I was wondering what Jessica Riches – public school educated, Lib Dem voting – was doing in the middle of Paul Mason’s new book on the global revolutions of 2011. In the company of turbulent figures like Musa Zekry, a Cairo rubbish recycler who joins the protestors at Tahrir Square “to make a revolution and get freedom”, and Len-len, an unemployed mother trapped in a rural Philippino shack, but dreaming of escaping to the city to become a “lady security guard”, Riches, with her taste in chick-lit and talk of dinner parties, seems a little unpromising, historically speaking.
Then it struck me that she shares some of the qualities of an oddly un-imprinted character in Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966). Having somehow escaped the clutches of history, Emily is invulnerable to myth, in control of her biology, adaptable and pragmatic. Riches may not be quite so original, but as a child of the technological revolution who “tweets in her dreams”, and who deploys her digital self (@littlemisswilde) in the services of the Occupy movement, she is, like Emily, a harbinger – one of the figures in Why it’s Kicking Off that Mason is trying to identify, not unambitiously, as “a new type of human being”.
In the January round-ups few critics will fail to register 2011’s historic nature, but Mason, I’d wager, will be the only mainstream figure who’ll go so far as to propose – as Virginia Woolf once did of human character in 1910 – that in this year human consciousness altered. He calls himself a “technological determinist” and argues that just as body shape changed during the industrial revolution, so the way we relate now, as “networked individuals” with socialised cognition, will change the map of our minds. The key point about the internet is that it is an ever-expanding learning loop, feeding back information about how things might be otherwise and already are elsewhere; its strongest meme is that being linked, we are powerful, because “a network can usually defeat a hierarchy”.
It was this knowledge, Mason argues – the fruit of “info-capitalism” – that created a tipping point in 2011 bringing people onto the streets in greater numbers than ever before. Those in the Middle East, unable any longer to put up with what Auden called “the elderly rubbish dictators talk”, came to topple tyrants; while westerners disappointed of their expectations (“the graduate with no future”, the worker losing her pension), challenged the ‘market is king’ orthodoxy that was destroying livelihoods and corroding democracies.
His account of this collapse in deference is engaging and informative – particularly fine is the opening chapter on how globalisation destroyed the micro-economy that, with great ingenuity, Zekry and other workers created out of Cairo’s rubbish, depriving them of a living and leaving them no option but to join the uprising. It is a story that distils a larger argument, though one not immediately apparent to the reader because the full audacity of Why it’s Kicking Off takes a while to reveal itself. Mason’s title promises answers to why 2011 was such a momentous year, but the narrative he comes up with does much more, suggesting that events now unfolding demand a revised reading of history, one from which we might – just possibly – find a new way into the future.
Yet what he’s writing, he insists, is journalism, albeit today’s opened-out journalism, still rooted in street-level reporting and the detail of individual lives, but invigorated and made increasingly speculative by the pressure of information (he draws on voices from social media, internet psychology, modernist art, radical manifestos, political and economic theory, labour history, sociology and urban planning, as well as re-working his own tweets, blogs, Newsnight reports and earlier books). Like the ‘netizens’ he describes, Mason is intellectually promiscuous, chopping between different ways of considering the world, but in a voice so conversational it goes some way to masking the designs he has on us.
As well as reportage from Egypt, Britain, Greece, America and the Philippines, there’s a briefing, updated from his 2009 book, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, on the decisions that brought capitalism to the brink, characterisation of the new activists (non-ideological, “without loyalty”, highly individualised), debate about why the year’s revolutionary uprisings were unforeseen (dogmatism on the right, defeatism on the left), analysis of how today’s ‘horizontalist’ movement is succeeding where earlier democratic movements faltered (a congruence of popular mood and technological means, making radicalism fashionable and potent again), and a range of historical and cultural parallels to mull over, many where economic decline and technological innovation also spurred revolt (Europe in 1848, the Paris Commune, modernism and the belle époque, syndicalism and the Great Unrest, the counter-culture of 1968).
In order to understand these connections between past and present, though, Mason thinks it necessary to reconsider the narrative of workers’ history and, with this, the left’s idea of what it should be doing now. The attempt of ordinary people to wrest control of their lives and communities, he believes, is not the dominant story of trade unionism and class struggle, but (as syndicalists once claimed) something more pioneering of modernity, more autonomous, imaginative, and less straitlaced.
It’s an argument he was already making in 2007 in Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, before Lehman Brothers collapsed and before the current wave of uprisings, and which now, in their wake, seems vindicated. What we see in today’s protests and occupations – resourcefulness, improvisation, knowledge- and pleasure-seeking, the euphoria of annexing spaces or simply of taking part – can be seen throughout history in waves of creative revolt and experiments in living. This is what Mason is thinking of when he tweets: “I will never tire of the minutae of minute by minute conquest and reconquest of #Tahrir by the people, a year after it started…”
Unlike “the actual history of organised labour”, these intermittent raids on freedom were invested with what Karl Marx, in his early, humanist phase argued for: not proletarian power, but the desire for “the liberation of individual human beings” in which people would “express their freedom through communal interaction”, so becoming a “species-being”. Because capitalism atomised and alienated workers Marx thought this could only be achieved after its rout. But Mason suggests that new technology poses the possibility we can achieve species-being – connected and expressive as we now are – inside capitalism.
Such an idea raises questions about the ground the left is fighting on: if we no longer need to wait for the revolution to end time and start it up again, we can begin to change things here and now – precisely what Mason thinks his “new type of human being” is already doing. What they have grasped is that capitalism’s most advanced form may not be run-for-profit corporations like Microsoft or Toyota, but a “semi-communal form of capitalism exemplified by open-source software and based on collaboration, management-free enterprise, profit-free projects, open-access information.”
It’s a wildly iconoclastic thought that turns capitalism into a machine of emancipation rather than enslavement, driven by curiosity and cooperation rather than greed. The prospect it holds out of accelerated learning and problem-solving makes our current ‘free-market’ system look archaic and superstitiously restrictive. More than this, for the left it allows reconciliation with a re-modelled capitalism without the spectre of apostasy, without losing faith with the history and tradition of workers’ liberation.
For these reasons the book ends not in one of 2011’s hotspots, with the dancers and drum-beaters facing down power, but in a Manila slum where the future is beginning to take shape. With great inventiveness, in cramped and shit-smelling conditions, inhabitants here have created something “orderly, solidaristic” and entrepreneurial. Making his way in a warren of tunnels Mason finds a store, an internet cafe (“the unmistakable whizz and pop of something digital”), and a DIY police force, all run by graduates in business admin, engineering and political science. He sees satellite dishes and solar panels, and thousands of people living hugger-mugger without too much in the way of crime or prostitution or drugs.
He talks to urban planners who explain how much we have to learn from slum-dwellers – how those who are managing such low-impact, highly-educated, technologically connected lives, look like a good model for our future on an overcrowded planet with limited resources. It is by no means a starry-eyed response, however: as in the opening chapter, Mason’s narrative emphasises the complexity of slum politics while keeping his eye trained on individuals like Len-len, who – barely able to feed her children, unable to pay for the course that might change her life – has no control over the global system she is part of.
A book as propositional as Why it’s Kicking Off (“The lesson is this”, “Exhibit one”, “I propose a different reading”) means to provoke argument. My reservations concerned the paradoxical way in which his new human beings, for all their “elevated individualism”, are presented as so improbably alike, largely undifferentiated by religion or sex, all jeans-wearing, looking “just like you” – as if homogeneity were a necessary pre-condition for their modernity. There is too, and perhaps for the same reasons, a disregard of the extent to which multinational corporations and power elites have already infiltrated the net (a Saudi prince owns 5% of Twitter) and to which governments are increasingly using it as a tool of repression. One of Angela Carter’s last prophecies, made not long before she died in 1992, was that surveillance would become a major political issue in the 21st century.
In early reviews some critics have raised questions about Mason’s infatuation with the power of new technology and his belief in its potential for liberation. These doubts perhaps stem from the perspective of the west. For those already living in relative prosperity and freedom the changes may not be so great. But this book begins and ends in the slums of the third world – where one billion of the world’s population live, and where soon many more will follow. For these people the revolution in technology and the possibility of sharing out globalisation’s dividends more equitably, of putting info-capitalism’s knowledge-power into their hands, will be utterly transformative. It’s not hard to hear those locked out from modernity, still only permitted “accidental glimpses of human freedom”, clamouring at the door: this week newspapers carry the story of rioting outside an Apple shop in China, where frustrated customers were unable to get their hands on the latest iphone; while on the radio, a Nigerian man declares, “We have the will and resources to look after ourselves, just bring us the technology”
This article first appeared on the Red Pepper website on 22.1.2012 as ‘History in the Making’.
Christa Wolf: An Exemplary Life – Guardian
Christa Wolf, who died yesterday, was a German writer of rare purity and sensitivity who grew up under nazism and became an adult under communism. Her work records the impact of these ideologies on individual lives. She was as one critic put it, “a writer of scrupulous ‘touchstone’ honesty”, and it is the pursuit and uncovering of truth, under the most beleaguered circumstances, that defines her.
When in 1992, it was revealed she had been used by the Stasi from 1959-1962 as an inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin (informal collaborator) the ensuing attacks on her integrity nearly brought her writing to a halt: “I have the feeling”, she said at this time, “that a bush is growing in my throat”. That she provided no information of value to the Stasi, was soon dropped for “reticence”, and was herself the subject of surveillance for thirty years, did not mitigate the ferocity of the attacks from “the stone-throwing West Germans”, as her translator, Michael Hoffman, called them.
It was argued that the writer who had done most to articulate “the difficulty of saying I” was herself little more than a state poet, a mouthpiece for the regime. Her refusal to simply exonerate herself was read as a sign of guilt, rather than for what it was: a continuation of her life’s work of intense self-interrogation and reflection, in which one must “execute the verdict oneself” – as she wrote in her most important work, Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968) – rather than succumb to the demagogue’s version of events.
Born in 1929 in Landsberg an der Warthe in Brandenburg to a grocer and his wife, who were protestant, middle class, pro-Nazi, Christa was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth. She was ten years old when she watched the SS march through her town as they advanced on Poland, and sixteen, in 1945, when her family ran from the invading Russian army.
This moment of ‘liberation’ recurs in her fiction, in Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), in which she tries to reconnect East Germans to a past from which they believe themselves acquitted; and in ‘Blickwechsel‘, a story from 1970, (translated as ‘Exchanging Glances’ in 1992), where a family snatch their belongings and flee westward toward the Oder-Neisse border. As flames rage in the night sky, the youngest daughter laughs uncontrollably at the spectacle of her resolutely bourgeois family, sellers of sour pickle and malt coffee, literally going to hell in a handcart.
Wolf’s family didn’t make it to the border, and when the dust settled and the maps were redrawn, Landsberg, the town of her birth, became Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland; Mecklenburg, where her family landed, was now part of a newly minted nation, the German Democratic Republic. She was finishing high school before she began to understand the full extent of “what happened back then”. Against this, the new republic offered another faith. Marxism, she believed, was the polar opposite of what happened in fascist Germany: “At all costs I didn’t want anything that could be like the past…That was the source of [my generation’s] commitment and…why we clung to it so long” – something critics in the West have often failed to grasp.
In 1949, as the GDR came into being, Wolf joined the state communist party (SED). She studied literature at Jena and Leipzig universities, was involved in the Bitterfeld movement of worker-writers, and spent three years as a research assistant in the East German Writers’ Union. Here she met “comrades who had come out of the concentration camps, out of prison, back from exile, impressive people”. Her generation’s guilty conscience about what happened to these men and women was another reason for commitment to their cause.
Her first book, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella, 1961), was well received in the east but never translated in the west. A novel influenced by her Bitterfeld work, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven), followed two years later. It won the Heinrich Mann Prize, bringing her international recognition. But in 1965 she spoke at the Eleventh Plenum of the SED Central Committee and began a long process of disenchantment with actually existing socialism, which, she felt, “wasn’t moving in the right direction.” A pattern emerged: disillusion, followed by withdrawal and contemplation, from which she would surface with a vindicating work: “Each time…I’d moved a bit further along the road to myself.”
Out of the “deep depression” she suffered after the Eleventh Plenum she wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. To read it now is to encounter an indisputable feminist classic: in its assault on patriarchal authority and in its fragmented sensibility, the novel pursues the difficult “attempt to be oneself”, for which she was accused in the GDR of being “individualistic”. The book was banned, then published only in a limited edition. Rather than the image of perfectibility that socialist writers were encouraged to present, Wolf set out in Christa T. to imagine the life of an outsider, but she does this from inside socialism, reinventing the heroic mould, or questioning at least whether a life like this – marginal, hesitant, obscure – might not also be of value, full of “latent possibility”; might be, in fact, what socialists looked for in art: the exemplary.
She continued to produce innovative work, countering crude Zhdanovite prescriptions with her notion of subjective authenticity – an author should not hide behind her characters but include intertextual commentary. While her position as a “loyal dissident” was not easy, it was undeniably a source of strength. It is as a writer from inside the socialist project – however distorted the GDR version of this was – that she seems so interesting, casting new light on questions of philosophy, genre, form, delivering insights on the writer’s ‘inner censor’, and in the process making much western writing seem too easily conformist.
Her success meant that she was allowed to travel and teach abroad, and in the Seventies she made friendships with other women writers, consolidating her interest in feminism. A study trip to Greece brought an oddly late epiphany about the extent of her sex’s marginalisation: “I…had a real shock when I realised that in the past two thousand years women really have not been able to exert any public influence.” The work that resulted from her forays into Greek myth in novels such as Kassandra (1983) and Medea (1996), was instantly recognisable to friends in the west like Margaret Atwood, who wrote Medea’s Introduction, observing that “the heroes are really like devils, and the victims are the most important”.
Following a further experience of defeat over the enforced exile of the singer-poet Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976, she continued her work of re-evaluating literary tradition from a specifically German context. In this she found inspiration in debates between Georg Lukács and Anna Seghers about the meaning of Romanticism. In Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979), she imagines a meeting between two writers, Heinrich von Kleist and the poet Karoline von Günderrode, both of whom killed themselves in the early 1800s, as a way of examining the German tendency to alienation, malady and self-destruction. Again, the exploration takes on greater force for being cast from inside a society whose ideology dismissed despair as a luxury.
A later work Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), draws on her experience of illness as the dream of socialism unravelled. In 1988 as Wolf finished writing Sommerstück (Summer Play), her appendix had burst, leaving her with peritonitis. The following year she resigned from the Party. Five months later she gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, then collapsed with a heart attack shortly before it came down. A few weeks later she wrote the final wording for the Für unser Land (For Our Country) petition, which argued against reunification and was signed by 1.1 million people, (“we were thinking about preserving an entirely different country”), but history’s doors were banging shut and the moment of possibility quickly passed.
In recent years, as Germany has come to feel more at ease with reunification, less bedevilled by the ghosts of history, Wolf has been recognised, alongside Günter Grass, as the nation’s most important postwar writer. She received the 2002 German Book award at the Leipzig Book Fair, and won the 2010 Thomas Mann Prize for her last novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud) based on a period of research she undertook in Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 Stasi revelations. This was a work ten years in the making and critics hailed it as her final reckoning, a courageous act of remembrance and leave-taking, a proof, Die Welt argued, “of the ordering mind’s triumph over the chaos of emotion”.
Wolf ended her life in her beloved Berlin, doubly exiled in her own country and shorn of her faith, left only with Was bleibt (What Remains) – the title of her account of being under surveillance by the Stasi; written in 1979, it aroused considerable controversy when published in 1990. Like her friend, the American writer Grace Paley, she came to believe that change would never again be born from an ideology, but progress might occur through shifts and pushes made at ground level from grassroots associations. And for such projects she remained engaged, believing in the importance of activism and hope.
Her 1987 book Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day’s News) about the Chernobyl disaster reflects some of this, with its concerns about technological advance and ecological decline, in the face of which she poses “the significance of daily structure”, the reiteration of human scale. Still, the loss of the comradeship and self-realization socialism had promised was hard to recover from; as was the possibility she refused with customary honesty to dispel entirely: that one may have done wrong in its name. And with all this was her abiding sense of “the abyss that yawns before us”, the fear of a future with no countering vision, a world with nothing but the military-industrial complex to guide our dreams.
“A post is vacant”, Wolf wrote, when her friend and sparring partner the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died in 1991. It’s taken from the Heine poem, ‘Enfant Perdu’, whose first line runs, “Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege ” (Vacated positions in the war of freedom). Asked later about her choice of encomium she replied, “No one talks like that any more. I think these ‘posts’ no longer exist. The times and people’s objectives have changed.” The times have indeed changed, and the terms of our struggle for freedom with them, but the need for voices like Wolf’s that remain fully human and compassionate even under the strongest pressure and provocation, is greater than ever.
Versions of this article appeared on the Guardian website as Christa Wolf Obituary on 1.12.2011 and in the newspaper on 6.12.2011.
Christa Wolf, Berlin, c.1975
November is going to be a critical month in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Today three officers of the Gulf Air union will appear in court on unspecified charges concerning “national security”. In a fortnight a group of sports journalists and athletes that includes the country’s top-scoring footballer, A’ala Hubail, are to be tried for “illegal assembly and inciting hatred against the regime”, and on November 28, the doctors arrested at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, already tried in a military court, will, after international outcry, have their appeal heard in a civilian court.
In the middle of this period, on November 23, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) – set up by King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa and chaired by the international jurist, M. Cherif Bassiouni – will produce its report into whether or not there were human rights violations during the spring uprisings.
A lot rides on this report. The fate of hundreds of protestors already imprisoned or still going through the courts may depend upon it. And for the Bahraini state – where financial services have overtaken oil as the nation’s prime business – at stake is its credibility on the world stage and ability to do business in the international market. In America, after objections from a handful of senators, Hilary Clinton has decided to delay a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain until the BICI’s findings are announced; while complaints raised by international trade unions and the European Parliament about the mistreatment of workers have put the US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement in jeopardy.
Since the uprising began on February 14, the Al-Khalifa Sunni ruling elite – governing a nation that is 70% Shia, and where the King’s uncle, with a forty year incumbency, is the world’s longest-serving Prime Minister – have proved themselves expert at combining antique methods of control with modern ones: not only the use of foreign troops, martial law, military courts and torture, but ‘soft’ power attacks on civil society. To date, nearly 3000 workers have been dismissed, television and social media are being used to name and shame ‘traitors’, and American and British PR and intelligence gathering firms such as Potomac Square Group and Olton Ltd have been employed to ensure that the government’s story is the one the world is listening to.
The stories they are trying to suppress are those being told by Faisal Hayyat, one of the sports journalists being tried, or Habib Alnabbool, the Chairman of the Gulf Air union, also on trial. “I was tortured by the Bahraini army and by security men connected to the Ministry of the Interior”, said Hayyat. “They tied my hands from behind, blindfolded and beat me with pipe, cable and their military boots.” Alnabbool also claims that after his arrest he was handed over to the Ministry of Interior, where, he says, “I was interrogated, humiliated, blindfolded and forced to sign documents I wasn’t allowed to read”.
Hayyat is one of more than sixty journalists who have been arrested. “There is no real journalism, no room for expressing opinions”, he says. When Al-Wasat, Bahrain’s main opposition paper, was closed down for a day its editor-in-chief, Mansoor Al-Jamri, was forced to resign; he was reinstated four months later but in October he and three colleagues were fined 1000 Bahraini Dinars ($US2650) for “publishing news that defamed the image of Bahrain abroad”. Alnabbool also feels that rights guaranteed him under the constitution to speak publicly about his area of work have come under attack. He was warned by Gulf Air’s CEO, Samer Majali, not to talk to Al Jazeera or to other press. Alnabbool is part of the largest group of victimised workers in Bahrain where twelve companies (Gulf Air, Alba, Batelco, and nine others) have been responsible for 919 dismissals.
All these companies are related to Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, the Mumtalakat Holding Company, which has substantial shares in each of them. This is important because it appears to link the victims of torture to the royal family. “Mumtalakat companies sacked workers”, Alnabbool said, “and then passed their names to the military prosecution”. Mumtalakat is presided over by the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa. He appoints the board whose members include one of four Deputy Prime Ministers, Khalid bin Abdulla Al-Khalifa, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Cabinet Affairs, the Minister of Works, and Gulf Air’s Chairman, Talal Al Zain.
“During the implementation of the ‘national safety’ [martial law] by the army”, said Alnabbool, “it was not safe to go into work. Samer Majali sent an email to all his employees, stating that workers who stayed away because they feared for their own or their family’s safety, would not be penalised.” Despite this, the blanket grounds given for dismissal in the Mumtalakat companies was “non-attendance”. At Gulf Air there were 230 dismissals and Majali sent an email to his remaining staff inviting them to inform on fellow workers. “This email was used by some to settle personal issues”, Alnabbool said.
Since then, union executives have been prevented from entering their office in the Gulf Air premises, and holding meetings with their members. The International Trades Union Confederation say that 59 union leaders have been fired, and two unions have been dismantled altogether: in March Bahrain Petroleum (Bapco), where 293 workers were dismissed, dissolved its company union, and in April the Bahrain Teachers Association was closed down, and its president and vice-president arrested.
Alongside these attacks on trade unionists, public vilification has continued. There are many websites such as Bahrain Online and Bahrain Arabia on which photographs of workers on demonstrations have been posted, their faces circled and names identified. One site, Awakened Giant, has 131 photographs identifying Gulf Air pilots, engineers, ground staff and cabin crew. “The government have closed down opposition sites”, Alnabbool says, “but continues to allow these people to target workers, to list their names and addresses, to call them traitors and conspirators. It’s fear and fear only that they’re spreading, and it sets people against one other.”
After international pressure the King, the Prime Minister and the Crown Prince have all made announcements that sacked workers should be returned to work, but these announcements are perhaps for western ears: the Mumtalakat companies have been slow to respond. At Gulf Air, where all of the dismissed workers are Shias, only 136 staff have been reinstated. Of these, however, 79 have not been returned to their former posts but are now required to spend their working hours cramped into a room 7 by 21 metres with only 30 chairs between them, an environment Alnabbool describes as “totally disgusting”, pointing out also that they are finger-printed on their way in and out and checked regularly throughout the day. “It’s possible these companies are using the political situation in Bahrain to restructure”, says Jane Kinninmont, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House. “Some have been riddled with corruption and Gulf Air is losing money.”
Foreign businesses operating in Bahrain like DHL have also been caught up in the political situation. Shukri Hassan, president of the Bahrain DHL union and eight of his colleagues have been charged with “violating national security”, though their case has been temporarily suspended without reason being given. And senior staff at RSCI Bahrain, the prestigious training college run by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where twenty medical staff have been arrested and imprisoned, asked three students to swear a loyalty oath to the Bahraini royal family. The RCSI in Dublin have since apologised for this, calling it “unacceptable”.
There are some in Bahrain who believe the King set up the BICI in order to give himself a weapon with which to fight more conservative elements in the Al-Khalifa family. If so, he may find that he gets more than he bargained for. Should Bassiouni’s report reveal even a fraction of the human rights violation protestors claim have taken place, the country’s reputation as one of the most forward-looking of the Gulf states will be tarnished, and conducting twenty-first century business while presiding over an archaic political system that breaches human rights, as well as ILO and OECD guidelines, will become more difficult.
The Al-Khalifas are already spinning the BICI report. On Sunday the Crown Prince said that after last year’s cancellation, Bahrain was now “safe” to stage next year’s Grand Prix, and that the BICI report would allow the country to “move on”. He made no mention of the 27 workers who were sacked at the International Circuit, where the Grand Prix has its home, nor of the allegations that some of these were tortured after arrest. Mumtalakat have a financial interest in the Grand Prix because it owns 42% shares in the McLaren company, and because, as the Crown Prince said on Sunday, the “race is what ties Bahrain to the world”.
The protestors share one thing in common with the Crown Prince: they also want to “move on”, but their idea of progress and modernity is not the same as the Al Khalifas’. “We want a civil state”, Faisal Hayyat says, “not a backward country where we are subjected to the armed forces and security police.”
This article appeared on 14.11.2011 as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow on the ITF website, on Counterfire as Bahrain: western-backed police state puts trade unionists on trial, and on the Gulf Air Trade Union website as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow. On 15.11.2011 it was picked up on the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights website as Latest Trials Begin Tuesday and on The Bahrain Justice and Development Movement site, where it appeared as Bahrain Trials and the BICI.
Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude – TLS
The resurrection of Irène Némirovsky’s writing over the last decade has been the cause of much pleasure, argument and anguish. Suite française, the unfinished novel about the French reaction to German invasion – interrupted when she was taken to Auschwitz and killed in 1942 – will remain the pinnacle of her achievement, a tantalising indicator of what might have been. But The Wine of Solitude, first published in 1935 as Le Vin de solitude, and appearing now in Sandra Smith’s fluent translation, is the book that holds the key to her oeuvre.
The novel begins with a swirl of yellow dust, a pale sunset, a gas-lit town. From this impressionist haze emerge the Karols – a family at war. Eight year old Hélène nurses thoughts of revenge against a mother whose fairy-tale looks (“snow-white skin…claw-like nails”) arouse feelings of revulsion in her. Bella, the scornful mother, dreaming of Paris and the arms of some anonymous lover, longs to escape from her provincial, Ukrainian family: from her husband, a banker who dreams only of money, and from her parents, the fading, aristocratic Safranovs, dependent now on their “peasant” of a son-in-law, “the little Jew who came out of nowhere”.
Hélène loves only her reserved French governess who dispenses nothing but the most practical advice: “Hélène, don’t read while putting on your socks. One thing at a time.” Yet even she is marked by “the stain of desire”, a story in her past (to do with “’love’, ‘kisses’, ‘fiancé’” and throwing herself in the Seine) that Hélène instinctively recoils from, stamping her feet and singing at the top of her voice in an attempt to banish the fate she senses lies in wait for her as a woman. What she likes best, what feeds her turbulent imagination, is to write in the pool of light at her bedside table, or to hear Mademoiselle sing the Marseillaise while she plays Napoleonic games with toy soldiers, “in a dream of bloodshed, of glory”.
The figure of the rebellious daughter is common enough in literature, but it is rare to find one as affronted and intelligent as Hélène. She stands shoulder to shoulder with Louisa in Christina Stead’s novel of 1940, The Man Who Loved Children, not just in her desire for revenge on an adult world that denies and humiliates her, but in her Nietzschean resourcefulness, transforming what material she has available – her repudiation and alienation – and making from it the steel in her back, the will to create herself: “if no one really cares about me I’m going to have to love myself”, she vows. It’s an idea Némirovsky returned to the year before her death in a poem she dedicated to herself, also titled ‘The Wine of Solitude’: “To lift such a heavy weight/ Sisyphus, you will need all your courage.”
Némirovsky wrote several versions of the daughter story including The Ball (1930), which Ian McEwan found “perfectly controlled”, and Jezebel (1936), a more melodramatic affair about matricide, but The Wine of Solitude is her most autobiographical fiction. Her identification with Hélène produces some complex narrative strategies that throw doubt on the teller’s memory and reliability, as Sartre was to in Nausea three years later. At one point Hélène is projected into adulthood: “The truth is that I came to understand gradually and now I’ve convinced myself I saw everything in a flash.” But the child rises up against this rewriting, thinking it further evidence of the bad faith between generations in which children (denied seriousness and the use of grown up language) feign ineptitude, and both adults and children see one another obscurely, as “insubstantial ghosts”.
When the Karols move to St Petersburg, Hélène’s illicitly scribbled words, “The husband, the wife and…the lover”, force the drama, leading to the death of Mademoiselle Rose. As revolution comes to the city the father stuffs dollars into sofas and under carpets, and Bella’s jewellery is sewn inside her clothing. The family leave for Finland, and it is here, in “air like ice-cold wine”, that Hélène has her first love affair and realises she can exact retribution by seducing Bella’s lover. The flirtation brings her “wild, proud pleasure”, demonstrating her power as a woman but also yielding a childhood freedom she has never before experienced – kisses happen on exhilarating sleigh rides, amidst shouting children and in the “rough and tumble” of snow play.
The affair ends when White Russians seize the town and the Karols are exiled to Bella’s beloved Paris. Here Hélène finally lets go of her obsession, as neither of her parents have been able to, realising “my desire for revenge isn’t strong enough to risk my own happiness.” But the damage is done, Bella is now the abandoned one, reduced to paying for lovers, and when her husband dies she is left searching for a fortune that no longer exists. Without saying goodbye, Hélène slips out onto the Champs-Élysées, shedding her past like an unwanted skin.
After much argument about the treatment of Jews in Irène Némirovsky’s writing, and claims from Gabriel Josipovici that Suite française was too highly praised, the republication of so many of her novels now allows us to consider her career in full. The Wine of Solitude is part of an analysis of Jewish life that begins in the caricatures of David Golder (1929) and culminates in the passionate illumination of The Dogs and the Wolves (1940). It places her among modernist contemporaries such as Stead and Jean Rhys who also wrote about estrangement and the modern diaspora, about women who “lived on the sidelines”, and the savagery of family life. Most importantly it lays claim to Némirovsky as one of literature’s great defenders and vindicators of children.
This review appeared in the TLS as ‘Bon Courage, Sisyphus’ on 10.11.2011.
Irène Némirovsky with her mother, Anna, 1918
Daljit Nagra is king of the exclamation mark! There are dozens of them electrifying the pages of his new poetry collection, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!!. A handful come coupled with question marks, as if in second-thought or double-take, others are italicised for added oomph. “I think of the exclamation almost as a punchbag or a dumb-bell”, Nagra tells me when we meet near the British Museum at the offices of Faber and Faber – the home of Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Hughes, and now his publisher too.
The figure of the tiger savaging a sepoy is perfect for Nagra’s pouncing poetry – in turn seductive and assaulting – and in this sly self-portrait he prises from its jaws ideas about the legacy of empire, but also about will, bravado, opportunism and parodic style. The seriously funny image of the poet clawing at his mirror, “overcome by the camps of history!”, sets the tone for the collection, a hot-blooded, coolly wrought affair in which indignation is balanced with a knowing playfulness: “You’re awfully scary once in your stripes!”
Such self-mockery, of course, could be self-defeating. But Nagra’s hybridity (he’s English born of Punjabi parents) means, I’d guess, that he’s always bound to see the other side, even of himself. One of the triumphs of this book is that it sustains such doubleness and complexity while raising a smile or packing a wallop. As the punchbag imagery suggests, the debate Nagra is rehearsing about his part in “Empire’s quid pro quo” isn’t academic. Like Yossarian in Catch 22 he refuses to regard himself as a cog in the machine and takes history personally, so the struggle is keenly felt: “To some degree it always feels out of control in my head” he admits. Once on the page, however, this volatile material is quite deliberately plotted: Nagra’s lines, as he says in his dedication, are “tamed”, his lovers and fighters all stage-managed.
There are some quiet moments (a pair of tender sonnets updating Shakespeare; a dissolving stanza musing on origins), but in the main the poems are rowdy or highly expressive – an aesthetic response to the equanimity of the English canon. Sitting in Faber’s offices, surrounded by glass cases full of handwritten manuscripts, Nagra observes, “Canon is quite a physical, scary word, isn’t it? And I don’t believe that can really apply anymore, there are so many different constituencies.” Which doesn’t mean the greats can be ignored; you have to work your way through them, trusting – as he says at the Bloomsbury Festival a few days later – “one’s personality is strong enough to make something of me, from them”. He particularly admires Eliot’s “spiritually-directed voice, that high rhetoric” which seems close to his own play with rhetorical surfaces; while Larkin’s interest in domestic arrangements strikes a chord (“growing up as an Indian in Britain you’re dealing with marriage as a major issue”) and his “plain-speaking, ordinary subject matter” is inspiring.
Plain and direct English – beloved of teachers and journalists – is for some, though, not readily available: “It’s fine if you’re a clear, cogent speaker, if you’ve learned the rules and studied well. But straightforward English in the Larkin or Orwellian sense is not easy for everyone. Especially for some of my speakers, it’s very hard, so I want to explain all that.” It’s another trick he pulls off: masking, ‘lying’ and browning up to prevent himself from being pinned down or written off, yet producing poetry that is spiritedly partisan. We’re left in no doubt that he sides not with the kings whose heads are “cluttered with golden age bumph”, but the “turncoat” class betrayers and the “groundlings”.
His father was a factory worker and shopkeeper, and Nagra has a nice line in workers’ romance (‘Confessions of a Coolie Woman, Part 1’; ‘Raju T’Wonder Dog’). At home there were no books, and his schoolmates, a bunch of “exceptionally bright kids who were always playing around with words” but who, like Nagra, left after CSEs, were aware that their way of talking was never heard on the telly, never mind getting a look in from the poets. It was the desire to capture these voices that spurred him to writing.
