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Tommy Handley

by
Ted Kavanagh

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?



The Death of Virgil
by
Hermann Broch


It was about four years ago when I finally got round to reading Virgil’s Aeneid. I’d owned a copy for decades but hadn’t read more than the blurb -  supposing it to be a cheap, Latin knock-off of The Iliad or The Odyssey. I wasn’t far wrong there. But while the Homer epics are not particularly known as political tracts, the story of Aeneas’s flight from Troy turns out to be a blatant case of imperial Roman propaganda. By the time Homer performed his take on the Trojan War, many of the tales were so ingrained in Greek consciousness that he was ploughing fields littered with bones & artefacts. Helen and Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, their sandals, combs, swords & shields were famous long before the poet was a lad. Whatever his literary spade turned over, authenticity was hardly the point. Truth - as a comedian once said – “was not the stories, but the way I tell ’em”. Virgil, on the other hand, had little more to go on than a few scraps of dubious progeny: the unlikely proposition that survivors from the sack of Troy had wandered round the southern Med for years before subduing the Latin aboriginals of Rome and founding a city state. His account, then, being little more of a trumped-up finders-keepers yarn - than a chip off the owl literary block.

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.

 




The Beckett Trilogy

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.




Orlando                        

by Virginia Woolf            

 


Orlando is the fictional biography of an imaginary poet; there’s not much plot to write of, but it’s full of amusing and beautiful passages. I envy the trick Virginia Woolf employs, addressing her reader with excuses for not bothering to go down certain paths. And the other speculations about her principal - thinking on the page, as it were - are done without the least side. Boy, she is modern, timelessly so. And playing with gender, skilfully avoiding the yucky bits while leaving quite enough to the imagination, works well up to a point. And the point IS the point. English literature, as most of us know it - I mean, as it is Accessible to most of us - is more than five hundred years old. Therefore, wouldn’t we be intrigued to meet any character set to embody the whole of English drama, prose and poetry? It’s only aspirational of us, but just as we can’t meet the Shakespeares and Dickenses of this world, encounters with Orlando will have to do. And as the women writers who have struggled during the half millennium would surely agree, it’s a lot easier for a man like Boz or The Bard to gain immortality than for any exceptional female scribe to get much acknowledgement at all. Apart from the lasting fame of the occasional Austen or Brontë, famous women writers are all too soon forgotten. I mean, do most people even know who created Frankenstein, or what Marie Corelli wrote? Yet it’s not from a woman into a man that Orlando in desperation morphs, but the reverse.

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


I had been under a wrong impression until I read this book. For over half a century I believed that the comedian Bob Monkhouse had starred in a film about a salesman pushing housewives to buy white goods on the never-never. The film I judged to be called something like, “Live Now, Pay Later”; and the character I'd always associated with Mr Monkhouse was one of those suave-if-seedy, foot-in-the-door artists who used Americanisms like “guy” and “folks” with more aplomb than seemed polite.

Bob Sinfield’s biographical tome, however, isn’t so much a dispeller of myths as a catalogue of mirth. Bob wrote for Bob (who in turn had written for Bob Hope). Sinfield got to know the star first hand and vouches for his unstarlike humanity. We're not talking alternative comedy here, though Monkhouse did for the UK circuit pretty much what Lenny Bruce did for America's: ie dragged the frumpy Fifties into the Swinging Sixties. But rather like rival advertising campaigns for Tide and Daz (soap powders) Monkhouse the comedian was only controversial if you preferred the old washtub and board method to the modern twintub.

And yet Bob was blue (rinsed in Thatcherism, too). I remember my dad complaining about his suitability when he became compère on The Golden Shot - an inane gameshow we all watched avidly of a Sunday evening instead of going to church. I think my parents had attended a Masonic Ladies' evening and he'd been the guest speaker, causing some embarrassment - and red faces amongst the organising committee.

The Golden Shot gave Monkhouse the public exposure his brief career in films had not, and rather set the tone for Bruce Forsyth type comedians to go forth and multiply (ie fold their bills). Years later I operated the spotlight for his Midnight Cabaret show at Butlin's Pwllheli. What really impressed me was his memory. He asked for female members of the audience to call out their names, and without a second's pause, he had a joke (usually a word play gag) for every one of them. The other thing that struck me was his wife, though not literally. She was anything but the contemporary “dollybird” – she was a down-to-earth lady without an ounce of fake glamour. They had one of those car[buncular] 1970s Rolls Royces, and I don’t think there was a chauffeur. If there was any side to them, it was kept well locked up in the boot.

So I can say from personal experience that everything Mr Sinfield has put into his book rings true. There are some surprises here, though. I had no idea his interest in smut was literary as well as littoral (if such a word may pass for "edgy"). Oddly, it seems a rather redeeming characteristic. If social comment was not his milieu, then neither was the effing and ranting of Alexei Sayle & cohorts. I don’t believe he deserved the unsavoury reputation he had amongst some reactionary types. His purpose was to entertain, not educate/proselytise. But he could slip the odd reaction in here and there. For example, calling the Fifties Swinging – on account of all the hangings.

Collectors of popular culture memorabilia will enjoy this book. And those who, like me, need a memory jog to supplement our 10,000 steps, will find it refreshing. It was Ian Hendry, btw, in “Live Now, Pay Later” – calling all pub quiz question writers.




Snow ["Kar"]

by Orhan Pamuk

“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.


Portrait of a Marriage                

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.




Bech

by John Updike


Plot, in BECH: A BOOK, is reduced to the recurring problem of how to pronounce one single syllable word. The great skill of writer John Updike is in how he keeps irritating plaguing taunting us with this puzzle, while never once consenting to mention it. And all we get to learn in the end (sorry for the spoiler) is how the word ISN’T said. Apart from which, nothing happens much in BECH: A BOOK: An American writer who has produced one decent novel, a disappointing follow-up, then a string of duds (inc a vol of poetry!?!), but nevertheless lauded as a giant of Eng Lit, goes on a tour of European communist countries and soviet republics (this is in the Sixties, aka The Cold War). He is half-heartedly sponsored by the spooks of the US State Department, and semi-lionised by the local literary stooges. And (by the way, more spoilers) while Stateside he has (sort of separate) affairs with a pair of sisters. And he has sex in London (but inexplicably not Moscow). BECH has also some (deliberately) badly written sentences. I think Updike has been a favourite of Martin Amis, who has thought him a writer of importance. Did I leave anything out? That he's Jewish, but not a religious way? Or that the book has an appendix (which as far as I can tell, you can read whenever you like, or leave unfinished, as I have so far done)? There must be a joke in there about leaving one's appendix in, which I in my dullness I have neither gotten nor indeed got.


The Wanderer of Liverpool

by John Masefield

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?




Cakes and Ale

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.



The Mysteries of Udolpho

by

Ann Radcliffe

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!




Northanger Abbey

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 Doctor's Family 
and other stories

by Margaret Oliphant




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.






The French Lieutenant's Woman

by John Fowles




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)




Rubicon

by Tom Holland


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

by Patrick Kinross


Kinross’s biography of Atatürk (MKA) is a tome I've been avoiding for the best part of thirty years. Lackadaisically, I suppose, but mostly it's been from mild trepidation. Not that I expected the book to be full of awkward truths, since it has a kind of authorised status here in Turkey. In spite of its hallowed subject, I’m pretty sure the Turkish translation would be uncensored. My fear is of joining the Atatürk cult, his gradually diminishing band of diehards.

As a foreigner – we Brits have to admit that we too are aliens – as a foreigner here in Turkey you’re not expected to be more than respectful towards the great man’s name, and the public commemorations him. Though his legacy isn’t universally approved, you won’t hear much open criticism. It’s more like the dissenters tend to groan ever so softly when someone gets up to make a speech about him and his philosophy. It’s drummed into kids at school, when every morning elementary pupils take turns in reciting his address to students. And even those Turks who still bother to oppose his nationalist, statist politics, tend to use Kemalist arguments when it suits them. Just the same as how many Brits who know Churchill wasn’t all good will grudgingly admit his useful role in wartime.

Lord Patrick of Kinross, then, a career diplomat who served a good deal of his time in Turkey, is as much apologist as historian; his book, indeed now nearing sixty years old, has become a feature of the scene. Having finally got the paperback in my hands, I read it almost as much as an historical document as a plain life.

The early chapters especially can’t shake off the laudatory style of homegrown accounts. As Atatürk grows up and becomes a soldier, Kinross plays Uncle Storyteller in a style more than just a little condescending. Though he's candid enough about Mustafa Kemal’s preference for prostitutes, his early drinking and gambling, and his generally rakish character, it’s all rather Boys Own stuff, and somewhat lacks the first hand, eyewitness testimony you would expect from a more penetrating study. Was MKA a Young Türk, for example? Well, yes, but we’re not actually told this in so many words, as though it’s all still rather hush-hush. Reading through the lines then, not only was he a young Young Turk, he was a hothead rebel amongst rebels. There, I’ve said it.

At times, I can’t help wondering to what extent Kinross was party to the truth, or was just an educated guesser. For example, as a junior staff officer in the Ottoman Army, MKA had to traverse Egypt disguised as an Arab. Just before crossing into Libya (to help organise resistance to an Italian invasion) he was detained by British troops. He was apparently let go after a short time, with Kinross implying the British secretly approved of his mission. As a diplomat, I suppose, the author would often have occasion to know more than the general public. So he leaves you to fill in the details for yourself. In this case, the year was 1912 and Britain had a military alliance with Italy. If the Brits really did let him go on his way, then it suggests they opposed their ally’s expansionist policy in the Mediterranean, which is not uncreditable. This is about the first of many intimations that portray MKA as a player in what the British called The Great Game.

Of course, as everyone knows, soon MKA would be fighting the Allies on the Gallipoli peninsula. First establishing his dissent at the way Enver, Talat and Cemal (the Young Türk triumvirate then at the helm of the Ottoman Empire) had dragged their country into the war on Germany’s side, Kinross shows plenty of enthusiasm for the successful defence he makes of its exposed western gateway, invaded by the French, Italian and British Empires. British incompetence and Turkish tenacity, backed up by MKA’s inspired insubordination, contained the bridgehead long enough to ensure the invaders moved elsewhere, and earned the young commander his crucial laurels. This much is orthodox history.

But after the war, in The Bandırma affair, when MKA again twice gives the British the slip, we are left to wonder if this wasn’t all somehow with the complicity of the troops on the ground, if not tacitly sanctioned by Whitehall. Although UK prime minister Lloyd George was to finally lose his job over backing the Greeks in what the Turks call their Independence War, Kinross’s portrayal of the British is rather like that of referees, forever cropping up on the pitch and blowing their whistles in Turkey’s favour. Even after the establishment of the Turkish Republic at Ankara, one British ambassador after another is happy to join MKA’s drinking and gambling cronies.

I would have liked a clearer picture of MKA’s linguistic abilities. We are told he had assistance with his French from various Turkish society ladies in Istanbul, and during a brief sojourn as a military attaché in Sofia. But during the negotiations with the French over the sovereignty of Hatay province, we are told he had the help of a translator. And when he reads HG Wells’s “Outline of History”, we learn he immediately calls for the book’s translation into Turkish. Does that mean he has read it in the original English?

His personal life is gone into in some detail, though no doors of skeleton-bearing cupboards are suddenly allowed to swing open. Close both to his mother and sister, we learn, the stepfather (like the real father, who died while he was a child) was a remote person who didn’t do much to help his advancement, or to form his character. The women he lived with openly were not allowed to interfere in his politics or his drinking habits, leading to separation; followed by divorce in one case and suicide in another. Names of casual partners are not given, though we are led to believe he sometimes carried on with married women, even the wives of foreign diplomats. His affairs seem to have been conducted above scandal. If this led him into a certain amount of manipulation, we’re not told. I get the feeling His Lordship the author simply preferred not to go into sordid details, though surely some penetration of the man’s psychology would have been appropriate, even sixty years ago.

Likewise his adoption of several children - with whom he liked to live in a semblance of family life - is reported in the ‘he was fond of the young’ vein. Atatürk saw himself as a teacher to his nation, often examining youngsters (and the not-so-young) in a brusque, dialectical manner. He seems to have taken some delight in weighing up young people’s worth, and on occasion would elevate some bright spark whose answers impressed him. The airwoman Sabiha Gökçen was one of his prodigies. We hear nothing about any illegitimate offspring he is alleged to have had.

Mostly Atatürk, as he became known when surnames were introduced, surrounded himself with good old boys. Of Celal Bayar, he’s reported to have remarked, “I gave him a bag of gold, and he gave me a bank.” İsmet İnönü, the comrade in arms he named as his successor, was too much of a family man to have been a close friend. MKA liked the company of rich, or at least of ambitious, businesses men – many of whom profited from accompanying him at the all-night sessions of rakı and mezzes that would eventually kill him. He would call famous musicians and poets to perform, often at short notice; on one occasion even Nazım Hikmet was summoned, though Lord Kinross fails to tell his readers that the poet was a communist who had recently been released as a political prisoner. He enjoyed his many processions around the country, where crowds greeted him as “Gazi” - a term actually meaning wounded veteran. In many ways, he was a fitting successor to the padishas who had ruled the empire. Some evenings he would slip out of his Dolmabahçe palace on the Bosphorous and only several hours later would his minders find him, drinking with some locals in a fisherman's tavern. In other words, MKA led the life of a dapper bachelor. As President of the Republic he created, he was its principal playboy.

On the political stage, named president for life, he took delight in winding up the clockwork dolls of democracy, in order to see them strutting about, knocking into each other and falling flat on their faces. His purpose – the transformation of a decrepit, superstitious empire into a lean & thriving modern democracy - was true and lasting reform. But as a human being, Kinross points out, he was a dictatorial, misogynistic dilettante. In doing away with the caliphate, he traduced Turkey’s standing in the Moslem world. In transforming the alphabet, he cut off the nation from its literary roots. In searching for the roots of Turkishness, he set scholars off on a scientific wild goose chase. Moreover, he didn’t seek rapprochement with the large Kurdish speaking minority, which has left deep scars on the nation’s identity. Again, you have to read between the lines to understand that Izmir was burned on his watch, that he was actually in the city while it was looted and torched, to say nothing of the fate of the people who lived there.


This biography, subtitled “The Rebith of a Nation”, not only leaves many questions unanswered, it fails to address key points. Published as it was sixty years ago (soon after a military coup in which the then prime minister was hanged), neither can it address the question of what MKA would have made of the modern Turkish state, or its current rulers. The progress I've seen in the twenty eight years I've lived here has been immense. Despite charges of political oppression and many unresolved issues regarding the position of women, the fourth estate and the Kurds, modernisation has been swift and mainly sure. The soaring economy that (despite what many foreigners and Turks alike believe) seems to rebound from every setback would surely have impressed the Gazi. While the role of religious values, an issue on which MKA was adamant, has repeatedly gnawed at the secular lives of a powerful, modernist, Westward-looking minority. As the Turks approach the centenary of the Republic Atatürk created for them, they are a nation still struggling to discover who they really are.




Quiet Days in Clichy
by
Henry Miller

After spending three turgid months edging along the Tropic of Cancer two or three pages at a time, I whip through Quiet Days in Clichy in three short sessions. By length, it's a mere novelette (I wouldn't tag it a “novella” as that implies a genre of some kind, whereas “long short story” would stretch it beyond the natural confines of fiction). It's about how Miller spent some of his decade long stay in Paris living with a French journalist/writer known as Carl. His relationship with Carl and various females form the subject matter, which flows in a single chapterless stream, taking in a short holiday to Luxembourg, and ending with another one of Miller's impertinances: a long purple passage in which he reaches a species of post-coital nirvana.
How, after barely finding much enjoyment in the first of the Tropic books - and only half-heartedly deciding on the possibility of reading Tropic of Capricorn at some distant point - did I fall for this? Serendipity played its part. I had a few minutes to spare and was next to the hall where Bursa's new book festival had started. I went in looking for a Christmas gift for my niece, who is studying English Literature at Istanbul University. Just inside the entrance, a secondhand stall grabbed me, and it having a large English section, I didn't take long being parted from my 100 TL in exchange for three vols: The Story of English (for my niece), Elvis Costello's autobiography (in near perfect, unread condition), and this fairly tatty copy of the Miller in question. Somehow, I couldn't resist it, coming on the heels of Cancer, the man having passed me by all these years.
Well, I should confess, I have enjoyed this read, despite experiencing some disquieting squirms. And, I suppose to come out fighting, I should state the sexual content was not at all what kept me entertained. I still dispute if Miller's work can be called pornographic. Technically, by the way, this is pure pornography: since it is writing about prostitutes. In fact, I should have expected tales of piquant adventures with females for hire would have made up a large part of so-called erotica. But it's not even a minor sub-genre. As I discovered, while doing research for my own novel, porn divides into all kinds of weird and wonderlust categories, such as predilections for corpulence, maturity, the domestic, dominance, leather & etc.. But prostitution mustn't sell, as it features neither on the shelves nor in the archives. Perhaps because it's just as easy to buy the real thing as study a book on the subject. There are, however, accounts of visits to brothels written as reviews. In Quiet Days in Clichy, Miller gives us neither of these things. I guess someone desperate to consume smut would class his work as a hot bedtime read (say, a pimply teenager in the 1950s or 60s), but I think he steers too much on the side of honesty for whatever titilation there is to endure as an end in itself.
He starts off with an unflattering self-portrait of how Nys - a cut above the average working girl - relieves him of his remittance. True, he enjoys himself immensely, and there is a deal showing off involved. But then his relationship with Nys is destined to become deeper than punter/client. I guess, with Miller you have to accept that sex is always going to be a transaction, and that romance itself is only a series of trade-offs. He continues to use raw language, referring to women as “cunts”, and depictions such as empty-headed are assigned to females in terms never ascribed to men. In other words, it would be useless to argue that Miller isn't anything but a damned misogynist.
Quiet Days in Clichy, though, differs from Tropic of Cancer in one major respect. The anti-semitism of the earlier work is here expunged, and a condemnation of Jew-hating interpolated. I wonder why? The dates and places given at the end: New York City, June, 1940. Rewritten in Big Sur, May, 1956. maybe a clue to that. In fact, some of the material covered here is in that earlier piece (see below); but what intervened between the writing done from memory in NYC, and the revisions at Big Sur, was the Holocaust. One can't help thinking Miller was anxious to distance himself from his own (literary) involvement in the greatest crime of all time by claiming he and his friend Carl had belittled an anti-Jewish restaurateur in German-leaning Luxembourg. How dashing of them!
The exploitation of an underage girl, Colette, cannot be whitewashed; but I fear even this has been doctored in the edit. I hardly wonder if Carl, who is given most of the blame, had approved! As the crime stands, Miller was an accessory; so I carefully read the text at this point and get a hint of legalese in the sections where his complete complicity is - shall we say – teased at. And as I read, I recall how no less a feminist icon than Simone de Beauvoir escaped prosecution for debauching a minor in 1939 (got her teaching licence revoked in 1943, the Nazi occupiers of France looking on bemused). To have judged these people by the standards of our day, their reputations would have been sunk, and their works shunned.
George Orwell, in a double-edged comment, is quoted on the back blurb praising Miller as, “The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.” If you dig out the full piece, you come upon this in the very next sentence, “...he [Miller] is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil...” Orwell, a professional reviewer himself, knew how to dish out the quotable, feathering his own in the process. But I suspect there was genuine admiration for Miller's honesty (if not “imagination” – I wonder if that's not pure irony) as Orwell is said to have spent whatever time and money he could in the brothels of Paris during his “down and out” period, without giving too much away in his own book on the subject.
Oh the clay feet of our heroes! Miller was a major influence on Jack Kerouac, whom I read avidly as a teenager. Years later, when I discovered just how bitter, twisted and rotten he became in his final alcoholic rages, I wanted to repudiate my love for On The Road and Big Sur. The latter ends with such a positive outcome from all that cheap, sweet wine he drank. You get a similar paean here when Joey (Miller) and Carl swindle a group of prostitutes into taking part in an orgy; but then, without bothering to consummate the scene, off he goes to bed, experiencing,

“A rich, fecundating dream, shot through with a mystic blue light.”

launched on fancy's flight, is this redemption or just the deliriums of a sex-junky?
I refuse to be taken in. Whereas Kerouac croaked in middle age, Miller lived on until 88, writing, painting and even appearing in films. He claimed in the early 60s to have come to dislike the reputation he had for smut, hoping we would think there was more to him than the seedy old roué of his image. But then again, here he stands once more condemned for misogyny and abuse. So will I read another?

