and how it may morph into something quite else.
Atatürk
Quiet Days in ClichyTropic of Cancer
Of course, the writer’s obsession with penetration is very old hat these days. And there is no deeper questioning of motives, the hunt is accepted for what it is. Men seek to possess women, and women either go along with them or not. The destructiveness of men's obsessions and impulses is made clear, as is the frequent indifference of their quarry. Women, we are led to believe, may be satisfied by the act itself, which suggests a lack of awareness on Moravia’s part; or else a lingering prudishness. Even women essentially selling their company may be put off by a saucy word or find a piquant tale offensive. Writing in the era of Simone de Beauvoir, he seems to take pretty much the same view of equality over difference. That given a level playing field, as it were (ie, a socialist world), inequalities of the sexes would wither away.
In about half of these stories, older women who have lived off men as mistresses come to an existential crisis. In the others, illness, war or politics has brought matters to a head. Until the final - title story - the reader unfamiliar with Moravia's work might believe him to be a bit of a misogynist. Women's indifference to the outside world seems to be endemic: a silk scarf, a bagful of cash and jewellery, or a pretty house in the countryside their only aim. But Bitter Honeymoon itself pins a notice to the wall. Woke females (to use a 21st century expression) exist. They may be possessed, but only at the risk of betraying a man's secrets. These secrets may be a prurient interest in women as objects of desire and pleasure, a dwindling income, or a fascist past. You may not learn more about women – or men – by reading this stories, but you will get closer to them; and, if such a thing interests you, get to eavesdrop on their intimacies.
Byzantium
(Vol 1)Moby-Dick
Citizens
Mansfield
Park
Persuasion
East
of Eden
Montcalm and Wolfe
By
MyselfPerfume
by
Patrick SüskindOK, that's my backstory.
"Perfume" is a modern folk tale, set in a brilliant evocation of the eighteenth century. I can see how it inspired Andrew Miller's period novels "Ingenious Pain" and "Pure". Though much of the characterisation hardly moves beyond stereotype - for example, the passivity of Grenouille's mother & the two principal victims, even the grandiosity of the Italian perfumier Baldini - that line of criticism misses the point. As a folk tale it only needs to scratch at the surface of character. We are, after all, drawn into the inner life of a mass murderer - albeit a highly unusual one - and it must be hard to read his story without experiencing an unholy degree of empathy. This in itself is an example of the gothic horror the reader experiences.
I have a feeling Süskind will never do anything like this again as his writing bears something of the gentleman amateur (he lectures his reader; and despite being short, the plot has an overlong interlude in a mountain cave; also Grenouille is demurely fantastical - a Mowgli via Tarzan creation, somewhat unselfconsciously drawn.)
An admirable achievement which has launched the careers of many imitators - whilst its aloof author has shunned the temptation to serialise and debase himself.
by
Milan Kundera“Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man”
Sassoon's
fictionalised memoirs pander to a recurring fantasy of the British,
that if only they had opted out of the twentieth century's
catastrophic wars and remained in 'Splendid Isolation'. In 1914, had
they left Germany, Austria, France & Russia to slog it out
without the benefit of their assistance, then the idyllic Edwardian
era would never have ended. The Empire, despite all its titanic
inequalities, would have sailed gloriously on: the great mother ship
of Pax Britannica majestically circling the maelström
at a safe – & profitable – distance
while its rivals pummelled each other into failed states.“Bleak House”
Anyhow, why have I commenced a review of a Dickens novel (this one was originally serialised in 1852) with reference to its latest TV version? The shilling-a-go, 24 page, double-columned tabloids in which “Bleak House” first appeared, were churned out in twenty monthly instalments that sold - to coin a contemporary phrase - like hot cakes. They were the popular entertainment of their day and, alongside Music Hall Theatre, were the Victorian equivalent of telly & netflix. So here's the answer to my rhetorical question. The most significant difference, it seems to me, between the appearance of a new Dickens serial and “Breaking Bad”, “Mad Men” or “Sherlock” (some of my particular favourites within the genre) is that the illustrated chapbooks were the product of a single, unedited mind.
“Bleak House” is a massive undertaking, more than 350,000 words in length (five times longer than “The Great Gatsby”, for example). It has more than twenty characters with major roles in the story. It paints a highly detailed picture of the Holborn area of London, with two other main locations: St Albans and the (ficitonal) Chesney Wold of Lincolnshire. Set in the apotheosis of the post chaise – that magical era just before railways revolutionised travel – it simply reeks of horse sweat and “London Peculiar” (fog). Dickens is not known as a writer of purple patchwork description, though that may only be because his descriptive passages are supreme examples of the form. Time and again he sets the scene in London or in Lincolnshire with pages-long preambles on the state of the weather, the buildings, the neighbourhood & local inhabitants. He does so with what we might be tempted to call cinematic mastery. Had he needed them, he might have employed the painters Constable, Sisley and Whistler to illustrate each of his chapters. But he didn't, his pen being enough to create each “swelling scene”.
The plot is essentially two main stories (one tragic, one romantic) with many digressive, though parallel, tropes leading off into satire, pathos and bathos. Two narrative voices are used: the first being anonymous, the second the testimony of a major character, Esther Summerson. While the Jarndyce & Jarndyce suit provides the mainspring of the novel, Esther's story is the source of most human interest. Of these, there is an unholy host of legal representatives, all seriously flawed; from lawyers, clerks, copywriters and stationers even down to a dealer in waste court papers. At the top of this pile, soaring even above the High Chancellor himself, there is the gaitered, crepuscular figure of Tulkinghorn. William Guppy, a lawyer's clerk who in the course of the story earns his articles and right of practice in court, is one of Dickens' slimiest creations. In love with Esther Summerson, his efforts to win the heart of fair maiden are a proper cringe. But to see him at sup with Tony Jobling & the younger Smallcreep takes him beyond stereotype and deep into character study. This is the power of Dickens' mature work. With interlaced storylines in a landscape peopled by fully-rounded characters, a not-so-little world is created for us.