Their expressions still enliven his performance (“She’s that fit!”), but it’s the way he infiltrates English with Indian accents and cadence that makes Nagra’s language so pleasurable and subversive: “When I think of English, OED words, the sort that Eliot and Larkin used, I’m always looking for a point of spring off from them, for an Indianness or Indian music in them.” This is also what arms his writing. For instance, ‘This Be the Pukka Verse’ is chock-a-block with Indianised words, its stanzas bulging with empire’s “shafted…goodies”. Such fullness rebukes Larkin’s English tightness, as if to say, Well, where did all that shafting get you, you miserable old bugger!
Above all, though, it’s Shakespeare who runs through Tippoo, and in a final pièce de résistance, ‘A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples’ (indebted to Auden’s ‘Spain’), Nagra considers the Bard’s part in empire-making, the canon’s “bleached yarns”, and the extent to which faith in this literary inheritance implicates or travesties him. His voice, he knows, is inevitably “phoney” in this pale company, but authenticity isn’t what he’s working towards. Rather he hopes that “through puppetry and hypocrisy” what rings true is his “gung-ho fury”. I, for one, say, long may he “reign Bolshie!”.
Daljit Nagra has been shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot prize. The winner will be announced on 16 January 2012. This article appeared in the West End Extra, in Camden New Journal as ‘Awful Sacry in Your Stripes’, and in the Islington Tribune on 27.10.2011.
Daljit Nagra, 2010
“The form of capitalism we are living under today is defective and it’s wrecking everything generations have achieved. If it goes on for three more decades we will be unrecognisable. Something must happen, but what?”
This was Tariq Ali, speaking on Saturday at the Conway Hall where he was giving the Hazlitt Society’s annual memorial lecture. The firebrand of the Sixties who once quipped “tabloid hysteria made my name”, has, at 67, become one of England’s grandest, though still most public intellectuals – usually to be found debating in town halls or bookshops, on Newsnight or Al Jazeera. He used the occasion to ask the question now on many people’s minds: as bankers and politicians frogmarch us into financial catastrophe, and armed police are turned on angry, rioting citizens, ‘Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy?’
Ali was a canny choice for the lecture and not only because his question is the right one to be asking at this time. He has much in common with William Hazlitt, the early nineteenth century writer of “embattled and paradoxical” essays who was also something of an outsider, neither Whig nor Tory but a restless man with strong convictions and various talents. Like Ali, he lived by his wits, without sinecure, and the radical tradition he laid claim to – “the good old cause” he called it, meaning the dream of a democratic republic and the ongoing struggle against superstition and unthinking convention – is one the two men share.
In an introductory talk, Paul Hamilton, professor of English at Queen Mary University, delineated this tradition, rooted in the Glorious Revolution and the subversive writing of John Milton, revived again with the hopes of the French Revolution and the Romantic poets, but squashed by its failures and the European settlement after the fall of Napoleon when Europe was reconstructed under monarchies, leaving its people, Hazlitt thought, “like wretches in a slave ship”.
As Hazlitt looked to history to explain the spirit of his age, so Ali argued that in order to understand the crisis now engulfing us we must consider the ideological battles that brought us here. He began by attacking the received view that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, reminding us that democracy is not a by-product of the economic system but something that was hard-fought for in a struggle from below. It took three revolutions, the English, the French and the Russian before universal suffrage was achieved. Prior to this, as Hazlitt observed, monarchs ruled regardless of the people’s will, with only the “authority of the skies”.
After the Russian revolution, with the rise of the trade union movement and labour and socialist parties in Europe, the elite were compelled to permit “all reforms possible” within the system for fear of revolution spreading. From 1919 to the 1970s an unprecedented series of democratic advances ensured a higher standard of living for the bulk of working people. Health and education systems were largely subsidised by the state and this social contract staved off the threat of revolt.
But in the 1980s and 90s a counter-revolution took place. The orthodoxy became: “only the discipline of the market is acceptable”; so the market was allowed to run its course largely unhampered by regulation. Privatisation took place in America and in most of Europe regardless of what people wanted. In Britain, for instance, the transfer of the railways into private hands was opposed by 75% of the population.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Wall Street declared that capitalism had won the war of ideas: there was no need for further social reform, resistance now was negligible. By the time of the Iraq war, disregard of the people had become “nearly universal”. Despite some of the largest mass gatherings on record, with millions protesting in London, New York, Rome and Madrid, war went ahead anyway. The effect of this was to create an overwhelming sense of demoralisation and alienation from the political process. For a long time bitterness and cynicism was internalised in a ‘nothing we can do’ attitude.
When the banking system collapsed in 2008 and it was bailed out to the tune of millions of dollars globally, there was little organised opposition. Democracy was so whittled-down that all parties agreed on the same course of action. “Today”, Ali observes wryly, “Labour behaves as if it too were in the coalition.”
The scenario painted by Ali might seem like one of powerlessness and defeat but his was not a counsel of despair. Who, after all, had predicted the Arab Uprisings? “The battle for democracy is still being fought. It’s like Europe in 1848. The desire of people to control and determine their lives, politically, socially, economically does not go away as long as enormous inequalities of wealth remain.”
Like Hazlitt who believed that even in a time of lost dreams and political failure there was always a “constantly available radical tradition” to be reached into and written out of, Ali argues, “We must fight with our pens, as Hazlitt did for causes he believed in, and as Shelley did. The Dissenting tradition has to be kept alive in different ways. The banner of democracy will have to be taken up once again, not because of fetishism, but because it’s the only way to bring about lasting change.”
A version of this article appeared on 22.9.2011 in Camden New Journal, Islington Tribune and West End Extra. It was also published on the CNJ website as ‘Tariq Ali at Hazlitt Society Annual Lecture in Conway Hall on September 17‘, and on 26.9.2011 on the Counterfire website, as ‘Capitalism and Democracy – Tariq Ali at the Hazlitt Society’, on Tariq Ali‘s website.
William Hazlitt, c.1805; Tariq Ali, 2011
It’s hardly surprising that as politicians rely increasingly on intermediaries – thinktanks, pollsters and spin doctors – alienation from the political mainstream grows and people look elsewhere for ideas about how to organise themselves. In Britain, there’s the unorthodox campaigning of UK Uncut, the revived student movement, the growth of local activism and international solidarity groups, flashmobs and even the riots (all empowered by social media). A mass opposition movement has yet to emerge – indeed, it may no longer be the goal – but against the background of economic meltdown and global uprisings something is stirring.
If you’ve been wondering whose ideas are swimming around in the heads of these people (whether they know it or not) you might dip into The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark’s new history of the Situationist International, that band of avant-garde artists, manifesto-writers, drifters and plagiarists whose example helped ignite the last global revolt of youth in 1968.
The Situationists emerged from the historical ambiguities of postwar Europe, when mass death, collaboration and deracination were quickly paved over with advertising, popular music and shiny white goods. Many of the disenchanted gravitated to Paris’s bohemian quarter, to the cafés and clubs of St Germain. Here Guy Debord, a student from the provinces, began hanging out with “delinquents”, street kids getting by as prostitutes or thieves. (Wark rather grandly calls this ‘street ethnography’.)
What interested Debord was not so much the individuals he met as how their way of living at the edge of things might present a challenge to the enveloping commodification of life. In The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, a thesis influenced by Marx and partly appropriated from Hegel, he describes “the decline of being into having” under capitalism, and how its media obscures the fact that all relations are now relations of property. ‘Never Work!’, Debord proclaimed, daubing the idea over the walls of Paris.
Brilliant at coining slogans – ‘Divided we stand’, ‘Remember, you are sleeping for the boss’, ‘The beach beneath the street’ – the Situationist provocation was to unthinking acceptance of life as capitalism ordained it, particularly the division of time and space into functional portions for work, leisure and sleep. The challenge was to construct ‘situations’, tenuous and fluid, that imagined things otherwise, that broke the hold of “mindless form” by amplifying the potential of messy, contradictory everyday life. This had to be done without directly opposing – because to oppose is to legitimise – and while circumventing as far as possible capitalism’s great propensity for “recuperating” any opposition. A further instruction was: “Be at war with the world, but lightly”.
The not inconsiderable difficulty of the task was no doubt part of the attraction. A strong emphasis was placed on strategy, tactics and game-playing; much Situationist discourse was couched in the language of war (Debord’s board-game, Le Jeu de la Guerre, created with Alice Becker-Ho; Michelle Bernstein’s novels about emotional gamesmanship); and throughout its fifteen year existence there were countless estrangements, splits and expulsions.
Before Debord called time, though, in 1972, out of all this fighting the Situationists came up with some valuable and long-lasting ideas. A principle one is the ‘turn’: wrong turns taken in history that might usefully be revisited (Wark’s book can be seen in this spirit); or détournement, a turn against an already existing work – call it recycling or defiguring with intent, a way of interrupting the seamless flow of the Spectacle, that adds to the conversation while also subverting it. Asger Jorn, the Danish “spontaneous-abstract” painter, was most commercially successful at this, achieving international acclaim in the late 1950s.
His success meant Jorn could be a provider of ‘the gift’ – something anthropologists have long studied, but of interest to Situationists because of its potential to disrupt commodity relations. From the sale of his paintings Jorn funded the International. He also donated a gallery at Silkeborg, housing his work together with that of other leading modernists, which he obtained by swapping. It is the only collection in the world ever built in this way.
Today, Situationist thinking on the gift, cultural sharing and copyright influences debates about intellectual property and creative commons; their notion of the dérive – “calculated drifting” – runs into the ambulatory musings of Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Will Self; their preoccupation with art and technology (“industrial art”) was echoed in recent Google-led discussions; their defacing of adverts has inspired groups like Adbusters; and their analysis of rioting (Debord wrote about Watts) as a logical response to the Spectacle, has been much referred to of late. “Our ideas are on everyone’s mind” the Situationists boasted in the 1960s, and half a century later they are once again.
Perhaps the keenest Situationist insight concerns the sense of futility and boredom in modern urban living, dispossessed by the Spectacle and blinded by its images to the world in itself, it can often feel as if, as Blur once sang, ‘Modern life is rubbish’. But in an alienated, all too knowing world absent of God, Art and Revolution, Wark’s book dares us to keep our spirits up, asking us to think about how to maintain creative resistance, how to keep fidelity with some detournéed idea of the Marxist and Situationist past, and, following their goal of ideas in action, how best to practise our passionate “solidarity without faith”.
A version of this article appeared in the Camden New Journal on 16.9.2011.
Situationist graffiti
Sheila Rowbotham’s most recent book, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century (Verso, £10.99) looks at that period bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which saw such a burst of energetic campaigning, when middle and upper class women for so long cloistered as angels in the house broke free and started tramping round the streets of London and Chicago. The working women and men they met there – and sometimes lived alongside in settlements – and the sweatshop conditions of many of the poorest, transformed these early activists who ranged from feminists to socialists, anarchists to imperialists, eugenicists, social purity campaigners and philanthropic reformers, and gave birth to an explosion of ideas about the meaning and organisation of everyday life. Some of the most radical thinking came from working class women.
Rowbotham lives in Bristol in what was once a Victorian bank, converted now into multiple flats. It’s the kind of housing project that might have been the dream-child of Octavia Hill, an early advocate of affordable housing and co-founder of the National Trust, or one of the many other social reformers she discusses in her book – though instead of shared kitchens and laundries as they imagined, the communal spaces here are a sports shop and coffee bar gesturing vaguely to the building’s history with tinted photographs of nineteenth century labourers.
Dreamers seeks to redress this treatment of the past, whether it’s ignored or made ephemeral, by presenting vivid sketches of the pioneers who played such an important part in bringing our world into being. Indeed, one of the most striking things about this history of reformers and revolutionaries is how contemporary they feel, how resonant the cries of these early moderns and how many of the questions and hypocrisies that troubled them, spurring them to action, are still on our minds.
After this book, when you next read on Twitter about the struggle of low-paid workers in the London Living Wage Campaign, or forced virginity testing of women protestors in Tahrir Square, or underage sweatshop workers in Shenzhen, or the risks faced by girls in getting an education in Kabul and by women trying to enter the professions in Riyadh, you’ll remember the passion and conviction that Rowbotham’s dreamers brought to fighting identical battles a century before.
You can read the interview at The Third Estate, where it was published on 8.9.2011.
McKenzie Wark is an associate professor in culture and media at the New School for Social Research in New York where he teaches courses in Game Culture, Media Avant-Gardes, and the Military Entertainment Complex. He’s written a bunch of cultish books, including A Hacker Manifesto which received enthusiastic reviews from Michael Hardt, Terry Eagleton and Jean Baudrillard, who called it “a jubilation”. I met Wark when he was in London recently to promote The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, £14.99). Over three nights I watched him parlay his ideas before very different crowds: at the Café Oto in East London, an artsy music venue full of tweeting students; at Housmans, the radical bookshop in Kings Cross, where he spent the afternoon before his talk playing Guy Debord’s Game of War; and in the refurbished Whitechapel Art Gallery, where he also showed his short film, an homage to one of the Situationists’ more ambitious ideas – Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon project which envisages an alternative world infrastructure, no less. Finally, Wark settled down long enough for me to interview him in the offices of Verso, his Soho publisher.
KW: How do you think the atmosphere of Paris in the postwar years – the hardships and rationing, the level of deracination of many of the people you discuss in the Beach Beneath the Street, some of whom had been in Auschwitz – how far do these circumstances shape the ideas of the Situationists, and how far were they a reaction to them?
MW: Paris is a pretty miserable place after the war. It’s the city of lights, but the lights don’t go on again until the early 50s. Money is scarce, the economy doesn’t work. It sounds like a terrible thing to say but in many ways people are worse off after the war than during it. People who have jobs have to work for longer hours for less money. Plus a lot of the characters who are important to telling the story of the Situationist International were children during the war, so they’re not of the age to have been drafted, but they’ve come through that time as adolescents. And two things have happened to them. Firstly, they’ve been dislocated from their families – sometimes because parents have gone to the camps and died, or just because of the effects of war. Secondly, there’s been the delegitimisation of big chunks of French culture because of collaboration. This really only leaves a slender range of alternatives. One is the Communist Party that’s claiming the mantle of resistance and wrapping itself in the bloodied flag, and not without some legitimacy. The other is the attempt to stay outside of that. Sartre and de Beauvoir would be an example, although they want to have some relation to the Communist Party because they assume it’s the representative of the working class. Their real relation, however, is with publishing and the media: establishing the intellectual wing of the whole postwar spectacle of a new French culture. There’s also the Saint Germain nightclub scene – the jazz that survives the war and that sort of stuff.
KW: And what’s interesting is how the media spectacle and bohemian Saint Germain feed off one other.
MW: Of course, there’s a continuum between those things. My characters who feed into the Situationist story are on the fringe – they’re existentialists with a lower case ‘e’. They’re younger and more marginal and haven’t gone to the right universities – or to university at all. There’s a continuum from that bohemia to delinquency and even to what we used to call ‘the dangerous classes’. So that’s the sort of territory out of which, interestingly enough – and this doesn’t happen very often – the Situationists’ concepts come. Art often comes out of bohemia but conceptual thinking rarely does.
KW: You describe it as if the Situationists were themselves the street kids, about whom you say in your book many needed to scratch a living either from prostitution or petty thieving. But the Situationists aren’t quite that class of people. Isn’t it, rather, that they are simply hanging out with the most destitute? It could be argued that their behaviour is not so different from de Beauvoir and others who also go to the cafés and nightclubs. Or do you think it is, somehow, qualitatively different?
MW: Well de Beauvoir will describe exactly what’s going on in the nightclubs and then say, But, of course, I never went there! So you wonder just what that relation was.
KW: Because her need for propriety was much stronger than the Situationists’, she had more at stake in being respectable?
MW: And she’s older, of another generation, properly educated and playing the main game. She’s realised a cultural opportunity. But you’re absolutely right. The central figure in this story – although I want to displace him a little – is Guy Debord. He’s from the provinces and has lived through the war as a youth. Disowned by his step-father, he’s a person of slender means who comes to Paris, ostensibly to go to university. But it’s really just for the stipend and the free meals (which might shock anyone who’s been a student recently). He becomes what I call a street ethnographer. He’s involved in a genuine learning experience by hanging out with street kids and teenage alcoholics. It’s an intellectual exercise and the question, I think, he’s substantially interested in is: what would that life be and what could you actually produce outside of wage labour? So while there’s a heroism of labour and a valuing of the working class, he wants to ask a slightly different question. If the whole point is to abolish wage labour, how do we start to think about what the ‘outside of wage labour’ would look like?
KW: But Debord’s ‘Never work!’ slogan could only arise from someone in a financial position to think such a thing. What does it mean even to propose this to people who can’t afford not to work?
MW: That’s the thing…
KW: …it’s meant to be incendiary not practical.
MW: Yes. And living outside wage labour, then as now, is extremely difficult to do. Of course, the other way is to have a vast inheritance. That’s also interesting: to find something really useful to do with vast amounts of money is not an insignificant problem. For most people, though, the problem is that you have to work. But is there not something to learn from: what would it be like to live outside of wage labour given that like most people I have to go to work and that consumes so much time that when I’m not working I don’t really know what to do because I haven’t had the time to think about it! So it struck me as interesting to study people who specialise in not working.
KW: Can we pursue a little further the relationship of the Situationists to the Existentialists? How much would you say Michèle Bernstein’s novels share with writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute? There’s a similar interest in game-playing and formalism – the sort of stuff you get when you empty God and moral authority out of the world and it all becomes about structure. To what extent did they consciously share territory? Or did they see themselves as separate and opposed?
MW: At the risk of a cliché, there is a coterie quality to how French intellectual life has always worked. Someone like Michèle Bernstein is intensely aware of the example of Simone de Beauvoir, who’s of another generation and who’s not an attractive model for lots of reasons. But the reverse is not the case. I’m quite sure that de Beauvoir never heard of Bernstein in the 50s and 60s. The Situationists are marginal people, publishing just initially on a Roneod sheet. You meet a lot of people who are veterans of French intellectual life in the 50s and 60s who will just straight up tell you: I never heard of these people! They were marginal at this moment and got famous later, as is often the case.
KW: Or not. And that’s part of your version of the Situationists, you look not just at the ‘great men’, at Debord and [Asger] Jorn, but also those who have been edged out of the story.
MW: Yeah, well: “can the subaltern speak?” There’s always someone who’s been cut off and whose voice you didn’t hear at all. But if you get as far as the marginal lives that are documented, it gestures towards those other lives that you can never retrieve. So I wanted to get women back into the story – and I got two that I think are worth telling [Michèle Bernstein and Jacqueline de Jong]. I would have loved to have gotten the North African stories back in – there are three – but there’s hardly a trace! [Abdelhafid Khatib is the only one Wark mentions: the other two were Mohamed Dahou and Mutsapha Kayati]. They’re the folks who didn’t get recorded into history in the same way.
KW: Yes I want to talk about the importance of the record, and the problems where it doesn’t exist. I was interested yesterday to see that while you were playing Debord’s Game of War you were recording every move. When I asked why, your opponent, [Richard Barbrook, from Class Wargames] said, “Because this is history!”
MW: Tongue in cheek.
KW: Of course. But if you don’t make the record you ‘aint in history! Given what you’ve just said about the lack of awareness of de Beauvoir and others about the International, how far do you think making the record was an important part of what they were doing?
MW: Debord self-consciously tried to write himself into cultural history from the time he was a teenager. Some correspondence has surfaced from that period and he’s already astonishingly well-read in a certain avant-garde tradition. He starts to archive the Situationist International before it even exists! So there’s a real self-consciousness about the significance of documents. And I think particularly in his later writing he becomes a very sophisticated thinker and ‘artist’.
KW: So from the outset his tactic involved self-reflexiveness?
MW: It’s not self-reflexive because that takes you off in a postmodern direction and he doesn’t do that. But it’s the specific question of: what’s the legitimate form in which you can document evanescent situations? One of his major themes is the passage and liquidity of time. How can one find ways of making cinema? Because in the absence of the revolution that didn’t happen, what you do is make cinema and write books and create a game. These are the three major ways he has of trying to document the tactics of negotiating situations. He’s a strategist, that’s his entire life. He’s an amazingly interesting character and I wanted to tell some slightly different stories about what he’s doing early on and his role as an organiser. What he does is co-ordinate and organise activity among other people, and that’s a role we tend to neglect. It’s the writers who get famous, not the folks who hold it all together. He does both, which is what makes him so interesting.
KW: That’s a skill you indentified as your own in your talk at Housmans. You mentioned your background as an organiser on the left and how easy that made it for you to fit into academia.
MW: I never particularly claimed to be a good organiser but I had a certain training in how you get things to happen, including mass meetings. We tried to get the President of the New School Social Research to resign in 2008, which involved meetings of up to 300 people. I remember walking in there and going, Oh I haven’t done this for so long, but I still remember how to do it: Move that the motion be put!; Let’s get unity on this! So, yeah, having had that experience it struck me as worthwhile to look again at the role of organiser on the boundary between politics and media. Everything you organise is a compromise with something so negotiation requires very subtle tactics.
KW: This is all part of why there’s such a great interest now in Debord – because these questions of organisation and tactics are being re-thought once more. To go back to the record, though: how much does Debord talk about the impact of making the record on the practice itself? We live now in a state of almost incessant self-recording and self-surveillance. Often it seems the prior thought, before the action.
MW: Debord was very good at seduction. He was able to make it appear like things were happening before they were, and this called them into being. It was a bootstrap operation in that regard. He realised early on you don’t need a lot of people. A lot of people could actually be an impediment to getting things done. A small group of carefully chosen comrades can achieve more than a mass movement.
KW: An elite cadre?
MW: It wasn’t quite like that.
KW: But there’s some resonance, isn’t there?.
MW: A little bit. It’s partly modelled on the surrealists and it’s partly a reaction to Communist Party type organisation. There are definitely people associated with the Situationists who’ve been through the Party but who are also hostile to it as well.
KW: I want to push you on how far the recording-making and act are now one and the same thing: what kind of impact does recording have upon the act itself?
MW: I’m also a writer of an obviously somewhat more minor kind and we’re always very self-conscious people about how you craft the appearance of either an individual or collective subjectivity. I’m resistant to Debord becoming canonised as a great writer – although he was – but he has an intense self-awareness of role-plays.
KW: So you’re suggesting the self-awareness and role-playing that’s occupational for writers and artists is now prevalent in the general population? You don’t think there’s a downside to any of this?
MW: Oh of course. You have to think about all of these things dialectically. It’s not like you can parcel out the good bits and the bad bits – you’re always involved in these complicated tensions. But that’s where the Situationists are interesting, because they’re looking for tactics that can deal with these complicated things where you can’t decide in advance what’s good and what’s bad.
KW: No, but you can be aware of a general drift. In the book you say there are two fathers in the head for the Situationists: the Surrealist bad father, and the Dadaist good father. But there’s a third begetter, surely? Marx. As you say, some of the Situationists were Party members. Can you talk about what they took from Marx?
MW: I think the interesting person who’s writing has been ignored is Asger Jorn. He was of the older generation, meaning he was an adult during the war. He was in the Danish Communist Party and was active – probably not doing anything more than printing a journal in his apartment, but this is still a serious thing to do in a Nazi-occupied country so I don’t want to exaggerate or belittle what he did. The Party was somewhat broadminded about cultural politics at this period and didn’t know what its policy was. But it became narrowly…
KW: …Zhdanovite?
MW: Yes, and socialist realist after the war, and Jorn leaves it. Anyway, he was always much more influenced by Danish syndicalist thought. So he goes through this intense process of re-thinking Marxism as he understands it, which actually has a lot to do with Engels. We forget: a lot more people read Engels than Marx at that time. And Jorn has a really quite strange and interesting critique of Marx on commodity form. He’s trying to think about the question of what class artists belong to. Because it’s not quite labour. What they do is more like the innovation of form, rather than the manual labour of repeating an action that’s been already formed in advance. And his argument, in essence, is that there are two subordinate classes – the working class and the creative elite (which is tongue in cheek – a joke on C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite). But his argument is the vital thing, it’s the experimental attempt to extract from nature new possibilities of form.
KW: And the artist’s labour, he says, not the worker’s, creates the only genuine production of value.
MW: No, it does not come from workers. The idea of the commodity form is that when you can make it all in the same form, it actually has no value. And Jorn is speaking here in the context of the postwar ramping up of consumer economy. The problem is what he calls ‘tin can philosophy’, where there’s no relation whatsoever between the content and the form. It’s an interesting argument, that it’s partly because of the form of the tin can, that the content starts to be goop. At the end of the day, it’s goop. Right there, he anticipates the argument of the whole food movement!
KW: It is interesting. But it’s not so different from the critique of capitalism that was made in the 1880s by William Morris and the arts and craft movement – the desire to reinstate meaningful labour. But their vision was not of a creative elite, as Jorn envisages, but of returning workers to some kind of pre-industrial craft culture.
MW: Oh absolutely, and Jorn definitely partakes of that. But he adds a few things to Morris. One is, he reads Marx closely and tries to understand the contemporary economy of his time, which is a real advance on the romantic critique of capitalism. The other thing he does is come up with a critique of European aesthetics that covers a period of 10,000 years. He thinks we’ve got the story wrong – it’s an astonishing claim to make.
KW: He attacks the Renaissance. Can you explain his reservations about the idea of purity?
MW: He’s resistant to the Platonist idea that the goal is to reduce everything down to purity of form, which is definitely one of the things that’s alive and well in modernism. Modernism reconstructs a history of the value of things like the Renaissance and selectively reads the classical art of Greece to make this a consistent story. Jorn completely reverses that. Partly this has to do with a desire to restore the Northern European story rather than the Southern one. He thinks there’s a much more organic form coming out of the North. It’s a little bit ethnocentric.
KW: Yes, but inevitably so, because he’s arguing against another ethnocentrism.
MW: Exactly. And the other context to bear in mind is that he’s formed by Nazi occupation in Denmark where the Nazis insisted the Danes were Aryans, so to say there’s such a thing as Scandanavian culture is a resistance position. He continues with that line and makes it into an astonishing re-thinking of the whole of European aesthetics. That’s why I have two whole chapters on Jorn because his writing’s been ignored, when he’s actually one of the major figures, I think, of the postwar period.
KW: Can you say something about why the idea of ‘everyday life’ was so important to the Situationists? And something, too, about their Benjaminesque idea of boredom as an instigator of action, “the dreambird that hatches the egg of experience”.
MW: Arguably it’s the surrealists who discover everyday life as a space and a concept. It’s also in Baudelaire. But maybe the turning point is a character called Henri Lefebvre who writes The Critique of Everyday Life in 1947. Lefebvre identifies the space of the everyday.
KW: He has the idea of ‘moments outside’.
MW: Yes, it’s outside of work and family and state. So the everyday is the inbetween bits – the things that are inbetween that might become something else.
KW: So it’s not like the counter-culture: opposed, parallel, outside?
MW: Exactly, it’s inside. And, incidentally, it’s why Lefebvre and what comes after him is an interesting counterweight to the Beat version of outsiderness, with its romantic figure.
KW: And the counter-culture that this leads to.
MW: Yes, which thought it was outside but is more inside than it knows! But within the space of the everyday there are moments that come and go, moments of love and of challenge and of play. They can then crystallise out into something more…
KW: …threatening? Can they start to erode the other parts of life? Or does Lefebvre hold them in abeyance?
MW: It’s a question of whether they should become oppositional. Because the problem is when you oppose something, you legitimise it. But, yeah: can moments in the everyday gently secede? Sometimes they’ll be antagonistic, but sometimes not. Lefebvre is struggling to find a language in which all the ways and practises of the construction of everyday life might be brought forward.
KW: So rather than being avowedly oppositional, we should just try to amplify these moments and push them to their fullest expression?
MW: Lefebvre is interested in memory – and this goes back to your question about the self-consciousness of writing – because part of stabilising something out of the everyday is to do with memory. Not in the sense of an idea in your head, but in the sense of a form that enables you to revisit and repeat something. How do you build something out of memory that sustains itself? Just to give you an everyday example: you set up a social club
KW: And how does that relate to the idea of memory?
MW: Well if you set up a social club it has a certain repetition of itself. Let’s say you have a social club that meets every Friday. This is not a memory in your head but it’s embodied in the fact that it meets every Friday. It’s in everyone’s calendars, they know to go to a certain place. So it crystallises out as a form. Lefebvre is interested in this not as politics with a capital P, but as practises in everyday life that construct spaces of autonomy.
KW: And there’s none of the anxiety about memory that’s present in, say, Nausea - no worry about the deceptive nature of memory?
MW: Nausea is a prewar novel. It’s about the bourgeois individual struggling with the facticity of material life, and the difference between consciousness and the facticity against which it rubs up. But Sartre is a dualist and Lefevbre – and very definitely Jorn – are trying to think outside of that. Hence the idea of the situation being at the centre.
KW: A situation is a much more organic idea?
MW: Yeah, it’s unitary, there isn’t a separation between consciousness and materiality. It’s where you don’t know where the boundaries are between those things.
KW: What about the idea of ‘the gift’? You discuss Debord’s notion of this as not at all religious, but strategic. And the way it was deployed in Situationist circles seems sometimes fraternal, but at others deliberately menacing. In The Beach the description of Debord demanding a gift from new Situationists in return for being allowed into the International, but without explaining what the nature of the return gift might be, and then expelling those who couldn’t come up with the goods, seems Kafkaesque.
MW: Well you could read it that way. We owe to Kafka that sense of seemingly negligible, everyday things creating a bottomless pit of anxiety and nightmare. But we’re dealing here with a somewhat more French sensibility that says: Yeah, of course it’s a bottomless pit but that’s everyday life and one plays with it. One plays with the little bottomless pit.
KW: But expulsion isn’t play is it?
MW: I’m sure a lot of people have either a direct experience of, or have observed this situation: you’re given a gift you don’t expect and you don’t know what the hell to do about it. For example, you have a birthday party and someone that you invite but don’t really know very well gives you a gift that’s just a little bit too extravagant. You think, Oh my God, that’s a really good bottle of wine! Or what’s even worse is you’ve exchanged gifts with a friend and you’ve given them a tin of biscuits and they’ve got you…
KW: …a bottle of fantastic champagne!
MW: You think, oh shit! Or someone’s given you something and your first thought is, I have to give them something back.
KW: So a gift immediately implies an economy, an exchange value?
MW: But if it’s an exchange it doesn’t work, that negates the gift. If I give you a bottle of wine and you give me one back, then there was no gift, one cancels the other out. My brother and I used to give each other cheques for Christmas and it was this game of making sure the cheques were the same. It ended up being an interesting game: I think he’s given me x dollars, so I’d better give him x dollars. We’ve all had these sorts of experiences. This is the other side of the commodity economy where you buy and sell stuff. Here, it’s where you give stuff.
KW: So are the Situationists interested in the idea of the gift as an attempt to circumvent capitalist economy? Or attack it? Or as a game?
MW: All of the above. It’s one of the keys to how the whole of the economy works. The thing about the commodity exchange is, if I go into a shop and buy something, then there’s absolutely no other obligation involved in that transaction, whatsoever. But if you give someone a gift, you put them under an obligation. And it isn’t necessarily to give you something back; the obligation is to the culture of the gift in general. And that’s what’s astonishing about gifts: they obligates you sometimes to a particular individual, but in general to the whole culture of gift-giving.
KW: Sorry, I’m laughing because what’s coming to mind is a lousy American film I saw…
MW: Pay it Forward? The film itself is symptomatic. Gift is a central problem in anthropology because it’s irresolvable and the literature on it is enormous. The Situationists are not anthropologists…
KW: …but they read and are interested in anthropology.
MW: Sort of, indirectly. They read Georges Bataille who read Marcel Mauss who read certain more technical, empirical papers about potlatch in the Pacific Northwest. So the idea of the gift comes into European discourse from the outside, geographically, which is interesting. Mauss has this astonishing intuition that it’s already always going on. Don’t we always think that culture belongs to all of us collectively? Another thread to this is Wittgenstein’s bulletproof argument that there is no private language. By definition language involves you in something that can’t be bought, can’t be privatised. So the commodity economy always has this other side, and maybe one of the ways of understanding the whole of modernity is that it’s a struggle between what parts of it are commodified, and what parts are not. What’s the boundary and the relation between them? The Situationists push particularly on culture being something that is common property and, in fact, not even property – it’s outside the property system. This is what they call détournement, the detour or the subversion, plagiarism in essence. So there are huge chunks of Debord’s major work, Society of the Spectacle [1967] that are straight out plagiarised from other books. Now it’s not plagiarisim if you tell people you’re doing it! The book says, This is what I’m doing. People say, Oh it’s all Hegelian. That’s cos it actually is Hegel – a whole paragraph of Hegel, only stuck in another context where it becomes something else. You realise that’s the way the whole of language works. If I was to create an absolutely original text I would have to make up the letters. And of course the Situationists did have another precursor, the Letterists, and that’s exactly what they did: made up a whole other alphabet. So there’s that precedent in the background. But rather than making up everything from scratch, as the Letterists did, Debord goes in this other direction: he borrows everything all over again as a way of saying language is common.