Actually, there is another piece in this book. A short story called “Mara-Marignan”...

But again, I'm not sure if this isn't so much a story as another bite of fictionalised autohagiography. Kate Millett's devastating appraisal of Miller's work (in Sexual Politics, 1971) mentions Mara many times. The name seems to stand for his ideal mate, and is spread across a host of his books and female characters. In this short piece (50-odd, big print pages) I'm not sure if it doesn't apply to all three of the women he talks about, two of them prostitutes.
Once again, Carl is the sidekick, and we're treated to another of those second-hand affairs Miller is obsessed with recounting in some detail. And once more, he signs the story off with a similar time and date, “New York City, May, 1940. Rewritten in Big Sur, May, 1956.” After reading Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy, I get the impression there is an almost limitless supply of these, just as there is a never ending flow of remittances to buy the services of girls for hire. I think Miller wants us to think there is a sacred prostitute out there somewhere whose presence he sometimes feels he's in company with. The parasitical, half crazed world of the working girl keeps drawing him as if he truly believes there is an real angel to be found. Of course, he never tells the reader this directly, but the way their company has him swinging from disinterested benefactor to hungry hound is disarming. Millett, who dissects him like a split eel, reckons he must have been a pretty cold fish in real life. I would tend to agree, but with reservations. Which? Many, many years ago, I spent a couple of hours standing at a bar with a few fine fellows I had just met, including an ex-merchant seaman who told us about the fantastic prostitutes he'd been with in Hong Kong. When I let it out that though I was no playboy, I'd never paid for sex, the tar sensed my sniffy tone. He reminded me it wasn't on to be judgmental when you hadn't been in a situation yourself. His words coming out so matter-of-fact and without puffing up his chest, I felt a little ashamed of myself. After all, it takes two to make a transaction, and who's to say the other isn't something we simply aren't up to? I wondered if, in another life - where I ran away to sea (instead of London) - I mightn't have stood there right beside him on the Hong Kong street.


 Just like the fact Miller got away with racism and abuse that these days could have landed him in gaol and probably all washed up as a writer, the world of Paris in the 1930s is something we may have to make allowances for. After the decimation and disruption of the First World War, is it any surprise that a great surplus of unattached women turned to sex work as an sop to their pride an hunger? He was drawn to the city to write, and soon enough it was the being there that inspired his output. Even if these smutty, sexist, racist anecdotes are boastful & mean, there is a kind of honesty in them. As Kate Millett implies, his role in the early sexual revolution was less as liberator than exposer. But isn't that enough already?



Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller

This ain't what you'd call a long book; the hardback copy I've been with since mid-September has 276 small format pages, which means I've averaged 3 short sides a night on my bedtime read. The reason for this rate of progress will be the main subject of my review. Generally, I'm neither a painfully slow nor a pitilessly fast reader. I guess I consume fiction at a slightly quicker rate than, say, history or biography. For me, plot and character development drive narratives along; so if the story is a good one, or the personnel of a book are interesting enough, I drag myself earlier to bed to get more pages in before lights out.

Tropic of Cancer is a book with no plot to speak of. It is staffed by folk who - you're led by the blurb to assume - are taken direct from real life. However, no attempt is made to explore them beyond the gangshow relationship they have with their narrator. I'm not trying to be hard on Henry Miller, the author, because there are some good things about his writing. He wrote the book in the middle of his decade-long sojourn in Paris where, by all accounts, he mixed with some genuine characters. Many of these were... or were to become... famous in their own right. Some fans of Miller must play the who-was-who game with the Fillmores and Van Nordens found here. FGS, I've done this often enough myself with Kerouac, another writer associated with the ditching narrative.

Stringing together real life anecdotes in a sort of linear chaos, though, is not what makes a post-modernist novel succeed. Miller was writing in the mainline modernist Pound/Eliot/Joyce/Becket era, though his writing is hardly close to their carefully constructed neo-Classicisms. It has more to do with the stream of consciousness efforts of followers such as the Beats (I've already mentioned Kerouac) and the respected Saab dealer Kurt Vonnegut. But this is no serious or irreverent work of deconstruction that challenges conventions. The blatant misogyny, anti-Semitism and sleaze purveyed here is at best offensive, and at worst simply part of the social problem itself. Neither is it a truly erotic novel (as claimed on the cover), because the sex content isn't gratuitously graphic or titillating. It is just dirty, obscene and incontinent. No jolly bildungsroman this. Tropic of Cancer is what you get when you are determined to be a writer but have little to say beyond reproducing scenes from your life.

So, why didn't I throw the book at the wall? A work of art us supposed to do a good deal other than than peddle sexist and racist stereotypes as a take on social history. I suppose the Paris hellholes a thirty-something Miller chose to inhabit weren't so different from Isherwood's in Berlin, or the flophouse and basement locations of Orwell's slumming period. The book has become what's known as a social document, and therein stakes its claim to post modernity. For three decades, it was passed furtively from hand to hand, while Lawrence was considered merely not to be seen in polite society. Though its publication made the author little or less than no money, his credibility was worth a thousand of Hemingway's lesser tomes. And yet, despite the debauchery he wrote of, Henry Miller lived to a fairly grand old age. He was the artist in the garret many writers dream of becoming, though I don’t believe he was misunderstood. Just a bit over-rated in the reading.

Sorry not to have given any quotes so far... The long section starting with the words,

The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure they won’t get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their high heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper...”


...has an impertinent quality, similar in tone to some of Fitzgerald’s purpler passages, which does lift the book out of the mire it’s mostly content to wade through. In his debaucheries, the author clearly had some transcendental experiences, and conveys them in fits and starts. The Metz chapter is possibly the only extended anecdote that truly justifies itself, though Fillmore’s end (which more or less concludes the piece) is also told in an effective, rounded manner. So when he bothers to give episodes a shape, or gives his imagination the rein, the writing does soar above its pasty base. I guess, it's a book that will bear dipping into again (if not warrant a full reread). And I wonder if the sequel (Tropic of Capricorn) holds some more of its soiled jewels?





Bitter Honeymoon

by Alberto Moravia

Moravia is the master. Where Lawrence fails in his promise to deliver the female mind, the Italian serves up the sphinx, head and body. Though whether we come away from his writing any the wiser, I am not sure. Certainly we seem to get a lot closer, and Moravia's women are both objects and players in the game of sex, which Lawrence could never accept. Rarely taking us into the bedroom itself, with all the skill of the romantic storyteller he allows his protagonists to dally on the threshold and thus reveal their inner selves. His greatest skill is offering the two viewpoints almost simultaneously, while holding enough back on each to keep the reader puzzling beyond the end.

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 2)
The Apogee

by John Julius Norwich

On the last page of his short introduction to this book - the second of his three volume history of the empire – Lord Norwich apologises thus, “... I make no claim to academic rigour. I knew little about Byzantium when I began writing about it and shall doubtless have forgotten a good deal of what I have written soon after I come to the close.” Reading his three books in sequence as I am, this admission of the author's is not quite so disconcerting as it may seem. The quantity characters (emperors, empresses, caliphs, kings, queens & consorts; popes, patriarchs, bishops & monks of note - eg Cyril of the cyrillic script; generals, admirals, ministers of state and chroniclers) is staggering. I doubt if even rigorous academics are experts on the whole period (spanning more than a thousand years). And Norwich often pays tribute to those he has studied and whose opinions he values, notably Sir Stephen Runciman. The difficulty the writer faces, with a popular readership in mind, has been (as it was in the first volume) to avoid his chronicle becoming too much of a list.

But by deconstructing his own narrative, he's also warning us that there is of necessity too much detail here. And that even though this is not an academic study, general readers will have to do some filling in themselves. It is as though Game of Thrones turned out to be no stranger than fact, hardly as long, and not so very nasty at all in comparison with this blood thirsty study of ruthless ambition vs. treachery.

I am yet to get round to reading Gibbon's account of the Eastern Roman Empire (so I don't know how much it deals with Byzantium), but decline and fall is not what happens here. The surprise is how Byzantium endures, then goes from strength to strength. Just when it appears to be tottering on the brink of destruction by the Saladins, by the Viking led Russians, or by its own insurgents, along comes an emperor like Basil II and boy does the empire strike back.

Other surprises include the return of Iconoclasm. I know this was dealt with extensively in vol 1, but by the ninth century it still hasn't gone away. That a civilisation synonymous with icons spent some much time and effort destroying its own religious artwork is mind boggling. This puritan streak is not the work of a couple of revolutions (like in sixteenth and seventeenth century England), but a recurring compulsion that drives emperors and patriarchs alike.

The urge to destroy is also turned on living beings as well as those represented in effigy. Noses and ears are still being lopped off, tongues pulled out; hair is shaved from the heads of men and women; and former emperors are paraded through the streets sat backwards upon donkeys. One patriarch was banished to a monastery for years before making his return to office; as was an empress. You couldn't write these stories. It makes accounts of the Borgias or the Medicis read like second rate soap opera treatments. I've heard that George R. R. Martin (writer of Game of Thrones) raked through the English Wars of the Roses for inspiration. No doubt one day this Eastern version of the Roman Empire will spawn some gigantic Netflix folly. Gladiators? No need for such spectacle when a common shipwright could make his bid for the imperial throne, when a fourteen year old jockey could become patriarch, or when a tavern dancing girl could marry a prince and become empress. The violence Byzantium did was not restricted to people or objects. Christianity itself was torn to shreds in the massacre of towns and cities, and if Jesus ever did weep it was standing in “God's holy fire” ie in the Greek fire turned on Byzantium's enemies.

Towards the end of this second volume, Norwich (surely tongue in cheek by now) reminds us that the “Roman Empire of the East had been in existence for little more than seven hundred years...” when on the verge of the Great Schism it once again passes from a great height to a very sorry depth. The split with Rome had long been a reality but while an obscure Norman Duke was fighting his nephew for the throne of a small island off the northern coast of Europe, much bigger fish were being fried in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Empire having passed its Apogee – in the safe hands of Basil II – and was being tossed around in a game of Find The Lady (ie, marry the Empress – his sister). A suitable point for the author to break off – having lost the decisive battle of Manazgirt (against the Selçuk Turks) – with a humiliating treaty. The stage, one can only assume, is set for the disasters of The Crusades in vol. 3.




Byzantium (Vol 1)

The Early Centuries

by John Julius Norwich

It's almost a year ago, in Bold Street's Oxfam Bookshop, where I buy the last volume of Byzantium, and the hairy book geek behind the counter beams at me, Good choice! Then, of course, he asks if I've read vols 1 & 2, to which I dumbly shake my head. Because already embarrassed from having lived next door to Byzantium for almost three decades, my lack of pre-Ottoman knowledge is, well, limited to the Greco-Roman period. I should add here, I arrived in Istanbul in November 1992 with echoes of Yeats' words in my ears,

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre
And be the singing masters of my soul.

But I was not a tired old man, and spent my first month in Turkey crossing and recrossing the “mackerel crowded” sea on foot, exploring the back streets, monuments and museums on either side of the Bosphorus. Since then, I have acquired many books on Turkish history, visited a great many ancient Greek, Lykian, Phrygian and Roman sites throughout the country, plus done much complementary reading of the Greek and Roman classics. But Byzantium has always somehow eluded my focus. There are always too many layers at work. At Troy you will see the attempts of archaeologists to pick between about a thousand years of one city built on top another... ending with the late Roman touristification of the site. Then there is little for the better part of two thousand years. There are basilicas just about everywhere else you go in Turkey, often built next to the temples of the ancient gods. Some churches date back only a century or so, as orthodox Greeks were encouraged to recolonise parts of the country in the final decades of the Ottoman empire. Those folks the Turks call “Rum” (pronounced “roum”) lingered on in towns such as Trabzon (on the Black Sea) for centuries after Byzantium itself was snuffed out, and it wasn't until the population exchanges at the end of the Greco-Turkish War - in 1922 - that most of their churches were closed down. Even to this day, the Patriarch (the spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, a kind of Eastern Pope) is still housed in Istanbul. As late as 2001, we visited a completely Greek village high up in the mountains on the Turkish island of Gökçeada (known in Greek as Imbros).

There is this discrepancy between what history tells us and what we find on the ground. The discovery of nine thousand year-old megaliths at Göbeklitepe (questioning a thousand ingrained notions of the origins of human society) is itself a monument to mismatch. Byzantium and the Turks have left us Aya Sofya (the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, built in its final form by the emperor Justinian in the fifth century AD) and the other churches of Istanbul, plus the ancient icons that survived the purges of the late first millennium. But Byzantium is more of history than of relics and archaeology. This is not simply because the Eastern Roman Empire built with less skill than the West did. Nor is it only because five and a half centuries of Muslim dominance has erased them. In fact, many churches (including those in Trabzon and Iznik - Nicaea) were converted to mosques with the coming of Islam, and therefore still stand today. And many generations quarried the buildings that came before them: look at most of the castle walls in Turkey - in Harran, Ankara, Gölyazi (ie from the vast to the small) – and you will see stones that were clearly cut and sculpted for earlier buildings. Byzantine cities were overrun by the Persians of the late pagan period, by the Goths, Huns, Bulgarians and Slavs; by the so-called Saladins (Muslim Arabs), and by the Crusaders who were meant to save them; and then by the Seljuk Turks... long before the Ottomans arrived at their walls. Byzantium, firstly as a Christian refinement of the Roman Empire and then as its oriental transformation, grew into a bastion of Christian survival that would last for a thousand years. During that time, its cities endured wave after wave of rebuilding. Ancient temples, amphitheatres, baths, agoras and hippodromes were unsympathetically torn down to supply the hard core and building blocks of protective walls. Surely this means it was Christianity – in all its imperfections – that was fighting for survival, not just the empire itself. While the West – based on Rome – clung on “by the skin of its teeth” (to quote Kenneth Clark), Byzantium managed to preserve itself more or less intact. And yet what is left in the twenty-first century is less of stone than the notion of pastiche; that peculiar mixture of pagan and Christian, of East and West that is Byzantium. Perhaps there is more history in the layers of cheese, spinach and pastry that make up the Greek lasagna known as pastichio (or ispanokopita) than any old carved stone walls?

So, what of John Julius's Volume 1? I couldn't bring myself to dip into the Vol 3 I had bought before I'd found the first two. After several trips back to Liverpool, I finally gave up on Oxfam and turned to Amazon, buying the missing two volumes. Therefore I'm now reading them in order.

The book geek in Oxfam, combined with the author's aristocratic name – John Julius (Viscount of Norwich), gave me the impression this reading adventure would be a bit like discovering Kenneth Clark's “Civilisation” for the first time. Of course, Clark's Western art history course was originally a TV series, and his book is more an enhancement of the viewing experience; but Baron Clark has a way with words. When you read – or listen – the combination of love for and authority about the subject only enhances his patrician tone. You never feel you're being talked down to by some erudite academic bore; it's more like you're being let into the secrets of the world. So could M'Lord of Norwich compete with that?

Alas, not quite. Perhaps the study of history has to be drier than the contemplation of art? That much time spent with nose in book rather than stood in front of subject doth weary the man?

I suppose what I dread in chronicles of this type is the dry reportage of succeeding warrior kings, their battles, palace struggles and sheer numbers... Vol 1 of Byzantium gets through six Constantines, four Leos, three each of Constantius, Valentinian, Tiberius & Theodosius, plus two Anastasiuses, Justinians, Justins & Constanses. So it comes as a relief to have names like Julian, Zeno and Irene that stand without ordinals. I appreciate that all these reigns must be got through somehow, but it is the skill of the writer to carry us onward without drumming our fingers to the beat of wooden facts & figures. Lord Norwich largely concentrates on those emperors whose reigns were most prominent in the records: for example, Theodosius the Great, Justinian the Great, Heraclius and Leo III. Beginning with the founder of the city, the peer indicates one difficulty of the historian's task by apologising for the confusion Constantine caused by naming his many children with variations on his own: Constantius, Constantina, Constantia, Constans etc...

Motives for Constantine's decision to build a new Roman capital are woven into the first three chapters of the book, but I think Norwich prefers to present his findings rather than draw any conclusions. We're not shown the founding of Constantinople with intimations of how or why the empire would eventually split, though the principle of having two beaks had gone back to Diocletian. Nor do we get much background information on the way a marginal and persecuted spin-off from Judaism had been taken up by so many Roman citizens. What we do get, though, is a thorough account of the hardly Christian behaviour of Constantine and his antecedents, who regularly tortured, disfigured and murdered their rivals in the pursuit of power and revenge. The constant building and rebuilding of Constantinople that goes on between its founder (Constantine reigned 306-24) and Justinian (527-65) pushes ahead as if the city had a life of its own as well as an imperial imperative.

Lord Norwich by no means ignores religion, but concentrates mainly on the Eastern church's unending theological disputes, principally concerning the divine or human nature of Jesus Christ. First with the Arian heresy, then the tendency towards Monophysitism, followed by the rise of iconoclasm, time and time again the Eastern church risked tearing itself apart. All this while Rome (under the Pope) seems to just carry on as if bemused. For most of the fourth century, Rome and Constantinople remained joint capitals, leaving the Pope to administer theological decisions taken at the Council of Nicaea (325). In the fifth century, the empire was more formally divided, with thrones in Rome and Constantinople. Thereafter, the city of Rome fell into the hands of the Goths and other so-called barbarian peoples. But as many of these had become Christians, the Pope – as spiritual rather than temporal leader - maintained a degree of independence. It wasn't until the coming of Charlemagne, early in the ninth Century, that a specifically Roman emperor would re-emerge, by which time the Eastern Church had become preoccupied with iconoclasm – a phenomena the West would not really experience until the Reformation, six hundred years later. This means there are actually more better preserved Byzantine monuments at Ravenna (in Italy) than in typical cities of the east.

In the meantime, much of the Byzantine empire had been overrun, first by the Persians (Sasanians), then the Muslim Caliphate. Before the middle of the seventh century – just decades after the Hegira - Syria, Egypt and Carthage had all gone. The city of Jerusalem was briefly liberated by Heraclius in 629 (Norwich calls him the First Crusader), but soon the remnants of the Western empire would find themselves fighting invasions via Spain and Sicily. Though periodically halted by internecine power struggles of their own, the Saladins brought a new kind of religious fanaticism to the battlefield. Conversely, once the brutality of their conquests was over, they practised religious tolerance, so that many communities – such as at Jerusalem – preferred their rule to that of the often intolerant anti-Monophysite Byzantines.