There are natural faults in the book, exaggeration, for example. John Jarndyce is simply too good to be true, Mr Vholes is one lawyer too many, Richard and Ada's love is simply too ideal, Caddy's father-in-law (Mr Turveydrop senior - the embodiment of Regency deportment) is a trifle too foppish and Richard's fate is really too contrived. Then the verbose self-obsession of many characters does tend to cloy. At times you may wonder why no one is ever told to, “Cut to the chase!” (though Lady Dedlock manages to do so once or twice, hardly without opening her mouth). Above all, the inevitable auto-backslapping (for which expression you might read 'sentimentality') of the writing is what sets it apart as Victorian.
This is not a book, though, that many readers will throw against the wall. It's too heavy, for one thing. It'll break your Kindle, for another. Soon recovering from the above tendencies, the dialogue in particular is always a delight. Inspector Bucket, for example, insisting on using the full title “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet” each time he addresses the peer – often twice in a single paragraph – is voiced in masterly fashion. The speeches of Harold Skimpole, a self-confessed sponge, are often long but never tedious. He will insist on justifying his irresponsible behaviour because his very insistences are their justification. Esther's complaint that her story is too much about herself neatly sidesteps many of the pitfalls of first person narrative. “Bleak House” is a novel you will put down at the end with a bitter-sweet feeling of loss that its world has now left your physical grasp.
A book of this length needs to have plenty of scope, and so I'll summarise some of its many parts before going to say what I think it's really all about. Every level of society is represented: from the gracious, often pompous, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet; down to the fatalistic mud sweeper, “Toughey” Jo. There are fine country and town houses, contrasting with a sordid squatted area of London - “Tom's All Alone” - itself the product of a long, unresolved Chancery case. There is a mysterious death (seemingly from auto-combustion); and a foul murder, followed by a police investigation, false accusation and imprisonment. There is a long, desperate chase through a snowstorm. There is a hero, Mr George, late sergeant of dragoons. There is a ghost that plods the terrace of Chesney Wold (ancient seat of the Dedlocks). There is a mean and snidey moneylender. There are several romances, not many of which end too happily. There is wife abuse, child neglect, and a satire on the misplaced philanthropy attendant on Britain's poor and African colonies. Finally, to round off my incomplete list, there are many comic and bathetic scenes ringing the death-knell of Chancery Law, which even as Dickens was writing was being reformed.
But nor can a novel of this length restrict itself to a single theme, no matter how powerful or relevant it may be. In fact, while the actual case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a somewhat murky device - lurking behind rather than driving the plot - other strands of story unravel with greater clarity. Esther's true status, for instance, is revealed in the middle; the murder is solved long before the book ends, and the chase concludes in good time for the full dossier of loose ends to be judiciously tied up. The perversion of justice, by allowing inheritance and property cases to consume themselves, is not even one of the main themes of "Bleak House". The central ideas explored are: interference in love and family matters, hypocrisy in the neglect of children, the rights and wrongs of charity, the kindling of false hopes and the abuse of sentiment.
I will end by returning to a comparison of “Bleak House” the novel with its own - and other - TV serials, and at my being daunted by the length of the book. Another example, “Games of Thrones” (which I haven't seen or read much of, I should point out) seems to be worth citing. The books on which this serial are based contain more than twice the word count of the Dickens, but are written - the author himself has stated (in The Guardian newspaper, August 13th, 2014) - with TV serialisation in mind. As soon as each manuscript is finished, a thousand and more hands are hired to build the sets, play the parts, wield the cameras and mike booms, digitise the graphics, edit the output and – dare I say it - write in the dialogues. Dickens, with the bare help of a few typesetters, printers and his national distribution network – pulled off this feat with no more than a single graphic artist (Hablot Knight Browne – Phiz) to flesh out his words.
What a mind!
"The Great Gatsby"
by
F. Scott FitzgeraldGeorgian Poetry 1911-12
The
Georgian began - let us picture the prelapsarian idyll on the eve of
World War One - as a collection of earnest young authors whose crisp
verse appeared in slim volumes, often published out of their own
pockets. The looming cataclysm set to destroy their world only
enhances their innocence. For the first Georgians are not famously
inspired by the sinking of the Titanic, by the uprising of labour
(even police forces went on strike in 1912), or by such international
crises as Agadir and the Balkan Wars. They are thought of as a mainly
back-to-nature lot, swains to buxom shepherdesses in plashy meads and
admirers of fauns at their tea-time frolics. Of course, great changes
were in store, but Volume 1, which I feature here, was only the first
of five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh (with the help of Rupert
Brooke & Lascelles Abercrombie) published in the decade from
1912.Laurence Olivier
by
CAESAR (Life of a Colossus)
This life of Julius Caesar was originally published (minus subtitle on jacket) as one of Weidenfield's military history tomes back in 2006. With the success of the BBC/HBO TV series “Rome”, it was quickly repackaged and relaunched to cater for a subsequent surge of interest in the founder of Imperial Rome. Arguably, Julius Caesar has always been ancient history's most popular figure. Even contemporary contenders for that distinction – Cleopatra as beauty/queen, Pompey Magnus as fixer/general, Cicero as writer/orator - were more or less satellites of Gaius Caesar of the Julii. What sets him above the other great figures of the day is the breadth of his achievements from the battlefield, to politics to oratory & authorship. Goldsworthy's biography, we are told, is wider in scope than other accounts. Whereas many books concentrate on Caesar the military tactician, others deal with the rise and fall of his dictatorship. What we have here is a life that claims to combine the man's political career with his military campaigns. But is that enough to pad out a full life?