KW: So with the Situationists you have that idea of commonality, common cultural property – they talk about “literary communism” – but also a desire to escape the commodity form. This dilemma came up last night [at Housmans] in relation to questions of transcendence. It’s the desire for a purer space in which to operate that leads to the most significant of their many splits, when the Situationists divide over art and writing. I have to say, it seems a strange argument premised on the idea that writing can somehow be exempt, existing outside, while painting is necessarily sullied from its operation in the market.
MW: Well, art and writing are involved in different economies. But you’re right, and the Situationists never quite manage a total critique of how they are involved in different ways. To renounce painting in favour of a purely written practice isn’t an escape. You’ve got to put the two together and think about the whole thing.
KW: Are they conscious of the problem? Do they attempt to solve it in their work?
MW: No. As everyone does, you get so far and then that’s the thing you want to push a little further.
KW: What about the Situationist idea of ‘recuperation’, of compromise and assimilation? Is there a way of framing this in relation to the respective fates of the hippies and the punks – the extent to which they were recuperated?
MW: Debord is already writing about this fairly early on. At the level of content everything gets recuperated. And in a sense, the commodity economy particularly likes to recuperate that which appears to be opposed to it. That’s one of the most desirable commodities of all – the thing which refuses to be a commodity!
KW: And Debord has this rather grandiose sense of providing ammunition for the other side.
MW: Yeah. So he’s imagining in Comments on Society of the Spectacle [1988] that this book will only be read and understood by 60 people – half of whom are dedicated to maintaining the spectacle and the other half who are dedicated to overthrowing it. It’s a fantastic paragraph, but there’s that bootstrapping operation we talked about, and in some senses it becomes true: when you write like that the secret police will pay attention. But while you can recuperate the content, what can’t be recuperated is the practise of decommodifying and gifting what it is that they are doing. There are several examples of that.
KW: For instance?
MW: The proto-Situationist journal, Potlatch, was never for sale, it was always given away to particular people, but it had copyright restrictions. Then they do a journal that’s expensive if you wanted to buy it, but it’s copyright free. The third model is Jorn, who does have a solution: he’s an artist, rich folks collect his paintings. So what he does is give the money away and creates all of these astonishing networks and collective projects. At the end he creates this amazing museum in Silkeborg.
KW: Yes, by exchanging his paintings for others. That’s a wonderful story.
MW: Every great collection of modern art that you can point to was put together by patronage or plunder except for Jorn’s. He did it through the gift. That in itself is an astonishing achievement. So I could multiply examples but that’s it – it’s all about the tactics of how you intervene.
KW: Finally I wanted to talk a little about where your interest in the Situationists came from. You said at the Café Oto that you were a third generation atheist, that you still trust Australian social democracy more than American, and that when you were young you were in the Australian Communist Party.
MW: Yes, but the Australian Communist Party was exceptional in that it was not Moscow aligned.
KW: How did you get from there to writing about the Situationists and new technologies?
MW: Well I was always interested in that space between politics and art. I had a bohemian youth in Sydney, which was a pretty good town to do it in, even though it was a peripheral one.
KW: Not so peripheral these days – the ‘cultural cringe’ is gone and the world is turning upside down.
MW: Certainly was then! And it’s remote from what it’s near to still: if you can find three people who speak Indonesian then good luck to you! So I occupied that space, in a marginal way, I don’t want to overstate the case. As we say inAustralia, I’m not going to sell tickets on myself.
KW: No. But this is what shaped you.
MW: I got into the university system. But to me it seems what not to do when you enter that system is to think you necessarily have only to value the things it does. The question is: how do you honour other kinds of intellectual practices? Which is not to negate the value of scholarship and documenting things properly and so forth. But to realise scholarship is a game with its own rules, at least indifferent to, and sometimes antithetical to this other thing, which is the self-conscious thinking about the practising of everyday life. What’s the politics of knowledge? You have to do that a little bit self-consciously. So I’m still interested in folks who’ve thought about that and hence I’ve ended up telling this story as I think it’s one from which there’s still all these really key lessons to draw. They were in my life and I hope they will be for other people – not to imitate but to try to learn from past examples of how the Situationists created concepts and practises.
KW: In terms of making this material address the present – one of the avowed intentions of your book – can you think of any specific, useful examples?. You talked about the creation of Jorn’s gallery. To create anything like that, of course, you have to have some kind of capital – financial or artistic, but something that allows you to exchange. And that’s not available to most people. Are there any more modest examples from the Situationists we might learn from?
MW: I’m always reluctant to talk about things people are doing in the present because not everybody wants to be publicised.
KW: You said that at Housmans, and I wondered what you meant by it. Are you suggesting that people are engaged in secret activities against the state?
MW: Well not secret. That’s the thing, one of the traps of the society of the spectacle is that to not want to be publicised immediately seems to be suspicious.
KW: So you’re talking about activities that people want to keep under the radar?
MW: Yeah. It’s just not everybody’s goal to be in newspapers. It’s like outing people.
KW: I’m not asking you to out people. I’m not even asking about what activists are up to today. I’m just wondering if there are any ideas that come out of Situationism that have been lost or forgotten, that now might usefully be fed into our everyday life.
MW: Well as [the Situationist and Sinologist] René Viénet says, ‘Our ideas are on everyone’s minds’. Who hasn’t experienced boredom with spectacle commodity life and wondered what you might do about it? It’s not like there’s a grand plan. It’s more a question of, What are the everyday spaces and practises? How am I to practise my everyday life with the people who matter to me in ways that aren’t always sucked into celebrity culture and all of its avatars?
KW: So you’re not going to give me an answer, a specific example?
MW: No, God no, of course not!
KW: You want just to encourage people to think more self-consciously about these things?
MW: That’s right. I’m not a preacher, I’m a pedagogue!
Sheila Rowbotham became interested in history at the age of eleven when a teacher told her how the Pheonicians discovered the colour purple. It seemed such an astonishing idea that something everyday should have come into the world at a particular moment (the purple dye was extracted from shellfish, so expensive a process they called it the ‘colour of kings’), and it established a lifelong interest in people whose sudden flashes of imagination or defiance change the world, advancing it from “what is, to something better”. Her new book, Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century, is the culmination of this lifelong passion, exploring a half century of women’s thinking and activity between 1880 and 1930, designed to revolutionise that most stubborn and immutable of things – daily life.
What’s interesting and a little surprising is not just the variety of women here, from Eleanor Marx to Mae West, but how all of them, even the Victorians, appear so contemporary. When I visited Rowbotham at her home in Bristol she told me that when she’s given readings, “audiences gasp at the modernity of the ideas of these women from a century ago”. The anthropologist, Elsie Clews Parsons, for example, who recorded her frustration with life’s limitations at the turn of the century: “This morning perhaps I feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one…It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly”. That “confounded” dates the language, but the sentiments anticipate many twentieth-first century adventurers, everyone from Eddie Izzard to Lady Gaga.
Reading Dreamers you feel the problems grappled with – about sex, work, state provision, how to dress, or that thorniest of questions, “How to Be” – remain substantially our own. When Caitlin Moran recently argued in an interview promoting her new bestseller, How to be a Woman, that we need continually to articulate our experience of sex in order that the subject not fall back into prudery or shame, she is asking of us only the same bravery Stella Browne showed when she talked publicly in the 1930s about her experience of abortion. And when young women take to the streets in the so-called Slutwalks, demanding they be allowed to dress however they want, wherever they want, they meet with taunts similar to those Beatrice Webb faced in 1885 when she was called an “impudent hussy” for walking about with men.
Living now between Bristol and Manchester (where she is Professor of Gender and Labour History) Rowbotham hails from Leeds and retains a robust Northern pragmatism that belies her rather girlish demeanour. For most of her adult life, though, she lived in London. Dreamers is a trans-Atlantic work tracing connections forged by British and American women in their endeavour to challenge the way men had hitherto organised the world, but London plays a significant part in the story. Mary Wollstonecraft, the visionary prototype for many of the women here, is buried in St Pancras churchyard and Rowbotham arranged for the restoration of her desecrated grave, finding the money from the undertakers (who still have offices on Kentish Town Rd) who originally buried her.
Not far away, off Brecknock Road, is a block of flats named after another of Rowbotham’s heroes: Edward Carpenter, whose biography she wrote in 2009. He is an important figure in Dreamers, one of the early ‘sexologists’ who women turned to, trying to find a new language in which to talk about sex that would take it out of the realm of backroom gossip and invest it with the authority of public discourse. Despite their modern mindset, though, Rowbotham emphasises how circumscribed were the lives of women a century ago – the middle class confined by corsets and respectability, the working woman by drudgery, often in sweatshops for 10 or 12 hours a day, before returning to homes without hot water or indoor toilets.
At the beginning of this period, women were not only denied the vote but access to the professions (a governess was still about the only paid occupation an educated woman could find), or even the right to move freely, which is why in the late nineteenth century the bicycle and the typewriter were such liberating inventions. Overcoming these restrictions took guts and imagination. In 1895, Edith Lanchester was incarcerated in a mental asylum by her middle class family because she chose to live out of wedlock with a working class man, while Mary Ware Dennett, Marie Stopes and Annie Besant who disseminated material about sexual pleasure and birth control faced prosecution for obscenity.
But this wave of women, whether revolutionaries or social reformers, anarchist free-lovers or purity campaigners, had history on their side. Lanchester was freed and those who published information intended to take the misery and shame out of sex eventually won the day against the censors. During the First World War women showed they were capable of all kinds of work and the pressure for the vote become irresistible. Proud and determined suffragettes adopted the regal colour purple as their own.
Besides the resurrection of innumerable engaging and provocative lives, this book’s most important achievements are the account of a key historical encounter between women of the West End middle class and working class East Enders which engendered profound change on both sides and laid the basis for much of the welfare state. Another is the challenge that Clementina Black and others made to a hierarchy that placed producer over consumer, workplace over home, paid worker over unpaid housewife, unionised worker over marginalised “sweater” – all this, Rowbotham suggests, “hinted at a more subversive economics”, one which contemporary activists are beginning to reclaim. “The Fair Trade or Clean Clothes campaigns, or the Mexican women in squatter camps demanding the state provide them with access to clean water”, all provide “small examples of campaigns that have proved effective.”
While it may be impossible to dream today on a grand scale (the twentieth century left us wary of grand narratives) Rowbotham’s designs on us are clear: she wrote her book so that “we might see in a society much poorer than ours that they still pursued the resolute idea you could reform or transform. I wanted to throw their example out like a dare – Here you are! Now what are you going to do?”
A version of this article appeared as The Purple Reign of Women… in the Camden New Journal, Review, pp 2-3, Islington Tribune and West End Extra on 25.8.2011.
Clare Morgan, A Book for All and None – TLS
“From what stars have we both descended to meet here?” Frederick Nietzsche wonders on first laying eyes on Louise von Salomé in St Peter’s Basilica in 1882. It’s a question that hovers over many of the meetings in Clare Morgan’s novel, a work grand enough in its ambition to house not only a trio of modern characters but also characterisations of Nietzsche, von Salomé, their mutual friend, Paul Rée; and, occupying a room not quite of her own, Virginia Woolf. Explaining herself in the Acknowledgements, Morgan writes of her “fascination” for Nietzsche and Woolf, and how her novel emerged “out of the… interstices of the documented lives of two extraordinary individuals”, lives with which, she admits, she has taken “enormous liberties”.
A more veiled explanation might be found in the book’s opening, with a letter to “My dear Schklovsky”, a man about whom who we are told only that he once annotated an early set of the works of Nietzsche. This is a nod perhaps to the Russian formalist critic, Viktor Shklovksy, who was influenced by Nietzsche, particularly in his theory of parody, and whose ideas are often used by scholars to explain modernism’s defamiliarising texts. (Morgan is director of the Master of Studies in creative writing at Oxford.)
Taking her cue from Shklovsky, Morgan advances the idea that out of parody and adjacency one might “cause an adjustment” in history, making people “see differently”. In the case of Woolf, the adjustment sought is to the view that she was weak and death-driven; for Nietzsche, the revision is more ambiguous, though there are discussions of the Nazi’s appropriation of his legacy and several portraits of vulgar, latter-day supermen. By contrast, Morgan’s Nietzsche and Woolf are powerful creators, aflame with life. And like her heroine, Beatrice Kopus, an Oxford scholar working on the relationship between the two, she exults in identification with them: “Her Woolf and her Nietzsche…have come alive again. Her very own self and all that she is has breathed life into them.”
The reference to Shklovsky can also be read as a tap on the reader’s shoulder, a reminder that readers have no privileged position and, like the characters, must struggle for meaning with the fragments at their disposal (among these are a scrap of a Woolf letter and a missing part of von Salomé’s diary).
Yet with all this, what Morgan’s multi-form novel demonstrates is the resilience of English fiction, its ability to assimilate any “strange shape” Woolf or others may have found out on the horizon, and carry on much as before. Despite its knowingness, (the montage, quotation and Nietzsche-like jostling of “the present and the bygone upon earth”, the references to paperiness) this remains a work that sits comfortably in the English canon, fascinated by biography and history rather than textuality.
The different stories layered into the novel’s seven sections concern Nietzsche’s trip to Lake Orta in 1882 and his incarceration in a Jena mental asylum seven years later; three visits by Woolf to Wales, the first in 1908 when she was gestating The Voyage Out; and a love affair between Beatrice and another Nietzsche scholar, Raymond Greatorex. To top it off, there is Beatrice’s husband, Walter Cronk, a businessman (one of those debased Nietzscheans) building interrogation centres and transient camps in the Middle East.
Of course, there is wilfulness in assembling a cast as eccentric as this and making connections between them that go far beyond the bounds of plausibility (a family secret reaching down from Nietzsche and Woolf into the lives of the contemporary characters). Morgan seems determined to show just what, in her first novel, she can carry off. And for the most part she masters her disparate materials impressively, particularly in those passages vitalised by Nietzsche and Woolf – supporting Beatrice’s contention that, rather than traditional scholarship, fiction’s imaginative engagement might now be the best way to approach such “idols”.
She and Raymond, like many academics, exist vicariously in the residue of their idols’ lives. The air is thick with many kinds of dust, above all in Raymond’s family home which stands in for the house of British fiction: its sensibilities, sensitivities and snobberies. Morgan is conscious she’s writing about a culture that is falling away – “this is the end of the line” one character says – and the idea surfaces that what the British need is an injection of something with a greater will to power.
The Kuwaiti episodes, however, involving Cronk, set among the sequestered rich, in glass and desert landscapes, rely too much on surface atmosphere. We are jolted from intelligent immersion in Bloomsbury to a late-Ballard pastiche. The tale of callous money-makers, abuse of Arab workers and terrorist reprisals is raced through, as if Morgan has constructed it only as a stage set – the compromised business world as a foil to the subtleties and integrity of art.
At the finish, unlike van Salomé who chooses one of her suitors, and unlike the heroine of The Voyage Out who succumbs doubly to the fate of the traditional woman character (marriage and death), Beatrice walks away from her men and from motherhood. Refusing to be the bearer of culture, she chooses creativity over procreation, and is rewarded with a spectacular discovery. Alone of her contemporaries she has become the ubermensch, the knowing person who can see beyond the moment. But her victory dance is modest, not permitted to outshine Morgan’s, whose novel unfolds like a work of paper-sharp origami to reveal its incredible secret.
This review appeared in the TLS as ‘Strangely Shaped Idols’ on 3.6.2011.
He was the quiet American. A scruffy man who was sometimes seen with the homeless and the drunks. When he turned up dead in an abandoned house in Euston, no one had any idea who George Price was; an obscure ending for someone whose contributions to science have helped shape the way we think about what it means to be human.
Ever since Darwin’s account of evolution by natural selection, in which the fittest dominate in combat and have the greatest procreative strength, biologists have wondered how to account for anomalies in the natural world: what of the vampire bat who shares blood with a less successful hunter, the neuter ant or drone bee, the deer whose antlers limit the fight to the death? How to explain nature when it is not simply out for itself, ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson has it – how to explain altruism? In a science where a single master narrative has prevailed for a century and a half this has been the main bone of contention. If the argument has been unusually heated, it’s because what’s at stake is of much more than scientific interest.
The debates that fill these pages – about competition versus co-operation, selfishness over self-sacrifice, the interests of the individual against those of the group – could never be narrowly held in the sphere of science; they have inescapable political implication. “What was to be done?” Oren Harman wonders in his survey of the scientists caught in the battle: “If Nature was mankind’s moral compass…was civilization condemned to eternal cycles of bloodshed?” If competition was in our DNA shouldn’t we organise society accordingly?
Harman, an Israeli biologist and biographer, has written an energetic, if occasionally over-ramped tale that presents not only the science but the history and politics which produced it. His method is broadly dialectical, pairing opposing players. The first couple, T. H. Huxley and Prince Kropotkin, demonstrate the breadth of political difference (one a pillar of the British scientific establishment, the other a Russian anarchist) while showing how even among enemies the science was always co-operative, every new idea built upon the argument with others. The irony of this was not lost on the scientists (Fisher, Haldane, von Neumann, Allee, Maynard Smith and Hamilton) of whom one was a pacifist, one kept company with fascists, and two were members of the Communist Party.
The largest part of his story, however, Harman gives over to the turbulent life of George Price. Born in New York in 1922, he was a product of the American Dream-turned-nightmare, with a father who hid his Jewishness and died young, a family business that faltered in the Depression, a mother who took to feeding the pigeons and talking to the dead.
Some of the uncertainties that plagued Price in later life clearly grew among these rocky beginnings: he was drawn to Jews and yet hostile to them; an attempt at the picket-fence life soon unravelled and the man professionally preoccupied by kindness and kinship went for over twenty years without seeing his daughters. There are also suggestions that Price’s inability to react quite normally in social situations and his prodigious ability with numbers and systems were the result of undiagnosed autism.
For a while he touched the hem of history, working on uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project, experimenting with fluorescence and radiation at Bell Labs, modelling optimization systems at IBM. But his interests were gadfly, veering from one discipline to another, one girlfriend to another, never settling. Struggling to make sense of his life, after a thyroid operation left him partially paralysed he finally took flight.
Price arrived in London in the winter of 1967, he had no job and no prospects but he determinedly pursued his various interests. Applying game theory to animal conflict he came up with an elegant equation advancing Bill Hamilton’s work on kin-selection. Improbably enough, he walked off the street into University College and brandishing the equation landed a position in the department of human genetics.
His equation, however, left him unsatisfied because it showed that apparently selfless behaviour always masks self-interest. In search of a purer altruism he began a new experiment, this time in living, venturing into Soho to extend a hand to the down-and-outs, inviting them into his flat, giving away possessions; before long he, too, was homeless.
He drifted around, living in a number of squats around Tolmer’s Square at the back of Euston. In one of many fascinating digressions Harman describes the battle in this area between a property developer and the local community. Through it all Price remained on the sidelines: none of the participants was aware that the polite, frail American in their midst might have a contribution to make, that this was the man who had proved “the exact mathematical conditions under which the interest of the group trumps the interest of the individual.”
With his health failing, he wrote to relatives that he meant to draw back from the experiment in selflessness that others found so alarming and he, now debilitated, judged a failure. But for all his evident willpower, the man who had lived apart for most of his life found returning to the fold was beyond him. In January 1975, in a Drummond Street squat, George Price died after cutting his throat. He is buried in an unmarked grave in St Pancras cemetery
This review appeared as ‘The Evolution of Altruism’ in the Review section of Camden New Journal, Islington Tribune and West End Extra on 5.5.2011.
From Lincolnshire and Leicestershire
Here is a found poem by the Lancashire poet Jill Cragg. She culled the material from two reports in the Guardian about British firms making weaponry destined for dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa, much of it being sold this week at the Abu Dhabi arms fair. Robert Booth, the paper’s correspondent at Idex 2011, said the fair provided a snapshot of “a world perpetually preparing for war”. It was a state of affairs Karl Marx observed in his own time, but one that need not be permanent, he thought. Writing in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he declared that “the alliance of the working class of all countries would ultimately kill war.” It’s an assertion often referred to by his detractors in order to show what a poor prophet he was. But Marx was writing at a time, much like the present, of growing internationalism, in which workers were casting off the “political delirium” of the “old society” and beginning to see they had more in common with foreign workers than their war-mongering bosses.
He was not wrong. Nearly a century and a half later the question remains one of “alliance”, of solidarity and imaginative empathy: how do today’s workers in the English heartlands – at Primetake in Lincolnshire, Chemring in Hampshire, and NMS International in Leicestershire – supppose the products of their labour (armoured vehicles, CS gas shotguns, stun guns, rubber ball shot, teargas cartridges, baton rounds and the like) will be used by the regimes around the world that buy them?
It is time that this – the ‘respectable trade’ of the 21st century – was abolished. You can get involved by following Campaign Against the Arms Trade on Twitter @wwwcaatorguk, or join Amnesty’s Control Arms campaign and sign their petition demanding an immediate arms embargo to Libya.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————
The market is up in the air
and it’s too early to tell
where it will all end up.
An ethical policy is in place.
We defend our right to sell.
We can’t legislate on how
the buyers use our products.
They are security solutions.
Our armoured cars are not
in any way, designed to be
deployed in a hostile fashion.
For crowd control we sell
some tear-gas cartridges,
but, honestly, our bedrock trade’s in
cartridges to scare off birds.
Do not name us in this turmoil.
Given what is going on,
no-one is likely to be talking.
Our trade is respectable.
We have nothing to say today.
Benghazi: 21.2.2011
This was uploaded from the Flickr stream of ‘a7fadhomar’. Take a good look – as the people in the picture seem to be doing. There are more portraits of Libya breaking free, here.
Polly Samson, Perfect Lives – TLS
Polly Samson is such a creature of the moment that if she didn’t exist, someone in the publicity department of a major publishing house would probably invent her. Married to a rock star, mother to eight children, voted one of the UK’s most beautiful women, she’s all over the internet, until recently as glamorous appendage, but now, with her third book from Virago, in her own right. In an earlier life she lived with Heathcote Williams and was, indeed, head of publicity at Jonathan Cape. Her latest novel comes adorned with puffs from Ali Smith, Maggie O’Farrell and John Banville.
All of which would be by the by if the book in question was not such a work of glassy self-reflection, did not have the quality Samson admired in Lavinia Greenlaw’s 2007 memoir: “the constant throb of self-recognition”. Unlike Greenlaw, she’s writing fiction, this time about the lives of several women linked by a piano tuner in a seaside town, their individual stories running together in a novel. It’s a pleasurable form that draws attention to its own making – a reflexiveness deepened by the suggestion that the perfect lives to which the title alludes are self-created traps, cover stories for unresolved trauma.
One such illusionist is Celia Idlewild. Her well-heeled life with “everything as it should be”, is disturbed one morning when an egg drops through the letter box, the words “Happy Fat” written on the broken shell. Like the signs puffed out by the aeroplane in Mrs Dalloway, the meaning is elusive but carries a threat of spoiling. It’s an idea much repeated here: pleasure in a perfect world (“clean as peppermint”, “pristine as chalk”) that’s sullied by dogshit, tattoos, a concentration camp number inked on flesh.
As well as the musical-fluvial imagery, “the trilling ripples of waves”, Samson has the familiar inheritance of the woman writer, Woolf’s “luminous halo”. It creates here an impression of a world on show, “shimmering”, “glimmering”, “glistening”, “glinting”. But Samson is nothing if not knowing, and parodies herself: one woman romps in an orchard fantasising about her lover, the language becoming increasingly tremulous (“dewdrops”, “dewfall”, “diamonds of dew”). The joke is she lusts not after a man, but an “unbearably chic” Leica camera.
The result is a deformation of Woolf’s language of sensitivity. Rather than making us receptive, even to the falling atoms, in Samson’s stories, the writing becomes a sign of contemporary narcissism: the natural world glitters to attract me – like the camera, the “naughty kitten” shoes and the other spangly things a girl wants (but doesn’t want to feel guilty about wanting). This Fall is implied in differences between the generations, from “strong as an ox” grandmothers living through totalitarian regimes, to mothers of the vegetarian, Greenham Common kind; to resentful daughters, not wanting their kids to be scared out of their wits when Granny insists they demonstrate against the invasion of Iraq.
Aurelia, a concert pianist in Hamburg for a recital, remembers her grandmother on Kristallnacht telling her sons to look at “how prettily the glass glistened on the pavements”. Unspoken is the thought that what we once did to stave off fear – making the world into alluring objects – has today become a form of avoiding struggle. In the final story a woman gives in to a husband who annoys her by coming home late and slouching in front of the television. Urged on by a witty cat, voicing her misgivings, she thinks of attacking the box with a steak hammer but is distracted by her husband’s smile, “dazzling” in the firelight, then further seduced by an actor in a favourite movie. She knows the house is a shambles and that her husband has out-manoeuvred her, but the kids are fine and she snuggles contentedly on the couch. Is this collusion or finding joy in a necessarily imperfect life? Samson’s novel is so finely tuned it’s impossible to tell. Clever cat.
A shorter version of this review appeared in the TLS as ‘See How it Shines’, on 26.11.2010.
Perfect Lives; Polly Samson, 2010
Bill Douglas Among the Philistines
There was a rare showing recently on Film4 for Bill Douglas’s Comrades (1987), the story of six Devon men who became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs when they were transported to Australia in 1834 after organising one of the first trade unions. The film was only his second major piece of work for the cinema, it was also his last. Yet together with the trilogy of autobiographical films he made in the Seventies about growing up in a deprived Scottish mining village, this “poor man’s epic”, eight difficult years in the making, constitutes one of the most important – and overlooked – canons in British filmmaking.
The reasons for his neglect were obvious to Douglas, and to those around him who recognised his rare talent and tried, against the odds, to foster it. Mamoun Hassan, who helped produce the Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978), and offered Douglas teaching at the National Film School when finance for his projects was unforthcoming, remembers being told by Lindsay Anderson – an early admirer and encourager of Douglas’s work – “Remember, Mamoun, the English are philistines.” Douglas himself warned his friend, the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, that talent needed protecting but there was no system in Britain to properly nurture it: “He was a complete victim of…cultural intolerance in the British film industry of the non-commercial.”
At times this “intolerance” amounted to more than a refusal to fund Douglas’s work (when he died of cancer in 1991 he left several finished but unrealised scripts, including a life of Eadweard Muybridge, and an adaptation of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner). He was often the target of establishment disapproval, his films deemed “hopelessly slow” (Barry Norman) and unfashionable. Nor did they fit comfortably into the categories of British storytelling, in which, conventionally, the working class or dispossessed are portrayed in a realist vein. The New York Times film critic, Vincent Canby, found Comrades, “elaborately misconceived”. Even Sheila Rowbotham, the socialist historian, while applauding the film’s effort, criticised him for a style she considered too immodest for its subject: “The flaws of Comrades derive from the grandeur of Douglas’s cinematic ambition.”
As a child, Douglas spent as much time as he could at the cinema. He was too poor to pay for a ticket so he’d barter his way in with empty jam jars. His love of film stemmed from a desire to escape the meagre world he inhabited where, “it always seemed to be raining or grey…my heart would sink to despairing depths. I hated reality.” Illegitimate and orphaned (his mother became mentally ill after contracting peurperal fever, his father absconded), life was so austere that even after National Service provided an escape route from Newcraighall, Douglas remained “obsessed” by his beginning and the uneasy distinction he believed it conferred upon him. Which is why when he came to make his first fully-fledged film he decided to face the bitterness of the place and its people. The Trilogy, in its depiction of cruelty and indifference to children has something of Orwell’s “power of facing unpleasant facts”, though without ever succumbing to didacticism – perhaps because its view is that of an insider.
For the same reason, the three films have a degree of inwardness, seeming organic rather than shaped by the demands of character or plot. They are constructed as memory poems, assemblies of moments, feelings and atmospheres that leave the viewer in the same position as the children they are watching: struggling to understand the behaviour of inscrutable and alarming adults. Douglas’s scripts were similarly unorthodox, written without shot direction and reading more like works of pared back prose. The first of these was initially titled Jamie, so as to disguise its autobiographical nature, but when Douglas sent it to Lindsay Anderson, he was advised to take a leaf out of Gorky’s book. My Childhood is set in 1945 and was filmed in the same windblown village not far from Edinburgh where Douglas grew up. Its portrayal of two brothers, Jamie and Tommy, scavenging for coal, without a coat even in the iciest of Scottish winters, sears itself onto the mind. No one witnessing Stephen Archibald, the boy who plays Jamie, could forget his permanently harrowed face.
The ‘performance’ Douglas was able to elicit from Archibald (the word seems perverse applied to something that looks so natural) owes a debt to Joan Littlewood for whom he worked as an actor and unofficial assistant at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford East. From her came the instruction most often heard on his set: “Don’t overact!” He also learned the value of seeking out that “something different” a non-professional brings to a project, to cast for look rather than experience. Archibald and his friend, Hughie Restorick, so authentic as the brothers, were found by him at a bus-stop when they tried to cadge a cigarette.
The Trilogy films show life from the brothers’ point of view, from which men are absent or distant. The boys have a father apiece but these put in only rare appearances: Jamie’s doles out a sixpence, Tommy’s turns up one day with a caged bird. Equally remote, though more monumental, are the soot-faced miners seen rising and descending in the coal shafts. Despite their massed power, there is no sense of the boys finding protection in their wake; the men are merely a part of the landscape in the way that slag heaps, steam trains and turnip fields are.
With their mother in an asylum, the boys are shunted between orphanages and grandmothers – archetypal figures, one, silent and shawled in a rocking chair; the other, a terrorising witch who puts mouse-traps in the apple bowl. Jamie has little in the way of companionship: a cat, a washing line, these are his playthings. His main source of affection comes from an outsider, Helmut, one of the German prisoners of war still working on the land. The two of them read together and horse around, and for brief moments Jamie’s tense, unhappy features relax into laughter. His look of anguish when Helmut is driven away in a lorry is dreadful.
After a period of destitution in Edinburgh, the army flings Jamie half way across the world to the Egyptian desert, and the friendship of a man who draws him out, brushing aside his sullenness in the face of the Pyramids (“Enthuse! You’re looking at one of the seven wonders of the world!”), showing him how to fillet a kipper (“It’s easy once you know how to get through all the rubbish”) and demanding that he think for himself. When Jamie says he’d like to be a painter, or even a filmmaker he finds encouragement, not the tongue-lashing he faced in Newcraighall for shirking “honest work”, for getting above himself. This unusual friend, who has piles of books by his bed and pin-ups of Kafka and Gorky, helps him see that through the possibilities of art he might achieve a life less alienated, might find – as the title of this part of the Trilogy suggests – a way home. (This was the destination, O’Hagan felt, Douglas had been dreaming of since he was a lad sketching horses on his granny’s doorstep: “He must have realised that self-enlargement and self-invention were everything a boy from Newcraighall could hope for.”)
I came across the Trilogy in the early Eighties when I projected the films at the Ritzy in Brixton. Even in a picture house then screening the full cinematic repertoire, they stood out as astonishing and singular works. As British films they were particularly remarkable, aspiring to verisimilitude but ingrained with a strong poetic sensibility. Douglas shot them in colour then re-mastered in black and white, a mark of his intention to use any means he could to intensify the effect of ‘the real’. Later he wanted the two halves of Comrades to be shot in different ratios: narrow for the English countryside and in Cinemascope for the Australian outback (an innovation that proved too expensive to accommodate).
Such ideas meant that Douglas’s films have a rhythm and look all of their own. What shaped his distinct way of seeing? You can sense the influence of Hardy and Hogarth in his view of the English; the ‘naturalness’ of Bresson and the Italian neo-realists are answered in Douglas’ stripped back landscapes and economic performances; and he has some of the subversive lyricism of Bunuel and Genet (a sadistic guard in Comrades traces a flower across a beaten convict’s face). But the greatest stimulus to his imagination seems to have been the starkness of his early years, creating a taste for simplicity and stillness. Equally a part of that ‘taste’, however, was that its expression be restrained (something Rowbotham fails to register). For all the arresting sights, his audience is never made to feel they are being held merely to admire. He is unafraid to show beauty in even the most marginal life, the resonating power that objects and shapes acquire in a room uncluttered by poverty, (the latched door, a chunk of bread about to be shared, hands raised to a fire). But the sparse imagery and reserved figures are always consonant with their context.
Indeed one sequence in My Childhood seems to be a commentary on the dangers of aestheticism. Tommy swipes a bunch of dead flowers from the graveyard. We see them drooping in a cup on a bare kitchen table, looking like a painting, but there is no time to bask in their compositional beauty. Immediately, Jamie comes clattering in and throws the flowers on the floor (this is wrenching, shocking even, for the viewer). He fills the cup with hot water and lets it spill out across the table. Taking the emptied cup to his granny, who is half-asleep in her chair, he places the warmed receptacle in her hands and closes her fingers around it.