Norwich often gives us vivid accounts of the struggles in palaces and at battle. He's particularly good at Greek Fire, Byzantium's secret weapon. He describes methods of blinding and splitting noses which should be rated PG. He's not so good on items of daily life in Byzantium; and at one point gives some credence to a tale of starving Arabs who, during the 717 siege of Constantinople, allegedly ate human flesh baked in excrement. He reproduces verbatim Procopius's exaggerated account of the Empress Theodora's nymphomania from The Secret History without acknowledging the similarity that text has with spiteful accounts of the first century Empress Messalina.

Given history writing has supposed to have moved on from remorseless accounts of palace struggles and battles, I am more than a little disappointed with Lord Norwich's approach. Many times immense casualties are reported - 90,000 Christians supposedly murdered by Jews at Jerusalem in 614; 22,000 Saladin soldiers butchered by the Bulgars in 718). But the sources are chroniclers writing fifty or a hundred and fifty years later. To counter-balance this, I want more contemporary detail, flavour and atmosphere; a feeling that the researcher has trod the ground as well as delved through the manuscripts. True, Norwich does give us some useful structural information about the empire; for example, Heraclius's reorganisation of the territory into Themes populated by soldier-farmers. But I want to know what such military households looked like. Did they resemble the manses of medieval barons in France or England? Some readers will argue that such is the preserve of historical novelists, and I don't disagree with rules against making stuff up. But Byzantium eludes us by the arcane nature of its system, and we need to see chinks of light through its splendid mosaics. There are no real dynasties here, as the Greek Romans inherited the tradition of armies appointing their own Caesars (raising a successful general on their shields). So, how important was family life? Why is it that the Empress Irene – who had murdered her own son – was accepted as sole ruler (at least initially)? The Holy Roman Empire (as it would come to be) under Charlemagne would never accept inheritance passing to a female. I don't think Lord Norwich has given over enough space (at least in Vol 1) to gender issues; or to the roles of slaves and eunuchs. The main problem with listing kings and battles is it ignores social change, it skips over long periods of peace and prosperity, it plonks settlers (such as the Bulgars or Huns) on the ground and just leaves them there without exploring the effect of one culture on another.


It may sound as though I'm not enjoying the series enough to continue; in which case, I've given the wrong impression. Viscount Norwich, who died this year at the age of 88, has attempted to cram a thousand years of history into something like fifteen hundred pages, which in itself is no mean feat. To give him his due, he's certainly kept my interest up, even if I'm not particularly enamoured of his means or method. The books contain useful appendices and good (if not wonderful) illustrations. In Vol 2, rubbing his hands, this old man shall see how the empire survives The Great Schism.


Moby-Dick
by

Herman Melville

Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant...” is how Philip Hoare kicks off his recent review of “Moby-Dick” in the Guardian for the 200th anniversary of Melville's birth (Thursday, August 1st), going on to characterise him as, “author of the greatest unread novel in the English language”.

True enough, it took me half a century to get round to reading the third copy I have bought with that intention; and once the book was fully under way, almost six months went by as I nibbled rather than devoured it, often managing barely two or three pages a day. Which is odd, because as Victorian novels go, it's not spectacularly long. And that first, purplest of chapters is a sheer joy to read and re-read (though my brother Chris deplored it). The muddier waters that follow, the Sargasso seas the Pequod eventually enters in its relentless pursuit of the cursed white whale, do cloy with somewhat regularity. Melville's digressions into whale hunting technology and folklore, into religion and.. pseudo-religion, into the documentary minutiae of life aboard a sailing whaler and his philosophical broodings on the sea... slow the tale right down at times into a full stop. Maybe it's not the best bedtime reading... unless your reason is not peace and quiet, but to send you off to sleep?

BTW, I can recommend Redburn, which I had previously read, partly for its descriptions of my home town (Liverpool) in the days when the docks there were a wonder of the world. But it was also in preparation for Moby-Dick, with a portrait of life at sea for a novice setting the scene for his novitiate life as a hunter of whales. But Moby-Dick is a fully American book, and I read the first fifty pages convinced the search for the great American Novel should have been called off a century and a half ago. I still believe its failings do not disbar it from sharing that honour.

So what should disbar it? It's a book about men and fish, the handful of women who colour the opening chapters do little to balance the permanence of that starboard list. Also the tale itself smoulders for several hundred pages, and denouement – based on a real story (appended in my copy) - though not at all hurried, takes up but a fraction of the volume. The purplish writing does at times take over. It's at its best when it roars or moans in great biblical leitmotifs; it falters when Melville wanders too much into verbatim: indeed at times it's as though he's writing a vast libretto for an opera even longer than The Ring Cycle. Real people do not speak like that, even those driven mad by months at sea with nothing to occupy their minds than the great existential quest to survive.

And what recommends it? Yes, there is something gay in the life of these rough sea hands, though I take Queequeg's marriage-like embrace at face value. If Melville wanted us to read something more than was permissible under the censorship of Victorian values, it is certainly there in both concrete and symbolic forms. I like that you can take it or leave it, as the central violation is of nature's eternal laws, not mankind's temporary ones. This is no Boy's Own adventure tale, the descriptions of how a whale is caught, strung up, cut up and boiled down will have the stiffest constitution heaving. There was some moral objection to whaling in the day, though nothing like when I myself played an agit-prop Captain Ahab at the Brighton International Whaling Conference in 1983. I had to rise out of the sea and strut up the pebble beach on a peg-leg, with the world's TV cameras on me. Commercial whaling was halted then by popular opinion (it has recently resumed in Japan). But Moby-Dick has surely done more than any other book to raise awareness of the horrid cruelty and sheer waste that is whaling.


Published at a time when human slavery was still being fought over in the US, the book presents a multi-racial crew who - if not there as equals - have all elected to take part in the hunt and earn their share of the spoils. While I don't see Melville as campaigning in any way - for or against – this greedy exploitation of the world's greatest mammals, his dramatised documentation of the hunt does more than enough good in illuminating what was – and still is – a very dark matter.





Citizens

by Simon Schama

I am grateful to Simon Schama for writing this scholarly account of the personnel in the French Revolution. Had I not found it in the Oxfam bookshop (hardback £2.99), I might never have got round to plugging this enormous great gap in my knowledge of essential history. At school I studied Europe from the Treaty of Utrecht to 1789, and Britain from 1815 to to the outbreak of The Great War, neatly incising the Revolution itself from cause and result (I take Napoleon, whom Simon barely mentions, to be just as much a product of the Ancien Regime as Marat, Danton and Robespierre). Of course, I've always had the basic highlights: the fates of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the tale of Charlotte Corday (she was on Blue Peter, wasn’t she?), The Terror. As far as fiction goes (and history is at least 50% fiction, isn’t it?), A Tale Of Two Cities has always struck me as a somewhat flawed novel, not because of any lack of scholarly insight on Dickens' part, but because for me his repertory is inappropriately employed here (Hard Times suffers a similar miscasting). The Scarlet Pimpernel I’ve always taken to be at least 50% claptrap, though not on any authority. What I really lacked was an objective walkthrough of the facts; Simon Schama's take is not very detached – but his distinctive right wing (Thatcherite, Reaganomic) viewpoint only partially detracts from this account, while colouring it with the enthusiasm of a credible historian.
As an amateur academic, I had often wondered what the working class people of France ever saw in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s insistence on getting back to nature, which seemed as irrelevant to their hungry, downtrodden lives as Marie Antoinette's obsession with the peasant lifestyle. Voltaire’s championship of justice, though intellectually exclusive, was less difficult to brook. His view of Rousseau as a simpleton (ie Candide) is not all tongue in cheek, though I wonder how many starving farmworkers could have named any herbs beyond those they could eat? But I also wonder what on earth those two permanent occupants of the revolutionary Pantheon would have made of The Terror? Simon Schama does not take us there, but his portrait of Malesherbes – an amateur botanist – is one of the many semi-rounded walk-ons that make his book so readable. He conducts us through the revolution from the point of view of its main actors, pausing as each one comes into focus to give us their take on the situation thus far. In doing so, he rather assumes a working knowledge of the events and institutions on his readers' parts. This character based approach, as he warns us in the introduction, is a throwback to 19th century history writing; but he avoids stereotype in favour of something like investigative journalism. Rousseau and Voltaire were safely out of the way before 1789, so they’re left pretty flat; whereas Mirabeau and Malesherbes, who were old hands but still very much around, are treated to the full relief.
That a great many of these lives ended in bloody queues to the steps of the guillotine seems all too inevitable. But you can’t write that horrid invention out of history. In fact, Simon Schama tops and tails his book with portraits of a handful of men (and even one woman) who came before and after the 26 year interruption of Bourbon rule. Individuals are swept along by the tide, and yet movement in politics is made up of people, and real people are indeed individuals. Just as the innocent were butchered along with the guilty, so were a few of the principals wily or lucky enough to escape.
Not having read other books on the subject, I can't really comment on the idea that the origins of the French Revolution were in France's military failures in the Seven Years' War, though I've long held the proxy view that it must have stemmed in part from the French interference in the American Revolution (a view shared by a Frenchwoman of my acquaintance). However, I do know something of that earlier conflict (see below, my review of Montcalm and Wolfe). Known to Americans as The French And Indian War, it has long seemed ironic to me how the Yanks first used the British to get rid of the French, and then the French to do the same for the Brits. In this context, what happened in France was payback. Is bloodshed ever good? Schama doesn't bother to tackle such a horrid question; but he does speculate on whether Louis, for example, could have avoided the outcome.
A left wing analysis would probably take a more balanced view of The Terror. Like Stalin’s purges, the Killing Fields of Pol Pot or the Cultural Revolution in China, most revolutions seem programmed to undergo such brutal efforts at self purification: with the sheer logic of ideology inexorably leading to the proverbial fate of rats in a sack, Schama quietly tut-tuts over successive waves of revolutionaries bumping each other off. He all but avoids farce. More or less concluding with Robespierre, he sets the stage for Napoleon, then reaches out to catch that boomerang package of survivors he launched in the opening chapters.
Pity is reserved not so much for the king and his family, but for the likes of the Malesherbes clan. With the treachery of the Duc d'Orléans condemning his own cousin to the guillotine, and an unromanticised dismissal of Marie Antoinette, the royals are tellingly dispatched. Only Louis' untreated toothache seems to mitigate his fate, and the denial of the royal coach to his Queen, who has to endure the tumbril ride. While the Malesherbes are portrayed queueing at the foot of the scaffold, the old man having to wait till last as his daughter and granddaughter are decapitated before him, their blood spattering his shirt. Though the author doesn’t exactly rub their noses in it, it is a crime the whole French national are forever diminished by, at least in this reader’s eyes.
But a point I was curious Simon Schama didn’t make was how the revolutionaries failed to take Malesherbes' support for Rousseau into account. Surely anyone who had helped save their greatest hero was worthy of a kinder fate? Perhaps he reasoned the barbarity of The Terror needed no further highlighting, or that its illogicality was already sufficiently proved? He might also have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of atrocity. He does mention that many other whole families were wiped out on similarly absurd or trumped up charges.
The logic of the revolution was that a man should lose his head for being unaware how many eggs were needed to make an omelette. In other words, one absurdity deserves another. Private scores were settled in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, while a huge bunch of more or less eloquent rogues gradually ate themselves up before the reins of power were seized by a tyrant no one could murder – Napoleon. Why on earth the successors of the revolution didn't heed its obvious message – that Terror would become necessary, and then destroy any good work the revolution had done – is beyond the scope of Citizens. But that’s the main weakness of a book written from a reactionary point of view.

Meantime, I am most grateful to Simon Schama for reinforcing the terms ci-dessou and sans-culottes, which have now permanently entered my vocabulary, waiting to take their turns at suitable moments.



Mansfield Park

by Jane Austen

This is an entertaining but confusing novel that plays on the heart and mind, though exactly to what purpose is unclear even by the end. Perhaps it is the most serious of her works, or perhaps just the least frivolous? The first hundred pages – up to the debacle of The Play – are peopled with more than a dozen named characters: the Prices, the Bertrams, the Norrises & Grants; and then the Crawfords, Rushworth & Yates. Austen, as always, requires her readers to sit up and mark their cards, as if it won't do to play the timid novice, in order to win yourself a partner for each and every dance, you must quickly become conversant with every body in the ball room. But your confusion is compounded not simply by having to memorise all these names – and alternate names - of actors, but by discerning which are of lasting importance, which are only fleeting, and which may stand-in for whatever role is required. And yet, beyond all these natural confusions of person and personality, it was the purpose of the plot that ultimately left this reader somewhat bewildered.

Fanny Price, our hero, is another of Austen's faux Cinderellas out to catch her prince. This time, against a background of Napoleonic War and Caribbean slave revolt, it's the Virtue of her-and-his versus a lot of snides and sinners. Little Fanny must get her foothold in the Bertram family, resist the advances of rich young rentier Henry Crawford, and watch on while her prince - Edmund Bertram - is toyed with by Mary Crawford.

Born into a poor wing of the family, Fanny is taken up by an uncle (Sir Thomas Bertram, baronet) and placed among her well-off cousins (the un-ugly sisters Julia, Maria and their brothers Tom and Edmund). The uncle then departs for Antigua, presumably to deal with the chaos caused by the abolition of the slave trade (the main action of the novel takes place in 1810-11, the years immediately after Abolition). While Sir Thomas is away, the young people play. There is a visit to the run-down estate of Mr Rushworth, when Henry Crawford – far from helping the owner with ideas for improving the place – disappears over the ha-ha with Maria Bertram, his fiancée. Then rehearsals commence for an amateur drama. Fanny disapproves of it, thinking it disrespectful to her uncle. At this point, it's difficult not to see her as a prude. Reluctantly, she and her cousin Edmund help out with the production. Edmund is soon to be ordained into the Church of England, but his moral objections are over-ruled by his wilder, older brother Tom. Fanny has to look on, and even prompt, while Mary Crawford “makes love” to her Edmund.

On his sudden return, Fanny asks Sir Thomas about the slaves (who would make up the workforce on his plantation) but receives silence in answer. The intimation is better not to ask (reminiscent of a terse and equivocal reference to slavery in Persuasion). Though Sir Thomas's return brings normality to Mansfield Park, there is some gaiety in the wedding of Maria to the cuckold Mr Rushworth. Then, while the Bertram sisters go off to share Maria's honeymoon, Sir Thomas – to most everyone's surprise - orders a ball to be held in poor little Fanny's honour. Which coincides with Henry Crawford turning his roving eye on her... only to be smitten, in spite of himself. But are Henry Crawford's intentions ever more than selfish, thinking he may improve his life as well as his estates? And is Fanny ever going to be convinced? Austen artfully keeps us in suspended disbelief almost to the end.

And yet, all her art can't paper over some cracks. The way the amateur dramaturge Mr Yates suddenly makes a reappearance is rather convenient, and - merely being reported in a letter - quite melodramatic. Meanwhile, Mary Crawford's dubious character turns to utter crass while writing to Fanny about the likelihood of Tom's death and Edmund's succession to the baronetcy. And though we have seen enough of Henry's character in the visit to the Rushworth estate, what he goes on to do as Fanny lingers on in Portsmouth is not fleshed out for us. The scandal of his actions rings as hollow as noises-off in a ham-amateur production. I read somewhere that Cassandra Austen's preference was for Henry Crawford's coming good. But the author's sister would have to wait for Jane Eyre to come along, for surely Charlotte Brontë's waif is an improved Fanny Price? And is Becky Sharp (from Vanity Fair) not Mary Crawford on stilts?

It's the stickiness of incest that mars this novel more than its stablemates; the reinforcement of the familiar that trumps the unknown. At least in Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the heroes marry their brother-in-laws. OK, Wickham isn't D'Arcy's blood brother, but in both those novels we're dealing with a social rather than genetic tendency. In Mansfield Park, it's nurture mingled with nature; Fanny and Edmund as well as being brought up together, also share the same maternal grandmother. Setting aside debate over whether marrying a first cousin is socially or genetically unhealthy, it's the preponderance of such close-knit wedlock in Austen's novels that narrows them. Surely part of the function of balls and amateur theatricals is that they bring young people together in unexpected ways?

Not that there isn't much in Mansfield Park that is new or sparkles. Fanny and Crawford are in one sense the corollary of Elizabeth and D'Arcy, making Crawford's attempts at winning Fanny over by favours appear in a murky light. We get descriptions of seaside town and countryside, which are a relief in novels that generally take place indoors. This is a close-first person passage from Henry Crawford's visit to Fanny in Portsmouth,

The day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them. Nay, had she been without his arm, she would soon have known that she needed it, for she wanted strength for a two hours' saunter of this kind, coming, as it generally did, upon a week's previous inactivity.”

And this sentence from Fanny's return from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park further shows how even when describing nature, Austen is concerned to internalise the effect,

Her eye fell everywhere on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.”

There's even a smutty naval joke which appears to have escaped the censors. This is Mary Crawford teasing Edmund,

Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.'”

And there is one character, Mrs. Norris, whose brute nastiness is as close to pure evil as we're likely to get from this quarter. The Price household in Portsmouth is colourful, and Fanny's mother - Mrs Fanny Price (third of the Ward sisters, the elder though poor sibling of Lady Maria Bertram and Mrs Norris) – is a lower class drudge that Dickens would flesh out in characters such as Mrs Micawber.

Here in the early twenty-first century with entertainment on demand 24/7, we're a far cry from a world where amateur dramatics or just reading aloud from books of poetry or drama were staples of home entertainment. In this passage, Henry Crawford impresses Fanny with the way he takes over reading a Shakespeare passage,

Crawford took the volume. 'Let me have the pleasure of finishing that speech to your ladyship,' said he. 'I shall find it immediately.' And by carefully giving way to the inclination of the leaves, he did find it, or within a page or two, quite near enough to satisfy Lady Bertram, who assured him, as soon as he mentioned the name of Cardinal Wolsey, that he had got the very speech. Not a look or an offer of help had Fanny given; not a syllable for or against. All her attention was for her work. She seemed determined to be interested by nothing else. But taste was too strong in her. She could not abstract her mind five minutes: she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme.”

The effect of this - “his reading was capital” - begins to persuade Fanny of Crawford's value. A modern audience, even, might recognise a Briton who's 'got talent'. His ease, familiarity and skill at posing with book in hand are so impressive they prevent Fanny from continuing with her needlework. It's fair to say she's dazzled and has to struggle with herself. Education is something she has benefited from, her natural fondness for books being kindled by the library at Mansfield park, her cousin's enthusiasm for literature, and the private tutoring all the children would have received. Both the Crawfords, too, are clearly educated in the formal sense, and have aptitudes for showing off as actors and writers.

But education alone is not enough. Fanny's skills with the needle come in very handy when she's in Portsmouth; without them her airs and graces would have only counted against her. And education without a moral basis comes in for criticism at the end of the book, when Sir Thomas realises he has made mistakes in bringing up his daughters,

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect.”