Most biographies succeed or fail neither by strict adherence to fact, nor by spinning the good yarn. Where an author has to dig out hidden truths, then such facts may have something spicy to add. And where the telling of the tale reflects the legendary nature of its protagonist, then the story may benefit from spicier writing. However, built on original research & good writing, a successful biography needs to give the reader a contextualised portrait that stands up for itself. In the case of a well-known figure from ancient history, especially the most famous of all, the biographer is faced with two main obstacles. First comes the difficulty of finding out anything new. Secondly, when a tale has already been told many times, detaching the plausible from the mythologised takes precedence over constructing new narrative. And to compare the task of writing a biography of Julius Caesar with that of a “colossus” from recent times – say Winston Churchill – an author needs to keep the obscurity of the facts under control while encasing the narrative in familiar terms.
It's interesting that Goldsworthy draws only sparingly on Caesar's own Commentaries, preferring third hand accounts. But surely the reports he sent from the campaigns in Gaul, which were published more of less annually in Rome, would have been widely read at the time? According to Cicero, the author tells us, even tradespeople were fond of reading. Furthermore, Caesar was renowned for the clarity of his writing - making it easier for the less educated, and therefore I think we should simply assume he was a popular author in his lifetime. Although he didn't write an actual autobiography, like Sulla (his predecessor as dictator); I think it's necessary to distinguish between the way Caesar saw himself and the way others recalled him.
At this point, I pray to digress and delve into my own motives for reading a biography of such a remote figure. I often read these accounts of real people's lives as a sort of antidote to my fiction reading. It intrigues me to see how well or ill character is conveyed by words alone; and I qualify that point of view by stating I come from the first generation brought up in the television age (I was born in 1956 and remember watching Popeye cartoons at the age of three or four). The virtual window of inscribed words on a page (whether of clay tablet, papyrus roll, paper book or e-reader screen) was established long before the time of Julius Caesar. By his era, real life & myth had already been recorded in histories or mimicked in prose & verse for more than a thousand years (if we go merely as far back as the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh). Caesar himself made unique contributions to the body of writing, not only by publishing the Commentaries his own accounts of his military campaigns, he was also a poet and critic. Biographers, therefore, are able to use his own writing – and that of contemporaries such as Cicero – to base much of their texts on. We also have two thousand years' worth of commentaries on those commentaries to help us decipher them. When we pick up any book purporting to be a life of Julius Caesar, therefore, I think we are entitled to expect a fine distillation not just of the grapes of truth (if such a phrase may be pardonned) but the true essence of the man.
Goldsworthy's method, especially in the first third of his book, is to extrapolate Caesar's youth and early career from a wide-ranging of reading around the subject. He conjectures on the likely upbringing the boy would have received as a member of an old but somewhat undistinguished branch of the aristocratic Julii clan. He then fills in the backstory of Sulla's dictatorship, which began when Caesar was about fifteen years old. The known facts give the first inklings of the young man's character: his dandiness, defiance and courage. Goldsworthy's caution prevents him from drawing too fine a portrait, though; and when he recounts the young adventurer's expedition to Bythinia (incidentally located in the very part of modern Turkey where I live) he is confronted with one important unknown fact. Did Caesar have a homosexual affair with King Nicomedes? Contemporary sleaze-mongers styled him “Queen of Bythinia” - a sobriquet to dog him for the rest of his life. Though there is no other suggestion that Caesar was anything other than heterosexual (and the prolific seducer of other men's wives), he was still issuing denials of the affair in the year of his assassination, four decades later! In addition to the mocking title of “Queen”, Caesar so distinguished himself in battle against King Nicomedes' enemies (and therefore the enemies of Rome), he was awarded the Civic Crown, the second highest honour possible. These are the facts.
It's all very well to assume Caesar, as a youth, received the same education as every other scion of the rich. That level of research could be summarised without quotes from Suetonius (writing on Caesar himself) or Cicero (writing about another young man). What stands out in Caesar's case? Where precisely were his estates? What local legends survive of him? What is known of the gardens he was to bequeath in his will? I believe there must be things of this kind worthy to include, no matter how dubious the sources may be. After his adopted son Octavian became the Emperor Augustus, Romans worshipped Julius Caesar as a god. Temples were erected to him and all kind of relics would have been dug out and revered. Still being in living memory, anyone who knew him would have contributed to this lore. For comparison, take the life of Jesus Christ, who was far less well-known, yet many little snippets of his family story came out after his death. For example, during the flight to Egypt, Joseph is believed by Coptic Christians to have worked as a carpenter on the Fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo. In the decades after Julius Caesar's death, I am sure thousands of stories were told and many places identified with him. But this book is not based on field research, which is a great shame. We need to know more of his background than just the supposed shape and colour of his toga.
Any narrative that ends in the pre-known sudden death of its protagonist is bound to be overshadowed by a Faustian cloud; especially a text like Goldsworthy's, which blithely reminds us what is going happen to its protagonist every fifty or so pages. It's hard to imagine anyone watching a film like “The Bunker” without the grim knowledge of how it's going to end. Yet it does not follow that as soon as Caesar crossed the little Rubicon river with the XIIIth Legion (an act of civil war), that his committal of treason therefore doomed him. Yet the expression “crossing the Rubicon” equates to “burning one's boats” not to “selling one's soul to the devil”. It is no coincidence that so many of Caesar's words and actions (whether real, invented or associated) have similarly entered international parlance and culture. He may have uttered the phrase, “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (“I have come, I have seen, I have conquered”) on a previous occasion, but when he included it in his Commentary on the Civil War, he was referring to the pushovers of Pontus and not to his greatest victories. A few months later, returning in triumphal to Rome, the expression was written out on placards and carried in procession and was taken to mean ALL of his conquests. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” - the words with which Shakespeare has Mark Anthony open Caesar's funerary ovation - have become the catch-phrase of the populist rabble-rousing politician. Yet Caesar, then dead, remained aloof from the implication. Even the phrase, “Et tu, Brute”, which he himself may not have uttered, remains an expression of the betrayal he obviously felt, and therefore not actually untrue. The myth he built around himself continued to grow long after his death, robbing the assassins of their justification.