It was in sequences like these, Douglas felt, that one could discern the language of cinema – something he tried to explain to his students, though he found it difficult to put into words (and perhaps like many artists he was wary of picking apart the almost instinctual sense guiding him). In an interview of 1978, he says that what distinguishes film from the other arts is the way it places figures in a landscape. Film, uniquely, is about the observation of people in their environment. This is the basis of his materialist poetics in which speech is often reserved or withheld and we understand instead through expression, gesture and, more mysteriously, the way human beings reveal themselves through their surroundings. For Douglas, habitat is vitally telling.
Rare television interviews show him as handsome (when young he resembled a nervier Alan Bates) with an unforced charm. His voice had a peculiarly Scottish softness; he was engaging, but also watchful. There is one moment in a 1978 interview, though, where the guard drops. Talking about the strain of filmmaking on a tiny budget, he interrupts himself and says, “It’s not exactly working down the mines.” Another man might have made the point with greater irony but he seems simply to be reminding himself of something he knows, experientially, to be true. (Douglas is surely the only director in the history of British film to have worked down a mine.) If there is no great expectation the interviewer or for that matter the audience will catch the full weight of his words, it’s because he knows there aren’t many who’ve straddled both worlds.
Perhaps this makes too much of an off-hand remark. But it seems revelatory of something fundamental in Douglas’s temperament: a sense of apartness that was both the making and undoing of him as a filmmaker – feeding his absolute determination to realise his conception of every film, and his refusal to compromise, to bow to the ‘reality’ of budgets, producers and bottom lines. This earned him a reputation for difficulty, often understood as naivety, an accusation that came at him from both left and right and was furthered by readings of the films in which his liking for simplicity was misinterpreted as a lack of sophistication.
There was perhaps a degree of unworldliness about him, but I’d suggest it was willed, indicative of an unromantic sense that those with few possessions might be more capable of sharing. It’s an idea that seems at odds with the meanness of his childhood. But what the Trilogy reveals is that it is not being poor that is so devastating, it is being placeless. Loathed for their illegitimacy, the brothers live as pariahs, alongside but permanently cast out from a family and community that will not care for them.
By contrast, in Comrades, the spirit of fraternity seems to rise from the land itself. As much as the new ideas arriving by book and pamphlet that the literate lay preachers are able to read, it is a way of life the Martyrs act to defend. The threat comes from the machines appearing in the fields, devaluing their labour and causing the landlord to lower their wages (by the time they banded together, taking the ‘illegal oath’ for which they were transported, the wages in Tolpuddle had been reduced three times from 10 to 6 shillings). These are pre-industrial workers, still tied to the rhythm, beauty and lore of the land. In the opening sequence a man scurries across the chalk outline of the Cerne Abbas giant. The club in the giant’s hand is mirrored in the tools used by the farm labourers to smash the threshers.
What we witness in Comrades is the moment industrialisation came to the English countryside, the moment of Fall. Before this, a labourer smiles at his sweetheart, saying, “We are the most beautiful people in the whole world”. Eden is not idealised, however, (a man breaks his back over a field of stones, a woman demands of her lover, are we “too poor to breed?”), but there is a proposition here about different ways of being and living. This is best understood in the figure of George Loveless, (in a performance by Robert Soans that should have won greater acclaim) the Martyr’s leader, a ploughman and self-educated preacher. His guilessness, gladness in nature and cheerful greeting of man – “Welcome lad”, he beams at a newcomer to the barn where his Methodist congregation meet to sing rousingly, to praise and pray – and his uncomplicated morality, all these are not just individual traits, they are virtues made possible by community and solidarity. A member of his congregation reminds everyone, “it is worth bearing in mind, a grief shared is a smaller grief”; a mother tells her daughter, who is distraught after cheating a boy out of a halfpenny, “It’s quite simple really. We only have to love one another to know what we must do.”
Despite Douglas’s turbulence (he could be emotional when the day did not realize what he had in mind), the crew warmed to him, understanding this was uncommon work, and it mattered. When the budget overran during the complicated second half of the shoot – tracking the Martyrs on separate journeys across Australia – and it looked as if production might be halted, the actors banded together, offering to work for free. Alongside the then unknown actors playing the Martyrs, were the aristocracy of British theatre cast in the roles of the powerful or well-known: Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Stephens, James Fox, Michael Hordern and Barbara Windsor (whose tangy Englishness made her perfect casting, but for whom Douglas had to fight against uncomprehending producers at Channel Four.) Don’t worry, Douglas told them, brushing the problem aside: “There is always more money.” This might seem naive but having existed for the first half of his life with so very little money, Douglas refused to fetishize it, to grant it power over the man of art - O’Hagan saw - he had struggled long and hard to become.
Comrades was made in the heat of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union revolution, a time when, for some, there was indeed money in abundance. Shooting took place in 1984 and 1985 – the year the miners were defeated. The film was finally released in 1987, as Thatcher announced triumphantly to the Tory Party conference, “There is no such thing as society”, and Wall Street, with its mantra “Greed is good”, was a box office success. Those inclined to this sort of thing argued. as one might expect, that Douglas was out of touch. With hindsight, he looks anything but. The Trilogy now appears to be not only a record of one of postwar Britain’s most marginal communities, but anticipates, in its fracture and defeat, the future of the industrial working class. So too, Comrades, looks timely: a challenge to the Thatchers and Gekkos who dogmatically insisted not only history but morality was on their side. (“Greed is good” may have began as an ironic slogan but it quickly became – until market collapse proved otherwise – unchallengeable creed).
The film is prophetic too, in the way it combines what Douglas called “the longed-for transformations of society”, that the Martyrs were fighting for, with “the magical transformations of optics.” As a child his interest in cinema lay in its ability to transport him, bringing relief from the ‘reality’ he found so oppressive. (In the cinema scene in My Ain Folk, the film being screened is Lassie Come Home.) As an adult, Douglas’ taste for the taciturn led him to silent movies: at film school he made a short called Charlie Chaplin’s London. From here he was drawn further back to the pre-history of cinema, to the optical trickery and visual machinery that photography and cinema grew out of.
Douglas and Peter Jewell - the encouraging friend he portrayed in My Way Home – shared their lives, living in a small London flat for 30 years. Douglas was not gay, as many supposed, but the two men “relied on each other” and, as Jewell put it, “honed each other to our liking.” Jewell continued to support Douglas in his filmmaking, and together they built the finest collection of pre-cinema artefacts and memorabilia in the country. (These are now lodged in the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at Exeter University.)
Many of their discoveries made their way into Comrades (a few contraptions stem from the latter half of the nineteenth century so there is some cheerful anachronism). The actor Alex North, who previously worked with John McGrath’s 7:84 theatre company, plays a Lanternist, walking from village to village, carrying magic in the box on his back. In a herculean performance North also appears in 13 other guises as various kinds of showman: purveyor of the Raree Show, Diorama, Thaumotrope, Chromatrope, Camera Obscura and Kineograph flick book, as well as playing a Silhouettist and shadow puppeteer. Besides these, the film includes hymns, folk songs, banner making, hornpipe dancing (a sprightly Michael Clark), as well as varieties of child and adult play – all the storytelling forms and spirit-lifting activities of a largely illiterate community.
The broad range of arts on display are a part of the tale not simply because they tickled Douglas’s fancy, as some critics supposed, nor even as narrative device (though they are this too) but because they show working men and women as more than victims or martyrs, as self-reflecting people, with a denser, more intricate reality. (“The lives of these men”, Douglas thought, “was every bit as vivid as the men in coaches driving by.”) When Loveless’s wife, babe in arms, burns his books for the trouble they have brought into her home, praying, “Dear God, teach him not to think”, we understand the futility of her action. The tide cannot be held back because, as Douglas has revealed, even in rural communities itinerants would arrive bringing fresh delights and new ideas: “At the Lantern show you pay for the entertainment, but all the news is free!”
This reflexiveness also works at the level of the film itself, a commentary on the process of production and the way we tell stories. In other words, Douglas understood the disingenuous innocence of realism and opted in his work for less concealing forms. Three decades after Godard turned the camera on itself, such ideas were hardly novel in terms of world cinema, but they still seemed bemusing, even affronting, to many Anglo-American critics and audiences. And because film culture here was so timid, Douglas’s inventiveness caused endless problems. Ismail Merchant who was the original producer on Comrades, finally left the project when he was unable to persuade his director to shoot the journey from England to Australia with a real ship. He couldn’t understand why Douglas wanted to use the cheap and contemporary device of a Grand Moving Panorama – a painted backdrop propelled by rollers. (There was one at Covent Garden in 1832, illustrating the sea-going adventures of Puss in Boots.)
Douglas wasn’t interested in documentary realism, he stuck to his guns and employed Jim Clancey to paint a recreation of the voyage, which tells, with great charm, how the story is to unfold in another place – one so strange to the Tolpuddle men it is almost of a different dimension. Douglas trusted his taste in the matter of music, too, bringing on board Hans Werner Henze who composed a resolutely modernist score, played on only a small number of instruments, but perfectly evocative and apt in its spare sound.
Comrades ends with a Grand Finale marking the return of the Martyrs to England. There was a gala welcoming them back at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London (now the Old Vic), organised by Robert Owen and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union who had rallied protestors up and down the country on behalf of their exiled comrades, demanding and finally gaining their release. For a film concerned with ideas of artistic as well as material transformation, it makes a fittingly theatrical denouement. Over the closing credits, we are presented with a series of painted lantern slides that describe the Martyrs’ fate: five emigrated to Canada and lived full lives; one remained in Tolpuddle, ending his days in the Dorchester workhouse.
There was a similarly bad end for the boy who’d given such an extraordinary performance in the Trilogy. Stephen Archibald also failed to break decisively with the place he had come from. His background was just as bleak as Douglas’s, but like many of a later generation, he turned for his escape not to art or learning (he was virtually illiterate) but to drugs. Douglas had a part in mind for him in Comrades, and was keen to offer him this way out. However by the time the money was finally in place, Archibald was in jail for possession of heroin. Douglas tried to gain his release but failed, and filming went ahead without him. He died in 1998, at the age of 38.
When it comes to Douglas, it’s hard not to feel what a lost opportunity he represents for British, and in particular Scottish, filmmaking. It’s a terrible indictment that he said towards the end of his life, “I don’t want anything more to do with the film industry. It’s deadly.” If he’d been allowed to develop, given more opportunities, who knows what lasting impact he might have had? As it is, Douglas’s contemporaries remain divided by class and aesthetic (Loach and Leigh versus Jarman and Greenaway), and I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that this division arrested – still arrests – British culture. With his feel for authenticity and great love of showmanship Douglas might have been the man to break down old barriers. There is a legacy, of course: his influence can be felt in Terence Davies’ films about working class life in Liverpool, and on a new generation of Scottish filmmakers such as Lynne Ramsey, whose Ratcatcher has some of his raw poetry. Yet Douglas’s early exclusion from the scene and death at only 56 means there is forever a piece of the jigsaw missing.
Such regret does not diminish the achievement. At the end of the Trilogy, Jamie returns to Newcraighall. The camera pans around the deserted room in which he once lived. Douglas cuts unexpectedly to an outside view, revealing what the young man has learned: the world is larger than the place that once confined him. He may remember it now, and contemplate its meaning, but he is no longer constrained by the past. The final glorious image of an orchard in blossom tells us he is free – he has reached that fruitful place of the imagination. When people complained to Douglas that there were no happy endings to his films, he would smile and correct them: “I am the happy ending.”
For anyone writing a series of novels there are questions about the game of catch-up: with successive episodes, how much back story should you provide for those new to the party, and can you avoid the danger of alienating readers already in the know? In Started Early, Took My Dog, the fourth of Kate Atkinson’s books about the private detective Jackson Brodie, the dilemma is openly acknowledged. Twice we are told that the résumé of Brodie’s life is “more dramatic” than the “ennui of living it”. It is a rare loss of nerve on Atkinson’s part, not least because one of her guiding ideas elegantly accommodates the problem. The reverberations of Brodie’s past and the repetition of certain images across her books are of a piece with a sense that we are each our own museum – a generous notion housing us all.
Atkinson’s triumph in this series is in making over the logic of the crime novel – of hunter and prey – into a realm where women are heard and felt. (Here, this is complicated by the aping of masculinity: “What had happened to women?”, her detective wonders, observing a roomful of drunken and marauding social workers.) She avoids the genre’s pitfalls and tendency to exploitation by making her victims fully human, never ciphers; and having no interest in types. There are no discussions here of “the mind of a serial killer”, and Brodie is increasingly adrift of the story rather than key to it.
Despite this, her protagonist is something of a female fantasy as a tough and tender man, and this leaves Atkinson comically scrambling for a theory to explain women’s conflicting desire: “Hegelian synthesis. Dualism . . . ?”. Women are moved by his imperfections (“the dent of a chickenpox scar, the cast of despair”) though such feelings are usually unrequited. In his desires, at least, Brodie is a conventional man – falling for a woman’s wielded breasts, marrying a con-artist without detecting she is “designed . . . to appeal”. But as he ages, and reflecting the times, the modifying voices in his head are increasingly those of women. It is this – and his sister’s rape and murder – that makes the divide between the sexes so acutely felt. “Why did men kill women?” is the question that plagues Brodie.
He is a Yorkshireman, inheriting from his father, a miner, a grief for a world now destroyed and forgotten. It is a world he never inhabited yet which haunts him, and from which he harbours a reflexive way of thinking (“Fucking Thatcher”). Brodie’s lodestar is the understanding his father gleaned at the bottom of a coal pit: “Who said life is fair?”. A lover observes, “You can take the boy out of his collectivist past, but you can’t take the collectivist past out of the boy”. His own career in the army and police – somewhere back there he has killed men – is coupled with sentimentality (a liking for country music) and pain. He is haunted by the events of his twelfth year, when his sister was killed so harrowingly, his mother died of cancer and his brother hanged himself. The suffering and “disrepair” this caused ally him in some fashion with victimized femininity – all the lost girls who are the subject of his investigations, and who are Atkinson’s quarry.
In earlier outings with Brodie (Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?), Atkinson tells the stories of women battered and slain – there are women who kill, though their actions tend to be comprehensible, the result of child abuse or post-natal depression – and scrutinizes survivors of these disasters, “witnesses to the unthinkable”. In doing so, she is asking us to think about why it is so hard to imagine a “utopia” where women might walk without fear. Her answer has something to do with “the eternal maternal”, the primal bond of mother and child at the heart of everything, which leaves men “kicked out of paradise”, and women and children the symbolic image of a world an outsider might want to smash up.
These destroyers of worlds, however, are contrasted with the “mutinous” characters Atkinson favours, the would-not-be-goods like Brodie and like Tracy, the retired policewoman in this new novel, who battle with life, even as they try to mend it, wary of the “shites” still running the world, and acting as shepherds to the lost sheep that fall victim to them. As a result, along with the many easy pleasures of Atkinson’s writing – her great resourcefulness and fluency, her partisan wit (“Should you marry a man who loved Wagner?”), her revelling in language’s jostling and borrowing – there is also retributive zeal.
Arriving every two years, like chapters in a fictional compendium of these shoddy times, Atkinson’s canon of crime brings an energizing sense of work written to the minute and to the bone – precise articulations of a “disunited kingdom”. In this latest instalment, as Woolworth’s closes down and the Polish workers start to return home, Brodie abandons his BlackBerry and succumbs to the iPhone. Like the country he roams through, looking for clues to a woman’s identity, he is now crueller, older and more violent, tendencies that are not ameliorated by his growing interest in poetry, Beethoven, Betty’s teashops and world classics.
Set mainly in Leeds, the story moves between the 1970s when the Yorkshire Ripper cast darkness over so many Northern towns, and a shiny, merciless present. In both eras there are murdered women and stolen children, but in the interim some things have changed. Men aren’t what they used to be, everyone keeps saying, but Atkinson’s feeling for the past is one of regret, not nostalgia. After all, what men used to be left women with little choice: they could be, like the wives of the novel’s corrupt policemen, kitchen saints on “valium and tea”; or like the women they are mixed up with through work, “slappers and bints”.
There is more room for manoeuvre now, not that the Carole Braithwaites of this world would know it. They are still struggling alone, strung between giddy kiddy love and drink or drugs in a dangerous carnival of highs and lows, that to the coppers, five quid in hand, knocking at the door for sex, looks like mental illness. But this time around, some women do come through. Tracy assuages her feeling that she failed to commandeer the first child in danger, by taking the next out of harm’s way: “Save the kid, save the world”, she thinks, and save herself, too, giving herself a chance “to be human, to love”. And for Tilly, an elderly actress with a moth-eaten mind, one of life’s permanently put-upon, there is a heroic last dash to rectify the past by standing up for a child dressed in strange fairy rags.
In all this Brodie does not get star billing, but has to muddle along with everyone else, and his detecting now seems more clueless and haphazard. By Atkinson’s democratic manner, though, we understand that his role is still vital: someone must dig into history, must search, however blindly, for truth to be unearthed.
In the end, there is magic. The star of Atkinson’s show is the Kid. She is the antidote to all the queasy adult talk of “kiddies”: resilient, doughty and firmly planted in the world, with an instructive simplicity (“Sleep. Eat. Repeat”), and an unalloyed sense of her own rightness – the element that gets lost so early and disastrously in women. As she looks at herself in the mirror in her new fairy costume, Tracy tells her how good she looks. “I do”, she agrees.
This review appeared in the TLS as ‘All the Lost Girls’, on 12.8.2010, and on the Times website on 11.8.2010 as ‘Kate Atkinson and the Lost Girls’.
Kate Atkinson, 2007; Emily Dickinson, c.1847
Kate Atkinson’s new book begins and ends with the Amherst poet, Emily Dickinson, a writer she has great fellow feeling for, often quoting in work which, like Dickinson’s (“Civilisation – spurns – the Leopard!”) is trained on the unconventional. Atkinson’s title, Started Early, Took My Dog, is from Dickinson’s poem no. 520 (Complete Works, 1955). It is easy to imagine how the poet’s searching intelligence, love of riddling and use of threat might attract a writer of detective stories, but it is the poem closing the novel – about the persistence of hope - that points to a deeper relationship between the two writers, linking Dickinson’s abashed figures to the obscure, imperfect heroes of Atkinson’s fiction. Here are the two poems:
520 254
I started Early – Took my Dog - `Hope’ is the thing with feathers -
And visited the Sea - That perches in the soul -
The Mermaids in the Basement And sings the tune without the words -
Came out to look at me - And never stops at all -
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard -
Extended Hempen Hands - And sore must be the storm
Presuming Me to be a Mouse - That could abash the little bird
Aground – upon the Sands - That kept so many warm.
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
Went past my simple Shoe - And on the strangest Sea -
And past my Apron – and my Belt - Yet, never, in Extremity,
And past my Bodice – too - It asked a crumb – of Me.
And made as He would eat me up -
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve -
And then – I started – too -
And He – He followed – close behind -
I felt his Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle – Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -
Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know -
And bowing – with a Mighty look -
At me – The Sea withdrew -
Dame Beryl of Camden Town
They buried Beryl Bainbridge today after a service at St Silas the Martyr, the Catholic church she attended in Camden, not far from where she lived in Albert Terrace. She took possession of the house in 1963, a northerner in exile and single mother with two small children (a third came along two years later). Finding herself strapped for cash she went to work down the road at Belloni’s Wine Warehouse. Some of the people she met there turn up in her novel about Italian immigrants in London, The Bottle Factory Outing, though its main English characters - two women: one timid, another, feisty - are both self-portraits. It won the Guardian fiction prize in 1974, bringing early critical recognition and making her an enthusiastic regular at the paper’s literary lunches from which she was often last to be hustled out. As those likenesses in The Bottle Factory Outing suggest, Bainbridge was a peculiar mix of shyness and conviviality, at one year’s luncheon, holding court under the grand piano.
Perhaps she found it easier to commune with the presences in her home - the many effigies, curiosities and relics. A stuffed bison graced the hall and and there was an altar’s worth of saints adorning the fireplace in her living room. She also had Greek statues, religious icons and a life-size model called Neville Chamberlain. Bainbridge enjoyed the theatricality of these props - her own first dramatic role came at the age of 11 in the Northern Children’s Hour radio show, and in 1961 she appeared in an episode of Coronation Street. Long after her stage career was over she continued to describe herself in Who’s Who as an actress and writer.
At the church, set in the middle of a modern housing estate, shirt-sleeved photographers lurked in the doorway, discussing the celebrity potential of everyone who shuffled up. You could see them fretting over the elderly mourners: was that someone who once was someone or just an old codger that lived on Beryl’s street? They needn’t have worried, mingling with the churchful of family and friends were Paul Bailey, Joseph Connelly, Mark Lawson, Melvyn Bragg, Michael Howowitz, Terry Waite, Richard Ingrams, A.N. Wilson, Sue McGregor and Ronald Haywood, as well as a clutch of literary editors past, small press editors and journalists, some of whom had also known her friends - the Welsh novelist Bernice Rubens, who died in 2004, and Alice Haycraft (who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis), who died the following year. Coming so close together, these losses were hard for Bainbridge but she responded with her own brand of quirky resilience, saying of Haycraft, “I don’t think of her as dead … more that she’s just not answering the phone.”
In an essay on death, Bainbridge wrote that, other than family, all that mattered to her were “tolerance, patience, regard for others and the love of labour”. And she laboured heroically, producing 16 compact novels, 2 volumes of stories and 4 of non-fiction. Her fiction divides into halves. There are autobiographical works like The Bottle Factory Outing and An Awfully Big Adventure, based on her experiences at the Liverpool Playhouse which she joined after being expelled from school for writing smutty poems. Like much of her writing it manages to be both bleak and funny, giving an account of Stella-by-starlight’s calamitous sexual relations with members of the theatre’s provincial bohemia. (A 1995 film adaptation has an unusually good turn by Hugh Grant as a catty director.) But it was with histories of other people that Bainbridge found her forte, and a larger audience.
Young Adolf imagines Hitler working as a waiter at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, Every Man for Himself is about the Titanic sinking, Master Georgie, the Crimean War, and her admiration for Samuel Johnson gave us According to Queeney, a sidelong view of the great man from Hester Thrale’s young daughter. There was also a TV series tracing J.B.Priestley’s journey, 40 years earlier, back home to Liverpool, in which she accuses Thatcher of desecrating the city. She was particularly appalled by the fate of the Albert Docks, finding its proud history overrun with nightclubs. As a rebellious teenager Bainbridge converted to Catholicism, but as an adult she came to miss the drama that originally attracted her: “No more Latin or sin or confession or penance. There’s no longer any point to it.” The “emptiness” she experienced as a result was linked to her feeling about the destruction of her hometown. “I have great deserts now in my mind”, she told Laurie Taylor in 2004, “Blank spaces.”
When some of the younger members of her red-haired tribe finally carried in the coffin, heaped in lillies, it was hard to imagine such a vivid character was no longer alive and among us. True to her younger self, she had asked for the full Latin Mass, and in his homily, Father Rowland recollected the amiable eccentricities of Bainbridge’s daily life, also speaking of “her great generosity…the many ways…she found to give of herself” - a sentiment echoed in the local paper, which described her kindnesses to people in surrounding streets; her heartfelt joining in with campaigns for tenants’ rights and single mothers.
She was part of her community in a way few people are now - let alone writers, notorious for their self-absorption - and was often to be seen in the Mornington Arms, the Ferreria Deli on Delancy Street, up and down Camden High Street (particularly enthralled by the varieties of things on offer at the 99p shop), or taking a favourite walk down to St Pancras Old Church. (Here, she would have found much for her imagination to play on: the three lives joined in the one grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane; the modest pillow stone marking the fate of Johann Christian, “the English Bach”; the Hardy Tree, around which, the young Thomas - then an apprentice in architecture – arranged the headstones of graves exhumed to make way for the Midland Railway in 1860; or even the innovative domed structure of Sir John Soame’s mausoleum and its influence on the design of the telephone kiosk). She liked to amble around, often working up her pavement encounters for columns in the Spectator. In Camden Town, a book by her neighbour, David Thomson (the Woodbrook author), portrays her with a sack of clothes on her back, calling out on her way to the laundrette , “Any dirty washing?”, as if she were collecting it. Many people were amazed to learn this raffish local figure was a famous writer.
Bainbridge was a friendly woman but equally, at times, quite a proper one. She thought it important to dress properly, speak properly, and later in life, brushed away suggestions of bohemianism: no serious writer could live erratically, she chastised a succession of misguided interviewers. There was a fuss when she proposed that schoolkids take elocution lessons, as she had as a child (part of a well-rounded education that included Latin and tap dancing). This tension between informality and order had something to do with the remnants of her Catholicism, sustaining the warmth and tolerance bestowed on family, friends and street acquaintances - who were at the heart of her life in Camden - but also making her a respecter of certain kinds of tradition. In 2001 when she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, she was pleased as punch to meet the Queen, while the year before she gave a defiantly old-fashioned view of sexual politics to the Paris Review: “I’ve never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior. It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.”
This reverence did not extend to literature, however. In one interview when she was reminded that Howard Jacobson said writing had “transcendental significance”, she replied quick as a flash: “Oh yes. He did. But then he’s a fellah. And it matters to fellahs.” It’s a telling comeback, skewering men without appearing to. She acknowledges there are different ways of looking at the world, but in that “it” - mattering so much to them - there’s deflation. Women did not speak in such lofty terms, she thought, but were more likely to gossip about what their grandkids were up to – unless “one had a few drinks”, and then the talk would be not of aspiration to other-worldliness, but of hope for this one: the desire to be “moving to something better…the desire to be good.” Almost in the same breath, though, she acknowledges the immaturity of this idea, recognising its roots in childhood, when she was told “you have been a very good girl” and felt “so proud.” Female interest in virtue may not be altruistic, she implies, but tied to the need for approval, and is, in its own way, just as delusional as men’s fixation on transcendence or overcoming. If her deference was born of respect (for city, religion, royalty – for an idea of England), there was about it, often, the whiff of impersonation, a sense she was only carrying on in the role of dutiful daughter or subject. Perhaps it was this kind of subterfuge the historian Roy Forster had in mind when he called Bainbridge, “a great novelist of repression”.
Inside St Silas it was soon misty with incense, the thick perfume hung in a cloud over the congregation, seeping into the skin and nostrils, making the throat sore. Above this, the choir in the balcony sounded with the clarity only church acoustics seem able to produce, while down below we sang with thicker voices - our unexpected homage to Bainbridge’s cigarette huskiness. The hymns were both Parry settings: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, from John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, The Brewing of Soma, and Blake’s Jerusalem. Lastly, for those carried by red double-decker bus to the graveside in Highgate Cemetary, there was a final sending off – the Edwardian song Rolf Harris popularised, Two Little Boys, a kitsch and tender tribute to comradeship whose singing contrived to cheer everyone up.
At the end she wanted beginings. What Beryl liked best, Father Rowland said, was a baby. She would always stop on the street to talk to any she came across. And on her deathbed she asked to look at photographs of babies – any babies – to cheer herself up.
Rain on My Parade
Last weekend in Wakefield the nights were as hot as Bangkok, but Harrogate yesterday was customarily Northern: cool, grey and wet. I have come in search of Victoriana, and on the Walks and Parades there’s abundant nineteenth century glass - thick, warmly-coloured and throwing off queer reflections. There are also sights to avoid: the simulated ‘Victoria Shopping Centre’, the Winter Gardens (now a Wetherspoons), Turkish baths (a Chinese restaurant), and plenty of heritaged hotels (The Crown has Byron, Thackeray, Bronte and Elgar-themed suites). Skirt your way round these, however, and you are rewarded with the more out of the way pleasures of the Pump Room and Mercer Art Gallery.
The Pump Room is now a museum, of sorts. A world-show (residue of the town’s cosmopolitan past) yields ‘curiosities’ – tat, mostly, but there is one item that strikes the eye. A large Victorian doll’s house with its fourth wall removed, exposing servant dolls twice the size of their master’s family who sit weird and little at table, loll on canopied beds or watch themselves in giant mirrors – a Balzacian order this, the bourgeoise sidelined in their own homes by hirelings and clutter (lionskin, lace table cloth, metal bed warmer), all now, after a century of child’s play, pleasingly greasy and worn.
Then there are ‘exhibits’ from the original Pump Room. Among them, photographs of the building’s basilica, furnished with black marble columns and terrazzo floor (“based on the Italian Renaissance”). Sadly, other than these faded images, all that remains of this early magnificence is a water fountain, the Titus deVille, named after one of the spa’s “more colouful physicians”. Hidden a little out of view, it was once the Pump Room’s centrepiece – three bare-breasted mermaids and their fishy associates embracing in a porcelain clutch that would make Grayson Perry blush. More prominently featured, reflecting the taste of our times, is the spa’s equipment (so much puritan revenge, one suspects, for the unapologetic opulence), ingenious varieties of torture chamber such as the Needle Bath, an iron contraption that shot streams of water “at considerable pressure” onto quaking, iron-caged bodies.
The shame it engendered, perhaps, throws light on the mystery of Agatha Christie’s visit in 1926. Those eleven days, her husband claimed when he came to fetch her home, of which she had no memory. Leaving by the gift shop, I pour a drop of well-water from a jug covered in muslin and weighted beads. The sulphurous smell is overpowering so that, much as I want to, I cannot bring myself to sip with the devil. I purchase, instead, a cardboard cut-out of Byron’s eyes (he visited in 1806 with his ‘brother’, a female companion dressed as a boy) and recall that when I worked for Rock Against Racism in the late Seventies, it was from Harrogate that the National Front sent such vehement hate mail. “History is the devil’s scripture”, Byron said.
Around the corner is the Mercer Art Gallery, a civic centre, gifted by the family and - fair enough - displaying some of their own artistic efforts. One, a painting by Gavin Mercer of ‘St Ives Herring Packers’ is quite pretty, and forms part of the gallery’s standing collection that has studies in all manner of work: hop pickers, waterside labourers, carpet beaters and horse-traders. The world of work is virtually absent from contemporary art, which looks oddly parochial in the face of serious – and seriously sentimental – Northern Victorians like the Friths and Grimshaws. (It’s an absence that’s always puzzled me: why, after Lowry and Hopper, is there so little in the way of urban landscape?)
The current exhibition, based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel, The Secret Garden (1910), displays pieces from the Mercer vault – it’s a broad brief with pictures on nature, enclosure and seclusion hailing from the C18 to the present day. But the gallery space is human-sized and the thematic looseness, part of the show’s charm, drawing attention to the off-beat and ramshackle without, well, making too much of a show of it. So a woodcut of a wonderfully-charactered ‘Lion’ (after Thomas Bewick, 1795), a glimpse of garrett poverty (Edward Cobbett’s ‘Peeling Apples’, c.1850), and a twenty-first century painting of a country corner, fitted out with bits of building from different stages of history (‘The Wooden Plunge Pool’, Simon Palmer), all hang together, like-minded in their attention to the overlooked and under-considered.
At the gallery back there’s a collection of modern feminist pieces neurotically re-presenting one long gown: Bronte territory you think (the paraphernalia of gloves, hearts, doors, keys, birds and scratched words, give the clue), before discovering they are indeed based on Charlotte’s dress, still hanging with her sisters’, at the vicarage in Howarth, where the artist, Victoria Brookland, has been in residence. The best of her bunch, the most mysterious and powerful, is ‘Into the Woods’: a stark black tree with outcrops of flame, and at the trunk’s base, two cowering women emerging from a door.
These collage-paintings are suggestively placed next to a heavy C17 Beckwithshaw door (“Lent by Miss Bramley”), comprising four wooden panels studded with nails, iron hinges and giant key. Also in this corner, a Victorian screen encasing taxidermied birds - tatty, spiny, but resiliently colourful, the “exotic species” valiantly clinging to the branches of a crooked tree. And lastly, in distant dialogue with Brookland’s hanging frocks, there are portraits of Victorian partriarchs. Hubert von Herkhomer’s and Howard Somerville’s studies in masculinity, their subjects, sternly-staring (one, a drypoint from 1883, inevitably titled ‘ The Artist and his Model’ ) have each, at the edge of their frame, a tiny, troubling female nude.
Later that day, on the train returning to Leeds, I recollect the precarious status of these figures (barely in the picture), as I watch a Welsh woman trying to cheer up her fellow-guard: “You do such a loverly job with them clippers.” Two guards on a three-carriage train. Like the grandmothers in headscarves we saw in Prague in 68, employed to sit at the top of elevators, and the gallery attendants there just to shush you into proper art-reverence before the disorders of Schiele, Mucha and Klimt. They’re gone now and I can’t imagine this ‘clipper’ cameraderie will survive the next 18 months.