But still harping on the downside, I'm afraid I don't buy the idea that the names Mansfield Park and Mrs Norris are more than symbolic. It's doubtful Jane Austen chose them unknowingly. The Earl of Mansfield was the judge who, in 1772, had ruled that slavery was not legal within the British Isles, while Robert Norris was the author of a 1789 book that notoriously described and supported the slave trade. However subtly Jane Austen wanted to signal that slavery was evil, no matter who defended it (Johnson's biographer Boswell was another Norris!), it ultimately broke English Common Law. Even so, just using the names Mansfield and Norris doesn't bear the weight of serious conviction. Symbolism only goes so far, and Mansfield Park itself comes under more threat from the Crawfords. Moreover Tom - by his illness - appears to have learnt his lesson, so the break-up of the an estate built with the proceeds of slavery is never on the cards. Indeed, Sir Thomas's visit to Antigua appears to have resolved the situation there, though we are not informed how. If he had freed the slaves with compensation, offered them accommodation and paid work, or free passage back to Africa, we would have heard all about it. Instead, what we get is William Price going off to sea, and to who-knows-what adventures? The Raft of the Medusa?

Perhaps Jane Austen's true purpose in Mansfield Park is to show the flipside of winning fair heart by favour-doing? This time, instead of becoming mistress of Pemberley, and most every body living happily thereafter, half the cast gets mired in squabbles and public shame. Like the sort of well-made play favoured by amateur theatricals, as a romance Mansfield Park is novel that equivocates between comic and problematic. But without the arch orneriness of untrained actors to carry its audience, the plot is too thin and the ending too pat for its own good.




Persuasion

by Jane Austen

The Allies' victory at the battle of Waterloo brought a disasterous fall off in orders for industrial goods, and a flood of cheap imported foodstuffs. All England was affected, from the cotton towns of the North to the farm lands of the South and East; the joy of peace soon turned to the misery of unemployment, want and homelessness. Indeed, many working-class folk became refugees in their own country. But peace brought its dividends too. Whereas large numbers of foot soldiers were discharged into the ranks of unemployed factory and agricultural workers, those who had spent a decade or so in the Royal Navy were apt to come ashore as very rich men indeed. In those days, loot was divided between the crews of any of His Majesty's ships within signalling distance of an enemy vessel taken as a prize. So it is that Persuasion, the last novel Jane Austen finished – itself a product of a post-war era – is largely the tale of four retired seamen, one admiral and three captains, who have landed with bags of gold. Our hero, then, as Captain and Commander, though unemployed has no need of a rich bride and can marry purely for love.

But Persusion opens as a tale of a nobleman's financial decline: a proud baronet forced to rent out his manse (the reward of a great grandfather's loyalty to Charles I) in order to pursue a genteel lifestyle in Bath spa. He has three daughters: the youngest safely married off, the eldest still holding out for a baronet of her own (though in a rapidly emptying field); and then there is Anne, our heroine, who has been unlucky in love. Actually, unlucky here means not that she has been rejected, but that as a young woman she was persuaded to break off with Captain Wentworth, one of the very officers who has now returned. Whereas Wentworth's fortunes have turned him from a rather dim prospect to a very eligible, still young-ish man, Anne is on the cusp of spinsterhood. Harbouring a deep affection for him, the question is, how does he feel for her now she is 27 years old and past the first blooms of her youth?

To further understand the plot, we must bear in mind that two centuries ago, women had very inferior rights to property. There was male primogeniture – the preferment of eldest sons over all other siblings; and in the case of the nobility, the male line would revert backwards through the generations to find a male heir. Having three daughters (it seems nearly all Jane Austen novels have principal families blessed* with three or more daughters and no sons) was a kind of disaster. Sometimes, in order to keep a title and its estate within a family, marriages were arranged between cousins. This had been the case here, only the match between Elizabeth Elliot (Anne's eldest sister) and her distant cousin William Elliot (the heir to her father's baronetcy and manse) had not turned out and he had stalked off. Now, as well as Wentworth's return, William is again on the scene, though seeming to prefer Anne's hand to Elizabeth's.

I won't give away any more of the plot, as part of the pleasure in reading this kind of early psychological romance is its nuanced tone of narration. The volume also contains a life of Jane Austen by her nephew (who as a young boy had known her before she died). Written in 1871, it contains few of the investigations or speculations of scholars, but does include some family details (such as the way recipes were handed down) which help to put the text in context. Most interesting to me was the early version of chapter 10, which is presented here as something Jane Austen had revised. I don't go with that at all. The writing is quite different and it seems to me to be a text exerpted from an earlier draft of the novel. Reading it, I wonder if an early title for the piece has been Manipulation rather than Persuasion, as it portrays the pro-active role of the Admiral and his wife in bringing the couple together.

One final point. I have not yet read The French Lieutenant's Woman, but I am quite familiar with Lyme Regis and its surrounding countryside. Dorset is to me one of the special places in England. Unlike Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen is not known as a landscape artist. She's more associated with interiors, more with drawing rooms than places to be drawn. And yet, I can't help thinking she had a feel for location even if she didn't exploit it much in her work.

*blessed, of course, also suggests its opposite: cursed






Emma

by Jane Austen

If you want a novel of sentiment, here it is. Never mind that the age of sentiment (somewhere between the end of the Seven Years War and the outbreak of the American Revolution) came and went half a century before Jane Austen penned this charming, delightful three-volume entertainment. Ignore also the sweeping away of the grand old life of rural France by the guillotine and the jackboots of Napoleon's Grand Armee. In the county of Surrey, England is somehow untouched by revolutions political, industrial, though perhaps not agrarian, the inhabitants of a small country community – just sixteen miles from London - go about the exquisite business of falling in and out of love as though the only other game in town was to gaze upon Endymion's sheep leaping a fence.

Chronologically speaking, the martydoms of the working class at Peterloo and Tolpuddle were just around the corner. Enclosures of common land had driven hordes of poor workers from the land and into industrial towns. There, health and sanitation were breaking down and disabled war veterans had to rely on charity, vast numbers of English children went barefoot, uneducated and underfed, and meanwhile the democratic system that Voltaire had admired and envied so much was undermined by rotten boroughs and a dissolute Regency.

Many readers might question should we should care if this handsome, spoilt twenty-one year-old young lady interfering in the life of a younger friend brings the idyll of her tight, secluded world crashing about her ears? (Oh! what a dreadful spoiler that would be, if the question were as pertinent as it sounds!) So what for the life of the English gentry, for the championing of a snobbish caste system, for the prim and prissy idleness and gossip of a world almost as hypocritical as the Victorian era it presaged? If the cartoons of Thomas Rowlandson are anything to go by, then in Jane Fairfax's red-faced declaration that the governess-trade may be as great a misery to its victims as “a fling at the slave-trade”, we get a glimpse at the under-surface of life in those days. Jane Fairfax, unlike Emma Woodhouse, is unfortunate. That is, having no fortune, she must attract a man through looks and talent. While poor Harriet – Emma's protege – has only looks, and her friend's dubious talents as a match-maker. Strip away all the laced-bonnets, afternoon teas, rides in open carriages, pianoforte practice and charitable visits to the poor - and we're left with what could be a girly campus novel, or a beach babe saga. And yet there is much more tenderness in Emma than any committee of Hollywood scriptwriters could call up. This novel, and its stablemates, is what moved English fiction on from the droleries and moralising of the eighteenth century towards the social realism of Dickens, Gaskell and the modern world.

So how does she do it? Like all great fiction, the voice is strong and true throughout. Though we are seldom far from Emma's point of view, there are enough asides to give us a semi-rounded view of a good half dozen other characters (Mr Woodhouse, Mr Knightley, Harriet, Miss Bates, Mr and Mrs Weston, Frank Churchill). Jane Fairfax remains as sketchy and distant as her character allows. And though there is much auto-back-slapping (it is after all a romance with - dare I say it? - the inevitable ending?), we might only flinch out of jealousy. The most basic assumption is that marriage is a truly wonderful thing and whatever ridiculous courtship rituals its victims are put through, they must be glad not to be left on the shelf. And most readers, even some that abhor the institution, will still root for them.


As a footnote on the novel's social comment, I would add that one of the characters is illegitimate, and that another is a war orphan. Though Mr Weston is the local vicar, there is no spirituality and not much goodness in his character; he is never really seen in church and most of his behaviour is decidedly worldly. By choosing not to highlight or sensationalise her material, Jane Austen may come across as a rather conservative or pedestrian figure. The world she preserves for us may not be outwardly very representative of her time and place, but it is not a fantasy world, and it has an internal unity and logic that rings true. Emma is one of the many rungs on the ladder of women's – and men's – liberation.





The Bonfire Of The Vanities

by Tom Wolfe


Authors criss-cross the borders of reality and fiction to selfie-cackles and hip-hoorays; though many readers will skip - or simply not see - these lines. Dazzling prose may amuse the cognoscenti, but the great reading public prefers the rough and tumble of celebrity yarn to the arcane niceties of silken thread. Therefore the dapper Tom (see inside cover photo in double-breasted suit) Wolfe did trim his pencil, stifle his sniggers and rattle off this best seller. Many of the characters portrayed here may be modelled on real inhabitants (already larger than life), and to a great extent the plot is a musing on the portmanteaux and plastic bags of the rich and poor – the whites and blacks - of New York City. To complete this loop, chapters from the book have inspired the treatments of a thousand Netflicks episodes; and the real or super real careers of many actual journalists, politicians, stock brokers, trophy stunners and law officers have been schooled by its pages.


Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street Master of the Universe, comes a cropper while dallying with a Southern vamp (the young and glamorous wife of an ageing charter mogul). As a result of their folly, a promising black kid from The Projects lies in a pool of coma. Meanwhile, the vultures circle: politicians, community leaders, lawyers, cops and press. Who is behind all this? The British, of course. Just about every page reeks with some reference to the all-pervading purveyor of worsted suit, of shirt with detachable collar, of hand-tooled footwear, of fireplace ripped from Home Counties manse to be installed on the 99th floor of steel & concrete block; and - most glittering and dazzling of all - of scoop à la Murdoch tabloid.

The fact that Rupert Murdoch is an Oz super-baron and disqualified as a true Brit, is irrelevant. Steiner (his effigy) and the sottish hack Fellows, are portrayed as Limeys, though mere shadows of the Oxbridge type. Actually Fellows is an alumni of Kent at Canterbury, but who in NY could tell the difference? Wolfie! He knows exactly what he's peddling. The author, by the way, tackles the transatlantic difference in analogue to Martin Amis: plotting his chapters like a prime time TV producer with one eye on the stopwatch, the other on his sponsors. But while the American's prose hardly glitters and never dazzles, it seldom stutters and only rarely stumbles.

That said, there are stutters here, or splutters when some characters – principally, Maria (the vamp) and Kramer (the Assistant DA) – speak in slang or drawl, and quite laboriously so. Wolfie rams home Maria's cotton mouth, her pronunciation of “Shuhmum” for Sherman is even worked into the plot; while Kramer's faux NY cop-Irish is annotated with brackets, interpolations and plain translations that staunch the flow of speech. Dialogue aside, the pages of Wolfie's book turn themselves with the synchromesh stick-shift a of wash'n'waxed journalese.

(I have never read the “Electric Kool Aid Acid Test”, nor the late Robert M. Pirsig's “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. However, I did once flick a few pages of “The Whole Earth Catalog”. Heavy tome, that. Until I scored this secondhand paperback, I had associated “The Bonfire Of The Vanities” with an errant pape called Savanarola urging the citizens of Florence to burn their Botticellis. Though maybe I got that from a Netflicks series?)

So, how much of this novel is a shot of “In Hot Blood” - cocking the big ears of its little pitcher first to barely-fiction, then to almost-fact? The first flush of The Vanities turns on a theatre of embarrassment, but the plot pops short of outright farce; instead Wolfie, puppet-walks our moral sensibilities from liberal outrage to outraged liberal. Face-to-face with Shuhmun's crimes and punishments, the focus pulls back from how low can high-enders sink - to – isn't the end nigh? And – reading in 2017 - to how do the times change? Thirty years on, the Bronx has become yuppified, gentrified, safer than milk (one hears); but back in the eighties it was still all that, no? In these pages, there is a pre-anticipation of nostalgia, a premature longing for the kind of NY where pimp rolls are performed by actual pimps, not actual stockbrokers in actual sneakers.

To end on the book's epigram, there comes a simulacrum of the “Where they all are now...” type that grated on me somewhat. Actually, each of these present premonitions reads like another mini treatment for a further episode. OK, Wolfie, you could have turned this into a saga. Or maybe you have written half a dozen sequels which I should now Google? But, casting off your otherwise good yarn in this way is such a terrific yawn, I wonder if I'll bother.




East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

I enjoyed hearing this serialised, in condensed form, on BBC Radio 4 last year; so when I came across a tatty paperback copy I grabbed it for reading 'at some point'. In fact, I got round to the read sooner rather than later, but for some reason it then took me about two months to get through it. I could only take in a few pages at a time, which is unusual for me.

OK, I read with the recurring idea that this is a contender for the Great American Novel. But a fable quality in the story-telling kept knocking it back. I mean, fable overrides story because the protagonist - Cathy (later called Kate) Ames - is evil beyond words; and her antagonist – Adam Trask, whom she marries then leaves to bring up twin boys on his own - is passive beyond reason. Having said that, East of Eden's fable stands in the midst of some dozens of characters and episodes that are very credible indeed. And the time and place where most of the book is set – Salinas, California, at the turn of the 19th century - has got to be a real contender for paradise on earth, though it has its share of unsuccessful farmers.

I suppose because the crux of the novel is biblical - containing two iterations of Cain and Abel in the Trask family (Adam & Charles, then Caleb & Aron), with Adam & Eve's Expulsion (Adam & Kate) thrown in – the characters and scenes drawn from real life must needs appear offset. But it's a rollicking story, in which Kate sweeps through peoples' lives scattering the good crumbs of an evil wind. This is no feminist tract, but the presence of such a powerful woman, set against the weakness of men, does give Kate's peculiar form of witchcraft a proselytising twist.

The BBC version was narrated by Lee, the Chinese cook & majordomo who looks after the Trask boys as they grow up. The book itself is narrated by an unnamed relative of the Hamiltons - an extended clan of on-going sub-plotters. I think the very slightness of the connection is a deliberate ploy to highlight the fable or mythical nature of the Trasks' story. I don't need to know if Steinbeck really had a connection with such people, this just seems to be his way of suggesting so. The narrator has no real role but speaks with discreet authority. Getting Lee to narrate, as on BBC Radio, gives it a rather different slant. Lee's Chinese wisdom does play a major part in the story, and his own achingly poignant story is one of those threads that weaves its way through the book to great effect.

Something always intrigues me, are these accounts we read of brothels all that? In Salinas, Kate runs a house specialising in sado-masochism. At one time or another, all the pillars of the local community have been paying guests there; and by using a hidden camera, Kate has accumulated the evidence to bring the whole town to its knees. Maybe I'm just naïve about prostitution, but I somehow don't buy that. I'd have thought, compromising photos of a handful of bigwigs had been enough; but I guess a belief in the ubiquity of conspiracy sex doesn't harm your book sales.

East of Eden remains, for my money, a least a contender. It has elements of how the West was won, how the family was redefined, and how fortune smiles on the haves. A lot of characters lose their lives in this book and at times I felt the author was getting too cocky at playing god the while. But he does suggest that paradise lies in the opposite direction of where it's expected.; and that, on the whole, people do get better in time; or anyhow, those that choose to. Which is on the money.



Mr Norris Changes Trains
by Christopher Isherwood


'Mr Norris Changes Trains' (or 'The Last of Mr Norris', as it was published in the USA) is a queer piece by the creator of 'Sally Bowles'. My copy (a cheap American pocket paperback, published by Avon Reprints in 1952) has the exploitation hook, “HE WAS TORMENTED WITH EVIL DESIRE” in yellow lettering across the top of the front cover, which shows a tormented soul – presumably Norris himself - sitting on a sofa, surrounded by young men and women necking. The artwork is classic 50s, from the days when it was cheaper & quicker to have an artist paint a scene in full colour than to hire a photographer and some models for an hour. The man in the centre of the proto-orgy looks decidedly left out.

The cover lies. Norris is nothing like the tortured young man portrayed there, and this is not an exploitation novel. Homosexual eroticism is hinted at throughout, but only once is a character - the genuinely tortured Baron Pregnitz - accused of being ”a fairy”, and that at the end of the book when his tale has all been told. Mr Arthur Norris is an English conman-cum-spy, an ex-pat domiciled in Berlin, fifty-ish and comically bewigged, but tortured more by his financial ups and downs and the hard-knocks of his associates. He is a collector of sadistic novels such as 'Imprisoned at a Girls' School' (he has even authored 'Miss Smith's Torture Chamber') and the regular customer of a dominatrix and flagellator.

The scene (1931-3) is before and after Hitler's election as Chancellor, the last - that is – of the Weimar Republic. The book would be an important documentary of its times, especially since both narrator (William Bradshaw) and Mr Norris attend communist party meetings and do odd jobs for the Berlin Commissar. But it isn't a tale punctuated with political speeches or street fights with thugs of the Horst Wessel type, nor does it dwell much on the way Hitler's gang snatched a popular victory from the jaws of electoral defeat. The main plot of this slim novel concerns how Arthur Norris, in order to pay off his debtors and leave Europe, inveigles William into helping him pull off a piece of entrepreneurial espionage. In the meantime there is much fairly comic shenanigans and some vague suggestions of lewdness.

I guess this book was read fondly by those in the know, dwelling on its scenes of male friendship, all of which have a unreal innocence. William's ski resort trysts, first with his 'Billy The Castaway'-loving Baron, then with the young Belgian-Aryan, Piet van Hoorn, are as charming as they are unconvincing. In an era (the book was first published in Britain in 1935) when heterosexual relations were appearing in books with increasing daring, 'Mr Norris Changes Trains' remains prudishly chaste (with the exception of Mr Norris' flagellation noises-off, and a single recommendation of a prostitute's good value).

One – mild – disappointment with the book, which I found an easy and entertaining read, was its polite refusal to get to the bottom of anything. There is the suggestion that Norris' time in Germany is due to his disreputable past. He is able to carry on as a member of the upper echelons in somewhere like pre-fascist Berlin, whereafter his options are limited. But how so the narrator? What is his real fascination with Germany? Or are we simply to accept it is to get the love that dare not speak its name, and go no deeper than that? I dread to think of poking my nose in where it is not wanted.


My other irritation was that the first few chapters contained too many inconsequential characters. I think perhaps Isherwood wrote in people he knew on the Berlin scene – with Norris, his factotum Schmidt, the landlady Fräulein Schroeder and Kuno the Baron roundly drawn from real life – but without bothering to sketch in the lesser characters' portraits. The result is a few mix-ups during the middle chapters, when I found myself reading names for names without having much idea of whom they represented.