Throughout the book, the initials BC are used, which I can't bother objecting to as date marker. The alternative BCE, though it is more politically correct, still refers to the Gregorian calendar (itself a revision of a calendar introduced by Julius Caesar), and anchors history to a Romano-Christian world view. What niggles me is the Faustian countdown effect of constantly referring to these dates. Goldsworthy even talks about BC decades as though they existed. Well, yes, of course ten year periods did exist, but not in the way we count them back from the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. The Romans had their own anno primo (though never fully agreed on) from which Julius Caesar lived in the eighth century. Roman people would refer to a year as “when so-and-so had the consulship”, or “x years after the dictatorship of another so-and-so”, or “when the triumph of whatshisname was held”. By constantly mentioning years in the countdown BC timetable, Goldsworthy alienates us from the mental set of the Romans.
When we get into the middle and latter thirds of the book, the narrative is dominated by Caesar's military campaigns in Gaul and the Civil War, the true military bias of the book is revealed. Generals throughout history (whether of the field or armchair variety) have studied Caesar's campaigns and Napoleon Bonaparte's commentaries on Caesar's set piece battles are mentioned several times. Caesar's luck, especially in recovering from his own mistakes, seems to have been a major feature of the campaigns he waged. Also, his caution, which probably cost him more victories than defeats, preserved him to fight another day. Of life on his campaigns, Goldsworthy gives interesting details. For example, that Caesar would often stay with local Celtic nobles rather than in his own camp. That horses were fed on seaweed when all other fodder was used up. And that barley or even roots were sometimes made into bread for the legionnaires.
What Goldsworthy fails to do, I think because he always prefers to reserve final judgement, is to summarise the main qualities of Caesar's war fighting succinctly enough. And yet, all the evidence is in the book. Firstly, he was a front-line general who shared the risks of combat and thereby gained the devotion of his soldiers. As a youngster, he went East, organised local militias along Roman lines, and achieved modest successes against poorly-led opposition. Later on, in Gaul, again pitching well-trained troops against semi-wild native warriors, time and time again he overcame divided enemies. Finally, forced to fight against Roman legions in the civil war, he lost almost everything - except his head. Against a tired Pompey, the twelve years he had spent leading armies in the field gave him a significant edge and total victory in the end .
It may come as no surprise to the reader that Caesar suffered from epilepsy, and Goldsworthy does mention the bare facts. However, I would expect a biographer worth his salt to have investigated the incidence of epilepsy amongst other figures from military, political and literary history. Then, by comparing Casear's situation with their's, at least we could have had a better idea of what he and his followers were up against.
Nowhere does Goldsworthy make it clear that Caesar's ability to compromise with his fellow Roman aristocrats would, in the end, prove his downfall. His dictatorship was never the tyranny that Sulla's was, he didn't have people rounded up and killed. He wanted genuine reform: land redistribution to the less well off, the prosecution of corrupt officials, the reward of loyalty, even democracy. He was not vengeful, never dismissed the Senate or blocked elections to the various offices of state. Few could have borne him real grudges. It was simple jealousy, with which the Roman republic was rife (and which he practised as much as most), that set men against him. Jealousy was even encouraged by the system. Elections for the highest offices of state being held every year was just incompatible with a growing empire. Having already expanded far beyond the city-state it was founded as, Rome risked the same fate Athens had suffered four centuries before. An empire needs both strong central AND devolved local government. When appointments were made on a yearly basis and new governors took months to arrive at their territories, there was bound to be discontinuity and corruption. As long as men were able to fight amongst themselves for favours, they would do so to the detriment of the common good.
"This Side Of Paradise"
Visits to Monasteries in the Levant
The publication of Curzon's book in 1849, coming five years on the heels of Kinglake's 'Eothen', turned its well-heeled author into a literary celebrity. The work went through three printings in its first year, then several editions. 'Eothen' had created a surge in demand for travel writing, especially about the Orient; a popular sensation which would climax in the 1865 issue of Sir Richard Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca'. Curzon's tome played up to Victorian fantasies of the East, exploited the eternal craze for treasure hunting; and the author was lent academic credibility by his pursuit of lost classical texts.
What merit does the book have besides the achievement of popular success? Perhaps not as not as finely written as Kinglake's journal - which always avoids reading like a diary - where 'Monasteries' is lacking in literary artifice, it makes up for in the freshness of its portraits and landscapes. Curzon, still only twenty-three years of age when he first sailed for the East, had come down from Oxford without a degree in order to succeed his father as member of parliament for Clitheroe. He promptly lost this seat, as a result of the Great Reform Bill, and so embarked on his own version of what was still called The Grand Tour. One of the first scenes he describes is the harbour of Navarino, where wrecks of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets could still be seen, seven years after they were destroyed by Admiral Codrington's coalition fleet. From the Peloponnese, Curzon and his companion would embark for Egypt, and so the scene shift to the streets of Alexandria and their first vision of life in the Orient.