Inside the train it’s damp. I look out beyond the smudgy windows where there are stone walls, sheep, dandelion clocks furring the air. A patch of trodden flowers reminds me: this time last year we went into the bluebell woods, sat down on fallen trees and picked wild garlic for our baguettes, while you son’s girlfriend - the dancer - walked out to the tip of the trunk and practised her pirouettes. Afterwards, lying in the blue-greenery, we sang – remember? – all the lyrics with the word ‘blue’ we could think of, only stopping when the bottled fizz ran out and we were song-drunk.
North by Northwest, 1959
Had Angela Carter lived she would have been 70 this week and it’s a fair bet she would have celebrated her birthday with a night at the movies. “I like anything that flickers,” she said, finding in cinema’s luminescent beings an image of her aesthetic sensibility, which was at war with the essential in art. She was an intellectually knowing writer, as certain of what she was up to as any novelist of her generation, often remarking that her fiction had “a tendency to be telling you something”. As she had designs on her readers, making them a participant audience – waiting for the next sleight of hand, the next trick of the light – so, from the beginning, she sensed that film had designs on her: “When I first started going to the cinema intensively in the late Fifties,” she wrote, “Hollywood had colonised the imagination of the entire world.” It fascinated her, she “resented it”, her cinema-going continued unabated.
By the Seventies her excursions to the pictures, often with gay friends like the novelist, Paul Bailey, were usually to London’s independent cinemas. She enjoyed visiting these tatty, rundown palaces and was a regular at the Little Bit Ritzy in Brixton when I worked there in the Eighties, coming to see Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, among other films. And I remember her talking about a visit to the Electric in Notting Hill Gate, recounting with relish how fleas jumped off the seats and patrons indulged in acts rather more intimate than the customary necking over popcorn in the back row.
The so-called “art houses” were a lot rowdier then. At the Ritzy, ancient projectors meant that films often broke down during the changeover from reel to reel, and a member of the audience might get up and play rock‘n’roll on the clapped-out piano at the side of the stage. It was a time when London thrived culturally. Many young people found it possible to live on the dole, work at cash-in-hand jobs and spend their free time writing, painting, making Super 8 movies or, like the drag queens squatting in Railton Road in Brixton, work on the endless task of re-creating oneself.
I bumped into Angela wandering up Railton Road after the riots in 1981, delighted by the carnival spirit that prevailed in its aftermath, when the police temporarily withdrew. Raised in Balham, schooled in Streatham, taking her first job as a reporter on the Croydon Advertiser and later living in Clapham, she wasn’t just a tourist: she knew the streets of South London well. When Grace Paley came over from New York and we took her to Brixton market, Angela proudly showed her the best stalls for aki, salt fish and yams.
You can find these places in her swansong, Wise Children: Bard’s Road, where the theatrical twins Dora and Nora Chance live, is in reality Shakespeare Road, running off Railton Road, or the Frontline as Brixtonians used to call it before the squats were knocked down or tarted up. In 2008 Lambeth Council named a new street after her, Angela Carter Close – a great “Yah, boo, sucks!” (one of her favourite comebacks) to the Booker judges who never gave her the prize.
From the beginning she wrote in praise of “recycling” and her fictions deploy the tricks of pantomime and music hall, those bawdy and popular arts that gave rise to the cinema (in turn, harking back to magic lanterns, fairy tales and oral storytelling), so she was inevitably drawn to film, a bastard medium based on refashioning the work of others. It appealed to her, too, as a collective art, not reliant on some master author. She was dismissive of post-war French intellectuals who tried in their auteur theory to trash the collectivity of the Hollywood system and raise the director to the status of sole creative genius.
French cinema itself, however, was a significant influence, particularly Godard who underscored the anti-intellectualism of British culture: “When Godard quoted Hegel, Lautréamont, Fanon, we didn’t groan. We pricked up our ears.” He made her see herself differently. She was not the product of F R Leavis and the welfare state – as Carter and a generation of grammar school children had been told they were – but part of “the great international conspiracy of the disaffected”, a child of Marx and Coca-Cola, “Hitchcock, Dostoevsky, Brecht – and of pulp fiction, phenomenology and the class struggle. Heady stuff, that changes you.”
Her favourite film was Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis: “It is the definitive film about romanticism… in which it always seems possible to jump through the screen… and live there, in a state of luminous anguish.” This fantasy of crossing over – and cinema’s state of longing, its ingrained nostalgia for somewhere else – is explored in Carter’s picaresque fantasy of the New World, The Passion of New Eve, in which she charts the progress of a misogynist English man across America. Evelyn is castrated and transformed into Eve who, in turn, is impregnated by Tristessa, an ex-film star in the Garbo/Dietrich mould. As it often transpires in her fiction, the beautiful woman is a fake – Tristessa is in fact a man. “Enigma. Illusion. Woman?” Carter upbraids him/her, “And all you signified was false!”
At the centre of the book’s dark journey is the glass mausoleum to which Tristessa has retired and in which she now sits, endlessly replaying her movies, a witness to her own immortality. This labyrinthine house of mirrors is also a house of horror, a waxworks in which pale imitations of the Hollywood dead – Valentino, Harlow, Dean, Monroe – lie in transparent coffins. Carter, of course, throws stones at this glasshouse, sets it spinning and brings it shattering to the ground. But, as her friend, the critic Lorna Sage, observed, “this isn’t a straightforward piece of iconoclasm. The only way to write oneself out of the labyrinth… is to take the mirror-images seriously.” And it is, I think, as a writer who understood, and took the mirror-images seriously, long before others thought them worthy of serious attention, that Carter will be remembered.
There are more cine-fables in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, published posthumously, the collection was influenced by Robert Coover’s A Night at the Movies. These stories are like Late Show re-runs laced through Carter’s private projector, they Play It Again but off-kilter. There is a piece in praise of Jan Svankmayer’s animation of Alice in Wonderland, a wonderfully sadistic tale, ‘Gun for the Devil’, set in Mexico – it’s a tortilla rather than a spaghetti Western, and a script replaying John Ford’s Jacobean melodrama, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, as the latter-day John Ford, the director of Stagecoach, might have filmed it. Her peroration, containing Carter’s most playful writing on film, is the ‘The Merchant of Shadows’, which sees a nameless young English student living in California and writing a thesis on Heinrich Mannheim - a German émigré director who reinvented himself as Hank Mann, found work in pre-war Hollywood, only to commit suicide in the dark days of 1940.
The story begins with a disorienting anomaly. Our hero recollects when he first saw the sign announcing HOLLYWOOD-LAND and we assume the story is set in the past, because the part that says LAND has long since crumbled like old film stock and fallen into the valley below. A moment later, though, we are informed he is visiting Mann’s third wife, once a famous star, and outside her mansion is a “crap-caked Toyota”. So we must be in modern-day Los Angeles, furnished now not by the imaginations of European immigrants but by Asian hardware and finance. This time-bending trick is just one of many vertiginous moments Carter achieves through narrative twists but also by stylistic effect: the writing here is pathetic fallacy played as camp, the California landscape is flooded with cinematic meaning: ‘The ocean shushed and tittered, like an audience when the lights dim before the main feature.”
Among the pleasures of the story is the feeling of being goaded, Carter prods you on to work out the mystery. So, you think, Hank Mann is clearly not Anthony Mann, director of Westerns, more likely he’s some hybrid of Erich von Stroheim – the famously sadistic director Carter reprised in Wise Children, lover of the casting couch and “steak-eating orchids”; Josef von Sternberg – who directed Dietrich in The Blue Angel, the German precursor of endless cross-dressing turns in Hollywood; and Heinrich Mann, of course - who wrote Professor Unrat, on which that film was based, and who himself washed up in California in 1940 with what was left of Germany’s intelligentsia. (In life, the wife, not the writer, committed suicide.)
The name, Mann, announces what is hidden from the hapless lad who, blinded by scholarly earnestness, is unable to read between the lines, to see the joke, until it is literally shoved under his nose at the end of this sensationally tall tale. He suspects something is wrong. The setting of the cliff-top mansion to which he has been summoned is rampant, lush, decaying; a gin bottle floats in the obligatory Hollywood pool. Film student that he is, our hero is reminded not only that this is the very pool in which Hank Mann expired, doing “his A Star is Born bit”, but recalls ominously, the pool in Sunset Boulevard. When the star is finally wheeled out – bewigged, painted and pancaked to the hilt – he finds himself playing the role of gigolo to her impersonation of Gloria Swanson’s bitch-goddess.
Thinking back over her career he surmises, “She was no Gish, nor Brooks, nor Dietrich, nor Garbo, who all share…the ability to reveal otherness.” And perhaps he’s right. For hers is not the ethereal otherness of the film star, nor the peculiar otherness he feels under the scrutiny of his sexually ambiguous leather-loving roommate. But, still, like Red Ridinghood in ‘The Company of Wolves’, (a story Carter and Neil Jordan adapted for the screen), this innocent abroad cannot yet see “the wolf may be more than he seems”. Recklessly he passes over the one clue his research presents him with. Tracking down Mann’s second wife, once a starlet, now a dyspeptic cleaning lady, he refuses to fork out the hundred bucks she asks for a snap of the director “artfully posed” in schoolgirl uniform, on the grounds that, “it wouldn’t add much to the history of film.”
He is wrong, of course, spectacularly so, for as it turns out, Mann hasn’t died, just moved on, and his taste for transfiguration - revealed in the photograph - gives the clue. Like Garbo, Mann’s third wife has backed out of the limelight, wearying of playing the goddess (she appears now in the role of sidekick, weirdly omni-sexual, a lumberjack in a bandana), so it is left to Mann to perform the star turn: “having made her,” Carter tells us, “he then became her, became a better she than she herself had ever been”.
There was a sign secreted in the script: the young man describes his meeting at the mansion as a “tryst”, betraying for the knowing reader that this is to be another tale of Tristessa, of transforming movie stars. It was not just that Carter was well-versed in Hollywood’s famously camp moments: Garbo epitomising androgynous beauty in Queen Christina; Hepburn hamming it up as a travelling transvestite in Sylvia Scarlett; Dietrich in top hat and tails flirting with the girls in Morocco and Blonde Venus. The point she makes here is that Hollywood brought about the final denaturing of femininity in Western civilization’s because its eroticism was built upon the allure of the fake. The movie stars who inspired Tristessa were so manifestly queens of artifice, creatures of dream and design, they flaunted an idea only previously rumoured in books - that femininity itself was a drag act.
What would Carter make today of Della Grace’s self-portraits, with her breasts and moustache; Cindy Sherman in her various (dis)guises from slut to Ancient Master; the half-stripped, half-swaddled creations of Alexander McQueen and Lady Gaga; or the androgynous beauty of Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto or Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry? No doubt she’d have some new angle on it all, but as one obituarist lamented: “She will never have the chance to shock us at 70.” She is not here to deliver her smart commentaries, so we must do the best we can by continuing to read this most undeceived of writers, attending to her iconoclasm, wit and wild imagination.
This is an extended version of a tribute to Angela Carter that appeared on 3.5.2010 in the Daily Telegraph and on the paper’s website as ‘Angela Carter Remembered‘.
Tonight the BBC is airing the first of a trio of dramas about the murder of five women in Ipswich in the winter of 2006. Some of the victim’s families assisted the production, hoping to redress the portraits of their daughters that appeared in the press at the time. Others have questioned the wisdom of dramatising events already so sensationally reported by the media. During the trial, the Queen’s Counsel, Peter Wright, described how the women were killed, stripped and dumped in out of the way places. The third and fourth victims, Wright told the court, were also “posed in a cruciform shape”. Looking for headlines, journalists seized on these remarks and soon just about every report included that word, “cruciform”. The effect was titillating, but few seemed interested in speculating on the source of the word’s power or its underlying meaning.
However well-intentioned the BBC dramas, I doubt there’ll be much in these renderings – beyond emphasising the women’s drug addiction as the cause of their vulnerability, driving them onto the streets - that adds to our understanding of what happened. For that, I suggest taking a step back from the events and looking at a book published over forty years ago, Angela Carter’s debut, Shadow Dance, in which she exhumes the plot of the crucified woman or martyred girl, in order, finally, to lay it to rest. In the novel a young woman is found dead in a derelict house. She, too, has been undressed, murdered and laid out in the form of a crucifix. Carter’s purpose in writing was the opposite of sensationalism: what she wanted, was to defuse those myths and mystifications holding us in their grip, particularly the narrative of Christian martyrdom.
She did not, of course, in any sense ‘foresee’ the Ipswich murders, but Carter grasped what an endlessly repeating scenario, what recurrent violence taking age-old forms, might tell us: just how deeply embedded and affective some stories are. This explains the coincidence of her narrative with these real murders many years later. And it explains, too, the particular feeling of nausea they engendered. What happened in Ipswich, after all, can hardly be considered an isolated incident. Indeed, when I think back it seems much of my adult life has been accompanied by similar headlines: somewhere on the edge of town a man is killing women. Just a few years before the deaths in Ipswich, two girls working the streets – they were 16 and 22 – were murdered in Norwich about a mile from where I was living. Further back still, I recall how visits to my sister in Leeds were over-shadowed by the knowledge that another killer was at large (the man was Peter Sutcliffe), his threat close-by, especially at night when we walked to the pub across an unlit park.
And here was the feeling again: we are caught in a nightmare and can’t wake up. The Ipswich murders were as familiar to us as a grim fairy tale. We knew all too well the lone wolf (a truck driver); the isolated path (“disused stretches of trunk roads”); and the victim, Little Red (prostitutes, drug addicts, the young). We also knew, from the outset, how the story would end: badly. For women, even forty years on from the sexual revolution, what this latest in a long line of chilling re-enactments tells us, is that it is still going to end badly. And for that reason, accompanying the horror is incredulity: why are women, even today, trapped in these same dead-end plots?
In the early Sixties, Carter, then a young woman, was living as a student in a rundown area of Bristol. This “provincial bohemia” provided the setting for Shadow Dance. For all its permissiveness, however, she felt unfree (she later wrote about how tricky bohemia can be for women), so Carter plotted to desert her husband and escape – running, eventually, as far as Japan. One factor in her flight was the behaviour of women around her, in her notebooks she wrote that she was sick to death of the female victim. To counter this, she developed a different strategy, a flight of fancy, in which she would nail and then eliminate the victim. She executed her plan in a novel incandescent with anger at the waste of women’s lives. “Never again. Never”, Carter declared in Shadow Dance.
When faced with a news ‘story’ such as the Ipswich killings we find it hard to react, it leaves us stunned and ashamed, we turn away. The repetition of that word “cruciform”, the descriptions of the state of the women’s bodies, the effect is to frighten us out of our wits. Reading Carter, I’d suggest, can return us to our senses and help us think more coolly about these unthinkable things. It may be vulgar to read from imaginary lives and deaths the meaning contained in real ones. But the alternative to contemplating what happened, and finding new ways to think about it, is not to. And that pretty much leaves us back at the beginning, uncomprehending, in an endlessly replaying story of victim and beast.
It was this feeling of being stuck in a rehashed, but lethal tale, where the meanings are played-out, the symbols used up, that led Carter to write Shadow Dance, a novel in which nothing is original and life is constantly “imitating rotten old art”. She was, of course, not alone in her disenchantment with postwar Britain, the sense of living in aftermath - a whole generation felt the need to break the mould and begin again. And in Shadow Dance this is precisely what Carter attempts: to rescue her readers from a moribund story. It is the power of this story over her characters, not just their seamy living conditions, that keeps them so bowed down and explains their nostalgic, sepia-tinted world.
There is guilt-ridden Morris who looks like an “an El Greco Christ”, an impotent junk man fit only for scavenging in the past; Pre-Raphaelite Edna, his endlessly suffering and, hence, insufferable wife, who longs for kiddies or kitties or something to fill the void; and a whole chorus of disapproval, bit-part players whose tenuous identities threaten at any moment to harden into a mob. But worst of the lot is Ghislaine, once the neighbourhood’s baby doll, now sporting the “disgusting” flesh of a Francis Bacon. We find her, in the beginning, a young, promiscuous girl out on the town, haunting pubs and parks, hooking up with any man who’ll have her; insatiable and unstoppable, even after she has been raped and knifed and left in the bushes to die.
The assault on Ghislaine is the result of an unholy pact between Morris and his alter-ego, Honeybuzzard: too much of a coward to act on his own behalf, one night Morris dares his comrade and shadow-self to “teach her a lesson”. But though Honey is happy to oblige, killing her off will not prove easy. Because the girl in Carter’s story has been around a long time: that is the point. We know her of old, this undead Lolita, all curls and smiles, sugar and ice-cream. Here she comes, the embarrassing Bride of Frankenstein; and here she is again, Dracula’s nauseating wife. By the end, however, Carter has achieved her objective: Ghislaine is written, terminally, out of the script, crucified on trestle tables in the basement of an abandoned house, dead as a doornail. This, after all, is what the girl had been asking for: as Honeybuzzard brags, the lamb was begging to be slaughtered.
Here, Carter takes a leaf out of Jane Eyre (where Bronte cut her hero down to size, laming, burning, amputating and blinding him), but goes one further: she cuts her ‘heroine’ right out of the plot, finishes her off once and for all so that this masquerade of femininity, this embodiment of bad faith will no longer be available for further use. Or that was the idea, the brutal lesson Carter was trying to teach us. But the similarity to these recent murders, Carter’s anticipation of their grisly fate, suggests very little has been learned.
Precisely because it is a rotten plot – then as now – we should not be fooled into thinking there is anything uncanny in the way Carter, forty years before the event, imagined real deaths. She understood exactly what she was doing, and continued to do throughout her writing life: exploring the deadening impact of well-worn narratives (be they myths, tales, or religious stories) upon poor readers: those who are credulous or those who fail to recognise the plot in which they are caught up.
From the outset, Carter took as her subject the intimate relation of the material and the imaginary. As a feminist she said she was not so worried about the effects of the way women were represented, even in pornography, but thought much more important the conditions of women’s lives: equal pay, access to contraception and abortion, racism, these were the things that needed to change. As a writer what she tells us is that the disconnect between the imaginary and the real can be lethal.
Time and again she shows how the images, characters and stories that make up the ‘shadow’ world cannot be consigned to a separate sphere, but are present and busily at work even in our daily bread, kitchen sink lives. If we fail to recognise these shadows, we will be prey not only to the consolatory fictions that subdue and distort us, but also to those patriarchal superstitions that are, quite literally, out to get us. It is not by accident that Ghislaine is the daughter of a clergyman.
So Carter’s project for Year One was to wake up her audience to the archetypal stories that programme our lives. She wanted us to stop treating the products of our imagination as if they had nothing to do with us, as if they – God forbid! – came from another world. She thought it was only by taking responsibility for their meaning (the monstrous things that gods and monsters do), that we could begin to understand ourselves. And start, if needs be, to re-write the script.
It is not just the plot of her novel that finds an echo in what happened in Ipswich, there are also character resemblances. Peter Wright, the QC, said the murderer was a divided man, killing when his girlfriend worked the nightshift, stopping when she was sick at home, and resuming when she got better. In Shadow Dance, Morris and Honey also function like a split personality, one that Carter tries to sew back together, where Morris inhabits the ‘real’ world – the inexorable domestic daytime; and Honey, the ‘shadow’ – the brilliant insane night.
Honeybuzzard is brother, mirror and id to Morris. He is devoid of guilt and unrestrained by history or feeling. But in his madness there is a kind of truth: his freedom to endlessly recreate himself, his dressing-up box clothes, his wigs and false nose, his greedily swinging sexuality all give the lie to what Carter was later to identify in a review of Christina Stead’s work, as the “socially determined fiction” of the “private self”. We contain multitudes Honey reminds us, and the past is dead, so why not play around in it: “be somebody different each morning. Me and not-me…have a cupboard bulging with all different bodies and faces…”
It is this realisation, finally, that helps Morris to throw off his blanket of Christian guilt, and act. Action doesn’t make him authentic, of course, turning him into that ‘autonomous bourgeois individual’ queried by Carter, but with Honey’s example before him, he sees he can at least slip out of his straight-jacket and into someone else’s shoes. Throughout, Morris’s refrain has been, “How could I be so thoughtless?” He says this to his wife with her perpetual, admonishing headache, but he also says it because he is quite literally thoughtless, unable to grasp the narratives in which his life abounds.
By the end, though, Morris has learned this much: he can make myth work for him. Wondering, “am I brave enough to walk into the ruins?”, he adopts the mantle of Orpheus to help him descend into the underworld-basement where Ghislaine lies murdered, in order to retrieve his Honey-Eurydice. As Carter faced her fears in this book (the eternal female victim), so Morris must look the fearful Honeybuzzard in the eye and find out what he has goaded into existence, discover the full extent of what has been done in his name.
If there is something important to be learned from the freeform Honey (a descendent of Milton’s Satan if ever I saw one), the character in Shadow Dance with the greatest potential (precisely because she is without antecedence), is his girlfriend, the pragmatic and insouciant Emily. She is the novel’s news from nowhere, arriving as if without gestation or fingerprints, her only baggage a self-cleaning cat. Self-possessed and prepossessing, Emily is the first of Carter’s New Women, and if there is something odd and unnatural about her, then her unheimlich disposition has the exact opposite meaning to Ghislaine’s.
Where Ghislaine is ghastly, ghostly, and embarrassingly blatant – stuffed with ready-made meaning, Emily is uncoded and mysterious, calling to mind a surrealist painting, a big empty room with as yet very little furniture in it. Indeed, if she hails at all from the house of fiction then the contents have all been swept away: Emily’s form may be recognisable – the innocent in peril – but her reactions are entirely novel. This means when Honey’s side-show stops amusing, becoming savage and ghoulish, she reacts promptly but without alarm: scrubbing the house, showering herself down, and building a bonfire of his fetishes and curiosities (foetuses in jam-jars). Having abandoned him with no more thought than last season’s coat, she is emotionally emptied, licked clean as her cat and ready to move on; without any sign of psychic damage, “Her affections [a]re to let again.”
Emily is also connected to the canny grannies of Carter’s later fiction, not wise (that is for children only), but equipped with street smarts and a puncturing common sense. When Morris, aghast at Honey’s macabre activities, feels they have “fallen through a hole in time into a dimension of pure horror”, Emily thinks, “so what ?” So what if she’s carrying a murderer’s baby? It’s hers, not his, and she will love it without foreboding.
Emily’s ability to remain splendidly unfazed by the shadows engulfing her is helped by her ability to read her surroundings. She picks out the resemblance between the colourful Honeybuzzard and Bluebeard, sensing that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. It’s a theme Carter returns to again and again, perhaps nowhere more effectively than in her rewriting of the Bluebeard tale, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, where her ingénue protagonist must confront her husband’s library of cruelty, his pornographic “prayerbooks”, if she is to escape the fate of his earlier wives, all of them entombed in his torture chamber. The key to this hell – and to her survival of it – is that she become a good reader.
It is a skill Carter is keen for everyone to acquire, but the women in her audience most particularly. Because for us, taking the imaginary seriously, she thinks, knowing or not knowing where the story comes from, how it ends and what it means – all this may be a matter of life and death. “I have learned my lesson, master”, Ghislaine announces when she prostrates herself before Honey. (Another nod to Jane Eyre who, Carter noted, for all her bird-talk of flight and freedom, addresses Rochester “habitually, in masochistic ecstasy” as “my Master”.) But Ghislaine, the ultimate femme fatale, has learned nothing. Without a thought to call her own, she knows only this: how lethal it is to be a woman and how much she wants to die.
So what is the link between Ghislaine-the-Victim, laid out on a makeshift cross, and the Ipswich women, “posed in cruciform”? The answer, perhaps, can be found in one of Carter’s last pieces of work, The Holy Family Album, a short film scripted for Channel Four not long before her own premature death in 1992. Using a collage of art devoted to Christ’s life and death by crucifixion, Carter launched an attack on the dysfunctional Holy family asking, what kind of a father does that to his son?
In God’s book, the Bible, it is a man who is crucified, who must be seen to suffer for the sins of the world. But in Carter’s, she argues, while men like Morris enact parodies of filial obedience, clinging to the past to avoid the trouble of making the future, in our society it is women who are made to pay, and who, because they carry the imprint of centuries of powerlessness, are most susceptible to the drama of martyrdom.
Perhaps this is why, although women have achieved greater freedom since Carter wrote Shadow Dance, the spectacle of female anguish shows no sign of abating. And why the Ipswich murders present such thorny questions: do we, in fact, judge these to be the actions of an isolated, violent individual, or part of a broader, on-going story? And if the latter, how much responsibility do we bear collectively for what happened? Because the more visible power women gain (the closer we get to the Oval Office), it seems, the more ubiquitous is the story of the woman in pain.
It has got to the point now where it is the one we tell ourselves most consistently, infecting all forms of public discourse: the endless parade of Dianas and Britneys and Amys – all the hounded young women heading for destruction, and all of them so poorly equipped to turn the plot around. (As Amy sings, ruefully, “I didn’t get a lot in class”.) I just wonder what impact this daily resurrection of female suffering has on the people exposed to it, on the runaway girls, on the violent men, on all of us reading and hearing it, come to that. Perhaps the very least we can do in memory of those five young Ipswich women is, as Carter demanded in Shadow Dance, stop telling ourselves this lacerating story.
In her later fiction, when she had worked her way through some of her anger at the violence done to women – and the harm, in turn, we do to ourselves (though it never entirely went away: “I understand why men hate women and they are right, yes, right” she told her friend, Lorna Sage), more and more of Carter’s characters are equipped for the journey, able to recognise the world’s plots and save themselves from them by putting their reading too good use.
In Nights at the Circus an understanding of Frances Yates helps Fevvers escape the clutches of a ‘collector’ hell-bent on achieving immortality through her death; and in Wise Children, Tiffany, sensing herself slide towards Ophelia’s watery end, picks herself up and runs off in the opposite direction. So by her last book, perhaps what is most characteristic in Carter’s writing is this: women reading their way out of trouble by recognising well-trodden plots and refusing to go down them.
I am not, of course, trying to suggest anything as crass as: if the Ipswich women had opened a book by Carter they would now be alive. But I do think reading her carefully can help the rest of us go some way to comprehending deaths the press reported as ”beyond understanding”. Carter makes a truer guide, her writing, in the end, is designed to help and works like a talisman. As Margaret Atwood saw, she is the one bestowing the “magic token you need to get through the dark forest.”
June 26th – July 2nd. This year’s writer at the festival will be Vikram Seth. The programme can be found here.
Take a glance at the Seattle Times website and you quickly come across news of the Tea Party’s activities in the city – the leaderless, refusenik movement whose adherents call for the overthrow of a government run, so they argue, by “unaccountable and self-serving elites”. The campaign has grown rapidly because people jolted into action by “economic distress”, have made common cause with other disgruntled Americans in a coalition of the hard-pressed and hard done-by: “If you don’t trust the…people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore.” So Tea Party “activists” have built online communities, disseminating the ideas of writers and economists – Buckley, Sowell, Hayek and Rand – whose facts accord more closely with their values.
One example is a Facebook site, The Seattle Sons and Daughters of Liberty (376 members) run by ‘Liberty Belle’, a Seattle teacher and one of the movement’s founders. She calls upon today’s dissenters to have the courage of their revolutionary forebears in the struggle against Obama and his kind, who are leading the nation “down the road to serfdom”. In the name of liberty, freedom and patriotism, she invites Tea Party volunteers to fight for the “free market” and against any signs of “collectivist mentality”.
If the talk today is of free markets, one hundred years ago it was of free people. Then the Seattle Times filed reports of another grass-roots movement with revolution in its sights, one that also believed government was in the grip of a powerful coterie – robber barons – who kept ordinary people in a state of serfdom and “economic distress” hardly imaginable by today’s standards. They, too, set up communities. Between 1897 and 1915 thousands moved to utopian colonies around Seattle, with names like Equality, Freeland – run by ‘Rochdalers’, followers of the English co-operative movement – and Home (the longest-lasting and most unconventional: some of its Russian and Swedish members were jailed for advocating free love and nude swimming).
Those without the wherewithal to find their way to the colonies established communities right where they stood: in makeshift shop-fronts on skid roads (“skidding” logs from the forest to the waterfront), the International Workers of the World (IWW) set up halls where the homeless and jobless could find a bowl of stew, a flop for the night, shelves of radical literature, and plenty of fighting talk. And because these were idealists, concerned not just with material deprivation, but “the sickness of heart of people”, the colonies and many of the unions or halls produced newspapers or journals, carrying news of resistance, but also ideas for transforming the world. With titles like Spirit of 76, Agitator, Discontent, Barbarian, The Call, Industrial Freedom, Wage Worker (“the only 3-color ‘roughneck’ revolutionary monthly on earth!”), Appeal to Reason, Voice of the People, Revolution, Justice, Freedom and The Truth, there were scores of them in Washington State alone.
The IWW (the Wobblies, as they were affectionately known), were founded in 1905 by Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood. Debs was a leader of the Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth (“The Kingdom of Heaven Here and Now” was the demand on their masthead), that launched many of the colonies, but he soon saw progress would not be made by isolating workers from the industrial market. Their example, however, helped to shape the IWW’s syndicalism. The Wobblies, as the colonies had, disavowed the politics of the ballot-box. Unlike them, they did not isolate workers in utopian groups, but connected them in solidarity, deploying only the immediate power that lay in their hands: the power to strike.
For the first two decades of the twentieth century the Wobblies, in a loose coalition with socialists and anarchists, union men and women, journalists and lawyers with a heart or a conscience, all fought to improve the meagre conditions of life for manual workers, many of them migratory ‘bindlestiffs’, who hired out where they could up and down the coast, hopping freights and carrying their possessions in bindles (blankets), as the companies provided only bare ground or cots for them to sleep on.
The fight was strongest in the lumber mills and shipyards of Washington state where men of steel and wood waged a series of strikes, go-slows, and works-to-rule that eventually brought down the working day from twelve to eight hours, cleared out the job sharks charging men to work and, finally, abolished the hated bindles, forcing companies to provide bedding, and in some instances, unchain the tin plates and cutlery from the benches where they ate. Bindles were replaced by cardboard suitcases in which a man could carry something other than his stiff and stinking overalls – a suit and shoes fit for civil company. Their ongoing rebellion culminated in the Seattle general strike of 1919 when for five days the city held its breath and workers imagined a different kind of world.
Harvey O’Connor was a journalist known for his books on America’s business dynasties, (the Mellons, Astors and Vanderbilts), and on the oil and steel industry. But he started out on worker-produced broadsheets like The Call where he swept the office, learned to pour lead for the moulds, and later, “the knack of writing news stories”, eventually, reluctantly, taking the helm (“It was the editor who took the rap when the police asked for the person in charge”). Revolution in Seattle was written during McCarthy’s reign of terror (which is why many of the testimonials are anonymous), and looks back to an already forgotten period of activism that ended in the Twenties, when a combination of recession, repression, and a failure to marry homegrown radicalism with European Marxism all but kicked the life out of it.
There was no revolution in Seattle, but from O’Connor’s pen you get a sense of revolutionary possibility that hovered briefly in the air, when many saw for the first time their fates need not be sealed in drudgery. More than the temerity of the strike itself, it was the demonstration that workers could run a city (milk was delivered to mothers, clean linen provided to hospitals, garbage cleared, and improvised workers canteens fed the people) that so enraged the business class and its press, already threatened by events in Russia.
When the strike unravelled, reaction was brutal and swift: radicals and unionists were rounded up across the territory. “Terrorise the American Bolshevik!”, the Seattle Times demanded; while the Business Chronicle incited its readers to “put to death the leaders in this gigantic conspiracy of murder, pillage and revolution.” In Centralia, south of Seattle, Wobblies defending their hall in the face of an attack by the American Legion were sentenced to thirty years in prison. Awaiting trial, Wesley Everest was sprung from jail by vigilantes who castrated and lynched him before dumping his body back on the jailhouse floor: a warning to other defendants.
Why read a book written half a century ago about a period, O’Connor admits, that already seemed remote? At a time of increasing historical deafness – “the United States of Amnesia”, Gore Vidal calls his country – it is important to listen to the voices of the men and women who fought and in some cases died for the freedoms we take for granted. Today moreover, a lack of interest in the past means there is a paucity of connecting literature making the moment live again and speak to now. A few disparate works come to mind: Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting, linking the struggles of labour history to those of a globalised workforce; Frances Fitzgerald’s Cities on a Hill, recounting the history of utopias in America; and John Sayles’s film Matewan, about attempts in 1920 to unionise miners. But perhaps the work that comes closest to O’Connor’s world, the one most imaginatively realised, is Michael Ondaatje’s lyrical novel, In The Skin of a Lion, that tells how those “foot-loose rebels” – railroaders, loggers and miners – moved into the cities of North America, encountered immigrants with new customs and ideas and, against the bosses and agents provocateur, and despite the threat of jail or deportation, began unionising.
This is the original version of a review that appeared in Tribune, April 16-22, 2010, pp. 24-5, it was posted on Tribune‘s website on April 17 2010.