Montcalm and Wolfe
by Francis Parkman

About a dozen years ago I finally got round to reading James Fenimore Cooper's “Last of the Mohicans”. A shocking tale, I thought, and one that portrayed the Huron - a native people of North America - as utter savages. Let's be clear about that term (which Parkman uses throughout his “Montcalm and Wolfe”): savage denotes those who would practice cruelty as a matter of course; force prisoners of war to 'run the gauntlet'; and - in prima facie evidence of the accusation - cut the scalp from a wounded man, woman or child; all the while, glorying in such deeds as their natural right. Cooper's book is pretty lurid in this respect.
As someone who spent a rather severe winter living in a North American Tipi – though in the Southern English countryside – I had gained something of a first hand respect for the so-called Red Indians because of their close-to-nature lifestyle. Not that I was surprised by Cooper's account of the Huron, but I have to say I was expecting redeeming qualities. Which, of course, are present in the honour and humanity of Uncas and his father Chingachgook (the last of the Mohicans). But the savagery of Magua and the other Huron is not redeemed by such of the 'Indians' deemed 'friendly' by Whites. Besides which, Cooper was probably guilty of romanticising both the good and the evil of his characters; and it's not surprising to learn (from his own words) that his take on native America was derived from books rather than living in Tipis or Wigwams (whatever they are). In contrast, Parkman had first hand experience of life with native Americans (the Sioux), though he was in the habit of calling even the Christianised ones 'savages'.
Another reason for picking up Parkman's book was the puzzle of Canada. I have often wondered why it was that whereas the United States, with their historic family connections to the British Isles, could fight for their independence - while Canada, only newly wrestled from the French, should fight to remain loyal to the crown? This is not something you can Google in an hour or two. Last year, we had a couple of Quebecois students couch-surfing with us and one of them was of native stock. Exchanging ideas in broken French and English we learned where they stood on independence for Quebec and - for that matter - on Scotland. While Canadians are not known for their warmth or sense of humour, these boys were everything you'd hope for in the next generation: well brought up, alternative looking, concerned & talented. But you'd hardly guess we shared the same royals. It's a strange old world in which countries and nationalities are not what they used to be.
As you can see, whenever I read a book, I want it to engage with the world I live in; even if it's a history book written more than a century ago. Parkman's “Montcalm & Wolfe” was first published in 1884, but when I came across a 1984 centenary edition – hrdbck. gd-cnd. – in a second-hand book store here in Bursa, I had no hesitation buying it, knowing I would be motivated to read it in a short time – and start making connections.
The title is a bit of a misnomer, as General Montcalm - commander of the French forces in New France - does not make an appearance in the first 200 pages; and to meet General Wolfe - who led the main assaults on Louisville and Quebec – the reader must get deep into the second half of the book. In the meantime, a dozen & more characters of equal or near-equal stature appear. Prominent amongst those who, like Montcalm and Wolfe, lost their lives on the fields was Braddock, a conventional English general mortally wounded at the battle of Monongahela. Of still greater prominence is George Washington, who was a volunteer captain with Braddock's tragic expedition to Fort Duquesne. Parkman's method is to give rounded portraits of all his main protagonists, so the title of this book (one of a series he wrote on the British and French in North America) functions as a token of its contents rather than a summary.
Herein lies one of the faults with Parkman's shameless historicism. He is forever partisan towards the Americans in the field (if not at home), usually against the French, often against the Canadians & Indians, and ultimately (despite admiring glances) against the British. For example, over Duquesne: he rates Washington's good sense above Braddock's heroism, praising the American's advice of splitting the column in two, with the Englishman leading a flying wing into Beaujeu's experienced Canadian woodsmen. But he then fails to point out one result of this very strategy leads the British - after being ambushed - to come crashing back into the rear guard. And whereas Braddock is then portrayed as a hero for rallying the regulars - implying it is all a folly anyway - Washington is allowed to criticise the British soldiers for a friendly-fire incident without comment. The tendency to style Washington as a dashing volunteer in the British army (as though his home state was never under any threat from New France) didn't start with Parkman; but he, as the virtual founder of American historical studies, does not seek to be objective about the famed Virginian soldier & statesman.
To return to stereotypes for a moment. James Fenimore Cooper candidly admitted to knowing little about native Americans beyond what he had read. Parkman, however, spent much time with the Sioux tribes of his own day (roughly a century after the events portrayed in this book). However, whereas Cooper is careful to give a balanced picture of native life, creating the idea of the noble savage (later to be taken up by others such as Longfellow), Parkman has no praise for native peoples. He refers to them as savages but never ascribes honour. Furthermore, several times he points out that it is often the Christianised tribes that commit the worst atrocities, scalping men, women & children in homesteads and forcing prisoners to run the gauntlet. In the notorious murder & scalping of the wounded at Fort William Henry, followed by robbing & the massacre of the column, the natives are portrayed as nothing short of devils incarnate.
The reverse of this is echoed in Parkman's partisan portrait of Washington. Whereas modern historians tend to question the value of Washington's strategic role in the Braddock expedition, Parkman has nothing but praise for the man who was to become first US president. As I said above, he reports Washington's disgust at the confusion of the British regular soldiers without comment. Moreover, Parkman does not much question Washington's earlier role in the death of the French officer de Jumonville (an incident that had led to the war), though it was widely believed at the time that Washington had been directly involved. Parkman's history, then, is the typical written-by-victors approach, which then becomes subject to revision and reconstruction.
Parkman's treatment of Montcalm & Wolfe and their exploits, is less open to reëvaluation – being more straightforward accounts of character and battles. Both were professional soldiers, the credibility of whose loyalties and fidelities has never needed questioning. The majority of this book, then, is a slow build-up to the dramatic events portrayed in its final hundred or so pages: the siege of the French citadel-port of Louisville turning the tide for Britain; then its forces sailing up the St Lawrence River and laying siege to Quebec; and (almost) finally the dramatic, literally cliff-hanging dénouement as French power crumbles.

Parkman is good at giving the economic & social roots of New France's failure, contrasting the colonial styles of the British & French. He does not do irony, however, and draws few parallels with what happened within two decades of victory at the Heights of Abraham (1763), or half a century later in the War of 1812. More recent historians have put those events in perspective (for example, Peter Snow's “When Britain Burned The White House”). But Parkman's style is engaging enough, for a Victorian, and his copious notes – including many archival extracts – make for an entertaining read (if you like this sort of thing). The copy I have has page after page of contemporary illustrations and, published in 1984, was a centenary reprint of the original edition.



By Myself

by Lauren Bacall


What constitutes a feminist icon? Simone de Beauvoir? Germaine Greer? Madonna? Soon after this Instagram message appeared,

madonna: Thank you Margaret Thatcher!
#unapologetic#rebelheart

the sender deleted it. Reports say she had received a barrage of complaints from many of her gay fans – or at least, people whose reaction the entertainer may not have thought of when she 'liked' the photograph of Britain's first (and so far only) woman prime minister. The image of Margaret Thatcher was headed by a quote (presumably) from the so-called Iron Lady herself. At any rate, the words read straight from the horse's mouth,

If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”

which is possibly what the singer known as Madonna was really responding to by her Instagram message. Apart from being a great fillip for Instagram - that must be grating on Twitter - what have either of these women done for women? Are either of them feminist icons?

It was when just finishing off Lauren Bacall's autobiography “By Myself” when the above story broke. The news came on BBC's Radio Four and though the details were somewhat sketchy, it sounded like Madonna had been hailing the Prime Minister at the time of Clause 28 as someone women should be looking up to. Now, most of us who got through the Thatcher years did so without compromising ourselves over her gender. The fact that she was a woman made no one on the Left love her. Nor did feminists publicly express delight over her ascendency. The most feminine solidarity Mrs Thatcher got was from women who rode to hounds, from yuppie women striving to make it in the male dominated world of capitalism, from housewives indelibly blue-rinsed in the tweed, and – one supposes – from those silent majority women who may simply not have denied voting for her. Thatcher, btw, was a near contemporary of Lauren Bacall. On Thatcher, The New Look must have worn thin before it became old fashioned. Yet The New Look, as embodied by The Look (Bacall's seminal own contribution to post-War fashion) never went out.

Bacall's autobiography, “By Myself”, is a book by a real feminist icon. The image projected through her was of a strong woman in control. From the first film, “To Have And Have Not” onwards, age and sex would be no bar to her. Though she was a mere eighteen year-old unknown when she left her native New York and went off to Hollywood to star alongside Humphrey Bogart – the biggest box office star of the day – she comes across as an all-knowing, wisecracking tomboy who just oozes sex. As well as this, The Look was created around her and, though she was actually somewhat angular, gawky and (in her own words) flat-chested, she instantly became the bombshell that knocked Rita Hayworth off her pedestal.

Bacall's was a high-shouldered, manly image which perfectly suited the position many women had been thrust into by the war. Working in factories or in uniform huge numbers of women had been recruited into the war effort and achieved a sudden independence. Her role in the film, and the off-set romance between her and Bogart – which the script was rewritten to trade off – was appealing to male and female audiences alike. She was admired by women for her style and confidence, while men couldn't help dreaming they should have Bogart's luck.

The way she tells it, Betty Perske (her real name) didn't have to struggle to get to the top. An only child, her mother was abandoned by her father when she was small, though she was lucky to come from a well-connected, Jewish family who sent her to private schools. From her first acting lessons at the age of sixteen to top Hollywood billing just three years later, she must have led a charmed life. And in fact, she admits as much, for this is not quite a dishonest book. She devoted all of her twenties to Bogart and their children, with her acting career taking second or third place. Bogart's early death, which takes approximately seventy pages, also took its toll on her. We cannot doubt her devotion to him, and she does not doubt ours. Bogart, sixty years on from his death, is still an icon (though not quite a feminist one).

There is always important stuff missing from biographies and autobiographies and we pour over them struggling to fill up the gaps, to add local colour. Film stars, in my book, usually win out over politicians as their stories are mirrored many times over in their performances. What's missing here, though, is on two levels. The first, and most obvious, is that although we get impressions of what it was like in Hollywood in the Forties and Fifties, and later on Broadway and London's West End in the Seventies, the roar of crowd and smell of greasepaint passages don't quite draw us in (though the smell of Bogart's decaying body is put somewhat pungently). I think that's down to Bacall's somewhat prosaic writing. She did write it “by herself”, so what you get is what you read; little is edited out or in.

The other thing missing is some (and not all) of the truth. Bogart is portrayed as a saintly husband (if very much the sinner when it comes to booze). Bacall does not mention the on-off affair he had with his long time assistant, which elsewhere has been documented. If it's true, the way Betty extracted a shopping spree from him in revenge points to a very different kind of marriage than she would have us believe. Also, airbrushing out Katherine Hepburn – Spencer Tracy's lover – and replacing her with his estranged Louise (died 1983) – is simply private politics. All those visits by Spencer and his 'wife' – especially as (his best pal) Bogart lay dying (a twelve months' gig) is an example of such doublespeak.


So don't come here for the truth, come here for a 1979 version, one that needs to be read in context. As a self portrait of an icon it's just a part of the jigsaw. Lauren Bacall was created by the auteur Howard Hawks and – like Pygmalion's creation – whatever Betty Perske was like in private, her public story is all the reader may count on her to tell.


Perfume

by Patrick Süskind

I just re-visited this book. I saw the film soon after it came out (so impressed, entertained, shocked and in catharsis I had to watch again within days) then started to read the book. It seemed identical, so, it being a translation, I never finished it.

OK, 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 S
üskind 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.


The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

A throwaway remark, about this novel being so light I had forgotten most if it, forced me to pick up the book again after thirteen-odd years. When I finally finished my loose-leafed paperback copy, I realised I must have mistaken it for another - like the man who mistook his wife for a hat. For the one detail I thought I had remembered – about a reluctant dissident wandering round with a bomb – still eluded me. But having spent portions of the last few weeks in the company of Milan Kundera (ie his reader), I find myself, as people are fond of saying here in Turkey, “left standing like a Frenchman” (ie understanding nothing).

I am being facetious. There are things I understand, in my own way. I should amend the analogy: from the historical Frank listening to an unintelligible language, to the modern European tourist hearing Arabesque music for the first time. Just as an overblown wailing rattles one's nerves, so “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” alienates me in horror at its subject matter. Why? Am I a prude? Well, I judge myself to be a libertarian socialist, and something of an unreconstructed romantic. Therefore the palliative philandering rife under communist Eastern Europe, after pricking my libido, gives me a double dose of the heebie jeebies. In 1984, when this book was first published in English, Czechoslovakia was still living though its Orwellian nightmare. While the author had long since fled the scene and (in reality) become a Frenchman, his book was concerned with those Czechs who, in one way or another, were chained to their national identity. In that sense, Kundera himself was being facetious. Or else he was playing with fire.

Before I get started on Nietzsche, and the other philosophical stuff here that alienates me, I should also state my lack of empathy with Kundera's characters. I can appreciate cheating. In farce, it's obligatory and either mutually or otherwise justified. In tragedy, its often part of a wider pathology. The temptation to cheat, the intrigue of cheating, the pleasure of illicit sex, and so forth, are all major subjects for entertainment in novels of many types. Where would “Madame Bovary”, “Tender Is The Night” or “Fear of Flying” be without the cheating husband or wife? Either we root for the cheater, or look on in horror/admiration with a 'there but for the grace of God go I'. Even though characters in fiction are not real, we may reflect on them as if they were actual people - depending on how well or ill their author has breathed life into them.

However poignant the images, I am unconvinced by the character of Tomas, who is addicted to sex with as many women as he can find, cheats daily on his wife Tereza, to whom he regularly comes home with the smell of female crotch on his hair. She still makes passionate love with him at weekends, which puts her at some distance, too. I can empathise with Tereza's despair when she realises what he gets up to on his way home; but the survival of their marriage leaves me with a cold feeling. Though the actual infidelities of both are convincing, even compelling, the improbability of their marriage is... dare I say unbearable?... because the author does so little to explore it.

To understand the kind of men, Tomas and his spin-off Franz, who leave their families - children as well as wives - without regret, without a thought, would be something. Plenty of couples divorce, and in those a good proportion of the men give up being primary carers. But how many then break off all contact with their sons and daughters? Divorce, and the solving of one problem by the introduction of others, is a subject not often enough dealt with by serious writers, and I am sorry to see it passed over here with such flippancy.

Anyhow, I've decided not to go into Nietzsche here. I tried to read his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” at the age of sixteen. The story, or whatever it is, had not grabbed me by page ten, and I regretted the major slice of pocket money it had cost me. I still regret it, and it makes me think you should be able to return books and get a full refund if you don't get more than 10% in.

I didn't like “The Unbearable...” first time round, and I may not have finished it then. I think I was managing a summer school in the UK at the time and I had acquired the book as a way of winding down when my duties were ended around about 11pm each night. This time, I again used it as bedtime reading, but I only finished it after about three weeks. Good value at 79p from Oxford? Hardly, considering all the effort and time put in.

When story-tellers decide to include themselves in their books merely by using the words I & me in the text, or by becoming full-blown characters, they prompt the reader to do some googling. It becomes legitimate, even obligatory, to find out what parallels exist between the fictional characters and their own. In the case of Kundera, Tomas and his satellite Franz can be seen as meditations on the writer's own predicament. As someone who took part in the communist coup d'état in 1948, was later imprisoned by the regime, then readmitted to the Communist Party, finally fleeing Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion of 1968, we see he is somewhat conflicted. Freely admitting, in the book, that his characters are impressions of what he might have been, though continuously intoning the phrase “What must be” (in German!), I cannot help wondering as I read each word of the story that this is all true in one way or another.


For example, when Tomas is tricked into betraying the editor of a dissident magazine, is he not somehow admitting his guilt over the real life gaoling of a university colleague? It is said that the Nobel prize has been withheld from Kundera for that very suspicion. This dismays me somewhat, when former Nazis are made laureates and even Popes. I prefer to think the committee are just not as impressed by the book as its publishers' would hope. Then the reading public can be left to make their own mind up without being told, officially, that this is the work of a truly great writer.



Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man”
by Siegfried Sassoon

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.
Sassoon is not so concerned here with the politics of what might have been as with nostalgia for the lost world. His one direct comment (in these fictional memoirs) on the slaughter of the 14-18, is that “...the War ... as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.” Written in 1928, this rather equivocal comment points an accusing finger without apportioning blame. The duality continues. On leave from the front, he defends the enemy when his kindly Aunt Evelyn “bitterly call[s] them 'hell hounds'”; but when confessing to the reader doubts about the truth of German war crimes, his amanuensis - George Sherston - discreetly avoids voicing them in public.
Hang on a minute. Why, dear reader you ask, are we talking about war, when the subject is supposed to be hunting? Is this the tale of one who runs with the fox and hunts with the hounds? In a word, yes. Sassoon's prize-winning, instant classic is an attempt to be all things to all men & women. On one level, it's a cashing-in on the fad for Bertie Woosterism in an age of declining private incomes, of demesnes being sold off for golf courses, manor houses boarded up, and of old soldiers plodding country lanes begging for scraps of work.
George is an orphan, an only child, with a £600 per year trust fund, looked after by his Aunt Evelyn in the countryside of East Kent. A delicate child, he is educated at home until his twelfth year, then at Ballboro' (Marlborough College) & Cambridge. On the eve of his departure for boarding school, Tom Dixon (the family groom), takes young George fox hunting for the first time. At the meet, he is attracted by a slightly older boy, Denis Milden, who is already a proficient horseman and fox hunter.
For economy reasons, George's pony is sold when he goes away to school and so, without the opportunity to hunt, he takes up cricket. It isn't until he comes down from Cambridge, sans degree, that he takes up fox hunting again, once more at the suggestion of Dixon. There follows an obsession with hunting and point-to-point horse racing which uses up more income than the family solicitor (his trust fund manager) is happy to part with. Moreover, George's refusal either to resume his university studies or prepare himself for a commercial career, exasperates the prudent guardian. However, his kindly Aunt Evelyn generally supports his wishes and even sells one of her precious rings to help pay for one of the four horses essential to George's becoming a true blue huntsman.
Anyone unfamiliar with what fox hunting consisted of at this time, might be forgiven for feeling puzzled what all the fuss is about. Over the course of the book, Sassoon gives a valuable insight into just what many of the so-called leisured classes got up to with their time, and their money. But a historical perspective –somewhat buried here - may help to put fox hunting in context.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the aristocratic 'sport' of stag hunting, which had been in vogue since Roman times, was in serious decline – along with the deer's natural habitat, the aboriginal forests of Albion. A new quarry had to be found, else the very fabric of social hierarchy would go to the wall. So it was that the poor blasted fox, admittedly a bit of a nuisance to some farmers, was elevated far beyond its original threat status. Artificial 'coverts' were constructed around the countryside wherein M. & Mme Reynard (ie Mr & Mrs. Fox) were encouraged to make their lairs and breed. Not all farmers approved of this and many went on trapping & shooting foxes as pests in time honoured fashion. These were considered bad sports by the new fox hunting community. In the nineteenth century, when barbed wire fencing was introduced, farmers who used it to protect their fields were despised by the hunt who enjoyed jumping with their horses over fences. Despite such obstacles, the 'sport' or fox hunting spread rapidly round the country and society was saved.
George Sherston is a fan of R.S. Surtees' nineteenth century hunting novels, and therefore the concentration of his memoir on riding to hounds – with only a side chapter devoted to cricket – sets it up as a comic novel modelled on the same. A light tone is maintained throughout the book, even in the couple of chapters dealing with the war years 1914-16. Sassoon not only fictionalises his life (by changing names & dwelling on the comic and adventurous aspects of his subject), he edits out his school and Cambridge years, plus his early literary career. The effect of this is to narrow and box-in George's character, making him out to be a genial if somewhat empty-headed fellow who, merely by an accidental interest in equestrianism, manages to prepare himself to be a useful and courageous leader of men in battle. This is the Bertie Wooster side of the piece, to whom Tom Dixon plays an ever-willing Jeeves.
So are these memoirs reliable? Perhaps the real question is to wonder if they memoirs at all. To whit, on page two comes a passage which almost had this reader putting the book down before it had hardly started,

...it was Dixon who taught me to ride, and my admiration for him was unqualified. And since he was what I afterwards learnt to call 'a perfect gentleman's servant', he never allowed me to forget my position as 'a little gentleman': he always knew exactly when to become discreetly respectful. In fact, he 'knew his place'.”