Curzon's portrayal of what nowadays would be called culture shock relies on a thoughtful evaluation of what it meant to be a traveller in those days. In this, he is a decidedly modern writer. From the balcony of what he calls 'the only hotel in Africa', a typical paragraph,
“Some miserable-looking black slaves caught our attention, clothed each in a piece of Isabel-coloured canvas and led by a well-dressed man, who had probably just bought them. Then a great personage came by on horseback with a number of mounted attendants and some men on foot, who cleared the way before him, and struck everybody on the head with their sticks who did not get out of the way fast enough. These blows were dealt all round in the most unceremonious manner; but what appeared to us extraordinary was, that all these beaten people did not seem to care for being beat. They looked neither angry nor affronted, but only grinned and rubbed their shoulders, and moved on one side to let the train of the great man pass by. Now if this were done in London, what a ferment would it create! what speeches would be made about tyranny and oppression! what a capital thing some high-minded and independent patriot would make of it! how he would call a meeting to defend the rights of the subject! and how he would get his admirers to vote him a piece of plate for his noble and glorious exertions! Here nobody minded the thing; they took no heed of the indignity; and I verily believe my friend and I, who were safe up at the window, were the only persons in the place who felt any annoyance.”
The 'annoyance' felt by Curzon and his companion is not, I would suggest, indignation. His irritation was less to do with self-righteousness than the affront to human dignity with which such peremptory beatings were endured. There is exploitation here, too. The passage quoted is accompanied by the following illustration:
Not all of Curzon's attitudes, however, are of a political reactionary. There was something like Humanism in the man, too. Firstly, we see the human touch in his challenge to the prevalent Protestant belief that all monks were fat and lazy. At least as far as Benedictine monks of the Catholic Church were concerned, he disavowed the image of Friar Tuck in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as unreal. He asserts that the majority of Orthodox monks he encountered in the Levant were pious, hard-working and worthy individuals. Secondly, he parodies European attitudes towards Islam in a jocular passage his contemporary Edward Lear might have penned. A Persian – i.e. a Moslem - visitor to England enters a church. On seeing the organ pipes then hearing it played, he starts at its ugliness and guesses it to be the incarnation of a monster. When, service being over, the congregation stream headlong out of the church, the Persian naturally assumes it is in flight from the said beast.
There are in fact many anecdotes in the book, mostly second hand (as the above), that illustrate, for example, the honesty of Turkish porters or the guile of Armenian dealers. I suspect many a national stereotype has its origins in the tales told to Victorian travellers. But enough apologies already! No matter that Curzon was content to be cheated of a few shekels for his board & lodging. He carried about with him a bag of universal gold and he carried off the core of what is now the British Museum's collection of Orthodox Church manuscripts. No doubt the curators there will excuse his avarice by pointing to the bad conditions the books were kept in and how he had actually rescued them from the hungry jaws of rat & bookworm. Will these two wrongs make a right? If yes, then at least we have Curzon's own words to help restore the books to their original locations.
'David Niven
The
Other Side Of The Moon'
Many,
many years later, when I began researching for the second volume of
my 'Leaves of the Poets', I picked up both of Niven's autobiographies
and read them with amusement. These vols are light reads, not what is
called 'literature', but flipping heck, books can be simple fun,
can't they? Without reading between the lines, it wasn't hard to
guess what Niven had done to become a writer. In fact, whenever the
film career took a dip, he'd turn his hand to another medium to
supplement his income. Before becoming a movie actor, for instance,
he'd been a solider, sold liquor and promoted horse racing. Ensconced
in Hollywood, whenever he was laid off, he would do some radio,
television or even live theatre. So what would he write about,
besides himself? He'd always been known as a raconteur. In the long
hours movie actors have to stand about waiting for their turn to
perform, he would keep everyone on the set amused by prattling about
all the famous people he'd hung out with. These included legendary
names such as Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Gary Cooper, Merle
Oberon, Olivia de Havilland, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant, Shirley
Temple... the list is quite without limit. On the set, he would hone
the telling of these stories, embellishing them and taking liberties
with the truth, as far as decorum and friendship would allow.
Therefore his stories should not be seen as true in themselves, but
rather as gossipy commentaries on great cinema celebrities and the
times in which they lived. Reading his books, you soon twig the vein
in which the stories are told and glimpse the real world which they
gloss over.
For
example, opening 'The Moon's a Balloon' at a random page, I find a
typical anecdote. It is 1938, Niven is under contract to the producer
Sam Goldwyn but has been suspended for turning down a script. With
nothing else to do, he makes a couple of lucrative radio broadcasts;
only to be informed by Goldwyn's lawyer that under the terms of his
contract – despite suspension - he is not allowed to do any acting
work at all. But Sam Goldwyn knows a good thing when he sees one, and
instead of being sued, Niven has to cough up fifty per cent of his
fees. Next off, he does a radio show with Bing Crosby, sponsored by
the food corporation Kraft. In due course, along with his cheque,
Niven is sent a hamper full of food. So the star writes out Sam
Goldwyn a cheque for half this amount; then cuts every item of food
in the hamper in half, too – including the contents of tinned
sardines – and sends them off with the money.
I read this book out of two rather joyless motives: researching the Whodunit genre and the Second Novel. Another reason for reading was more whimsical: having seen plenty of Agatha Christie on screen, I'd never actually sat down and finished one of her tomes. And sit down I did, getting through the book's 200 oddish pages in two longish sessions. It was very readable, not particularly challenging, sometimes charming and occasionally annoying. In other words, it did what it said it would do on the box.
Sylvia & Michael
The Later Adventures
by Compton Mackenzie
I can only deplore the auto-backslapping of certain adventure writers that spend the last quarter of a book congratulating themselves on what a grand old tale they have told us. This pompousness kills half the suspense. "Sylvia & Michael" being the fourth, if shortest, volume of Mackenzie's romantic adventures of Michael Fane and Sylvia Scarlett, I'm afraid smugness pervades the whole tome.
“Sylvia Scarlett” by Compton Mackenzie
“Sylvia
Scarlett”, one of the continuations in Mackenzie's “Sinister Street”
saga, prompts a little backstory-telling. The eponymous heroine
appeared in the first book of the series as self-appointed guardian
of Lily Haden, whom Michael Fane is in love with. Roughly at the same
age, Sylvia and Lily are a couple of prozzies.
Having baldly stated the fact, there is some further qualification of Ms.