John Calder: A Hero for Art
Cross over the road from the Young Vic, walk east along The Cut for one hundred yards and you arrive at The Bookshop Theatre, an unassuming place, easy to pass by without noticing. But venture inside one Thursday evening and you’ll find something truly heroic going on. At the front there’s a sparsely furnished bookshop, step into the back and you are confronted with a small curtained stage. Tonight the publisher John Calder and the actor John McManus sit at a table under a couple of blond spots, shuffling papers, while the plastic seats lined up in rows before them slowly fill up.
By seven o’clock there are twenty-one people in the audience, only three of whom, I’d guess, are under fifty. We’ve come for a talk on Eugene Jolas (1995-1951) - Joyce’s great friend and encourager, and editor of what Calder thinks was “the most important literary magazine of the last century”, transition, in which instalments of Finnegans Wake first appeared. It’s a unique event, a cross between a literary salon and the kind of ‘educationals’ socialist parties used to run in upstairs pub rooms, and it’s conducted not as part of the literary circuit where writers charge the public to listen to advertisements for their latest publication, but simply in the name of intellectual curiosity.
McManus reads first from Jolas’s essays on the agonies and ecstasies of Finnegans Wake’s 15 year progress – on the book’s “great destruction of the word and the new, undreamed of possibilities of expression” this gave rise to, emphasising particularly the humour of Joyce’s “insurgent mind”. Then there’s a memoir written shortly after Joyce’s death in 1941, containing some of warmest biographical writing that exists on the great Dubliner, full of lively portraits of Joyce: walking in the dusk, “grape-happy”; teaching himself Finnish, Russian and Japanese; responding to Karl Radek’s accusation that Ulysses “was without social conscience”, by pointing out that all his writing was about lower or working class people.
The audience are a friendly, erudite bunch, many of whom offer up their own anecdotes about the Joyce family, snippets of information about his supporters in Paris and Trieste, or speculation about the banning and neglect of Ulysses: in the Fifties Bodley Head were selling less than 100 copies a year in England, and right up to the end of the Sixties it was only available in 3 or 4 Dublin bookshops, under the counter; the Times obituary called Joyce “a talented man who wasted his talent on cheap pornography”. One man recalls that his father ran into Joyce’s sister on the Dublin street, she told him about the difficulties of keeping goats in the middle of the city and lamented her brother’s unprofitable literary career: “Poor Jimmy, if he’d worked hard he could have been editor of the Evening Post”.
Calder used to run the bookshop himself and much of its stock comes from his unrivalled imprint which published Beckett and the leading lights of the Nouveau Roman - Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Duras, Pinget, Mauriac and Queneau’s ingenious Exercises in Style (inspired by Bach’s The Art Of Fugue) - as well as banned writers such as Henry Miller and Hugh Selby Jnr, many of whom were friends. There is also a fine selection of Opera Guides: until recently, it is rumoured, Calder attended every opening night in Europe. Over the past few years he’s gathered a pool of dedicated actors – the Godot Company – and the good news is that some of these will be taking over the performances, as well as injecting some cash and energy into the daily running of the shop. So if you have nothing better to do next Thursday, why not stroll up to Waterloo for an evening spent in the company of John Calder, listening to The Prose and Poetry of Baudelaire? The curtain goes up at 7 o’clock.
John Calder – River Deben, Suffolk, 1995
Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch – Observer
Writerly ambition can take many forms. Martin Amis took on nuclear war, Stalin, and the Nazis – running them backwards for good measure. Nabokov famously impersonated a paedophile. In his first novel, Victor Lodato, who has previously written as a dramatist, pretends to be an adolescent girl, just shy of her first period. There has been some squeamishness from American critics concerned about a middle-aged man inhabiting the mind and body of a female child, but this, after all, is the job of fiction, (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”): what matters is not what, or who, you do, but how well, and to what end.
Mathilda is a startlingly successful invention: intellectually innovative and oblique – as only the young can be – pumped with resolve (“put on your goddamned walking boots!”), ludic and unremitting. There have been a tranche of juvenile leads in fiction of late, but Lodato departs from these by reaching beyond the mere showing-off of ventriloquism, connecting his heroine’s pubescent storminess to America’s endless adolescence. On the first anniversary of her sister’s death there is another terrorist attack and she is left to battle for the meaning of personal tragedy in a country already consumed by death. As her mother retreats into pain, becoming animal-like in her home-made “cave”, Mathilda is left alone – the word spelled backwards, this wise child notes, is Enola, the name of the original plane with a bomb in its belly.
If the novel has a weakness, it is Lodato’s tendency to over-press his themes: Blakean contraries, the animal-human and textual self-consciousness might all have been more effective if less hammered out. Lodato, for instance, is not above peeping out from behind Mathilda and winking at the audience. This is not just a question of bad manners, making jokes your narrator isn’t in on, but bad faith, breaking the covenant with your character. And in a book which relies on the plausibility of voice, it’s a dangerous game to play, risking alienating the reader. Having said that, his version of the story as a trap in which a character senses they are being ‘Watched’ is one of the freshest since Vonnegut’s in Slaughterhouse Five, whose ideas about childhood and death, Lodato surely owes a debt to.
The story, which skims along so satisfyingly, powered by Mathilda’s determination to reach the truth about her sister’s death, drops like a stone in its final pages. And Lodato, ever-aware of what he is doing, wonders if the ‘Watchers’ will be dissatisfied with the outcome. He leaves off with the demand that attention be paid to this battling child: “watch me, okay?” This time, however, he is in good faith, unwilling to furnish a consolatory conclusion. The final injunction to “stop, will you stop?” is both a request to Mathilda to let go of her sister’s death and to the author to leave her be.
Versions of this review appeared on Bookmunch on 10.12.2009; and in the Observer on 14.3.2010.
Enola Gay, 1945; Mathilda Savitch, 2009
Rainer and Odets: Honeymoon in Mexico
Luise Rainer lit up the National Theatre last night, wearing her 100 years lightly, and still in command of herself, her host, Christopher Frayling (who struggled to get a word in edgeways), and her delighted audience.
The two of them came gliding into view, carried by the Olivier’s rotating stage. Rainer - dressed in trousers, silver skull cap, and eyebrows arched to the heavens - was effortlessly elegant, still resembling the lively young figure we saw in clips from her two Oscar winning performances. Watching her in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) as she sighed, “I’m too tired to go anywhere, to do anything”, it struck me there is nothing in today’s cinema resembling the enervation that actresses of this period went in for, nor the gusts of gaiety which often followed. It was something Rainer excelled at: the shift from introspection to animation, and the determination to cast off gloom, “to be be be be be be be be zholly!”, as she sings in Ziegfeld, however great the effort.
This style, and stylishness, went out of fashion with the advent of naturalism: to many critics now Rainer seems a highly mannered actress. But it is her manner – lofty one minute, impish the next – that makes her such a winning speaker. It’s true, there’s not much new material on offer, though in a long life so endlessly rehearsed, novelty is hardly what you’d expect. The questions don’t help much but she does what she can with them. So, has she any advice for the young actor? “Live, and look around, be observant.” A philosophy of life? “Keep up your humour.”
And she gamely gives us glimpses of some of the greats: Max Reinhardt – “a wonderful person. He had an aura around him. When I say an aura, there was a certain part where you didn’t want to step in…he was absolutely special, what I call an aristocrat”. Brecht – a great writer, but “I came to know Brecht. I did not like him.” And the actors, Salka Viertel – “always had a big group around her…a great circle of interesting and intelligent people”; Garbo “was wonderful, she was beautiful”; “Spencer Tracy was a dear”; and Paul Muni, who she worked alongside in The Good Earth – “He had a very different approach to acting. Everything had to be exactly in place. He came to the set in the morning and said, the door must be here. And I always felt very different. If the ceiling would have fallen on my head, I wouldn’t have cared.”
Finally, when one ungallant gentleman asked her about her wedding night with Clifford Odets, the impertinence of the question, and the audience gasps, provoked a sudden recollection: “It was very simple: Odets worked at night. He started his writing every night and he slept in the day. And we drove down to Mexico and he went by his routine. The night was his – so he wrote. And I was alone in that hotel. And there was a group of dwarves. And they did the Conga – all little men and women. And they looked at me and said, [pointing to one little woman]: Doesn’t she look like you? I spent the night with dwarves, and Clifford was writing in his room. I went out to the nearby ocean and walked there. From far away Clifford came towards me and I jumped into his arms! And then he went away and I was left there – flat.”
Storm Jameson, Love in Winter – TLS
Storm Jameson’s first trilogy was based on her Whitby ship-building family, ruled by Mary Hervey, a Victorian battle-axe possessed of great self-assurance and – unusual for a woman of the time - power. Her second, Mirror in the Darkness, places her stormy granddaughter centre stage, but as part of the generation who have come through the barbarism of the First World War, the younger Hervey is a more ambivalent figure. With many of the men she encounters wounded in war – and now wary of manhood – she struggles to make sense of her life as a woman and writer.
In Love in Winter, the middle part of this later trilogy (Jameson wrote an astonishing 45 novels) Hervey is in awe of her grandmother, who “would have gone to prison rather than hold her tongue”, but tells herself that to capture the man she desires, she must be quiet, “hoping that if she kept still he would not notice anything”. She is equally divided between pride in her family’s business and the knowledge that its drive to power has led to the disasters of war, imperialism, and a humiliated workforce.
Love in Winter, like most of Jameson’s writing, a self-descriptive work, was published in 1935 but looks back to an earlier self in the Twenties. There is a reflexiveness caused by this autobiographical time-lag (complicated further for those who have read her parallel memoir, Journey from the North, or later novels featuring Hervey), but this is managed without textual irony or vertiginy. Like Jameson, Hervey wants to write unfussy prose, and of the kind Engels prescribed, achieving realism by presenting a world in total. So the novel’s large, improbably connected cast links Hervey to bankers, businessmen, politicians, writers, scientists, union representatives and factory workers, as well as the destitute and children living in infested basements.
Even more ambitiously, Jameson extends Engels’s ‘whole picture’ to the realm of the individual: Hervey aims to “record every item in the tale of mistakes, joys, cruelties, and simple meannesses that make up our dealings with one another, then to write down the total…” And Love in Winter does achieve a global portrait of sorts, one produced by accumulation of information and honesty to the truth of the matter – as far as the narrator can tell it, which is not entirely – so there are blind spots, oddnesses, middling feelings, and a sense of life happening rather than narrative racing forward to a pre-determined end.
This review appeared in the TLS on 29.1.2010.
Storm Jameson, c.1934
Willie Mitchell: “Music all the Way”
Just heard on Radio Four’s Last Word that Willie Mitchell has died in Memphis. Producer, arranger, trumpet player – Mitchell produced Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Anne Peebles, two of the stirring voices that emerged with soul music and the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, though neither found the audience they deserved. He’s better known for his ‘discovery’ of Al Green – lopping the ‘e’ of the end of his name, chopping his Afro and teaching him to sound “like himself”, rather than aping Sam Cooke or Wilson Pickett – and was responsible for many of the Reverend’s songs, including ‘Let’s Stay Together’, ‘Tired Of Being Alone’ and ’Take Me to the River’.
Born in Mississippi in 1928, Mitchell moved to Memphis when he was two and grew up there imbibing the music of Jazz royalty - the Count, the Duke and the Lady. Eschewing Stax and Motown, but part of the same black entrepreneurial tradition, he joined Hi Records and bought a derelict cinema, The Royal, turning it into a recording studio where he worked his magic over the next forty years. Mitchell’s grandson said he “was doing music all the way till he couldn’t”, and up to three weeks ago he was still working on Solomon Burke’s new album. Burke remembers his first encounter with this “cool-looking guy”, constantly combing his hair back and showing off his ‘lucky jacket’: “I aint gonna take this off” Mitchell told him, “till we get a hit!”
There are many tracks that demonstrate Mitchell’s skill as an arranger, most obviously, the atmospheric introduction to Anne Peebles’s ‘I Cant Stand the Rain’, capturing the sound of water droppping on a window. But my favourite Mitchell production is of Peebles’s cooly understated performance of an Eric Randle song from 1972, ‘I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down’ - a domestic drama, it’s one of the great expressions in song of female revenge: “You’ve been playing madly/With every mind in town./So what you gonna do when you look up one day/and see your playhouse tumbling down?/I’m gonna’ tear your playhouse down, room by room”!
Willie Mitchell
Hollywood on Thames: Luise Rainer, 100
Luise Rainer, possibly the last survivor of ‘classical’ Hollywood living in London, is 100 years old today. Famed for her watering eyes (she was known as ‘the Viennese teardrop’), and cheek bones remarkable even by the standards of Hollywood where actresses extracted their back molars to achieve the look, she was an extraordinarily well-connected figure who brushed up against many of the great lives of the twentieth century.
As a German Jew in Thirties Hollywood, (the studios pretended she was Austrian), she took the long view, rejecting attempts to pigeon-hole her in the kind of sentimental parts the boss at MGM felt best suited his women stars. When she baulked at these, demanding strong roles such as Madame Curie or Nora in The Doll’s House, Louis B. Mayer threatened to end her career. She was not cowed by his bullying, though, coolly predicting she would outlast him: “You are now 60 and I am 20”, she told the astonished Mayer, “When I am 40, the age of a successful actress, you will be dead and I will live!”
These defiant words pretty much ended her Hollywood career. Only a few years earlier she had become the first actor to win consecutive Oscars in two very different roles that showed her range. Both were portraits of female nobility, the first as a spurned common-law wife in The Great Ziefeld in 1936 (it was the famous tearful telephone scene that earned her that nickname and took her into America’s sentimental heart), and in the following year in Irving Thalberg’s last production, as a stoical Chinese peasant in an adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. This performance is often dismissed now as ‘yellow-face’ acting, but Rainer was admired in her day by critics as discerning as Graham Greene and James Agee for being so affecting. In 1938 the studio married her off again – in The Toy Wife, and then as Strauss’s wife in The Great Waltz, before she gave up and walked away (there was a brief return for Hostages in 1943, but basically it was over).
The record books record Rainer’s Oscar double, but in popular culture it is her renunciation that is remembered – and held up as a warning. In Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a Hollywood agent remarks, “when you walk out on a thing like that, you don’t walk back. Ask Luise Rainer. And Rainer was a star.” While both Raymond Chandler’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s wives are said to have used her example to caution their husbands against Oscar hubris. Rainer herself said simply, “Nothing worse could have happened to me”.
But she was more in control of the script of her life than this might imply. Her existence, post-Hollywood is routinely discounted – like Louise Brooks’s, another Hollywood refusenik – as mere afterlife, or posthumous failure. But in 1950, the year she finally reached “the age of a successful actress”, Rainer appeared in precisely the kind of serious role she had envisaged for herself, playing Nina in a BBC production of The Seagull. The setting was perhaps less grand, but glamour had never interested her: she used one Oscar as a doorstop before giving it away to a removal man.
Rainer had, after all, begun her career as a serious stage actress in Ibsen, Shakespeare and Pirandello, joining Max Reinhardt’s legendary theatre in Berlin. His expressionist style, and the support of an ensemble, suited Rainer, her career flourished. In February 1933, however, she witnessed the burning of the Reichstag and soon after was picked up by a talent scout and moved to Hollywood.
So it is perhaps no surprise that once in America Rainer gravitated to the Group Theatre. Here she met Clifford Odets, the author of Waiting for Lefty. Their marriage, though, was too tempestuous to survive, Odets too divided: “He wanted me to be his little wife and a great actress at the same time. Somehow I could not live up to all of that.”
In Odets’s diary of 1940 Rainer lingers in his mind like the heavy scent of a lily. After his affair with fellow Group and Hollywood actress, Frances Farmer, Rainer left him, “sluggish among the alligators, lost in the Everglades”. He turned out to be a rather different kind of beast, however, not an alligator, but a stool-pigeon. Like Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb and several other Group Theatre associates, Odets ‘named names’ before the House Un-America Activities Committee, and the shame of it broke him.
Rainer was buoyed up by many famous admirers and friends: Albert Einstein, Arthur Steiglitz, Jean Renoir, George Gershwin, Albert Schweitzer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Anais Nin, Erich Maria Remarque, all paid her court, as well as directors like Lewis Milestone, Clarence Bull and William Wyler. Despite this sterling cast she was dissatisfied with her life, Hollywood seemed very narrow: “I couldn’t bear this total concentration on oneself, oneself, oneself. I wanted to go all over the world, to learn by seeing and experiencing things”.
So she escaped the city’s parochialism, finding her way to Salka Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica. Viertel, a scriptwriter and Garbo’s lover, was no doubt amused by the gamine girl who the studios proposed as the great star’s replacement. They seemed to have little in common. But perhaps Mayer saw something in Rainer’s up-tilted face, some of the same ability to reflect cinema’s ambition to immortality and transcendence.
This, of course, was all just a matter of good lighting, as Marlene Dietrich understood so well, a trick of the trade, and acting was a craft like any other. Rainer, schooled by Reinhardt and the Group, was of the same materialist persuasion, wary of Hollywood’s vanity and pomp: making a film, she thought, was like having a baby: “You labour, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? No, every cow can do that.”
Most of Germany’s intellectual elite eventually washed up at Viertel’s beachfront bungalow: Feuchtwanger, Schoenberg, and the Mann brothers entertained American film stars here, while Gene Kelly’s young wife, Betsy Blair, walked barefoot in the sand, earnestly explaining the meaning of socialism to Bertholt Brecht. Perhaps the most brilliant and incongruous talent to wash up on the backlot, Brecht, like many of the emigrés, felt he was prostituting himself at the Hollywood bazaar: “Every morning, to earn my bread/I go to the market, where lies are bought. Hopefully/I join the ranks of the sellers.” Rainer had been instrumental in getting Brecht out of Germany and he repaid her with a new draft of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. But the play wasn’t finished to her satisfaction (Isherwood was too busy to write the English version, Auden felt it would “have to be completely remodelled”). “He reminded me of a spider… there was something crawling about him”, Rainer judged the great man, “he was immensely conceited. Politically I couldn’t even talk to him.”
She got along better with Eleanor Roosevelt for whom she energetically undertook war work, raising bonds and travelling to entertain troops in Africa and Italy. On one trip her gift for encountering interesting people led her to bunk up with Ernest Hemingway’s girlfriend, the journalist Martha Gelhorn. After the war she decamped to Europe marrying a rich publisher and living with him in Geneva and London. Robert Knittel became Solzhentisyn’s publisher and the Russian stayed with them for a week at their flat in Eaton Square (where Vivien Leigh once entertained). Rainer found him, like Brecht, an insufferable egotist.
She returned to the stage in Erwin Piscator’s production of Saint Joan, and in 1942 debuted on Broadway in J.M. Barrie’s A Kiss for Cinderella. After this her appearances became more intermittent but she continued to crop up from time to time. J.B. Priestley cast her in his television play The Stone Faces in 1957, as a film star hiding out in a Mexican hotel trying to avoid the press: “I’ve had the idea at the back of my mind for several years, but never wrote it before because of the difficulty of casting the central character”, Priestley told the Radio Times. “Then at a party I happened to run into Luise Rainer, a very fine actress who had been a great film star in her time – and the difficulty was solved.”
Three years later it was Frederico Fellini’s turn: he offered her a role in La Dolce Vita. But, characteristically, Rainer asked for rewrites to the script that Fellini was unable to accommodate. There followed odd soap appearances in Combat or Love Boat. Finally in 1997, there was a last, vindicating appearance in a film of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, starring opposite Dominic West and Michael Gambon.
Along the way Rainer was persuaded to sell her papers to Boston University, something she came to regret. Their loss deprived her of the necessary detail, and deprived us, quite possibly – given the wit and intelligence she displays in several documentaries about Hollywood’s golden age – of a memoir to rank alongside Brooks’s, Lulu in Hollywood, Viertel’s The Kindness of Strangers, or Betsy Blair’s The Memory of All That.
But there has been a lot more to Rainer’s life than acting, as she says, “I always lived more than I worked”. And it is perhaps this attitude that accounts for her longevity, her avoidance of the madness that beset Frances Farmer, Vivien Leigh and countless others. At a time when Hollywood is still killing actresses (Brittany Murphy, 32: plastic surgery, pain killers) her sense of taste and proportion is not only perhaps a saving grace, it is also instructive: “I can’t watch the Oscars…Everybody thanking their mother, their father, their grandparents, their nurse – it’s crazy, horrible.”
———————–
The NFT has a double bill of Rainer’s films on January 17th, The Edinburgh Playhouse is showing them on January 12th, 16th and 24th, and Christopher Frayling is interviewing her at the National Theatre on February 1st.
Max Reinhardt, Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel, Luise Rainer on the cover of Radio Times, 1957
Suggs, Suggs and the City; Marcus Gray, Route 19: The Clash and London Calling – Guardian
When the twenty-first century hits its stride will pop groups start talking about breaking China in the way they used to talk about breaking America? I doubt it. Because even if China becomes the world’s biggest market, the history and meaning of pop will always be bound up with the United States. And because of this, the English, in the grip of a cultural cringe that has lasted at least as long as rock’n’roll, will go on needing to prove themselves.
Questions of identity and influence dominate two new books from the pop world: one by Madness’s front man, Suggs, explores his lifelong love affair with London and goes rummaging in its “history drawer”; the other by Marcus Gray, looks at the Clash’s double album, London Calling, on its thirtieth anniversary.
“I don’t think you could really mistake Madness for an American band, could you?” Suggs asks pointedly. The question of influence matters because there’s always been a Beatles/Stones divide in England: do you sing in a Liverpudlian accent or adopt an American drawl? Suggs was never in doubt about his stomping ground: “Hollywood?” he brags, “I only got as far as Holloway.”
His book grew out of research for Madness’s last album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate, about Spitalfields, one of London’s most fluid and historically-redolent areas. From Protestant Huguenots to European Jews, from Bangladeshis to Poles, “we’re all”, Suggs concludes, “dancing in the moonlight…on borrowed ground”.
But Madness were not always so all-embracing. For a work intended to shore up memory in the face of careless forgetting – its dedicatee is London’s last rag-and-bone man – the author’s own recollections seem partial. Suggs talks fondly of early gigs at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, for instance, but makes no mention of the sieg-heiling, swastika-sporting fans I saw there. Perhaps a biography will bring a fuller account of the transition he and his fans have made – something to look forward to, because among his descriptions of Camden’s Irish pubs and Soho nightlife, music halls and race tracks, dandies and bohemians, the most vivid are those etched with stories from his life.
Like Suggs, Joe Strummer insisted that he, too, “sang in English”, yet the Clash’s loyalty was still called into question. If Suggs is concerned with a disappearing past, the Clash reserved their nostalgia for the future. The album’s title track, one of the most rousing and urgent products of punk’s apocalyptic imagination, imagines the band as clandestine Londoners, under threat and sending out distress signals: “London calling to the faraway towns/Now war is declared, and battle come down”.
‘London Calling’, of course, was the BBC call sign to occupied Europe during the Second Word War. In 1979 when this record was made, a new war was underway on London’s streets: Margaret Thatcher had come to power, unemployment was rising and the National Front marched, brandishing Union Jacks. The Clash heralded this new order in songs like ‘Clampdown’ and ‘The Guns of Brixton’, tolling the death-knell of Sixties optimism. Now all that swung in London was the policeman’s truncheon.
Gray’s sprawling book has a fan’s tendency to throw in every last scrap of information, and is written in a linguistic mishmash (“the sounds and rhythms of days of yore”; “urgent crosstown dashes by the ever-prosaic bus or Tube”). But the discussion of the band’s influences is interesting. The album also contains American inspired material: ‘Brand New Cadillac’, ‘Jimmy Jazz’, ‘Kola Kola’ and ‘The Right Profile’ (about Montgomery Clift). And reggae, in ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’, ‘Revolution Rock’, and ‘Lover’s Rock’. For the Clash the problem was this: it was a principle of punk that you did-it-yourself: music should be homemade and home-grown. The reason Jagger’s drawl was so loathed was not because anyone hated the black American sound he mimicked, but because it represented a kind of musical tourism. Punk, reacting to the betrayed idealism of the Sixties wanted, above all, to be without illusions, to deflate the phoniness and pomposity of ‘rock’ music, so rather than dry ice and satin shirts, it dressed itself in safety pins and bin liners.
It was for these reasons, Gray reminds us, that Johnny Rotten objected to white kids playing Jamaican music – it was a kind of cultural imperialism, he thought, they hadn’t earned the right to it. It was a persuasive argument but one Strummer strongly refuted: “People say white blokes can’t do reggae, but that’s a load of shit…I didn’t discover reggae in a book, I grew up with it. It’s part of me.”
The dangers of bad faith, however, were there for all to see. In 1974 Eric Clapton remodelled Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sherriff’ and had a number one hit in the States. Two years later he harangued a bewildered Birmingham audience: “I think Enoch’s right…Stop Britain becoming a black colony…get the foreigners out.” The hypocrisy of a man who’d made a career playing black music was more than some music fans could stomach: it was this outburst that lead to the creation of Rock Against Racism, an organisation the Clash played for at the Hackney Carnival in 1978 and again the following year in aid of a Defence Fund set up to help those arrested or injured when the National Front brought mayhem to Southall.
In these Cowell-fuelled times, young musicians would do well to look to Suggs’ historical delving, or the Clash’s internationalism (their next album was called Sandinista!) to see how pop might re-imagine itself. It’s going to be interesting listening to the sound of Britain as the world tilts away from the Atlantic and America starts to lose power.
On screen, whether crunching statistics, puzzling Paxman with graphs, or laying out the latest chapter of the banking crisis, Paul Mason packs a wallop not immediately discernible out in the real world. But then he starts talking and is instantly recognisable. It’s not just the Lancashire accent, adding tang to all he says, but the nervy intelligence and impatience on display, indicative of quickness and pride. The figure he cuts is more city banker than roving reporter. It’s about class, I think, not for the last time, and politics: two good reasons why Mason can’t afford the dishevelment some journalists go in for, even if his sartorial tendencies were to run that way. The smart suit, the “equivalent of body armour” he calls it, gives no hostage to fortune.
It’s a high-wire act he’s trying to pull off, after all, presenting himself as a ‘neutral’ BBC man, while describing what, over the last year or so, has looked like the implosion of international capitalism. And, harder still, one imagines, getting the viewer to care about the impact of this crisis in the big world, to share some of his focussed curiosity and fellow feeling for hard-pressed, far-flung interviewees, the kind of people who are, even in our endlessly-trumpeted global age, still too rarely glimpsed on television. “Poor you,” a receptionist once said to him, “having to try and interest people in all that boring stuff”.
During the dotcom era, in his early career as a journalist (there have been others in academia and music) he specialised in what were then the backwaters of business and technology, working for Reed Elsevier and Computer Weekly before the BBC. Now the world had caught up and he’s like everyone else issuing continual advertisements for himself in the world of mutual back-slapping that is Twitter. An avowed techie, his attitude, in the main, however, is functional and democratic, “just get out there, be yourself, and interact”, which is no doubt why in 2005 he became the first onscreen person at the Beeb given ‘permission’ to start blogging.
His Idle Scrawl was shortlisted for the Orwell prize this year (losing to Night Jack) and is named after the Lancashire insult Mason’s mother hurled his way to shake him out of bed in the morning, rather than the conventional meaning, once rendered by a Chinese producer as “bad writing by lazy person”. Its ambit, as you’d expect, is politics and economics, with the obligatory detours into football and encomiums to The Wire. More idiosyncratically, he writes about opera and Northern Soul, and in attempting to analyse the opposing worlds his work takes him into makes frequent, unabashed reference to sociology and economic theory.
A holiday from Newsnight spent in the library yields a discourse “on the link between occupation and psychological attitudes” taken from Erich Fromm’s 1929 survey of The Working Class in Weimar Germany: “Social Democrats favoured bric-a-brac over modernism by 10% vs 3%. Communists also, 4% to 2%. Nazis too liked flying ducks better than Mies van der Rohe chairs, by a factor of 11% to 6%.” While in 2006 he gave the Newsnight team their own “sociological going-over” with a straw poll designed to indicate “levels of poshness” and equivalence with the Conservative Party: “1) Were you privately educated? 42% (Tories 52%). 2) Did you go Oxbridge? 30% (Tories 28%). 3) Are you from the South? 60% (Tories 61%).”
Mostly what you get from his blog are impressions on the hop when he’s out in the world and concentrated observation of life on the homeground. There are hunches, tips, snippets of insider information; on-going assessment of what he’s up to as a journalist; and a powerful sense of him speaking directly to his audience. For instance, writing after the death of the singer Astrid Varnay in 2006 he observes: “What you are listening to is supreme self-confidence and artistry – a quality to hold on to even if you hate opera.” While a Comment on whether he’s out of the loop while reporting from China draws a steely No, “because frankly, the fate of 1.3bn people is also quite important.”
He’s interested enough in the medium to play around with it. After reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Mason invented a mental exercise imagining how the Russian Revolution would be reported today. In the same spirit, one blog relays a day in his life in the style of a George Orwell diary: “At big offices of major company had to argue my way past security man: London companies now increasingly in shared buildings where instead of receptionist you have security men who have no feel for the class system and treat one lower than dirt unless one wears some recognisable badge and ‘lanyard’”. It’s all delivered with a sense of urgency, wit and compression that perfectly suits the style he’s aiming for: “tight, acerbic and as close to the truth as I can get”. Writing it must be addictive; reading it, you get a strong idea of who he is and what fires him up, which is surely the point of a blog.
But it’s in his second, non-aligned life as a writer of books that you really start to sense what an ambitious writer Mason is – and what he might yet produce if he doesn’t allow himself to be waylaid. There have already been two non-fiction works in quick succession. In 2007, his Live Working or Die Fighting chronicled modern labour’s creative revolt from its bloody christening at Peterloo in 1819 to the organisation and resistance of the Jewish Bund in Poland a century and a half later. Tales of individual audacity and community organising are placed alongside stories of today’s emerging global workforce, suggesting what a wealth of history has been lost, but also what, if properly understood, might usefully be regained. In these forgetful days the not un-important message he’s sending to the mutilated, uninsured worker in a Chinese factory, or the migrant living in a Nigerian slum amid shit-filled canals and street sellers hawking the “neo-junk of the Third World economy” is: know this – you are not alone; your struggle isn’t empty of meaning; you are heir to the dreams, battles, ambitions and hopes of millions who went before, and whose lives were not so different from your own.
Then earlier this year came Meltdown, a rapidly written, and inevitably more journalistic, history of the economic downturn. Both are significant books, vivid counterblasts to conventional narratives. Yet both, one suspects, were written, at least somewhere in the back of his mind, with the brakes on. Just why this might be, and what, if anything he can do about it, is what interested me when I talked to him. He began by acknowledging he’s perhaps not quite in the same vein as many BBC journalists: “I’m a bloke from a small town in Lancashire [Leigh in Greater Manchester] whose family were miners and cotton weavers and silk weavers. That’s me, whatever else I’ve done, which has been all sorts of things. On TV the important thing is to be somebody, especially if you’re in a job where you’re supposed to put this patina of impartiality over the work you do, which we have to.”
When asked a question, Mason will often begin his reply with a phrase such as, “A Masai person said to me…” or “If I’m talking to a migrant from Shizuishan…” This is not showing off, I think, but a constant recourse to the empirical facts of the existence of others. And, as he must be aware, it lends to what he has to say an authority that’s hard to refute. He thinks a good part of his power and relevance as a journalist resides in this: the authority of access – whether that’s to the Prime Minister or a Chinese peasant who earns her living skinning sheep. It’s access that separates him from the ‘blogger in pyjamas’. That, and the influence of an abrasive system of peer review that comes from working in the context of a newsroom. He makes these arguments as Newsnight’s Father of the Chapel, encouraging the NUJ to be pragmatic in the face of technological change, and to better define, so as to defend, territory that is specifically theirs.
“What you see on TV is just the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve done. If I’m on a train with a bunch of migrants, as I was in China four weeks ago, then once I’ve got the interview with one guy, I know I’m only going to use a minute of what he said, but I’m not going to just sit there for a minute with him, I’ll sit there for as long as I possibly can,” he said. “The key to all good journalism is just letting people speak to you. You don’t do that by constantly challenging them. You do it by understanding them. The job is not to challenge them – unless they’re giving you bullshit. Then you have to make the challenge without becoming the ‘great big white man comes here and tells us we’re doing wrong’. That’s the danger if you do my job. It’s the same if you go to Wall Street, if you talk to traders. You’ve got to accept their reasons for what they’re doing before you go any further.”