After that, I only carried reading because of Sassoon's reputation. Although I suspected he was a bit of a snob, I had never thought he was someone for whom the right-wing reactionary phrase 'knew his place' could be quarantined in anything as flimsy as a pair of quotation marks. In fact, as I began to say above, though on one level these fictional memoirs were published as a commercial venture; on another, they are supposed to be a subversive dig at the very people they appear to celebrate. Only last January (2014), in the Guardian's Reading Group, Sam Jordison quoted Sassoon himself, forty years after publication, calling it, “innocently insidious anti-war propaganda”.
Not only do Sassoon's school & Cambridge days go uncatalogued, his Jewish heritage, homosexual love life & writing career are similarly expunged. But not entirely so as, merrily, the text swings from sublimely refined code to the cor-blimey of name calling. George Sherston, far from periodically suffering the black-ball of anti-Semitism, is portrayed as English to the point of absurdity. Absurdity of a different kind appears in the naming of George's favourite horse: Cockbird (whose depiction in the art of cottage doors is well-known). Furthermore the comic novelist Surtees is elevated to the status of mandarin sports writer he would himself have taken delight to pillory. Finally in this list of subtexts, the naming of Nigel Croplady is an unsubtle dig at an unsavoury hunt character who, presumably, was a known flagellant of deprived gentlewomen.
This is therefore a curious tome which can be read on levels of increasing depth. Even a hunt saboteur might applaud George's unjoy at the killing of foxes and their cubs. Indeed, being in at the kill, which one presumes is the object of the fox hunter, hardly ever features in his many detailed descriptions of hunts. Tropes from the hunt are recycled in his descriptions of life and death at the front line. Just as he makes no fun of those farmers or churchmen who abhor hunting, so he defends the Germans against accusations of war crimes. When he meets an old hunting companion in a dugout, they discuss the man's German cousin, who is in the artillery 'on the other side'. And perhaps the most poignant example is the barbed wire so loathed of fox hunters, making life so difficult for soldiers at the front.

In conclusion, I would generally approve Sassoon's claim that the book is a piece of anti-war propaganda. In that it was followed by second and third instalments of war memoirs, its purpose is partly to draw readers in. The vanilla hunting theme and the book's plain avoidance of contentious sexuality & ethnicity only serve to sweeten the pill. At the time of writing, I have read just the famous Part Four of “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer”. If that is anything to go by, though, the anti-war purpose is very well served by this introductory volume.



Bleak House”
by Charles Dickens

It was one of those novels I was determined to read... just whenever I got round to it. Being sufficiently aware of the term “Jarndyce & Jarndyce” - the story of an inheritance case bound up for years in the old Courts of Chancery - to have deployed it in a probity battle of my own, all that held me back from commencing the book was its sheer length. Even so, when the latest (2005) BBC serialisation was broadcast on Prime, I was tempted not to watch, thinking I should still do the book before it was spoiled for me. Then the trailers got me hooked. With a gaunt-looking Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Alun Armstrong as Inspector Bucket, Denis Lawson in the Jarndyce role and Johnny Vegas as Krook... not to watch seemed perverse. And when I noticed it on dizimag earlier this year, I had to watch again, though by then a pdf of the text was lined up on my tablet. I read the bulk of it on a week's holiday binge.

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 Fitzgerald

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away."

Nick Carraway's profound depiction of an otherwise profane character, Jay Gatsby, lifts a rather short jazz-age tale into the realms of the Great American Novel. The above quotation is a conceit, and readers often despair how Fitzgerald uses Nick's viewpoint to veer into purple pontifications, but somehow the device works. Peering through his buttonholes into the swank salons of 1920s New York, we attend wild parties, eavesdrop on crooked gamblers and prohibition cheats, see into the drawing rooms, limousines and love-nests of the rich, and get the low-down on two notorious killings. Through Nick's cautious and incautious perceptions, we also get glimpses inside the heads of various characters: Gatsby, with his pure romantic optimism; Daisy with her ennui touching on genuine despair, Tom's priggish contempt for everyone outside his race and class, Myrtle's hunger and jealousy, and Jordan Baker's dishonesty and cynicism. Even minor characters get this under-the-skin treatment; for example how the gambler Wolfshiem's fatherly affection for Gatsby does not prevent him from avoiding his duty; or how Gatsby's actual father glosses awe at his son's wealth with delusions of the boy's social prospects. At times Nick's perceptions probe a little too deep for belief; for instance, Gatsby could hardly have shared all the emotional reaction he felt during his return to Daisy's hometown after she married. That he is able to carry us into such private territory is more an outcome of Fitzgerald's compellingness as a story teller than the verisimilitude of Nick's narrative tropes.

Much of the novel is taken up with snippets of backstory, which weave through the plot, revealing and amending as the 'truth' about James Gatz - aka Jay Gatsby - gradually comes out. He is a self-made man in every sense of the phrase. Coming from a poor family in the mid-West, he improves himself by private study and discipline. Leaving home at an early age, he drifts along the shores of Lake Superior, picking up work where he can, until one day he comes across the yacht of Dan Cody - an adventurer who has made a fortune in the Yukon. As Dan's factotum, he learns the ways of the word. So when the US enters the first World War, he is able to enlist and train as an officer. This is when he meets and courts the aristocratic Daisy; conquering her, before setting off for France. The war, during which he is decorated for acts of leadership and heroism, earns him the right to a European education; and so he overstays by five months at Oxford University in England, picking up some upper class English speech and manners. He returns to America after his girl has married someone from her own class (Tom Buchanan), and thus begins his campaign to get rich enough to win her back someday. To achieve this, Gatsby mixes with gamblers, bootleggers and fraudsters; though Nick Carraway is careful not to give away too many of his secrets - turning down an offer to join him in one venture (an open contempt of the man's wealth, for Nick Carraway in all his genteel poverty is decidedly Old Money and looks down on the upstart, writing, “I disapproved of him from beginning to end.”) Gatsby has bought a large house across the bay from Daisy and Tom's mansion. He throws huge open parties there in an attempt to lure the unsuspecting Daisy to his home. The story actually starts with the arrival of Nick, who comes to live in a small house conveniently next door to the love-struck Gatsby. Nick, along with tennis star Jordan Baker, then becomes a go-between in Gatsby's seduction mark II of Daisy - who (also conveniently) happens to be Nick's distant cousin, and whose husband Tom was a frat pal of Nick's at Yale.

Though there is fine intertwining of plot with sub plot (Gatsby & Daisy vs. Tom & Myrtle/Nick & Jordan), enough colourful characters to have kept Hollywood in Gatsby-themed restaurants for decades (Owl-Eyes, the Chester McKees, the Elevator Boy), and 'scope of landscape (the sound between East & West Egg, Doctor T.J. Eckleburg's gigantic glasses with the ash heaps behind, plus various open topped car rides through the streets of New York) "The Great Gatsby" owes more to Fitzgerald's short story writing than his previous novels. For such a short book, it's not a fast-paced read, nor is it un-putdownable. In particular, its long chapters are probably shy of running the whole mile - and this is doubtless why some readers refuse to countenance it as contender for the Great American Novel. And yet it's hard to say what else the book could contain, harder still to say what's missing. Fitzgerald's familiar device of understatement is present throughout, so whatever the characters don't say or do becomes almost as important as what we're told. Even less is 'explained' - which has led to many long, winding debates (eg “Was Gatsby a bootlegger?” and “Is Nick Carraway Gay?”) Also it has been singled out as one of the first truly modernist novels in English.

Jay Gatsby being synonymous with a kind of crass overdressed overbearing representative of the Jazz Age (a term Fitzgerald helped to coin) it's worth taking a fresh look at the text to see whether the stereotype is justified. Are Gatsby's parties festivals of bad taste? Is his house a temple of kitsch?

When Daisy visits, she is moved to tears by his collection of shirts. Given her wealth, sensibility and fashion cool, those sobs do not sound hollow. Owl Eyes is astonished by the quality of the library - authentic down to its uncut books - which shows us that Wolfshiem is not the only one to appreciate Gatsby's “Oggsford” (Oxford) stay. Moreover, Owl Eyes does his duty by Gatsby in the end, unlike the gambler, again reinforcing the sincerity of his admiration. As to the parties, though "Vladimir Tostoff's 'Jazz History of the World'" is not played nowadays alongside orchestral works by Cole Porter and Berlin, it would at least have had some cultural leverage in an age when the popular arts were beginning to influence even highbrow culture (cf TS Eliot's lines "O O O O that Shakespeherean rag/It's so elegant/So intelligent", published just three years before). As to the man himself, Nick's assertions, from the first to last chapters, that Gatsby turned out all right in the end; also his assertion - to the fellow's face - that he was “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (the bunch meaning, Daisy, Tom and Jordan) place him almost on a moral high ground. In spite, then, of his pink suit, his yellow Rolls Royce, his over familiar "old sport" routine and the drunken excesses of his parties, there is more to Gatsby than his stereotype image

Fitzgerald, through Nick, leaves us to decide for ourselves if Gatsby “turned out all right in the end”. In the last chapter, where he is sharing the final pieces of his backstory, he makes a comment about Daisy's admitted love for his rival Tom, which seemed crucial a few hours before,

"'Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married - and loved me even more then, do you see?'

Suddenly he came out with a curious remark:

'In any case,' he said, 'it was just personal.'

What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?"

Earlier Daisy has used the word 'personal' against Tom, who has challenged Gatsby's “old sport” catchphrase. She says, "if you're going to make personal remarks I won't stay here a minute.” The usual meaning of the expletive, "That's personal!" is the crossing of a boundary. In Gatsby's “curious remark” it doesn't seem to mean the violation of anything private - especially nothing grudge-worthy. To go back to the quotation from Chapter One, "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures," Nick seems to have found the answer to that question. At the end of the story, Gatsby, who created himself in order to recreate the past, may have given up the idea of being anybody at all. Though he clings to the possibility of winning Daisy back, the events of the story have brought him to a kind of beatific state of mind. It is as though “just personal” means that only by stripping away all wealth and class could Daisy and he be together. After all, she had defended his artificial turns of phrase. What he makes of Daisy then, with his being a kind of human seismograph, has an intensity of conception beyond normal measurement. He sees beyond the wealth in her voice. But this interpretation, like the idea of Nick Carraway being secretly homosexual, is neither something Fitzgerald actually says, nor can it be proved either way. The device of using a narrator means every implication is left to the reader's discretion.


To sum up, then, “The Great Gatsby” is a tragic romance on a par with Romeo & Juliet. Though only one of the lovers is doomed – I shouldn't say which – the story reaches beyond its immediate subjects and is actually prophetic. Paranoia over bond scams, which are central to Gatsby's wealth, were a real factor in the Great Crash of 1929. Daisy's marriage seems likely to fail, too. Nick Carraway's prospect seems to be as a writer of great romans-à-clef rather than great bond issues. Perhaps only the ultra cool trickster Jordan Baker – herself a real “old sport” - has what it takes to come out on top?




Georgian Poetry 1911-12
ed. by
Edward Marsh

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.

Rupert Brooks' “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, which is included here, would be the type-cast for this school of verse. Its apparent patriotism, or at least its affection for a down-your-way homeland, would eschew the jingoism of bull-dogs & gun-dogs (often to be observed in Mr Kipling's offerings) for the gentler love of scones with butter, jam & cream. But reading “Grantchester” in this, its true context, I appreciate more the fun of it all. For example, how the nostalgia the poet felt for his favourite corner of Cambridge is contrasted by sly digs at other local spots and their inhabitants. For example the “Royston men” who,

Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched and shot their wives
Rather than send them to St. Ives;”

In fact, this whole section of the poem is such a riot of comic jibes you can't help but hoot when it is read it out, and then to read the rest of the lines with wry chuckles and smiles.

As a movement, the Georgians are also known for their reaction against the pure aestheticism of late Victorian poetry. I suppose you could take that to mean they were anti-decadent, wrote from the heart and were not given to high-brow ironies or cynicisms. As we have seen from the above, and will see below, there is more to this generation of writers than a posture of deliberate naïvety. There is the usual deal of classical reference we would expect from the public school system. For example Ronald Ross calls his poem to the Evening Star, “Herperus”, while the Greco-Roman mythology of T. Sturge Moore's “A Sicilian Idyll” perhaps reflects a return to Aristotelian values. In the way the Pre-Raphaelites of an earlier generation had sought to cut through the embellishments of the late renaissance and early modern period, were the Georgians trying to arrive at purer models for their art? Yet Sturge Moore's story of the youth Delphius' depair at the loss of his childhood friend (first to a tutor, then to a wife), could appear to a modern reader to have undertones of ambiguous sexuality. Moore was excluded from the later volumes on the grounds that he wasn't a real Georgian. So what constituted the genuine article?

The number of religious – perhaps I should say Christian – works comes as a surprise to this reader, who was not expecting so much piety in 1912. Because of alphabetical ordering of the authors, Liverpool poet Lascelles Abercrombie's “The Sale of St Thomas” has first place in the book. It's a blank verse dialogue between a very worldly (I might say unsaintly) Thomas (of the doubts) and the captain of a vessel bound for India. Thomas wants to sail for India and books his passage with the captain. But the captain can't sail for want of a carpenter on board. The need for this, plus stories of a missionary flayed to death and of the flies that plague India persuade Thomas he had better not make such a voyage, so he informs the captain he has changed his mind. Then along comes a Noble stranger (the 'owner' of Thomas, who turns out to be His runnaway slave), who pays the captain to take him anyway. In other words, this is an allegorical piece that does not so much disturb the tenets of religiosity as give them a gloss of realism.

Another kind of realism pervades James Stephens' “The Lonely God” which portrays God forlornly wandering about the garden of Eden after the Expulsion. I say realism because this human mould deity is a jealous god of rather mortal tendencies, coveting Adam's wife Eve and imagining the day when she,

The perfect woman of his perfect race
Shall sit beside Me in the highest place
And be my Goddess, Queen, Companion, Wife,
The rounder of My majesty, the life,
Of My ambition. She will smile to see
Me bending down to worship at her knee
Who never bent before, and she will say,
'Dear God, who was it taught 'Thee' how to pray?'

I am somewhat startled to discover the author was an Irishman, a nationalist, friend of Joyce and surely in another camp from the Georgians! It's amazing to me how poetry of this era managed to cross political divides. Rupert Brooke, after all, was an intimate of Winston Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty and not too chummy with many Fenians. After World War One kicked off, Brooke was able to joke – hinting of a real prospect – that with Winston's intervention, Lascelles Abercrombie could join him in uniform as official War Bard. And yet, I think the inclusion of James' work is actually a nod and a wink towards the true aim of the Georgians. Edward Marsh, Lascelles Abercrombie and Rupert Brooke were seeking to do for English poetry (still weighed down by much Victorian baggage) what the Celtic Revival had done for the Irish.

This book is far too long to review in great depth and I want to single out only one further long poem. Meantime, I should say that DH Lawrence, Walter De La Mare & GK Chesterton are among the seventeen poets included in the anthology.

The Georgian poet Wilfrid Gibson is singled out for much attention in “Centre & Periphery in Modern British Poetry” (Andrew Duncan, Liverpool University Press). I would like to steer readers in the direction of this book, though I fear many will – like me – find the going tough. It's at once a scholarly and eccentric piece of criticism and my attempt to write a review of it may never be finished. However, it does throw light on this (nowadays) obscure Northerner, who, in Duncan's claim is really the only poet to have made a serious attempt at writing in an English dialect. Gibson has three poems in Georgian Poetry Vol 1, but “The Hare” is the one I wish to focus briefly on.

The Hare” is a rambling, quasi gypsy-ballad in which a young man recounts his pursuit of and romance with an orphan girl. “The Hare”, which he almost strangles in a dream in the opening of the piece, returns several times, either as guide or allegorical figure. It's a poem of escapist romanticism, celebrating the freedom of the road, a nomadic lifestyle & utopian love. The landscape is a throwback to the British Isles of George Borrow (especially his "Lavengro") in which the countryside could be plodded without crossing railway lines or entering large towns.

Here' a short though typical stanza. The whole poem is in iambic tetrameter with an eccentric pattern of rhyming. The narrator and his girl have now fallen in with each other are on the road at nightfall, she having escaped into his company from a guardian who was about to give her in marriage to an unwholesome friend.

"And all about us, through the night,
The mists were stealing, cold and white,
Down every rushy syke or slack:
But soon the moon swung into sight;
And as we went my heart was light.
And singing like a burn in flood:
And in my ears were tinkling bells;
My body was a rattled drum:
And fifes were shrilling through my blood
That summer night, to think that she
Was walking through the world with me."

Without in the least murmuring of smut, "The Hare" is a powerful erotic fantasy of homely chivalry and free love. It shows us that the growth of social revolution in the nineteen twenties came from seeds planted before the First War. Andrew Duncan would also have us believe that the Georgians were socialists who laid the ground for the more radical poets of the nineteen thirties. Having read Vol 1, I am intrigued by both these ideas.





Laurence Olivier
by
John Cottrell

In a recent Guardian newspaper interview (6/5/2014), the poet John Cooper Clarke made fun of poets whose parents approved of their work,

I can read a poet now and tell within a few lines if they have been encouraged by their parents. You know the ones who have been told from an early age: "It's marvellous Tarquin." It's invariably rotten.

The same holds true, I believe, of actors. Leaving aside for one moment those from established Thespian families (the Redgraves and Fondas of this world), actors can easily be divided into individuals whose parents pushed them, and the rebels who had to jump ship to get into the business. That's not to say the likes of Dirk Bogarde or Toyah Wilcox turned into "rotten" actors, though there was a quality of self-satisfaction about their work which they needed to overcome. Lawrence Olivier came not from a theatrical background but from a High Anglican vicar father with an interest in the stage. By substituting religion for the theatre, Shakespeare for god, his single-parent upbringing and being sent off to drama school at the age of seventeen, we can appreciate how Olivier sprang from between two sources: sub-noble scion and gang-show bore. Bolted on to that, the early years of slogging at his craft and mixing with sundry Method actors (yes, John, there's always one hanging about), comedians and natural talents, Olivier honed himself into the greatest ham of all time.

This much, John Cottrell's book tells us, though never so directly. We could have expected a more in-depth analysis of the actor's psychological make-up from the writer of a "best-selling account of the assassination of President Kennedy". Instead we get copious notes on the false-noses, hair-dos, voice production and other externals that make up an actor's craft, along with some details on his career as empressario, then as first director of the Chichester Festival and National Theatres. Of his three marriages, four children (by two wives), home life, friendships and out-of-theatre interests, we get some snippets - though few of them choice or telling asides. The fact that Oliver was still very much alive when this biography was published (coinciding with his seventieth birthday; he was to go on living and working for another decade and more) seems to have inhibited not merely its content but its scope.