Scarlett's character: neither she nor Lily have much
of the street-walking hooker in them. As Sylvia has already said to
Fane (it is repeated here), “Money is necessary sometimes, you
know.” These two educated and cultured young women inhabit the
Imagist, Edwardian London of Ezra Pound (parodied here as the
Languedoc poetester “Hezekiah Penny”). The company they keep is
that particularly Kensington blend of low life fraudsters, single
mammas, pseudo artists and young men of the Oxbridge set. It is a sort
of West London version of the Bloomsbury group, except that for politics you should substitute religion; and for theatre, music hall.Meet Murder: Revisiting Michael Herr's “Dispatches”
"SE Persia"
Sir Arnold Wilson is one of the most reviled characters in that strange unfinished enterprise, the British Empire. After the First World War he was put in charge of the territory that would become Iraq, where he soon became known as 'the Despot of Mess-pot'. Under his administration, riots were put down at a cost of 10,000 lives. While he favoured direct rule by the British, Gertrude Bell, his assistant, supported by TE Lawrence, believed the only solution was to make an Arab kingdom under Faisal, son of Hussein (Guardian of the Holy Mosques). Wilson eventually accepted the idea, but was replaced by Sir Percy Cox, his old boss at the Foreign Office of the Indian Government. Wilson was knighted and, in consolation for his loss of public office, was appointed a director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the precursor of BP). Later he became a Tory MP and during the 1930 gained a reputation as an apologist for Mussolini and even Adolf Hitler. However, he died fighting fascism at Dunkirk in 1940, aged 55. This book, 'S.E. Persia' – subtitled 'Letters and Diary of a Young Political Officer, 1907-1914' was published posthumously in 19411. He had written it while serving as an air gunner officer with RAF Bomber Command in the year that led up to his death.Anyone with an interest in the history of the Middle East, especially if they have spent time in the area, will recognise the authenticity of this book. Wilson, who trained at Sandhurt and started his career as a map engineer in the Indian army, was made a liaison officer to accompany the Turko-Perso-Russian commission which was determining and mapping the eastern border between Iran (then known as Persia) and the Ottoman Empire. This meant surveying through tribal territories between the Shatt-al-Arab and Mount Ararat. It was the first time much of the area had been mapped using modern methods, and through Wilson's efforts the British gained invaluable intelligence. The need for the Turks, Persians and Russians to co-operate created an extraordinary opportunity for espionage that Wilson did not shrink from exploiting whenever he could.
At considerable risk to his own life, he employed knowledge of Arab and Persian dialects, a fearless belief in his right to be there, and the horse-trading skills of a native tribesman. The writing, especially in his letters to his family, often veers into the braggadocio of an earnest young Christian anxious to prove he is no heathen. Whenever he has the need to placate a local potentate, he hands out finely printed Korans as presents, buys up quantities of goats, has them slaughtered and then roasted to make propitiatory meals. According to him, the natives often look on this infidel with a certain awe – i.e. in the same regard we associate with Lawrence. In fact, if even half of these adventures are true, they make his more famous countryman's exploits look like those of a boy scout on some jolly jamboree. Wilson is not some mere orientalist with half his mind taken up by ancient ruins. His remit is as the agent of an increasingly oil-hungry empire. He looks on all foreigners as potential allies or enemies in the Great Game; and if he wonders now and then about the Kurdish or Zorastrian inhabitants of a forgotten village, it is seldom without the hint of how much more profitably they might live under the aegis of Pax Britannica.
At one point in his days as a young political officer, Wilson makes a journey home to visit his family in England. Instead of paying for a berth on board a steamer, he opts to work his passage as a stoker! When the ship calls in at Port Said to take on coal before entering the Suez Canal, he accompanies his fellow stokers to a brothel. I couldn't resist using this in 'My Heart Forgets To Beat', where I have Dic (the stoker of Swansea) befriending a version of Wilson and taking him to the house in the question. Other steamy details include the 'temporary wives' taken by the Bengal Lancers, Indian cavalrymen employed by the British in their occupation of southern Persia.
I don't think readers of this book will be converted into supporters of the British Empire, from which saints preserve us. But I do think a perusal of its anecdotes will help explain Britain's continuing embroilment in – and fascination with - the Persian Gulf.
(I) First published by OUP, I have the hardback Readers Union edition of 1942.
by Anthony Burgess
I seriously wonder what point there was in writing this book; or what point there was for me to read it! I half expected Burgess to do something novel with “the old, old story”; he is mostly known for his fiction after all, but apart from certain details there isn't much here that goes beyond or runs contra what we've heard so many times before.
I was brought up within the Christian tradition, as far as it goes in a secular household. Baptised as Catholic, I was never taken to church. Later on, I was recruited into a Church of England Choir. I enjoyed the music, until my voice started to break. Finding myself with little or no faith, I quit the job before joining the altos and compulsory confirmation classes. No regrets there, but religion has always interested me, especially from the historical perspective. For the past twenty years, I have lived mainly in Muslim countries. I once attended an Anglican service held in Saudi Arabia, partly for the novelty of doing something you could figuratively be thrown to the lions for.
Anyhow, I picked up this volume in a second-hand bookstore in Istanbul, hoping Burgess would have something more interesting to say about Jesus Christ than Dan Brown's slipshod offerings in “The Da Vinci Code”. The headline of the blurb on the back of the book claimed it filled in the twelve missing years of Christ's life. Pure hard sell. Beyond the claim that Jesus married when he attained manhood, and was a thirty-something (childless) widower by the time he started his mission, Burgess tells us little of the middle years.