But isn’t just listening rather passive? “The point about journalism is getting to the truth. And the truth is always more interesting than what you went out to find. I was teaching a bunch of medical students about media skills. I was making them interview me and I was being the doctor. They said: ‘Oh so Mr Doctor, what is the key health issue here in the Swat Valley refugee camp?’ And I replied: ‘It’s rape by 20 men who’ve got guns, who roam around at night. Now that doesn’t fit your story Mr Journalist, but I’m telling you that’s what it is. Are you going to put it in or not?’ That’s your common experience. You go to place A to report story A, and what you find is story B. The test of a good journalist is that they accept story B exists and don’t go, ‘Oh shit, that’s ruined my entire day, ‘cos it doesn’t fit with what I came here to report.’ Now you only get that by listening. And listening sounds passive but it isn’t – it’s engagement.”
Truth can be got at in many ways, of course. And for Mason, Michael Herr’s 1977 book on the Vietnam War, Dispatches, has been an important influence. “It’s reportage and I think we’re in danger of losing an understanding of what reportage is. It was born out of a desire to write social documentaries. I’ve forgotten the name of the Czech guy who invented and theorised it [Egon Erwin Kisch], but the Left, both the communist Left and the non-communist Left in the Thirties, worked it up to a quite serious level of sophistication. Orwell is effectively a reportage writer, so is Priestley. The definition is literary non-fiction, so you make no apology for producing a quasi-literary output. One of the problems we have in my profession is whether or not this is going to survive, not just a series of technical innovations, but the audience’s perception. I was watching a piece of well-made BBC reportage with a bunch of students and they didn’t like it: it looked too constructed.”
There are some truths about the modern world that can be told only through literature, he thinks. “I am never going to be able to get inside a meeting of Communist Party officials in China where they are plotting to screw up my reporting. I could write a short story about it quite easily, though, because I feel the outcome. I know what they’ve done. I know what they’ve plotted. So I don’t think reportage is a step away from the truth. In some senses it’s a step towards the truth. Fiction can be the truth also. A lot of news journalists would find that problematic, but I don’t. I think you just have to open your mind to it.”
Even though Mason has said, for him, the appeal of journalism is not about adrenaline, he is a speedy character. In the Q & A sessions that follow his book-talks he seems happiest taking six points at a time, looking around the room, calling out like a fairground barker for more, “Yes, Madam!”, taking from his audiences – they veer from Marxists in scruffy independent bookshops to private members’ clubs stuffed with investment bankers – a range of complex questions on the state of the economy. Perhaps, as with his technological avidity, there’s something in his make-up that pushes him on, making sure he gets the job done, whatever fear the work induces. In one blog he records his feeling at the moment he is told each day whether or not he’ll be called up for duty on Newsnight: “That hour between three and four pm is the journalistic equivalent to the hour when the secret police come and take people away into the night and fog…”
“It’s true”, he admits, “I have a high work-rate, can assimilate a lot fast. That’s just always been me. I’m an action driven person. And that’s quite different from the background I’ve come from – Catholic, working class, aspirational. My mum went to night school – she was a secretary who became a head teacher. My dad [who died when Mason was 26] was a lorry driver who read novels and bits of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. They were part of a generation that wanted to learn more and their big frustration was they didn’t know where to get it.”
It’s a frustration Mason, with his monetary expertise and mastery of technology, seems to have determinedly overcome. And yet something of it remains in evidence in Live Working or Die Fighting, where he makes an arresting statement about the long emotional legacy of Peterloo, even when the origins of that feeling have been lost to history: “All that was left was a gut feeling that Lancashire workers passed down the generations…something terrible was done to us and we will never forget.”
“My grandparents would never tell you anything about what I’d call the labour movement. Finally, if you persisted, they would talk about their own parents and how terrible they felt about how poor they were. It’s absolutely there in the folk memory of that side of my family: they’d had to live through poverty, it was unjust, nobody ever helped you.”
“I’ll give you a good example. By 1980 I’m active in student politics. I come home and there’s a debate which pops into the pub conversation: will there ever be a worker’s government in Britain? My Dad said to me: ‘I went to a Tony Benn meeting and, you know what? He was the same as every other politician.’ So there’s this great plebeian distrust of everybody. Even Benn he thought was basically just another politician who would always lie, avoid the question, or not come out with a straight answer. My Dad wasn’t disillusioned because that’s what his folk memory and folk tradition had told him: they’re all the bloody same. So just rely on yourself. But it’s the absence of detail that always frustrated me, and the evasiveness of bitterness, bitterness, bitterness about past generations and what they had to live through.”
A more affirming inheritance from his father was a love of music. But in this, too, there was shared dissatisfaction: “My Dad was a really good trombone player, had played in brass bands, and had a second job playing in a dance band. Even in the 60s and 70s you still had this Glen Miller-Stan Kenton tradition. And the big frustration – because it’s before the internet, before iTunes, before Wikipedia – is where do you find out how to play like a bebop trombonist? There’s a guy calledJ.J. Johnson who’s like the Charlie Parker of trombone. I was a trombonist too, and we both would sit around wondering how do you find that out? Today you’d go to the City Lit and there’d be somebody who could teach you to play like that. Also, me and me Dad both loved Tchaikovsky. We went to the Halle, went to the opera in Manchester. So it’s that kind of background. There’s a great feeling of autodidacticism in this sense: we know we are limited in what we can find out. It’s only later when I got to university, where I did two years of postgraduate research into music, and became exposed to a much wider intellectual world, that I realised even grammar school hadn’t really opened the challenging world of intellectual experience.”
When Mason described this I wondered why he’d made such a song and dance about the lack of modern technological information: after all, no one had this when he was growing up. But I see now this is also a matter of class. As he eventually understood, without access to these resources he was unarmed in the face of his grammar school teachers and all the other cultural gate-keepers who believed it was their job to determine what was fit for you, to deny you the wide world that only the web has finally opened up.
Instead of the resentment this might have bred, however, what you get in Mason is an abounding, sceptical mind and determination not to be hemmed in (pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will). He is that rare thing in British public life, an encourager and enthusiast, an adherent of the JFDI principle (“just flipping well do it”), and a herald of the liberating effects of technology. His 2007 report for Newsnight on the transformative power of mobile phones on the lives of many Africans was just one result of this enthusiasm.
What will he do next? Appearing on the box a couple of nights a week, his profile will rise, making it harder for him to pass unnoticed through a crowd. With the attention, will the sense that “something was done to us” be assuaged or forgotten? I hope not because it’s my guess that this feeling is at the root of his turbulent intelligence, making him capable of the kind of writing I hope he produces more of: that proclaims the poetry of the political, and then, as William Golding once described, rises up off the page at you like a fist.
This is a version of an article that appeared in British Journalism Review, Volume 20, Number 4, December 2009, pp. 71-77; there is a more wide-ranging interview transcript here.
J.J. Johnson, c.1947
James Agee: ‘The Dangerous Edge’ – Guardian
James Rufus Agee, born a hundred years ago today, is one of the most interesting and neglected writers of mid-century America. In his lifetime it was film writing he lived by, and was best known for. W. H. Auden was so moved by the “astonishing excellence” of his reviews in the Nation that in 1944 he wrote to the journal’s editors telling them he “looked forward all week to reading him again” and calling the column, “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today”.
Agee’s output, though, like his ‘hell-for-leather’ personality, was prodigal: as well as film criticism and screenplays (The African Queen, Night of the Hunter) he wrote poetry, letters, essays, novels, short stories, journalism and a work of ‘documentary’ non-fiction. So in a time when we like writers branded and tidily packaged, it is perhaps his ubiquity that best explains Agee’s obscurity.
Out of fashion for so long, there are signs his star may be rising again. The recession helps. In a recent Newsnight special about the economy’s bearing on the arts, Simon Schama was seen banging a book on the table in front of him, insisting it was “the greatest novel of the twentieth century”. Of course, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a record of Agee’s encounter with Alabama sharecroppers in the midst of the Depression, is not a novel at all, though it is, as Schama intimated, one of the most extraordinary, unconventional and important books ever to come out of America: sprawling, immense and immature, like the country it hails from, a work so wayward it veers close to eccentricity.
This risk, like those of being high-flown, “slow going”, or unfashionable, was one Agee dared to take. After a series of preambles (there are post-ambles too, the book is hedged with qualifications) – Walker Evans’s sparse photographs, a dedication and Preface, epigraphs from King Lear and the Communist Manifesto, an extract from a geography textbook, cast list, title, ‘Design of the Book’, and a poem dedicated to Evans – finally the opening lines read: “I spoke of the piece of work we were doing as ‘curious’. I had better amplify this.”
If the centrepiece of his body of work is too singular, too sui generis, to have become canonical and yielded literary offspring, the film criticism – his bread and butter work – has been influential. It was his uncondescending recognition of film as the American art form of the twentieth century that made Agee such a pioneer, unlike the attitude of many in the book world who reviled or patronised the medium even as they wrote for it, taking its wages, or sat in the back row and were happily seduced: or, like Auden, thinking it “rather unimportant”, admiring Agee’s writing on film precisely to the degree that it “transcends its ostensible…subject”.
Beyond this, what made Agee such a spur to later cineastes like Pauline Kael and David Thomson was the particular tenor of his work. His reviews were morally demanding of both film and its audience (“Huston’s pictures are not acts of…benign enslavement but of liberation, and they require, of anyone who enjoys them, the responsibilities of liberty”), but also conveyed intensity of reaction (“Every minute [of Ivan the Terrible] is exciting, but springing as it does against the tensions of near stand-still, it is exciting as if a corpse moved.”)
It was Agee’s style Kael and Thomson tried to emulate in their reviewing, a style, Auden felt, that combined profundity with “extraordinary wit and felicity” – though he sensed how easily it might be misinterpreted: “One foresees the sad day, indeed, when Agee on Films will be the subject of a Ph.D thesis.” Catching something of Agee’s manner, Kael called her first collection of reviews, I Lost it at the Movies. In the same vein, Thomson’s tribute to Agee in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, notes how intimate he was with the language of cinema – its speed, seduction, danger and dark. Agee, Thomson thought, “reviewed movies as if they were girls he’d been out with, drinking with, driving in the night with.”
When Agee on Film was reissued in 2000 as part of Martin Scorsese’s Modern Library series on film criticism, David Denby, writing in the Introduction, made roughly the same point: no amount of dry theory could produce, for instance, the marvel of Agee’s description of Orson Welles playing Rochester in Jane Eyre, “his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly.” Such a phrase was “unprecedented and inimitable” Denby thought, “worth more…than ten academic essays about ‘the male gaze’”.
Agee’s inimitability meant there was a moment when he looked like one of his country’s brightest hopes, a writer of such energy and audacity that to a small band of admirers he seemed nothing less than an American prophet. What they saw in his restless life and various work was a kind of ur or authentic American, someone they sensed had within him the amplitude, receptivity (even a legendary macho like John Huston was impressed by his unique “regard for other people’s feelings”) and skill to deliver that Great American Novel, the encapsulating work that would sum up the United States.
He had the look and gait for the part. In photographs by Walker Evans, his fellow “spy”, he appears ruggedly handsome and reflective; while, Huston, for whom he wrote The African Queen, said Agee never looked in the mirror, having little regard for his body or appearance – indeed, that its destruction was “implicit in his makeup”. Evans, too, thought it was Agee’s lack of vanity that disarmed the prickly, “wounded” families they scrutinised in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
He was prodigious as well as diffident – talking and writing copiously, marrying frequently, drinking excessively (“A little bit of too much is just enough for me”). But there was also in this self-description a provocation, an insistence on the appetite and curiosity that made him compelling and explained his many-handedness, while at the same time intimating the cause of his failure. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men missed its moment. Problems in getting such a difficult, unwieldy and unexpected book published meant that although he and Evans worked from material they garnered in the summer of 1936, the book did not appear until 1941, by which time war was looming and the Depression seemed like yesterday’s problem. Nor did Agee live to see his unfinished, autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, published and win the Pulitzer Prize. He ran out of time, dying from a heart attack in a New York taxi cab at the age of 45, thinking he had never produced the one irrefutable work that would confirm his heady talent.
His refusal to settle down as a writer and as a man can be read as profligacy. Dwight Macdonald, an editor of Partisan Review, thought “The trouble was he couldn’t say No. He let people invade him – all kinds, anyone who wanted to. He thought he had time and energy enough for them all.” But this ruefulness, with its implied admonishment (a writer should not spend himself so freely, should be self-protecting) missed the point. Agee is more interestingly considered as a study in enthusiasm and “unquenchable” rebellion (Evans), suffering from the existential drama such openness implies, yet still declining the narrow road to success, having the nerve, rather, to be passionate, headlong, un-guised. There is about all his work (even the most lyrical or still) a sense of danger, a thrill at the charge he invests it with and the pitch at which he plays it out, making the writing strain to go beyond itself – something Samuel Barber recognised in Agee’s tender nocturne, ‘Knoxville: Summer 1915’, leading him to set it to music so warmly and sympathetically.
It is this Whitmanesque sense of uncontainability and multitudinousness, and a corresponding endowment, self-awareness, that makes him so particular a writer. The pages he left behind engage with ideas of transcendence and materialism, poetry and politics, seem crafted from a sensibility that is both masculine and feminine, and, in a very modern way, ceaselessly analyse their own predicament: the possibility of their treachery to the person being rendered, the insufficiency of words to meet or dress the world.
“‘Description’ is a word to suspect”, he observes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and perhaps it was his wariness with language that drew Agee to silent cinema. A Death in the Family, opens with a young boy, Rufus, and his father, strolling “downtown in the light of mother-of-pearl, to the Majestic” to see Charlie Chaplin. “So vulgar!”, Rufus’s mother complains, making them squirm, “with his nasty little cane; hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty walk!” It’s a characteristic note from Agee, elegiac in remembrance of a father almost unbearably tentative and unforthcoming, whom we sense will soon be gone from the boy’s life, yet brilliantly antic in descriptions of Chaplin’s expressive, though equally silent, film routine (anticipating by three decades the virtuoso cine-games of Robert Coover and Angela Carter).
Among the best pieces in Agee on Film (they were written throughout the Forties and published in Time as well as the Nation) is a three-part defence of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, 1947, a work made when he was already under investigation by McCarthyites (he was exiled to Switzerland in 1952). It is a brave film, attuned to the times, that turns the beloved Tramp into a serial-killer, a redundant banker who marries and murders wealthy women then plays the market with the proceeds: “Verdoux is a business realist;” Agee argues, “in terms of that realism the only difference between free enterprise in murder and free enterprise in the sale of elastic stockings is the difference in legal liability and in net income.” The following year, he published an obituary of D. W. Griffiths, containing a line that could stand as self-assessment: “He was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge.”
The collection also includes one of cinema history’s most important essays: ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’ (1949) lovingly rescues the idols of Agee’s youth from the oblivion into which the Talkies had so quickly consigned them – Chaplin, but also Harold Lloyd, Henry Langdon and Buster Keaton. Long before Roland Barthes eulogised the iconography of Greta Garbo, Agee saw that cinema’s romance with the face was something novel. Garbo shared with Keaton, whose never-smiling visage earned him the title of The Great Stone Face, a white-paste, mask-like distinction. “He was by his whole style and nature”, Agee thought, “so much the most deeply ‘silent’ of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell.” It was not only that they didn’t speak, they barely emoted, retaining a Sphinx-like impassivity in face of the world’s clamouring. And this meant both were, in a way important for art, non-colluders with their audience.
In keeping with this praise of restraint – present also in film reviews extolling “taciturnity” and “uninsistence”, and in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where he is beguiled by many of the rural poor who are so withheld as to seem almost mythic – Agee fired off ‘Pseudo-Folk’ (1945). In it, he attacks the schmaltzing of jazz, while lambasting all false heroising of ‘the people’ and their art forms (taking a wide swing at Roosevelt, the Group Theatre, Steinbeck, Robeson singing ‘Ballad for Americans’, and Louis Armstrong’s more souped-up version of ‘West End Blues’). It’s an intemperate piece, and while there is some self-legitimisation going on, this is not just a case of snobbery or purism: what you read here is Agee trying to work out how his folk writing and democratic reverence was different from these other performances, debased, he thinks, by commercialism or a misconceiving politics.
Evidence of such intellectual tussling abounds in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men where, in an ‘Intermission Conversation in the Lobby’, he takes time out to debate with Partisan Review, the magazine established by Philip Rahv in 1934 as the Left’s anti-Stalinist riposte to the Communist Party’s journal, New Masses. Agee, a regular contributor (they published ‘Knoxville’ in 1935) was irked when the Review sent him a questionnaire asking him his views on “Questions Which Face American Writers Today”.
They did not print his furious reply. The questions were so bad and betraying, he told them, as to be virtually unanswerable. But answer he does, and what he says shows, once again, his contempt for language that is lazy and too easily categorising: “God help ‘American’ or any other ‘literature’. Or else let both suspect words become your property and that of your inferiors. The good work will meanwhile be done by those who can use neither word.” Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, then, is worldly, engaging with the hot literary-political debates of the day, but it is also profoundly night-inflected; Agee wrote most of it lying on his bed in the dark, the only invading sounds, timbers creaking or bodies breathing in sleep. And this means that the world suffusing the work is more infinite than can perhaps be accounted for in rational argument.
Three times in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Agee describes himself sitting with members of the farmer’s family on the porch of their bony, weathered house. Their talking falls away and they listen, analysing the night noises, catching in the air something new and insistent: “Whereas we had been silent before, this sound immediately stiffened us into much more intense silence.”
What they hear, or think they hear, is the sound of foxes calling to one another. And Agee is reminded of an “old, not especially funny vaudeville act” in which a troupe create a sketch out of nothing more than “different vocal and gesticulative colorations of the word ‘you’”. The foxes, he thinks, are even greater artists, “subtler…more enigmatic and more exciting to [an] audience” left to create meaning for themselves, to “sharpen and calibrate” the infinite sounds echoing down from the hills.
A truncated version of this essay appeared in the Guardian as ‘Let Us Now Praise James Agee’ and on the Guardian website as ‘In Praise of Film Writer James Agee’ on 11.12.2009.
Walker Evans – Porches in Alabama, 1936
John Muckle: London Brakes
John Muckle’s new novel, set in Eighties London, will be out from Shearsman Press in Jaunuary 2010. He’s an interesting writer and deserves much wider recognition - but don’t take my word for it, here’s what others had to say about his last novel, Cyclomotors:
“I don’t think I’ve read anything for quite a while—perhaps not since Norman Lewis’ memoir Jackdaw Cake—which conjures up quite so effectively this peculiar inter-zone between the behemoth of the city and the hinterland of the country. And on top of all of this there is the wrenching portrayal of a family at odds with itself in the most violent fashion, rendered without cant or sentimentality.” Will Self
“…a wonderful book—marvellously constructed, and of a fidelity to experience such as you only come across with a true storyteller—as distinct from word spinner!” John Berger
“The milky bar gleam of Kensington in the sun . . . memory of Spitalfields in the rain . . . a small flask of Southern Comfort . . . John Muckle’s window on that world is the one people will eventually look through.” Tom Raworth
“I think Cyclomotors is my best book of 1997 and a real bit of quality in a fairly bleak landscape.” Michael Moorcock
J.G. Ballard: The Bard of Shepperton
On Sunday there was a gathering of J.G. Ballad’s family, friends and admirers at Tate Modern. We came to celebrate the life and work of an English prophet, a man held in affectionate veneration by a generation of younger writers upon whom the impact of his poetic apocalypse is becoming increasingly evident: “uniquely unique”, Martin Amis proclaimed; “a touchstone of authentic genius”, Will Self contended: Ballard was his “single most important mentor and influence”.
By 11 o’clock a crowd gathered in the Tate’s top floor corridor pressing up against glass walls that frame the giant breast of St Pauls, the elegant lines of the Millennium Bridge, and the muck brown Father Thames. Among the throng were Peter and Solange, Jim’s next-door-neighbours-but-one. He wouldn’t let you across the threshold of his house, they tell us, but he liked to stop and talk in the street. And as casual descriptions often can, this turns out to be the image that holds throughout the morning.
Rather than the violent catastrophies associated with Ballard in the public mind, it is the picture of his English home on a suburban street in Shepperton that resonates in our imagination, the place of which he was so protective, that was at the core of what he did each day: wrapping his arms around his children and the “nest” he built for them. The kids, a little wild and indulged, Michael Moorcock thought, as any would be who’d lost a mother so young (Ballard’s wife, Mary, died suddenly of pneumonia when they were still little). But the house was full of love and talk, and in equal Blakean parts, or so it seemed from the testimony of his two girls, of energy and order.
Both daughters, Fay and Bea, who spoke also on behalf of their brother, Jim, remembered “gender roles” weren’t much observed at home: Jim the younger, a dab hand in the kitchen, while Jim the elder was, Fay thought, a “mummy-daddy”. Bea said he’d described himself , domestically, as rather “slatternly”, but she’d seen through this disguise and understood, in fact, how organised he was: he had to be. Later Moorcock, one of a handful of intimates, introduced him to Claire Walsh who became his partner for the next forty years, and the family expanded at holiday time to include Claire and her daughter. But he remained a single Dad to his three children, quite a rare bird in the 1960s.
Fay spoke first, telling us how in the hustle and bustle of family life the house remained unchanged. It was the unmoved things that were most remarkable and moving (perhaps because they had not been dislodged, had endured against the odds, allowing them the illusion of holding on to the past): a desiccated lemon found on a mantelpiece remaining untouched for forty years; a flipper, a remnant of some early holiday, still propping open a door. Afterwards I asked her what would happen to the house? She had worked in museums herself. Would their gloriously untouched 1933 semi, with all its original tones and fittings, become one? She and her dad had discussed the possibility once and he’d said, don’t you dare.
Fay and Bea shared a collage of family memories: the clacking typewriter and accompanying whisky glass, Jim painting in the fashion of the surrealists, watching Double Indemnity in the dark together, discussing Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, after-school trips to the movies, their father’s smiling face and bear hugs whenever he greeted them, and endless Chinese dinners with great plates of lobster and noodles. He encouraged all their enthusiasms, had been serious about education, hadn’t wanted them to waste any creative talent. His loss was incalculable for all, but particularly stinging for Bea, who had lost her own husband, and now Jim’s support and understanding of what she was going through. He was the most loving of fathers, their best friend and counsel, always warning them of “what was ahead in the road”.
The road turned out to be a ruling metaphor and feature of the life, as well as of the fiction. Victoria Barnsley his publisher at HarperCollins remembered this gentlemanly, but hugely professional writer announcing: “My job is to stand in the bend of the road holding a sign saying: Danger Ahead!” And Jeremy Thomas, who produced the film of Crash, recalled a Ferrari ride with Jim caressing the dashboard. He recognised in him another petrol-head, someone who shared his secret love of car magazines – “the equivalent of centrefolds in Penthouse”. While Moorcock, propping himself up with a walking stick and hunching over the podium, remembered Jim trying to sell him his falling-apart old Armstrong Siddeley – a “pantomime” car, whose windscreen wipers were always having to be retrieved when they fell off in the roadside.
But the memories he treasured most from their long comradeship, were from the early days when they were drawn together by domestic concerns as much as literary ones. Moorcock too, was an untraditional father, both of them, he claimed, “handy with the frying pan and the staple gun” (it saved on stitching). They’d meet to eat, wives at one end of the table, the men at the other, forever arguing. “Cobblers!”, Moorcock’s wife would object; “You know that’s not true, Jim”, Mary would chime in. Their dinner conversations made them seem like “a cadre taking over the world of SF”, and yet they never agreed on anything. Except that they had both freed themselves from “genre identification”.
Their lives became intertwined: Moorcock helping to nurse Jim through the shock of his wife’s sudden death (“he closed down”), coaxing from him the early writing for New Worlds, which he was by then at the helm of, and introducing Claire, the woman he felt was “the best possible choice for Jim”. They wrote constantly to one another, became one another’s editors. And Jim developed a liking for vicarious travel, endlessly pressing new brochures on him, suggesting places he might visit, suggestions he had had to work hard to resist.
A 2004 BBC documentary reminded us of the early experiences that shaped Ballard’s life, taking took him back to Shanghai, to the house they lived in on Amherst Avenue, and to the camp where he and his family were interned during the war. This was “the most important place in my life. I came close to an adult mind in this camp”, Ballard reflected. Dreams of it nurtured him throughout his time in England, where he had “never really been at home”. It was the place he referred to in his imagination, and which finally gave birth, in 1984, to his greatest work, Empire of the Sun, described eloquently by Barnsley as “a slow bruise that took forty years to come to the surface”.
Steven Spielberg, who directed the film adaptation, was summoned to the proceedings electronically (as was Martin Amis). Sitting with his producers in Hollywood he recollected how enlightening Ballard had been: he helped with “dimensionalising” the book, and with “colouring in” the story – this said, as perhaps only a filmmaker can, as if something was missing from the page, as if it needed fleshing out. But the warm feeling for the man was unmistakable, a feeling engendered, perhaps, in part by Ballard’s own abiding and knowledgeable interest in cinema.
His attitude to his film adapters, Thomas thought, was unusually generous: he was interested to see what they would make of his books, which parts of Crash, would Cronenberg choose to put on the screen? What Thomas remembered most, though, was how “animated in adversity” Jim had been. One of the best meals he’d ever had, eaten with the greatest relish, was on the beach in Cannes after philistine film critics, Alexander Walker leading the pack, attacked Crash at a press conference. This kind of resilience, even perverse delight, was also noted by Barnsley, who remembered his response to the infamous readers report on Crash, finding the mind behind the book psychotic: it was a “vindication”, he thought.
An avant-garde publisher from California, V. Vale, confessed to us he had “spent his whole life preparing to meet J. G. Ballard”. He interviewed him first alongside William Burroughs for his magazine, Search and Destroy (at the time Ballard was “sympathetic to punk rock”). Later a girlfriend renamed herself Vermilion Sands. But his finest moment came when he discovered The Atrocity Exhibition had fallen out of print in America. Ballard sent him four new stories and a set of annotations for the beautifully illustrated and designed edition he produced, and ever since he has been working on ‘Ballardania’. Perhaps we didn’t understand in England, he chided us, but, for him, Ballard was quite simply “the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”.
As it transpired, the bard’s last friendship was with a man of medicine – fitting for a quondam medical student who dropped out to write fictions with character Types, most often a doctor. Professor Jonathan Waxman was Claire’s oncologist and became Jim’s when he developed prostate cancer. Bea said her father was happy his last days were “spent under the care of such a strong-minded, kind and wise physician.” When Claire had first come to Waxman’s office, he was impressed by the quality of Jim’s support for her “in his mind and in his hands”. And then when Jim became ill he had seen this returned in loving abundance. Jim was of a generation that didn’t talk about their illnesses and when Waxman asked about his state of health he’d mutter something like, oh alright, and then: ‘“And how are you doing?’ This is how he dealt with it.”
Will Self, on the other hand, recalled him saying that chemotherapy was like “continually eating bad oysters”. And that if he had qualified as a psychiatrist he would have been his own first patient. Self also drew attention to the breadth of Ballard’s oeuvre, and the consistency of the warning note sounded throughout, from the early ruined worlds (planetary death by drowning, drought and crystallisation) to the last quartet of novels about wealthy Westerners, living gated and sanitised lives, “considering violence as an antidote to millenarian boredom”.
He opened though, with a letter written sixteen years ago in Ballard’s “legible and anarchic hand”, replying to a tentative suggestion from the ambitious younger man that he be allowed to write the screenplay for Crash. The letter didn’t dwell on this, but did recommend a book of Black Box recordings. These cockpit transcripts, happenings of disaster, were not at all voyeuristic he thought, nor particularly violent. However if that was what Self was after he knew where they could be found.
It was Self who came nearest to imitating Ballard, catching something of his particular cadences with their eccentrically pitched emphases. On winning a PEN award four months before his death, he warned Self about the ‘tweedy’ literati: ‘“It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember’, his voice dropped conspiratorially, ‘they are the enemy’.”
In the Bored Room
The Race to the Bottom
I was as deluded as Ben Bernanke, thinking I’d got to grips with my career, smoothing out the ups and downs, believing all I needed for a steady wage was hard graft and nous. Speaking now as one of the workless, that theory of control is starting to look fantastic: I had a job because there were jobs to be had. And now there aren’t. Eighty thousand people a month join the dole queue, and every addition to their number, skilled and unskilled, school leavers and college graduates, competes by undercutting, pressing the market down. Most newly unemployed end up on New Deal, meaning they, too, will be sitting in rooms like this one on the Holloway Road, where someone will be talking loudly over the blast of traffic, telling them to pick themselves up, take stock of their situation, get their lives back on track. As if the problem was self-induced, as if they’d taken a walk in their lunch-break and forgotten the way back to work.
Boom and Bust
Assembled on my first day, what you have here in North London is not so much a cross-section of the citizenry, as a roomful of people who look like they take the bus – but without the migrant workers, the Africans, Chinese, Latins and Poles. In other words most of them are working class. The majority are male. And soon, it becomes clear, many are angry. It’s a hot day; the pep talk and endless form-filling start to irritate. In thirteen weeks this is the only time underlying resentment and humiliation seems as if it might develop into something more seditious. When our supervisor leaves during a numeracy test, there is enough sense of solidarity for people to call out the answers to one another. By the end of the day, though, everyone is focussed not on bucking the system but getting what they can from it: the priority, to understand the complex mechanisms governing clothing allowances and travel expenses.
Inflation
Action for Employment, or ‘A4e’ as they style themselves, are paid by the government to run programmes for people who’ve become detached from the routine world. They aim to get us earning our living and off the state’s back. The company has interesting origins, set up twenty years ago to help redundant steel workers. Now they operate in India, South Africa, Israel, Australia and throughout Europe; a balance book of £152 million demonstrates how successful they’ve been in turning a profit from global unemployment. Their British website claims they “assisted 19,572 people into work” last year, but is less forthcoming on how many did their time only to be returned to the dole. With gushing testimonies from employees and a blog from Bette, the A4e marketing dog (“‘How can a dog work in Marketing?’ I hear you ask”), the style is homespun, but as ruthlessly targeted as any self-help book.
Masters of the Universe
We spend our days attached to computers searching the net for jobs. There aren’t enough to go round and a large table down the middle of the room is packed with people reading newspapers, doing the crossword. Another group gathers near those in possession of a master narrative – the guys who ask the big questions. Why are we here? (to cheat the unemployment statistics), why is our army in Afghanistan? (because we’re an American puppet-state), is international capitalism bust? (probably), is the West in permanent decline? (definitely). They divide into two camps: Conspiracy Theorists and God-botherers. The God-botherers are loud and zealous, possessing that self-belief in such short supply elsewhere in the room; the Conspiracy Theorists, who use the net to illustrate their points, have a line in anti-semitic cant. I reflect that, once again, in a city as cosmopolitan as London, this is the only kind of prejudice I hear routinely, and unashamedly, enunciated.
Interest Rate
The general view of the supervisors is: they are friendly guys, overworked and ineffectual. They compete with one another through music. At one end of the room there’s reggae, at the other, soul, upstairs it’s 1970s pop. The Bee-Gees are on and a melancholy voice sings along: “we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be.” One supervisor upbraids his client, “Don’t say, ‘Cross your fingers’ because then nothing happens. Say ‘Yes, I’ll get a job.’ Be more positive!” Occasionally there’s an announcement that someone’s got work and a round of applause is called for. The recipient of a job in carpentry and joinery grins, “No offence, folks, but I hope I never see any of you again.” Laughter rolls across the room. “Adios” a woman with a strong Cockney accent calls out. My supervisor thinks the problem with my CV is layout: I’m not centred enough; I need bullet points. I have a work and education history of thirty years but no one will be interested in anything further back than five. And the writing style is too “chatty”, it should be more formal. I grimace and type the alterations, but it makes no difference, no one bites. I have sent out 43 applications. In desperation I despatch requests for internships (not easy for the middle-aged-with-a-PhD) but these are also turned down or ignored. I can’t even give it away.
Globalisation
I start to come in late, which means there are no free computers, so I bring a book. This reminds me of school, where I minimised the tedium of second year Maths by reading my way through the Scott Fitzgerald box-set. This time I have Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh to eclipse my failure. Shehadeh’s book, full of plotting and perambulation, takes me out of this chemical-reeking room and into the heavily scented hills around Ramallah. The next day, striding up Holloway Road, I think about how to apply his ideas of walking and resistance: I will be active in the city, rather than subject to it. It’s not much of a response but it energises me to find a new route, one avoiding exhaust fumes, taking back roads through the posh part of Tufnell Park on up to Archway. Here are people who will never end up in A4e: the well-off, the well-known, even. Damien Lewis cycles past; he looks cheery. And why not? The sun is shining and there’s a trace of honeysuckle in the air; in the street laughing Indian girls wave hennaed hands, and Bylorussian women with hard-to-credit bodies sunbathe in the park.
Dark Liquidity
Many of the people who began the course have disappeared. I chat with Steadman, one of the few still around. The only thing that’s “made sense” to him is work experience in A4e itself, setting up email accounts. As well as help with your particulars (“A4e helped me with my CV”; “A4e gave me the confidence I lacked”), A4e are supposed to provide placements and training, but the courses on offer are just basic literacy and computer. So what’s everyone up to? There are rumours of people working off the books or splitting wages with employers. The government’s attitude to occasional work seems to encourage such scamming. Whatever freelance bits I declare are subtracted from my £64.30 weekly allowance and lead routinely to threats to cut me off.