As a straight forward account of Laurence Olivier's progress from child actor to his elevation to the peerage (he was the first actor to be granted a seat in the UK's House of Lords), this biography does a tolerable job. Graduating from the Central School of Speech Training & Drama in 1924, the artist served an apprenticeship at Birmingham Rep and rose, within a few years, to become a juvenile lead in London's West End. He made early forays into talking pictures and by the close of the 1930s had established himself on both stage and screen both sides of the Atlantic. His partnership with Vivien Leigh (second wife) continued through and beyond World War Two with both taking starring roles in acclaimed films (she in “Gone With the Wind”, he in “Pride and Prejudice) and in stage productions (appearing together as Lord and Lady in “Macbeth”). He also followed his colleague Ralph Richardson into active service in the Fleet Air Arm as a pilot, though for most of the conflict he was seconded to the entertainment side of the war effort. His filmed versions of three Shakespeare plays (“Henry V”, “Richard III” & “Othello”) were considered milestones both for their use of the medium and for popularising English classical theatre. Olivier could turn his hand to a wide variety of roles and acting styles. For example, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, he was able to star alongside Marilyn Monroe in “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1956); then on stage as a fading music hall comedian in John Osborne's “The Entertainer” (1957, filmed in 1959). The 1960s saw a slight reduction in his stage and screen work as he took on the administrative role of directing the National Theatre, however he was still capable of turning out powerful stage performances, such as “Othello” and many cameo roles on film (for example, “Oh, What a Lovely War!”). This biography only goes up to 1976, when he had given up his twelve year stint at the National (while continuing to act for the company) , and had made films such as “Sleuth” (with Michael Caine) plus various TV roles (Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and Nikodemus in “The Life of Jesus Christ”).

It is not until page 350 (of a 480 page book) that we are told,

So often in the past he had been a law unto himself in his interpretation of a part, going his own unpredictable way to great personal advantage but sometimes at the expense of the production as a whole.

The year is 1963, the fourth decade of his professional career. Are we to assume that some of the failed productions were due to Olivier upstaging fellow actors? We are told the 1940 production of “Romeo And Juliet”, in which he and Vivien Leigh starred together, flopped when it reached Broadway. Why? Cottrell merely suggests the New York critics were prejudiced. That hardly explains why the couple who were about to star in a film together (as Nelson and Mrs Hamilton - a wartime triumph both sides of the pond) failed so spectacularly on stage. They had sunk their personal fortunes into the lavish production and done well enough on the road. They were, moreover, newlyweds and every bit as famous as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were to become two decades later. Without further exploration, we may be excused from wondering if Olivier - as Romeo - upstaged his Juliet. Or did Olivier lose his nerve? Without closer analysis we will never know, but it is the job of the biographer to do so.

In his penultimate chapter, Cottrell singles out Olivier's physical fitness and physical presence as two of his major strengths. He goes on to catalogue injuries he sustained both on stage and in front of the camera, including thrust and slash wounds from swords, an arrow in the leg, a broken ankle and electric shock. At times he would throw himself about the stage in unrehearsed business, and at others he would routinely perform leaps and bounds – at one time, after a bracket had broken, being left dangling ten metres above the stage from a piano wire. All of which suggests a recklessness which is at somewhat at odds with the man's conservative image. Indeed, it seems Olivier was that rare animal, the old school revolutionary. Never wishing to appear “old hat” (a favourite phrase) he would embrace the unconventional. Cottrell presents evidence to support the idea he was in fact rather awkward at times and that - though fond of grand japes - his behaviour could be either ungraceful or downright clottish. On his first day of operational duty at the Fleet Air Arm, he was taxiing a seaplane across the tarmac when he crashed it into two other planes, knocking all three out of action. One evening at the National, he gave such a tour-de-force performance of Othello that the whole cast lined the corridor to his dressing room, cheering him as he went by. He strutted past them and slammed the door behind him. Apparently he was upset because he knew he could never repeat the performance. To behave with such gracelessness before his fellows seems at best a lack of feeling, at worst the antics of a callous boor. While he so often excelled in stage charisma was he sometimes weak in self awareness?


There are precious few anecdotes in this biography, concentrating as it does on the actor/manager's successes and failures. We are told of his friendship with Richardson but only once do we see really them together, when Olivier was taken for a spin in his friend's new car, along with his new wife. The joke is funny enough but on its own does not amount to a portrait of their relationship. The rest is exchanges of advice here and there. You are left speculating perhaps the pair were not really friends at all, that there might have been more rivalry than companionship between them. So Cottrell doesn't really pursue Olivier the man. In the last chapters we learn he had a temper, but were are the shouting matches with Kenneth Tynan? And what were they about? Why was he so irascible at times? Did he drink too much? And what really happened between him and Vivien Leigh? I'm not tempted to say this biography asks more questions than it answers. The real problem is, it questions too little of Olivier's life and work.





CAESAR (Life of a Colossus)

by Adrian Goldsworthy


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.


Other ways of getting at the real man could have included a comparative study of the sculpture. Roman artists followed the realism of their Greek masters and though not exactly a warts-and-all approach, neither was Roman stone portraiture ever more than lightly idealised or stylised. Caesar's portrayal in contemporary literature is undoubtedly biased towards the writer's politics. Suetonius in “The Twelve Caesars”, written a century and a half later, was drawing on such like, which writers have done ever since. There is a short round-up of Caesar in literature towards the end of Goldsworthy's book, but nothing like the comparative study I would have expected. Gielgud's portrayal of Shakespeare's Caesar, which I saw at the National Theatre in London, 1977, was somewhat elderly and patrician (the actor himself was probably too old by then), but I seem to remember it was greeted as a classic performance. Caesar, was responsible for his own myth-making, and his efforts to promote himself have reverberated down the centuries.

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.

That's not to suggest Caesar was too saintly for his own good. He and the rest of the Roman nobility were a blood-thirsty lot, which Goldsworthy's book bears witness to and apologises for. What distinguished the Romans from their Gaulish, Egyptian and German neighbours was their organisational skill; meaning they were able to work together in a way unique in the ancient world. Co-operating as soldiers on campaign, they divided the labour of foraging, construction work and actual fighting in a manner that confounded their enemies. In times of war and peace they were business people, traders, settlers, opportunists, you could almost say proto-capitalists – slave-drivers without ethical qualms. In the upshot, Caesar's assassination differs not from any St Valentine's Day massacre type of peer justice. All Caesars, whether big-hearted Julius' or snidey little Edward G. Robinson's, live and die by the sword of jealous brothers-in-arms.





"This Side Of Paradise"

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

I Do Hate to Be A Spoiler, but...

I must confess skim-reading “This Side Of Paradise” a couple of years back, dismissing the work as a rag bag and putting it down somewhere on Goodreads as “the first Coffee Table novel”. Before Christmas, I began delivering on a guilty self-pledge to plough through the tome word for word, and not a few weeks did pass before that mealy task was done. The verdict? It is more pastiche than rag bag, a distinction I endeavour to explain below.

Of course, the novel has to be read by all serious students of Fitzgerald's work not simply because it was the first he published; launching his career, it became the fiction sensation of 1920-1. It first took off on the back of positive reviews from a brace of friendly critics (Rascoe & Mencken) who were keen to promote Fitzgerald's distinctly Young American voice. Thereafter, it soared on chutzpah & hype; and benefiting from the coast-to-coast coverage of publishing giant Scribners almost 50,000 copies were sold in little over a year. It may be the first novel to depict the return of the US Expeditionary Force from Flanders, and by pre-dating Faulkner's “Soldier's Pay” and Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” by half a decade, it delineates the start of a literary movement of which the latter was to coin the term, “Lost Generation”.

That books sell through clever marketing is clear, but a certain amount of consumer satisfaction is also required. What appealed to 1920s readers is slightly more complex. No doubt, fascination with the lives of the rich would have kept many eyes on the page. Sex plays a major part, too. Of course, Fitzgerald was no purveyor of smut and the novel presented little that would have been worthy of any second glances by Jazz Age censors. It may therefore have benefited from the vogue for risqué without incurring any of the risks. Through a mixture of obtuseness and subtlety, Fitzgerald takes his reader from scandal-class kisses at posh house parties to the cheap hotel rooms of debauchery proscribed by the Mann - 'White Slavery' - Act of 1910. Also of topical note was the start of Prohibition in the very year of publication, which may have increased sales to the clientèle – or would-be clientèle - of the speak-easy. Most of all, though, “This Side of Paradise” is a book about young adults, written by a young adult, for young adults. It was the start of the era when law-making would begin to dog the lives of young Americans and lead, ultimately, to the revolutionary Beat Generation that came after the Second World War. Having laid that claim for it, however, it must be said that the text as a whole is not an easy read. Doubtless many copies would have fallen open at well-marked, well-read passages.

A handbag? Pastiche? Influenced by the likes of Compton MacKenzie’s “Sinister Street” and Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man”, its many passages of brittle prose are cut, for heaven's sake, with much damp poetry and windy dialogue. It's as though the contents of Zelda's diaries (the style of which Fitzgerald carefully deployed in drafts of his early novel, “The Romantic Egoist”) had been tipped out onto a large refectory table, cherry picked and then repackaged between leaves of his own stuff. Expensively produced stuff, that is. All the same, stuff. At one point our anti-hero Amory Blaine walks out of his job at a New York advertising agency complaining,

...it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you”.

We never get to read his copy, but we are tied to the mast while Fitzgerald does impressions of Endymion The Vogon,

                 “The shadow of a dove
Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
And down the valley through the crying trees
The body of the darker storm flies; brings
With its new air the breath of sunken seas
And slender tenuous thunder...

Is this the writer who gave us “The Great Gatsby”? You better believe it! How did the old Iggy Pop number go? “Success/Here comes my Chinese rug”.


The main characters are clearly life-meets-literature drawn, from Blaine (an amalgam of Fitz himself with various Princeton bonhomies), his fairy godmother Ma, an actual Monsignor, a succession of débutantes (amongst which Fitz's real-life loves Zelda Sayres and Ginevra King are measured out in coffee spoons) plus lesser souls for whom the East Coast of the nineteen-teens would have been an anthem stomp for disaffected youth. It's an artificial book in as much as it's populated by artificial people. There is no plot, no ending to give away. So here's my spoiler: some die, others go on to other things.




Visits to Monasteries in the Levant

by Robert Curzon

No mealy-mouthed apology, carefully worded excuse or legal argument can deny the truth. 'Visits to Monasteries in the Levent' is the tale of a gentleman thief. But nor is its author any sort of Raffles, no down-on-his-luck aristocrat preying on the follies of an idle rich bretheren. The book, despite a plea to have been written for his own pleasure, was a runaway success when first published, adding immoral profit to hoodwinks and larceny. In the years 1834-37 Robert Curzon, later fourteenth Baron Zouche, plundered the libraries of Orthodox monasteries in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. His claims to legitimacy include cash payments and donations made to the monks in occupation, assertions that he was looking principally for lost non-religious works, and that he rescued many books from destruction.

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:



I assume this to be a romanticised representation of slavery as it still existed in Egypt at the time. Curzon's reactionary pique was aroused not only by the oppressions of daily life in the east, but the corresponding freedoms his countrymen enjoyed. He was writing as a Tory whose narrative begins in the very year in which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Botany Bay.

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'



a biography by
Sheridan Morley


In general, books have to be read according to their contemporary style or timeless poetics. Irrespective of the writing, sometimes just the content of a book justifies the hours frittered away in a self world, ignoring the bleats of mobile phone to be charged or dishwasher to be emptied. When a book announces it will tell 'the other side' of a famous life story, filling in the bits left out by the author of no less than two autobiographies (both read and enjoyed), then there is a book screaming out to be read. But woe betide such a book that lets you down!

David Niven was a Hollywood actor, a British star; very well known during his five decades of picture-making and still remembered to this day, though he died thirty years back. He wasn't the most remarkable of actors and some of the ninety films he made were not what they promised to be ('Bonnie Prince Charlie', 1948), commercial flops ('Oh Men! Oh Women!' 1957) or just plain bizarre ('Casino Royale', 1967). The list of his blockbusters, though, tells of a career without parallel. Check out the movies you've either seen or heard of: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 1936; 'The Prisoner of Zenda', 1937; 'The Dawn Patrol', 1938; 'Wuthering Heights', 'Raffles', 1939; 'The First of the Few', 1942; 'Stairway To Heaven' 1945; 'Around The World In Eighty Days' 1956; 'Separate Tables', 1958 (for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor); 'The Guns of Navarone', 1961; 'The Pink Panther', 1964; 'Death On The Nile', 1978, and 'The Curse Of The Pink Panther', 1982. He was also one of the pioneers of live television drama in the US, both as actor and producer. He served his country on active service in the British Army throughout World War Two, only taking time off to make propaganda films (some good 'uns at that). Plus, he found time to write a couple of novels, and two highly successful volumes of autobiographical reminiscences: 'The Moon's A Balloon', 1971; and 'Bring On The Empty Horses', 1975.

I well remember us tuning in to the episode of 'Parkinson' (Britain's equivalent of the 'Dick Cavett Show') when he was promoting his first autobiography in 1971. I was fourteen at the time and by rights would have seen the old bean as another old square. The fact he dared to talk about his schoolboy sex life made him human to me. My father dismissed the man (he thought all actors were, “pimps, puffs or prostitutes”), but as a family we always watched 'Parkinson' together; and I then recalled how Dad had taken us to see Niven with Shirley MacLaine at the Odeon Cinema when 'Around The World In Eighty Days' was re-released (around 1965). In our wholes lives together, the only other film Dad took us to see was 'Lawrence of Arabia' (another Sixties re-release.)

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.

What Niven doesn't stoop to tell us is that the odds of a half hamper of spoiled food landing on Sam Goldwyn's actual desk were far less than even. The most that could be achieved by the prank would be to give the man's front office staff the headache of disposing of it. However, he does admit,

It was ridiculous and childish and I was behaving like a small boy attacking a heavy tank with a water pistol but rather enjoying it.”

...then he quickly segues into the intervention of Fred and Phyllis Astaire on his behalf, leading to a new seven-year contract, huge salary increase and promise of the game-changing 'Raffles' role. That, of course, is Niven-on-Niven, a man with enough material to achieve such clever use of juxtaposition. I'm coming to Morley-on-Niven in a jiffy.

Rex Harrison was perhaps the only influential person in the movie world who admitted never caring for our subject. Another Englishman in Los Angles, Harrison (star of “Dr Dolittle” and “My Fair Lady”) was present when Primmie, Niven's first wife, was fatally injured in a bizarre house party accident. He didn't give a reason for not liking the star of “Raffles”, but it seems strange of him to refuse to contribute anything to Sheridan Morley's biography - other than an off-the-record dislike for his compatriot. Morley reports Harrison's refusal, but offers no clue as to why. Which brings me to why this biography was such a size nine disappointment.

Morley kicks off by informing us his book will not be a simple retelling of Niven's well-known stories. Moreover that he has dug deep to find “The Facts Behind The Façade” and, in-line with his main sub-title, will tell 'The Other Side Of...' the man who wrote 'The Moon's A Balloon'. Not only that, in one of the first anecdotes (actually another Niven-on-Niven yarn), he promises juicy revelations,

...Some of the best of the stories sadly never made it into print, though they have a kind of 'ageing Englishman abroad' quality of considerable and hilarious charm, like the night at a grand Malibu gathering when he was apparently asked by a glamorous hostess if he would like a blow. Unable to believe his luck, David whispered that he would and is told to follow his hostess into an upstairs bathroom. Finding her there with his back to the door and standing by the bathroom cupboard, David removes his trousers in delighted expectation, only to have her scream in horror and surprise at his nudity. In her hand is a glass phial containing an exotic powdered drug – and I know of no better generation gap story than that.”

Morley's vapid deconstruction, “I know of no better...” does nothing to unmask the real Niven; who, though I am sure was the author of the reported gag, would never have behaved with such crass naivety: “Unable to believe his luck” & “delighted expectation” - what phooey! While crack cocaine only emerged on the scene in the 60s or 70s, the snorting of coke was rife in Hollywood in the 1930s when Niven would have been no stranger to it, if no user himself. Furthermore, the terms 'blow' and 'blow job' being close enough to confuse an uninitiated observer, would scarcely overlap in Malibu circles – even cross-generational ones. The truth is, Niven was given to the embellishment of such risqué stories, but the grain of truth embedded in this particular yarn was most likely as much aural as oral. Overhearing the words “blow” and “upstairs bathroom” at a party, Niven might have quipped that he was game, only to be informed he would have to keep his trousers on. To which, soberly snorting his Manhattan, he would have shrugged and said you couldn't blame a chap for wishing. I'm sad to say, this kind of one-click forwarding of Niven myths is really all Morley has to offer.

Even the revelation that heart-throb Merle Oberon and David Niven spent much of the 30's shacked up together is useless to us without some sort of analysis of why he rejected her pleas to get married. Why, for example, he was reluctant to marry someone in the same profession, shouldn't the author ponder what held him back? Isn't that what a biographer is supposed to do? Isn't that was makes Roger Lewis' 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' such a monumental work? Morley's book, through some weird shift in the time/space consortium of publishing, manages to tell us less than nothing. Who was Niven's father, for gawdsake? Beyond a name and the suggestion of wealth squandered, we learn precisely nought with-the-rim-off. The news that he died at Gallipoli, but his death was not confirmed by the War Office for two years, goes without comment. Egad! Did he have no comrades in arms? Nor does Niven's own reticence on the subject of his father go challenged. Throughout the book, serious analysis is parried by reassuring depictions of the man's privacy, his stiff upper lip, his utter discretion, old chap. Instead of lifting the lid on his sexual relationships, all we are given are a few inconsistencies of date and place. For instance, in 'The Moon's a Balloon', Morley smartly points out, Niven puts first wife Primmie's age at death as twenty-five instead of twenty-seven. It's not as if she was a case of gaol-bait, is it? What I would like to know, just for the toss, is how did his early experiences with prostitutes colour his romantic relationships? But Morley, family friend and official biographer, hangs out the old linen with only the whitest of stains.


Even the promise to refrain from repeating well-known Niven anecdotes is broken. He repeats stories broadcast on the 'Parkinson' show, and the above-quoted yarn of the Kraft food hamper, from “The Moon's A Balloon” is repeated almost word for word. What purpose does that serve? Is there any analysis? No. He even manages to purloin the actor's narrative style, so you can hear an echo of Niven's voice, almost smell the faint whiskied breath of him as though the book were a third, ghosted volume of reminiscences wafting up from the grave. “The Other Side Of The Moon” should have been like “The Far Side Of Paradise” - Arthur Mizener's well-researched biography of Scott Fitzgerald – the title a play on Fitz's first novel, “This Side of Paradise.” It is not. In fact, it hardly qualifies as the type of second-rate biography you expect of much lesser stars. Morley has simply chatted to a few of Niven's old chums (including his father, the actor Robert Morley), read the star's own books and consulted a few newspaper and magazine archives. True, from his childhood onwards, young Sheriden knew Niven personally, and you get the feeling the actor may have been somewhat of an uncle figure to him. So he recounts his life in chunks of five years or so, pausing frequently to remind us that “The Moon's A Balloon” and “Bring On The Empty Horses” will arrive in old age, as though his whole life had been leading up to them. Along the way Morley heavily criticises many of Niven's choice of parts and films and in so doing denigrates his career. His attitude reiterates the idea that the life of a jobbing actor is somehow demeaning to the gentleman he surely was. Which seems rather hypocritical since his father Robert Morley's career fared no better, you could say a lot worse. I saw Robert in a dull revival of the Ben Travers farce, “Banana Ridge” at the Savoy in 1977; but remember him principally as the first film actor to play Oscar Wilde - a role he revelled and excelled in. In my opinion, for all it's worth, Niven deserved better than this dishonest, rushed out semi-biography to accompany the reissue of his own witty confessions.