The narration is done as a kind of chronicle, a story written up by a jobbing scribe. It is reminiscent of Gore Vidal's “Julian” - a novel about a Christian era Roman Emperor who tries to turn the clock back to pagan times. Burgess' Azor, son of Sadok tells a plainer tale than the epistles exchanged between Vidal's pair of haughty scholars. His method is to debunk exaggerated anecdotes, employ his own knowledge of current affairs (for example, in the practice of crucifixion), play up Christ's ideas as sound where they are to do with love, and play down the question of his divinity. Telling an otherwise conventional story, he begins with the twin annunciations (of John the baptist and Jesus of Nazareth), and ends with the resurrection as it affects the disciples.
Characters such as Salomé, Judas and (to a lesser extent) Joseph (husband of Mary) and Herod Antipas are not as we heard them at shcool or in church. Azor would have us believe first century oral history distorted their true strengths and weaknesses, and that he is still close enough to events to give us the truth. Judas, for example, was a victim of his own innocence rather than avarice. One small revelation is that when he realised he had been tricked, he rejected the thirty pieces of silver. The money was from the Temple but could not be returned as it had become unclean. It was therefore used to buy the burial ground where Christ's tomb was located. The cruel dancer Salomé, according to Azor, was really the adopted daughter of Herod Antipas, and later became a follower of Christ. The High Priest Caiaphas conspired with Zerah, a Pharisee (Judas' old friend), to have Christ crucified as a scape-goat.
With the twelve disciples and two Marys, the various shepherds, Kings and sundry other well-knowns to fit in, any writer tackling the story of Jesus has a ready-made panoply to deal with. This may seem to be an advantage, but since all Christian readers will have different expectations – depending on their sect – the writer will have to decide which to leave out as much as which to include. Burgess gives near-rounded portraits of the disciples (Simon-)Peter, Thomas and Judas, but for the rest we have to be content with ensemble sketches as they come on to blow their flutes, complain about the food or lead a donkey. Whereas the down-to-earthness of the followers is poignant at times, otherwise it is bathetic. But the character of Jesus himself remains aloof, even when he consorts with the females. He is literally a giant and since no attempt is made to get under his skin, even in the desert, his mostly inhuman nature takes precedent.
The writing is not what I'd call vintage Burgess. There is little of the humour you get in the Enderby novels or the Malaysian Trilogy. He doesn't play with language, as he does in “A Clockwork Orange” - though he does show off his Greek, Latin and Aramaic. When I checked out the book's Wikipedia entry I saw it was written just after he'd collaborated on Zeffirelli's TV production “Jesus of Nazareth”. That figures. He used the research he'd done on the screenplay to dash off a novel, cashing on the publicity and controversy surrounding the broadcast. Since Wikipedia, and other sources, cite Burgess as a lapsed Catholic, it's hard not to think cynical thoughts of his motives in churning out this tome.
Still, the man was approaching the end of his life and it may be he had one eye cocked on the hereafter as he sat down each day to write his quota of words.
by Marina Lewycka
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| Not Old - But Looks Tatty! |
Were we to spend 30 to 40 years of our lives without meeting a single Ukrainian, and be unaware that their communities are dotted about the country, the revelation of their existence would come as little surprise. We've heard tell of Somali social clubs going back a century, personally we know shed-loads of Poles, we sit next to Brazilians on the bus or train every day. The UK is a peculiar sort of place. Funny, too. Its native humour is interlaced with the self-parodies of the Pakistani, Yahudi, Italian, Chinese and German types who over the years have made it their home. Such diversity began long long before the post-war immigration boom, by which time the UK already had its panoply of national stereo-goons: the Welsh teachers, Canadian adventurers, Irish nurses, Australian sheep farmers, English toffs, Caribbean sailors and Scottish housekeepers. So if now we've got Ukrainians too, it figures.
When people say, as they do, there's something very English about... and then go on to yak about something that is not at all English indeed, we nod and accept these as facts because so often there's truth in them. There's something very English, we say, about the Turkish kebabs on every high street, just as there's something terribly English about curry. There's something quite English about trusting a plumber because he's Polish, well they do work harder and invite you to haggle if you think they're overcharging. There's something absolutely English about the rise and fall of the Asian mini-mart; and then campaigns to save our Chinese laundries, Italian ice-cream parlours and French onion sellers are just about English as you can get. Though the English invented class snobbery, there's something utterly English about the young aristocratic lady in Downton marrying the Sinn Fein chauffeur.
Therefore, to say there's something very Engish about “A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian” is not to annex beetroot soup, fur-lined caps or Natashas with embossed fingernails for the British Empire. It's to say that this story of Ukrainians in Peterborough is an archetype in a post-modern world of which the UK has become capital. Of course, apart from the Crimean War (1853-5) a while ago there was little to connect Britain with the former Soviet Republic, and what is least English about the book is how the Mayevskyj family became slave workers under the Third Reich, then refugees after World War Two. The British were not overly concerned in the tragedies that befell former provinces of the Romanov empire, preferring to mop up after the Ottomans. Things began to change after the fall of Poland in 1939. In the seven decades since, it's fair to say that population-wise Britain has become the most European of all EU members, leaving aside its aloofness from the Euro project. What distinguishes the UK is not simply the sheer number of émigrés it has absorbed, but their diversity and the endurance of their cultural values. With alacrity, the UK celebrates its very own Hungarian bean-fests and Romanian Independence days.
“A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” is the story of how a septuagenarian engineer, Nicolai Mayevskyj, betroths a thirty-something Russian divorcée from the Ukraine, Valentina, and what his daughters Vera and Nadezhda - our narrtor – go through. It's partially a comic novel with the line “I have a cunning plan” - Baldrick's catchphrase from “Black Adder” - repeated no less than three times. The fun-poking at Nokolai's one-foot-in-the-grave search for companionship and Valentina's boil-in-the-bag modernity is interspersed with chunks of family history, sibling rivalry between Vera and Nadezhda, and memories of their dead mother. Actually, though the writing never ceases to be light, it is seldom lightweight. Through the medium of English and English slapstick, things Ukrainian and Russian are presented effortlessly and with charm. Whenever the action descends into parody and farce - over Pappa's “squishy-squashy” impotence for instance - the narrative takes a sudden twist and we're treated to a chapter from his on-going manuscript history of Ukrainian tractors.