"Literature"

by Peter Widdowson

This book explains what is meant by the term “post-modernist”. It also explores poetry and fiction of both the past and present by using post-modern critical tools. This means, it shows how ideas derived from linguistics, feminism and post-colonialism have changed critical thinking. The author presents the idea that the enjoyment of literature is a political act; and furthermore, that writers are engaged in creating alternative views of the world we live in.

We may, for example, see Shakespeare's play “The Tempest” as a commentary on the attitude of Europeans towards the native people of the New World. Although this particular play was written long before the morality of colonialism began to be criticised, nevertheless the text deconstructs itself to reveal underlying attitudes and assumptions. Likewise, nineteenth century novels such as George Eliot's “Adam Bede” are shown to contain a commentary on contemporary attitudes towards women's place in society.

More modern texts may be commentaries on literature itself. Ted Hughes' poem 'The Thought Fox' when analysed in detail reveals itself to be a poem about a poem. Other modern texts studied include poetry by Seamus Heaney (about ambivalence towards violent sectarianism), Tony Harrison (about the desecreation of his parents' grave by vandals) and Grace Nichols (about the “'double colonialisation' of being a black woman”). Also included are short critiques of fiction by Salman Rushdie (“Midnight's Children”) and Isabel Allende (“The House of the Spirits”).


Widdowson has a theory about what he calls “the literary”, which is his own hobby-horse. It's not too difficult to follow him, as he writes without pretentious references, and I think what he's saying is that the best writing is self-aware, and that good writers deploy words and expressions and use plot lines which foster new awareness in the reader.


The Secret Adversary

By Agatha Christie



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.

The characters Tommy and Tuppence are young, amiable almost-rogues who set out - circa 1919 - looking for remunerative adventure. Quickly, they get themselves embroiled in a plot, à la Zinoviev letter, to use the Labour movement to bring down the government. It's written from a mildly reactionary viewpoint, which mildly outrages me. The plot is far fetched and inevitably (for the genre) convoluted, but managed well enough and by changes of location, character and tone kept this jaded reader turning the page.

Let's see now, what's it got? Mystery a-plenty (if a-wishy-washy), crooked spies, red herrings, double-dealers, guns'n'poisons, the very prototype of the young assistant, romance, hard-boiled dialogue, hostage-taking, country houses, a millionaire with money to burn. No bumbling police, though; a shoot-out but no corpses; London scenes, but no pea-souper. I suppose you can't have everything.

Tommy and Tuppence, a couple whose first outing this is, were Christie's least commercially successful sleuths. I wonder if there isn't something too self-satisfied about a romantic couple's working together to make superstars of them like Miss Marple and Poirot? Perhaps one of these erotica hacks should take them on, insert bedroom scenes every ten pages and make a million dollars? Heck, it's outta copyright...





Sylvia & Michael

The Later Adventures
of Sylvia Scarlett

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.
Reminiscent of Kipling's "Kim" and Scott's "Heart of Midlothian" in this, and one other respect, the hero and heroine's fates are plotted against huge events that dwarf the sum of all the individuals involved. Sadly, when Mackenzie sat down to write "Youth's Encounter" (vol. 1 of "Sinister Street") he could have only an inkling that the final dénouement of his story would take place in the midst of what would become known as The Great War, and then the First World War. Yet drawing so heavily on his own experience of public school, Oxford university, the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Church of England, Music Hall Theatre and the seedier side of Edwardian London, it is little wonder he employs his wartime experience in the Balkans and Eastern Aegean to backdrop and populate the scene of Michael's epiphany.
War, which breaks out while Sylvia is delerious with typhoid in Russia, puts people into uniform; which as Mackenzie tell us on the title page, makes every one look alike; except for the women, I suppose? Notwithstanding this, he claims there are no 'portraits' in the book. Of characters, then, there is the usual mix of vamps and scamps: the good, the bad and the very bad. Concetta makes a reappearance, persued by the evil juggler Zozo. Her fate is still as unfortunate as before and mirrors Lily, of whom there is no more news. There is a friendly Bulgarian bandit, an English Petroleum baron and an accomodating priest. All stereotypes must have their origin in the real world and, rather despite his claim, I imagine Compton Mackenzie was one of those people you would be wary of meeting lest he put you into one of his books.
Though a good deal of action goes on in the background, as it were, most of these adventures are of the soul. We have the predicatable dose of Catholicism - Roman, this time - intruding, somewhat incongruously into Sylvia's story. Not that her reversion to the mother church isn't sufficiently explained away, exhaustively in fact. It's just that I object to a story-teller using his own particular convictions as material in this way. Much better, I thought, was Mackenzie's account (in "Galippolli Memories") of his time on the shrapnel raked beaches of Turkey, when he felt in the hands of God and strangely at peace with his fate. In "Sylvia and Michael" we are asked to believe the couple witness some pretty awful atrocities - the ethnic cleansing of modern parlance - without feeling much more than their own good fortune. Still, I suppose, there may be a deal of the writer's experience talking there. I hope I never live to see for myself what war really is.
Going back to the other point about Kipling and Scott, if I may, there is an English smugness here, an imperious view. All the Serbs, Romanians, Bulgars, Russians, Greeks and what have you appear as so much flotsam on their own shores. There is a pervasive class snobbery, too; and despite the boyish character of liberated Sylvia, sexism. Wherever the plot roams, there is always a common cockney girl, whether pay-to-dancer or guesthouse proprietress, who is salt-of-the-earth.
I wonder at Mackenzie's Englishness. At one point in the book, he appears to criticise Erskine Childers' novel "Riddle of the Sands" for giving away secrets to the Bosch. That's rich! After the war, both of these distinguished writers turned to Celtic nationalism.
The ending of a saga must come as a kind of anti-climax. So much has gone before, the dénouement can hardly be organic. We must leave the world the author has created with at least a tinge of regret. And, perhaps, a slap on our own backs for having read so far.




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.
Considered extremely daring at the time of publication (1918 forTHE EARLY LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT”, to give its full title) this saga can sensibly be compared with contemporary works by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. Whereby Mackenzie was adept at sailing as close as possible to the moral wind of the day, he managed to benefit from the publicity stirred up by outrage. At the same time he avoided the censure of the law without being shunned by the book-buying (if not the book-borrowing) public. In short, his tomes sold like hot cakes in a society increasingly obsessed by sex.
Whereas the adventures of “Sylvia Scarlett” are not as a poetically or lengthily written out as those of Michael Fane, her complete life up to the age of thirty is emcompassed, with much glossed over. The scenes with Michael and Lily, for example, which take place as the characters are in their early twenties, form only a short (if crucial) part of this narrative. And to what extent we are given a fully rounded, believable portrait of this young woman is debatable. When loosely filmed in 1935, with a tom-boyish Katherine Hepburn (as Syvia) and the super-dapper Cary Grant (as Jimmy Monkley), cross-dressing was used to much stronger effect than here. There is an obvious homosexual interpretation but, like a tamer version of Evelyn Waugh, Mackenzie merely dangles the possibility in front of his audience; for instance, at one point telling us that Sylvia's hands are masculine.
Sylvia's clear protoypes are Fanny Hill and Becky Sharp (the latter also filmed in 1935). She is her own woman from the start, and while she frequently throws herself on the kindness of strangers, she always manages to rise above the kind of squalor normally associated with frausters amd common prostitutes. This is despite not being a great beauty herself.
Still as a teenager, she is married (to an Oxford man) and divorced. She frequently walks out on money and prosperity because foremost in her mind is being true to herself and never to be groomed (“developed” is the word often deployed here) to suit another's whims. This doesn't stop her from grooming others, most notably Lily and Arthur Madden. The reader is treated at fairly regular intervals to solliloquies in which she, in something like a stream of consciousness, sums up her situation. For example, in a long paragraph beginning with the words “I must be getting old...” (she is twenty eight at the time) she compares herself, favourably, to a drunk, because, “drunkenness is the apotheosis of the individual”.
Later on, when facing the imminent prospect of marriage she tells a close friend that really she is no feminist, “...Personally I think that the Turks are wiser about women than we are; I think the majority of women are only fit for the harem and I’m not sure that the majority wouldn’t be much happier under such conditions. The incurable vanity of man, however, has removed us from our seclusion to admire his antics, and it’s too late to start shutting us up in a box now. Woman never thought of equality with man until he put the notion into her head.”
Having started life in France (she is only half English) she spends her teens in England then travels in Italy, Spain, Morocco, South America and the USA. By her mid-twenties, she seems to have given up the life of the working girl and turned instead to the family tradition of musical theatre as both her principal means of living and her means of fulfilling a creative urge. Throughout these novels we are given to believe the borderlines between fraud, musical theatre and prostitution are very thin indeed. Mackenzie himself grew up in a theatrical family, and the fame of his sister Fay Compton still survives in living memory at the time I write (2013). Presumably he knew his subject far better than he dares equate us.
The book abounds in piquant adventures. At one point Sylvia becomes the moll of an Argentine gangster with whom she escapes from a shoot-out in a bordello. At the same time, we are asked to believe her relationship with Carlos Morera is platonic and that he showers her with valuable presents (setting her up for several years to come) for the mere pleasure of escorting her round town.
Mackenzie does not subject Sylvia to the thorns of her many rose beds. Whatever ups and downs his heroine endures barely scratch the surface of this oh-so wise and cynical woman-child. And whenever she comes across characters whose fates are without her good fortune, she is able to look on with more sympathy than empathy. Concetta (a dancer) and Rodrigo (a guide) whom she meets in Granada, are in situations not unlike those she has been through herself. Yet as she is about to help them, one is abducted by a jealous lover while the other is fatally stabbed by a rival. Back in London she is shocked to hear that Jenny Pearl, the model of an artist friend, has been shot dead by her jealous husband. But this promises to be merely a plot device. In fact, Sylvia's character can be callous or even craven at times. For example when Jimmy Monkley, who took care of her after her father's suicide and who has been gaoled for fraud, comes out of prison to visit her, she flees for her life. At the time, she is riding high on the success of her musical show - but in horror of the past, overlooks the debt she owes him. Actually, survival instinct is in operation here and we can't blame Sylvia for shutting the trickster Monkley out. He was grooming her when she left him at the age of fifteen. But it convenient to be able to choose what you will of your past life, a luxury not afforded to most of the characters here, or in real life for that matter.
Even after her most crushing reversal (I won't reveal just what) Sylvia is able to dust herself off and, pocketing a timely windfall, escape from the consequences.
This is a story that does not end on the last page, though it says “THE END” in capital letters. Throughout this volume there are references to Miachael Fane and, who'd have guessed, it was followed up by “SYLVIA & MICHAEL - THE LATER ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT” in 1919, a book even shorter again. If there are diminishing returns in the series, more fool the reader (me, for example) hanging on in to the bittersweet end.


A note about religion: Sylvia, it is made plain from time to time, is a woman without religious faith. Mackenzie, however, cannot resist inserting a chapter mostly devoted to the pro- and anti- anglo-catholic schisms in the Church of England. He achieves this with skill and not a little entertainment à la Lurch in The Church. He even manages to get the non-believing Sylvia to come down on the side of his own pro-ritual views. The gauntlet thrown down by Joyce in "Portrait of the artist as a Young Man" is picked up.


Meet Murder: Revisiting Michael Herr's “Dispatches”


To my younger eyes, the film “Apocalypse Now” was somewhat pretentious. It had eventually come out not long after I finished reading Michael Herr's book “Dispatches”... but a while before I finally got round to Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”. I supposed there was some subtlety in Francis Ford Coppola's film that I was missing, since he had reportedly based his script on a fusion of those two books.

I next viewed the film a couple of decades later, by which time I had done my Conrad reading, and realised it was Marlon Brando's pretentious portrayal of Kurtz that had spoilt the show... and not the film's ambitious blending of fact and fiction. Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper and even FF Coppola himself were vindicated. Marlon had become a fat slob, a bloated angel unworthy even of the messianic Kurtz role.

Every bit as chilling as Capote's “In Cold Blood”, “Dispatches” brought the corpse of America's Vietnam war back to life to my generation. We had all too quickly moved on. Just when we were beginning to forget the horror, Herr came and jolted us out of our safe European punk rock fantasy world. One of the many telling images he gives is of a grunt he ran into a small jungle clearing. He had just gone to take and leak, but the young soldier seemed uptight to have him there,

He told me that they guys were all sick of sitting around waiting and that he'd come out to see if he could draw a little fire. What a look we gave each other. I backed out of there fast, I didn't want to bother him while he was working.”


Read this book if you think “Full Metal Jacket” is pure entertainment, if you're not afraid to face the truth behind the statement, “Hell Sucks”.




"SE Persia"
by Sir Arnold Wilson

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.




"Man of Nazareth"
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.




"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian"
by Marina Lewycka
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

by Alberto Moravia

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.

'The Woman of Rome' was written just post-World War Two, while the sexual revolution was barely in its gestation period. It is set in 1936, in Mussolini's fascist Italy, a time and place of much give-and-take in private morals. Would it be true to say, therefore, that a different moral code should be applied when reading it? Should we look very differently on Adriana, 'The Woman of Rome', than on a trafficked Asian woman of 2013? According to her own account, Adriana's family has lived in the city for seven generations. The daughter of a seamstress and (deceased) railway worker, at the age of 21 she discovers her chauffeur 'fiancé'/lover is already a husband and father. She is raped by a high official in the fascist police. Thereafter, thwarted of her marriage dream and in order to escape a life of drudgery, she decides to go on the streets. She does so, moreover, with the support and approval of her mother. A great conundrum is the extent to which Adriana enjoys her sex work and considers it wholesome. Having lost her virginity to the chauffeur, and being raped with the collusion of a friend who is already a prostitute, the life she turns to holds little horror for her; she has a healthy appetite for sleeping with men, young or elderly, strange or familiar. Nor do visits to church and the confessional persuade her there is very much morally wrong in her work. Some of her clients are old and uncouth, others knock her about a bit, and yet she always manages to find some aspect of them attractive enough to be an enthusiastic participant in the bed act. All this would be hard to credit, and harder still with the stark realism of the writing. Somehow, though, Adriana is not a fantasy figure, even in the way she finds sexual fulfilment with both casual clients, and the men she gets deeply involved with. Firmly rooted in her time and setting, it's somehow even possible to picture her life as charmed and idyllic. For Adriana is discerning about who she sleeps with; she only works when she feels in the mood; and she scorns the attitude of her friend Gisella, who forever haggles over money with her clients. Unlike her friend, 'The Woman of Rome' takes a special kind of pride in her profession, as she calls it, never claiming to be anything she is not.

The novel sets Adriana's life against the political situation of the day when she reminds us that 1936 was the year Italy brutally invaded Abyssinia. In revenge for the chauffeur's lies, she has stolen a valuable compact from his employer. It is a small crime but sets off a chain of tragic events that involves all her men: the cheating ex-lover Gino; Astarita, the fascist policeman who is madly in love with her; a psychopathic murderer, Sonzogno; and the student Mino, an anti-fascist with whom she in turn has fallen in love. Her relationship with Mino is scarred by the masochistic acceptance, even enjoyment, of the pain he brings her. He doesn't return her love and neither does he pay her to sleep with him. Nevertheless, she risks everything to help him, even when he lets her - and everyone else - down. No matter how strong Adriana's love for Mino is, she admits it is the brutal Sonzogno who possesses her most completely - a feeling she maintains even in the face of his evil intent. Being the lover of all these men, Adriana takes a little from each. Her positive attitude, although she herself feels suicidal at times, continuously asserts itself and in her way, given that a disastrous war is just around the corner, she comes to represent the spirit and beauty of the Italian people.

I can't help wondering if Moravia wasn't writing from some personal experience in pre-World War Two Italy, as Adriana's voice is so vivid and full of little twists of character. At the same time, the portrayal of a prostitute, without ever stooping into sentimentalism, is so strong and vibrant, Adriana transcends those around her. There are weaknesses in the novel's other portrayals, particularly Astarita's unprobed obsession with the lowly prostitute, but in a way this enforces her otherness, as nobody really deserves her.

Though Moravia was supposed to be an atheist, it would be difficult to read this book without drawing some comparison with the Madonna. In fact there is Adriana's meeting with the mysterious and Christ-like Father Elia and then her – apparently rejected – prayer to the Virgin. There is, at least, a supra-religious statement here regarding the imminent birth of the fatherless child.

As to me, reading the book again after thirty-five years, I am confirmed in my admiration for this kind of writing. Like the two-part film 1900 by Bertolucci (which I saw around the same time I first read the book) it is pellucid (a term the translator chooses twice), stark, super-real and romantic in a detached way. It's easy to fall in love with Adriana, and to maintain a sense of proportion. She is both a fictional character (someone that can't be possessed) and, aw shucks, a prostitute (ditto). I don't think a man could write a book like 'The Woman of Rome' today without receiving a lot of flak – or peppering it with graphic sex. More pertinently, these days it's less credible for an author to paste an uneducated person's voice over a complex narrative. You're going to have to find some clever angle to give it spin. Without all our post-modern clutter, the pulse of this book is strong and inspiring. We could do with a return to writing of this sort.

Note on the text:

The translation in my (lovely old paperback) copy, by Lydia Holland, seems reasonable except for lapses in tense, which frequently attribute habitual behaviour to characters Adriana has just met, as in “he used to...”, or “he would...”. There is also an inconsistency in the plot, when Adriana invites Astarita to visit her the night after Mino reappears, which is a tantamount promise to sleep with him; then six weeks pass before their next meeting. Given Astarita is madly in love with her, it seems rather far-fetched. Perhaps this is also down to a fault in translation - a missed nuance, perhaps - as the action is otherwise delicately plotted?




Ingenious Pain
by Andrew Miller

There's a great idea behind this book and Andrew's background (his father was a doctor, while he studied 18th century Eng. Lit. at Uni) meant he was very well qualified to write it. On the whole, this story of a freakish man unable to feel pain, works very well. You do feel you're in the times and you face the extraordinary situation James Dyer, the central character, is in. Anyone who had read and enjoyed Perfume by Patrick Süskind would have got a kick out of this, too; though its plot is not as strong. I have one serious quibble, which makes me distrust the awards system by which this book was given two very valuable prizes. The bulk of the book is written in present tenses, which gives it a post-modernist feel and jars somewhat with the historical setting. Added to that, though, comes a chapter written in convention style - an epistle, moreover - which (incidentally) to me is the best written part. However, there is no attempt to fit these shifts of tense into the narrative, which I consider to be a flaw. I understand librarians were responsible for the most valuable of the prizes won (the IMPAC), and they should know what the reading public like. However, it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Award; which, given how it is slightly flawed, I don't think it deserved.

Anyhow, it just goes to show how insincere and corrupt the book world is. It was great for Andrew, he was suddenly living on Cloud Nine after that momentous year. I wouldn't want to take his success away from him; if pop stars can make it like that, why not writers? But such grapes do taste sour. Put it like this, if I were an athlete and I saw people in front of me who I knew were on steroids, I think I'd have pretty much the same taste in my mouth.Literature on steroids is this: agents, publishers, booksellers, critics and book trade journalists get together to push a small number of writers. They do this to maximise sales through a practice familiar to all marketeers: brand/product placement. As if to acknowledge this, but really to take it to another level, Andrew and his mates organised workshops through the Guardian newspaper to show aspiring writers how to work the system! After creaming another two hundred quid off each of the eager punters, and with his face having appeared in the newspaper every day for three months, he only goes and scoops yet another prize for his latest historical offering! ("Pure" - which netted 25 grand in the Walter Scott Award).

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