Marina Lewycka's use of tense is subtly done. Most of the action is told in present tenses, which gives the story-telling a button-holed, in-your-face quality. Some writers, Andrew Miller for example, carry the use of present tenses to extremes. Lewycka, however, frequently reverts to past tense narrative, sometimes even in the same scene, and once again the effect looks effortless. I had only a few quibbles with the text; sometimes there were double line-breaks between paragraphs in the same scene and I couldn't see why. Also, as with the Baldrick line, there is occasional over-use of repetition: “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” pops up two or three times more often than originality demands. And occasionally you get lines which could only be of benefit to non-native speakers, for example: “Now he is spent up – he has no money left.”
This is an easy and rewarding read which leaves me feeling intrigued and keen to read on. If I ever come across the volume advertised on the back cover - “Caravans” - I'd certainly consider buying it, if only to see if Lewycka extends her reach, or branches out beyond the world of Ukrainian emigrés.
“Sinister Street”
by Compton Mackenzie
I read the first hundred pages of this gigantic novel in awe that its sparkling text could have been written over a hundred years ago. Mirroring Joyce's near-contemporary “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”, “Sinister Street” goes further, beefing up childhood impressions with deep probes into the psychology of the quixotic child, Michael Fane, as he grows from toddler to man about town. Also, there is great prose, much of it landscape, which almost always avoids the purple.
But not the purple cloth. Mackenzie was one of that triumvirate of Roman Catholic convert authors (the others being Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh). I was dismayed with the boy's religious fanaticism dominating the next two hundred pages. Precocious even by Joyce's standards, Michael Fane's curious admixture of faith, bookishness and larks stood him on the Irishman's shoulders, rather, as if at twelve he were already the Victorian equivalent of Compleat Man. Wallowing through all this religiosity, I began to apply the formula of seven deadly virtues to Compton Mackenzie's literary boasts. Deadly because seen from the outside as negative, in Fane's world these virtues are untainted by vice. Snob (as amalgam of pride and prejudice), prig, braggadocio, zealot, hypocrite, smug & glib. From a famous public school in London, to an exclusive college in Oxford then on into the slums of Pimlico, Michael Fane lives according to the above codes in order to retain the title of gentleman. Even punching a copper and spending the night in the Bow Street cells fails to tarnish his self esteem and righteousness.
Pre-dating “Brideshead Revisited” by three decades, “Sinister Street” is said to be the quintessential portrait of undergraduate life at Oxford. From the viewpoint of Michael Fane's snob, almost everyone deserves looking down on: street boys, Rhodes Scholars, peers whose tastes he deplores. Even his taste in girls suffers from an entropy of sneer. Attracted to those who set out to attract, Michael is sooner or later appalled by their contrariness and crashes out of his slumming ways.
The title puzzled me for hundreds and hundreds of pages; presumably it was meant to. The Fane family (Charles Michael Saxby Fane, his semi-pro pianist sister Stella and their unmarried mother) do move about somewhat; so at each of Michael's new locations I paused to think if it were the eponymous street. One thing that does not wander at all is the point of view, which doggedly remains Michael's. This is an achievement, enduring over two hundred thousand words; but his cut-glass world view distorts as well as reveals. Not quite in a sinister way, I should add.
This novel is so long, it becomes writing above fiction. What's more it begs sequels; and the sequence of three it begot (“Plasher's Mead”, “Sylva Scarlett”, “Syvia and Michael”) was only curtailed by The Great War. Other than that, it's a veritable Downton Abbey of industry over craft, a voluminous Victorian handbag of a work. Yet it is not all told. Which probably inspired Orwell to go “Down and Out” on crusading slums of his own; and as in there, we are left by caesuras to guess what peccadilloes dared not speak their names. The novel's popularity (stayed in print for most of the twentieth century) is partly down to the censorship of popular libraries followed by championship by the Daily Mail. Many were the boarding school bums caned for possessing it, but it was never banned outright like DH Lawrence's more explicit work. In truth, the (originally) two volumes are very long on the results of adultery but rather short on their details.
Having deprecated the hero, I must say the romantic vision of Lily is irresistible, despite her sloth. In Fane's smitten shoes, I would have been tempted to take old Mrs Carthew's advice and “beat her figuratively for a year” lest she became “a shrew or a whiner”. But in the pursuance of his romantic dream, he is incapable of taking good advice, only bad. Whether he marries her is not revealed until very near the end of the book (829 pages in my battered 1969 Penguin paperback). Like with further episodes of Downton, I ponder taking in the sequels - lifetime permitting.
The Woman of Rome
I can't begin a review this book, which I first read in 1978, without some discussion of prostitution. 'The woman of Rome' is the first-person narrative of a street walker. Not quite the lowest rung on the Roman pay-for-sex ladder, it asks on the cover of the 1951 US edition, Was She Good - or Was She bad?It will come as no shock to anyone that sex is a commodity bought and sold on the market. And yet, while the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s flourished, prostitution remained largely underground. Why was its liberation limited to bigger and brighter red lights districts? The answer seems to be that with marriage no longer the only outlet for lust, the new shame of paying for sex was Inadequacy. On the level playing field of 'free love', anyone resorting to a prostitute was not considered up to the task of attracting a mate. Then it turns out, in kiss-and-tell biographies published since, a good proportion of the 'dolly birds', 'groupies' and 'free-love hippies' on the scene were all the time selling their companionship in one way or another - as were many gay and straight men - through clubs, contact magazines and what have you. Nowadays prostitution is, like, the new rock'n'roll.
Ingenious Pain
by Andrew Miller
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