Moral Hazard
I speculate: what would happen if they took away my dole? A supervisor announces there are jobs at W.H. Smiths and in care homes. No one in the room seems keen. A few of us talk about this: if you’re signing on shouldn’t you take any job going? Everyone feels some people don’t want work (though no one in this category identifies themselves), but most have a sense of what they’re after and a plan to achieve it. The chief obstacles are universally known: lack of experience, relevant skills and qualifications. Yet instead of putting money into targeted training, the government continues to pay ‘service providers’ like A4e to provide what amounts to no service at all.
Futures
My thirteen weeks are up. I sit in cafes watching people meeting, talking, doing – plausible people. Is it possible I will never work again? I confer titles on my unemployment – an amusing game, indicating just how low I’ve sunk. I begin with the obvious like Love on the Dole, but quickly move on to more fanciful descriptions: Despair, Nausea, Fear Eats the Soul.
Penelope Lively, Family Album – TLS
The image of the house in fiction is a familiar one. Henry James, famously, made a many-windowed house stand for the novel’s different ways of seeing. Others have used it to remind us of the novel’s constructedness and, therefore, its potential for dismantling – think of Jean Rhys undoing Bronte’s world until all that is left is a dreamed-up, “cardboard house” (a mere book). And there is the figure of the house-as-character, memorable in Tony Morrison’s Beloved, in which a house, taken over by the past, becomes “spiteful”, making it rock and moan.
In Family Album, Penelope Lively’s sixteenth novel, her house, though filled with the presence of the past, seems a less self-conscious affair, set on firmer ground, evoking the long continuity of English history. Slipping between the 1970s and the present, the story is contained between opening and closing chapters titled ‘Allersmead’, after the house, the name a clue to who rules its roost. Lively furnishes it conventionally with a bookish patriarch, Charles; a dutiful wife, the “Always smiling, Alison”; and another woman, an au pair (the modern day equivalent of a governess). Intellectual pursuits concerning family ritual and tradition keep Charles detached from turmoil in his own household; to suppress revolt he simply closes the study door. So it is his wife’s concoction, Alison’s mead of ‘natural’ mothering and clannishness, that the family, and its employee, must swallow.
Ingrid, the worker in question, lives with the couple as their progeny multiply, returning home to Norway unexpectedly just once. Apparently satisfied with a life in the wings, she intrudes only with sharp pronouncements on family relations that go oddly, often comically, unremarked upon. In a novel where much is made of the mystery of people (“My mother was unfathomable”; “your father is inscrutable”), Ingrid is the most “enigmatic”, assimilating herself to Alison’s insistent, incurious idea that reality outside the family is of little value and not really to be countenanced.
By the time all but one of the six children have flown the coop (it is Paul, the one most loved by his mother and derided by his father who fails to fully fledge), Charles has removed himself to such a degree that Ingrid is no longer the third wheel in the marriage. The partnership between the women becomes more significant, Ingrid tending a fertile garden and Alison selling her rather creepy conception of “Mothercraft” to bemused women dismissive of the ideology but keen on her cooking tips. Their feminised industry is necessitated by the falling sale of Charles’s increasingly esoteric-looking books, representing a victory of sorts for Alison’s hippyish version of the domestic goddess (there are nods to Nigella Lawson et al), indicating what a hold home-making has on the culture: how much easier it has become to sell recipes than ideas.
Lively began late as a writer, starting with children’s books, work she could fit around her own motherhood. But she’s been making up for it ever since with novels, stories, essays, autobiography and a work on landscape history: industry that has not gone unrecognised (there was a CBE in 2001). In Moon Tiger, her 1987 Booker winner, the heroine thinks, “[There is] no halting or diverting the foreordained. This is the story; these are the things that must happen.” Often set in some version of what she calls a “memory house”, retrospection features in much of Lively’s fiction and has proved productive. But the danger is that continual dredging of the past tends to predictability, the backwards glance dessicates those big human dramas of freedom and choice.
For an English writer, like many of her generation, born elsewhere (Lessing, Ballard), not leaving Egypt until she was twelve, it is odd she possesses so little feel for other-worldiness. Perhaps this relates to the very rooted brand of realism she writes, displayed in Family Album’s redolent particularity, in details like the heated-up left-over cottage pie. The children are treated in the same way, kitted out with precise identities and destinies: Gina, the rebel, becomes a foreign correspondent, Claire, a ballet dancer, Sandra a fashion journalist, Katie the student, Roger the doctor, and Paul, the family mess-up.
Against this rather forced individualism, the world beyond Allersmead appears rote: famine children in some unspecified place are “wide-eyed with stick limbs and swollen bellies”. The final chapter, a battery of emails regarding Charles’s funeral arrangements, and spilling, finally, the family secret (“Spot on, Clare – thanks for lifting the veil, busting the taboo, etc.”), feels tacked on, an awkward nod to the modern world. Lively, however is aware that the bourgeois insular English family she’s writing about is close to extinction. The novel ends with the house sold off, the children, slow to reproduce, dispersed across the world, the pull of geography now replacing that of history.
A version of this review appeared as ‘Domestic Goddess’ in the TLS, 7.8.2009.
This is the transcript of a conversation I had in June with Newsnight’s Economics Editor, Paul Mason. I’ve made a few edits for the sake of sense and syntax. Some discussion of reportage and Mason’s family background is absent, forming the basis of a profile in the December issue of British Journalism Review. Otherwise it’s pretty much verbatim. We discussed his two books, Live Working or Die Fighting, 2007, about the history of the labour movement and its lessons for an emerging global workforce; and Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, 2009, on the origins and likely consequences of the international banking crisis.
He walks across the courtyard of the British Library and, as is often the case, the figure you meet in the real world doesn’t quite square with the one on TV. Something about talking heads on the box tends to caricature, and with his tense smile, quizzical eyebrows and strong Lancashire accent the figure prompted in my imagination had been that of Wigan’s beloved inventor, Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit fame). Close up, however, he’s altogether more concentrated; there’s a quiddity that’s anything but cartoonish. He accepts the bottle of water I hand him and redirects me further into the shade. Concerned it’ll get too warm, he says he knows what it feels like to roast. (A significant part of Mason’s job in the last few years has seen him travelling in China, Kenya, the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Eastern Europe and India.) Thus repositioned, he takes off the jacket of his sharp blue suit and lays his mobile on the table. He looks to see if the tape recorder is running and, satisfied with the technology, waits for me to start firing.
KW: Could you say something about the way personality influences your work as a journalist?
PM: [laughs] Well what do you mean by personality? I think above all, if I’m in, say, Western China then the television viewer sees me react to a series of situations, and what they want to know is who I am when I’m reacting. If I meet a bunch of poor people on a train going to be migrant workers, then I respond in a way that is conditioned by lots of things: having grown up in a working class town, having witnessed the defeat of the British labour movement, having been a journalist in very diverse places where people are in the same situation as them. So, yes, I think for television personality is an anchor point for the viewer to understand from. And if you’re honest, journalists have to work hard to get rid of all the crap that prevents you from being you in the situation where you are, because a lot of television encourages you not to be yourself.
KW: I thought you were going to say the problem for journalists is to differentiate themselves from one another because they’re all so alike. But perhaps that’s easier for you because you’re not quite in the same mould.
PM: No, I’m not.
KW: In the Introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans talks about James Agee and what it was about him that made it possible for the two of them to walk into the homes of Alabama sharecroppers, to sleep in their beds, to let them interrogate, interview and photograph them. What he says is: “He won over everybody… even though some of the individuals were hard-bitten, sore and shrewd. Probably it was his diffidence that took him into them.” When I asked about personality, I suppose I was thinking about diffidence – or charm, of which it can be a brand. [PM chuckles] What you’ve said is you have to be you, to react as yourself, but isn’t there something more about going out to people, putting them at their ease? To what degree do you have to construct an image that people can relate to and trust?
PM: On television – and I think it’s the right one – the common instruction is, be yourself, only 5 percent more. The people who look ‘natural’ on television are effectively doing that. They are either unconsciously or consciously doing that. But that’s about presentation. To me, the most important thing is getting the story, whatever that story is. The story can put me in a Kenyan slum or it can put me on Wall Street with a bunch of guys with red braces. And I have a conscious determination to make people the centre of the story. Not everybody in TV does that. Certainly in my writing, above all, I think people are at the centre of the narrative. I’m prepared to listen for hours on end to people’s stories. That’s what unites my writing work with my TV work. What you see on TV is just the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve done. Also I’m constantly triangulating with people. If I’m talking to Person A, who’s a migrant from Szechuan, I’m also thinking what does this woman who’s an office worker on the train who has to sit next to them, what’s she thinking? The key to all good journalism, I think, is just letting people speak to you, but also having a framework for where they’re coming from.
KW: You don’t feel there’s anything more strategic in what you do? And does it vary with the Wall Street wallah and the guys in China you talk about in Live Working or Die Fighting, who’ve lost limbs in industrial accidents?
PM: Yes it does. I just think the best way to do it is to show an element of understanding. Even if you think what they’re doing is quite horrible. When in Kenya I met a lot of people who were effectively involved in a small-scale ethnic war. And although many of the issues they were fighting around were just – what you saw was a bit like The Wire, in the sense that there were local politicians who’d probably got a decent case that the election was stolen from them, and then down from them, were people mobilising on the streets, the youth, in a perfectly legitimate and yet violent way, to protest the election. But when you met the politicians in their locality you realised a) they had a very fragile grip on those people, and b) some round the table were involved primarily in ethnic hatred of others. But the thing to do is to sit there and listen. I’m not saying you don’t go in there with a framework. One of the things I’ve realised is I do go into a lot of places with frameworks about understanding social spaces. I always look for what’s the informal social space. Who’s the real leader? What is the real network? It might be a mosque. But there might be something else going on. It might be a village and the village leader says he’s the leader. But then who’s this ‘ere and why’s everybody deferring to them? Who’s this other person? These are just skills. I don’t claim any patent on them; these are the skills you learn from doing journalism.
KW: In an article you wrote for Red Pepper, you discuss Dispatches [Michael Herr’s 1977 book on the Vietnam War], saying it showed you “the kind of journalist you wanted to be…the unflinching truthfulness of the gaze.” Do you think the image presented by some news journalists gets in the way of the story, lessens the possibility of that unflinching gaze? There are all sorts of examples, John Simpson in Iraq comes to mind, when you wonder if the journalist can really look around, because they themselves are so much the centre of attention.
PM: I think every journalist should just do what works for them. If John Simpson is such a big guy, big in terms of his reputation, that where he goes – well you can’t have the Heisenberg principle: wherever he goes will affect where he is. In a way, I kind of want to see his reaction. My thing is to make a contribution by doing a certain type of journalism, and I don’t think it’s about not being me and not being the centre of attention either. Why Dispatches still inspires me, and there are one or two other books like it, is that it’s really…
KW: …beautifully written?
PM: It’s beautifully written and, I was gonna’ say, it’s reportage. Some of the stuff in LWODF is reportage, some of the stuff I do on Newsnight is reportage, some of the stuff I do on Newsnight day to day is not reportage, it’s news reporting. If you read Orwell’s Diaries on the trip to Wigan Pier, and then you read The Road to Wigan Pier, you realise that he’s put two things together. He sees a woman here, poking a stick up a drain, and he’s on a train at another point. But in the final thing he’s on a train and he looks out of a window and he sees a woman poking a stick up a drain: that is reportage. Whether or not the audience is going to accept it anymore… it’s interesting. I don’t know. But I do think it has a value because it’s…
KW: …it’s getting to the truth of the thing. It puts you in there, too. And isn’t it also to do with the time and place you’re working in? If you think about the involvement of writers in the Prague Spring or the Velvet Revolution, or those from other countries who’ve been involved in intensely political moments, then lines between fiction and non-fiction blur. There are great truths, and important truths, in all kinds of work.
PM: Yes. I just think you’ve got to understand what genre you’re doing it in as you do it.
KW: You come across as a fairly twitchy, seat-of your-pants guy.
PM.: I am.
KW: I wonder if the speed and movement of the job, the peripatetic nature of journalism…
PM: …no it’s me, it’s me!
KW: Well where does that comes from? From your Dad, the lorry driver? Did that love of the road come from him? Did you go out with him as a kid?
PM: No, not at all. It’s weird. My Dad’s lorry driving days were spent within a fifty mile radius, mainly a ten mile radius.
KW: But even that can seem quite romantic when you’re young.
PM: No. Not at all. I’d say my personality, complex as it is, as all personalities are, I think the best word to use is driven: fair enough, I’m driven.
KW: So what was it like in Leigh [the Lancashire town he hails from]? What kind of cultural background did you have? What books were there in the house when you were growing up?
PM: Stuff my Mum was studying at college, lots of novels, everything from commercial trash to the usual staples. And once I was at grammar school, we’ve got the whole thing: 1984, Animal Farm, The Grapes of Wrath. And me and me Dad both loved Tchaikovsky.
KW: Did you go to the Halle?
PM: Yeah, we went to the Halle, went to the opera in Manchester. So it’s that kind of background. But there’s a great feeling of autodidacticism in this sense: we know we are limited in what we can find out.
KW: I wanted to ask you about that. I wonder what it was that propelled you – whether that sense of intellectual impoverishment, frustration at not being able to get out into the world of ideas…
PM: …well that’s always the feeling that anybody in a small Lancashire town has. You don’t feel impoverished at all.
KW: I mean in terms of ideas.
PM: That’s true. But remember there’s also a great radicalism in those small Lancashire towns; a great radicalism and a great conservatism. And they live side by side. Marxism is not strong there like it is, say, in South Wales; Methodism is a great influencer, and therefore labourism. What else? I’d say most of my peers as kids in grammar school, and the others who weren’t in grammar school, probably a lot of ideas that opened us up to the world came from music. Things like David Bowie or Bob Dylan lyrics which are poetic…
KW: I want to discuss this question of injustice more. In Catch 22 Yossarian keeps getting trapped in the insane bureaucracy of the war machine. And people say to him: it’s not personal. But he insists it is personal: it’s happening to me. I wonder, how personal is it for you?
PM: From my grandmother, on my father’s side, that comes again and again: the sense of bitterness going back generations. My granddad was a miner, my grandma, a cotton-weaving woman. Even though they would never tell you anything about the social history of the stuff they’d been in. Eventually you did get out of them they saw all the German prisoners being brought to Leigh in World War One – because it was a big event: Leigh had a German prison camp. And what’s interesting about this social history is how little they hated the Germans. How they feared, but respected them. We know that because somebody’s done some research. But it’s absolutely there in the folk memory of that side of my family: that they’d had to live through poverty, that it was unjust, that nobody ever helped you.
KW: There’s a moment in LWODF where you write about your realisation that power has become as important as class. It’s no longer just a question of bosses and workers, now it’s about power and monopolised power. And with the ascendancy of monopolised power, class consciousness has eroded. What do you think can be done when people no longer feel they have a shared history or the sense of solidarity that comes with class consciousness?
PM: Okay. What I’d say is that for twenty years as a vaguely politically active person, and as a trade unionist, and in all ways, I tended to look at everything from the point of class. And I still think that class as an analytical tool is fundamental. You can understand nine-tenths of your experience through it when you’re looking at society in the West.
KW: But it’s verboten.
PM: And that’s why I’ve written the book. Because I think it still is the case, and I don’t mean class culture and consciousness – I just mean by function class is a great underpinning. But the thing I came to realise in the Nineties, through reading people like Foucault – there’s a great quote by Foucault in an interview with Felix Guattari, he says: it took us a hundred years to understand class, but we still haven’t understood power. Then he sets out to try and understand it. I think he goes too far down the route of psychology. But when I’m going into a situation now, whether as a writer of a book, or as a journalist, it’s important to understand power as well as class. By class I mean, who are the factory owners? What’s their relationship with the workforce? Then you can look at the workforce. There are power structures within the workforce. And once you get into the global South or away from places like this – away from the classic experience of the Western workforce – and you get into Kenya or Bolivia, there power is more important as an analytical tool than pure poverty and class. But even in the West it’s changing: when you go into, say, the workforce of UCH [University College Hospital], where I’ve just been to someone’s leaving do, that same power structure is stronger now because all the domestics are Madeiran, and lots of the junior nurses are Nigerian, and this is not the world I grew up in. So power, and its layers, are more important than ever.
KW: But one of the things Foucault talks about is the dispersal of power: power is everywhere. And the problem with that is it makes it harder to find a target. Clearly in the Third World where things are less mediated, where you don’t have a media obscuring relations…
PM: …there’s an Us and Them everywhere…
KW: ..it might be easier to see an Us and Them. Whereas here the sense of identification, fraternity, connection, either with people through a shared history, or solidarity with workers across the world, these things have wained.
PM: They have wained but I don’t write them off completely. They are still there.
KW: How do you stir them?
PM: Well it’s not my job to be stirring. Unfortunately that’s the truth about the job I have.
KW: But as a writer? You’ve talked about Orwell and people like that.
PM: First of all, don’t write off the fact that the old class consciousness has survived in pockets and still continues to influence reality in a way that…
KW: …You’re talking about something like the Lindsey strike?
PM: Lindsey is a good example. It doesn’t fit into anybody’s narrative but the TUC has organised, and done well for, Bulgarian and Polish workers in farms in the South-West of England. Nobody wants to write a book about it. Nobody wants to put it on the tele because it doesn’t fit the idea that unions are in decline and the Poles are all very atomised. But this has actually happened. Likewise the American labour movement has revived itself.
KW: Through migrant workers?
PM: Partly through migrants. And you look at London Citizens in the East End and that’s the same there. These things are islands of social capital in a stream that is constantly washing them away. But I think a lot of people start from the idea there are no islands or dams or eddies – people have a very negative view of what modern capitalism is from the point of view of social organisation. And that’s partly a product of twenty years of defeat. But one of the things I try to do, certainly in LWODF, and to an extent in my work as a journalist, is point out that there are these great islands of social capital and what they’re up against. We are certainly in a pre-1889 situation; the tide has not turned, to change the metaphor, but don’t rule it out.
KW: At the end of Meltdown you ask, so where are we after the credit crisis? You say it’s your hunch that “organised labour looks set for a comeback.” But there’s not much sense of what this is based on, neither here, nor in LWODF, where many of the examples you give of people across the Third World have them trembling on the brink of action but still disparate, not yet organised or unionised; not having established the kind of communities you talk about in the historical sections of the book – the education, health and social groups – what you now label, with that unhappy phrase, ‘social capital’. So what is it, other than wishfulfulness, that makes you think a resurgence is likely?
PM: What it is… I don’t believe the labour movement is an inevitable history of cycles of destruction and revival, but nevertheless they are observable patterns. The workforce that created the 1848 revolution in Paris was unrecognisable to the workforce that created the Paris Commune [in 1871]. There were a few people still around but they were effectively locked in a mourning cycle for what had gone – for the pre-1848 movement, for the artisanat of the inner faubourgs of Paris. Whereas now the working class of the outer faubourgs are all living in tenements rather than hovels, often beguiled by pop culture, effectively. And you can feel this in their reactions: Louis Blanc, a leader of 1848 and a workers’ leader, first and foremost just rejects the Commune.
KW: He rejects it as what? Too bohemian?
PM: Too bohemian…
KW: You say of Louise Michel, that in the Commune there was a social experiment in living that gets overlooked…
PM: …and even the workers who are organised get dragged into that social experiment. In another example of the same period, the workers that made Chartism in the late 1830s and 40s, and were its vanguard, their world disappeared by the time labourism and trade unionism is being reinvented in the 1880s, 1890s. You get the odd person who’s the link between them. Someone like Engels, as an old man, stands up on the cart in Hyde Park saying: I never thought I’d see the day; after thirty years the British working class is back! I think it’s Theodore Rothstein’s book, From Chartism to Labourism, that tells the whole story. But remember it spans a period from 1848 through to 1888. That’s a heck of a long time. I believe the [Karl] Polanyi observation that capitalism calls forth a ‘double movement’ is really fundamental and true.
KW: He means capitalism moves itself relentlessly forward, taking whatever it can? And the double movement is the response, the attempt to restrain or curtail it?
PM: [Nods] I think a lot of the rest of what Polanyi writes is a bit crap. It’s an anti-Marxist justification of the progressiveness of capitalism. But this is a better insight in some ways than Marx’s idea that capitalism summons forth its own destruction. We don’t know yet, as Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution: it’s too soon to tell. But what it’s not too soon to tell is that capitalism summons up socially cohesive movements of those who feel the downside of it. And the organised workforce, come what may, whatever is thrown at it, seems to come back.
KW: So that’s what your hunch is based on?
PM: It’s more than a hunch. I think it’s an inspired guess, notwithstanding the fact that we’re in a downturn. At the end of Meltdown I say we’re probably at the beginning of a tech-driven upturn that will last us another fifty years. The issue is: do the people of the world impose some kind of sustainability and social justice on that? Or do the people who benefit most from it get to dictate the way it goes? For the first time ever that issue is posed globally. Last time we had a boom this was an issue for workers in France, Britain, Germany, America and Japan. And all the answers came out differently. Now I think we’re probably on the eve of – it’ll probably be delayed five or ten years – but there could be an up-rush. Capitalism’s got great reserves and therefore it will pose again the issue of who gets what from that reserve of growth.
KW: You said at Housman’s [an independent bookshop in North London] you were thinking about writing a novel. The writing in LWODF has the virtues of good journalistic writing – it’s punchy and in the moment. But I did feel the lack sometimes of connecting tissue. I know you were keen not to produce a lessons-of-history book.
PM: Yeah.
KW: There are moments, though, where the writing changes. There’s a section on Germany, 1905, it’s just five pages…
PM: …where I just sort of imagine…
KW: It’s languid, erotic – homoerotic even.
PM: Yeah, it is.
KW: There’s something about the imagination quickening the material. I wonder if that might be the direction you intend to go in?
PM: I think it is. There are two things pushing me in the direction of fiction. (I don’t want to give too much detail because you should never tell anybody what you want to do.) Every line of Meltdown was effectively overseen, okayed by the BBC. I understand why they have to do that and I’m glad to do it. It’s the rules. It creates a limitation, though, on what you can write. And the next thing I write I’ve got to be absolutely free.
KW: Do you think if this wasn’t the case you’d still be moving to fiction, regardless?
PM: I’m not moving irrevocably to fiction. But some of the things that need to be said about now are being said in the world where fiction meets journalism. For example, among TV dramatists the great question is: how do we get a British version of The Wire, whatever its limitations (there are some stereotypes, above all you can see the Robert McKee school of story structure written all the way through it.) But I like The Wire and it’s interesting you’ve got dramatists saying, shit, to get close to this we’ve got to use David Simon, a journalist on the Baltimore Sun, to get this we’ve gotta’ get echt, we’ve gotta’ get reality and therefore we’ve got to get closer to journalism than we are. Now I’m feeling it from the other side. To tell the truth about certain situations I’ve gotta’ get closer to fiction than journalism. And those situations might be about now, but equally I’m very attracted to writing historical fiction. So I’m still mulling about what I’m gonna’ do. And because I’ve got a history in creative production, I mean I was a musician, I did write hours of unperformed operas, I’m quite confident I’ll produce something. It’s just when and what do I want to do.
KW: You should write autobiographically.
PM: But when I do it comes straight out on the page. Someone told me the best bit of LWODF is the last three pages where I write about myself. And he’s right.
KW: If you’re going to write about now, the idea of going out and finding drug dealers on the street…
PM: ….but that’s not what the now is. The now, that no TV drama has got to the nub of, is the total empowerment of the rich and powerful by the situation we’re in, and the total disempowerment of everybody else.
KW: You could get to that through your family.
PM: You could get to it through a lot of things but the problem is, I also think that, in drama, weirdly, there’s an absence of imagination.
KW: Drama’s so class-bound in this country. You’ve got people who’re allowed to do the working class in a certain way and then you’ve got frocks and toffs.
PM: Isn’t it weird – we live in a world where the novel is almost owned by women as a genre? You think about it…
KW: I do. And I don’t know that it’s the case.
PM: It’s also the world of imagination. And yet drama is owned by men and it’s the world of reality.
KW: Well there are obvious reasons for that historically: you can write a novel in the corner of the room.
PM: Of course. But now, more than ever, you’ve got this bifurcation. When was the last time you saw a TV drama that had any element of imagination or unreality in it?
KW: Don’t write a drama. Write a novel.
PM: If I could write what I want tomorrow it would still probably be something fictional and something that goes to the core of this problem about now: about our acceptance of the fact that so few people have benefited from the economic and political and social changes of the last twenty years; and that so little of the official discourse is either about that or cares about it. That’s my big frustration, which I think you can tell in both books actually.
KW: Have you read In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje?
PM: No.
KW: The beginning of LWODL reminded me of it. He started as a poet and moved into fiction.
PM: Okay.
KW: It begins with the workers who’ve been building the Toronto viaduct. And in your book you start with that little act of rebellion where a worker secretly leaves a message to posterity in the foundations of a building. It’s a similar thing in Ondaatje. Before the bridge is about to be officially opened, one of the bridge builders breaks through the barrier and zooms across on his bike, taking the moment for the workers. Ondaatje writes beautifully about all kinds of work: dyers and tanners of leather, men in the abattoir, those swinging from ropes over the side of the bridge, dynamiters, loggers, farmers and thieves. It might be interesting for you to look at. But perhaps you’d hate the poeticism.
PM: I don’t hate poeticism. I think English literature is missing poeticism. What else do you want? Anything else you want to cover?
KW: Well I had some questions about ideology.
PM: Go on.
KW: Alright. Let’s try and do one. It’s a question about the loss of idealism and how you recover it. There are two ideas underpinning the history of workers’ struggle since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, since the Cottentots [as the early cotton barons were called] – two Enlightenment ideas that preceded the struggle and defined what it was trying to achieve. Both have been eroded in the last quarter century. One is about the nature of the liberation people were battling for – a notion of human potential and fulfilment, achievable in the worker’s paradise some envisaged. The other is about progress, and at the root, a feeling that it is workers, and not bosses, who are on the side of history. Of this last, one strand is teleological – dialectical materialism guaranteeing you a destination at the Finland Station if you only have the guts to hold fast. Another is the belief that science and technology will inevitably improve people’s lives. But these are now suspect: communism as it evolved meant, as Kundera and others saw, gulags attached to the side of paradise; and with the planet under threat, the belief that science and technology can deliver us out of pain and superstition, also seems doubtful. Yet these ideas were fundamental to the history of the labour movement and in getting people mobilised – getting them to see above the parapet of their daily lives.
PM: Alright. The science and technology thing. Basically, the development of capitalism will create the basis for a more just society, is something I believe. I might just be a product of – I don’t know – whether it’s Catholic grammar school, working class background, long engagement with Marxism, I don’t know what it is, but I believe it and I’m not going to stop believing it.
KW: So the end-ism of the mid-century, and where technology took us with the bomb and the camps, don’t really matter in relation to making you a better washing machine?
PM: No. The bomb is one thing. Technological determinism absolutely I reject. But at the end of the day I don’t think the gulag or the holocaust came out of people’s belief in scientific progress. It came out of the other part of what you’re talking about. I think that within the working class movement, and all forms of radicalism under capitalism for two hundred years, to adapt the Polanyi idea, there’s been a double movement. And at the very roots of it there is always a liberationism, and there’s always a kind of Jacobinism. The fatal attraction of forms of Jacobinism is something that, again, have been wrongly understood by twentieth century Marxism.
KW: Because [in a figure like Louise Michel] they’re incapable of uniting the cat lover and the woman with the rifle in the street?
PM: Yeah. But also because the Jacobin response is a response to the defeat and betrayal of the reformist libertarian attempt. So Louise Michel, after she’s been on New Caledonia, comes back in the 1880s, knowing that most of her people are dead, that she’s had ten years of suffering, and stands in front of this huge working class crowd at the Gard du Nord. And she thinks, you know what? The nihilists are right. There are 10,000 people here who will be shot or go to jail, if they do what I want them to do. Why don’t I just do it? And for me to do it, I have to amplify the power of me. And, therefore, within years she’s into the world of Ravachol, of the individual anarchist attempts to blow people up. So that’s what I call the Jacobin response: fuck you, we’re gonna’ impose freedom on the world. That’s where Bolshevism comes from and it’s there in the 1848 revolution.
KW: It shares Nietzschean tendencies too.
PM: Yeah, it does. The will to power. And yet what I think for anybody who’s involved in the struggle for social justice or social liberation, they have to understand that on certain points a little voice will whisper in their ear, fuck this, we’d be better off if we went down the route of an absolutist authoritarian method of solving this. To me, now, in retrospect, the greatness of a figure like [Eugene] Varlin, who I write about in LWODF, is that he understood – No, actually if it involves another directorate, another Committee of Public Safety, then the Commune is not going to lead us where we want to go. He realises that the need for a Committee of Public Safety and arrests and hostages arise out of the weakness and, probably, the unripeness of the situation. And he says, we’re not going to do that. It’s unfortunate that the dominant narrative of the workers’ movement for a century is authoritarian elitism.
KW: And LWODF was written as an antidote?
PM: Well I have to say, if you think so, that it’s written out of a profound knowledge and engagement with the opposite. Without going into all the details, I have been an activist on the Left when the only tradition you could be in was effectively something influenced by Marxism and Bolshevism. Even if you were in the Labour Party, even if you were in a trade union, even if you were organising workers’ aid for Bosnia, which we were, during the Bosnian civil war, doing things on the right side. I worked with dockers who filled up a lorry to take to Bosnia to help the Bosnian muslims. The only language we had with each other was this language of early twentieth century Marxism. They wouldn’t have understood the idea of Seattle, although they played their part in creating a movement where it became possible for Seattle to exist.
KW: But you seem not just frustrated but almost jaundiced about the modern forms resistence takes, the “low-level, non-ideological, anti-political culture” of think global, act local. As you say, you can’t tackle the banking crisis branch by branch.
PM: The first demonstration I went on in the City of London was against the Bank of England. It was quite funny to see a coalition of Marxists and anarchists try and march on the Bank of England because the answer to the crisis they were protesting about, the uber-radical Keynesian answer, is to do what the Bank of England has done, which is to print money and slash interest rates. You could be, as I have been, implicitly critical of the Bank of England for not slashing interest rates sooner, but it reflects an other-worldliness when people are not even engaged on the same page, on the same blogosphere, as anybody who understands that to stop two million unemployed becoming four million, you have to do what the Bank of England did. That’s why I’m frustrated by the lack of engagement in the anti-capitalist Left.
KW: You mean they say they’re anti-capitalist – campaigning on ecology or poverty – but they’re not paying attention to signs in the capitalist economy?
PM: It’s true. Look at the way the NGO’s reacted to the downturn in the Third World. At the Washington summit in November, they handed out leaflets saying: don’t forget aid to Africa – this, in a month when a million workers lost their job. Is it not their business to stand up and say, don’t forget Detroit, don’t forget Indiana? Who’s saying that? Alright, we know who’s saying that: pork-barrel politicians of both parties. But does the radical Left not believe it has a job to do defending the American workforce?
KW: But that’s partly the problem about the dispersal of power. It’s easier to organise around issues of ecology and poverty than getting down to the gritty business of defending jobs.
PM: It is.
KW: Okay, last question: about Louise Michel again. I wonder, other than the splendid idiosyncrasy of her prison letters demanding news of her cats, what was it that attracted you to her?
PM: I’ve since found out I am simply the English branch of a new beatification movement. In France, finally, after every other Communard got their square, Louise Michel gets the big one. She gets the square outside Sacre Coeur. Sacre Coeur was built to ‘expiate’ the memories of the Commune. Why does she matter? I think she’s an historical figure that deserves more attention.
KW: But what is it about her personality and character that engages you?
PM: We’re lucky that she was a woman engaged enough with the masses to be ‘real’, and literary enough and vain enough to have written it down. When you stare at the pictures of the women, after the commune, who were tried as petremerses, or even those who’d been artillery women in the Commune, you know there is probably a story like hers behind every one of them. But the brilliant thing about Louise Michel is she wrote it down. And not only that, she maintained a literary engagement, quite delusional in her case, with some of the great figures of her time. There’s a poem about Michel by Victor Hugo ['Viro Major'], there are others by Baudelaire, by Verlaine ['Ballade a Louise Michel']. She’s writing to Victor Hugo while she’s on Noumea.
KW: So it’s something about her audacity.
PM: It’s her audacity…
KW: And being a character so far out, who just assumed the centre ground, who refuses to be left out beyond the perimeter.
PM: And I think the discovery of that character has been an antidote to all the mock and fake heroicism imposed on the working class narrative by Stalinism in the twentieth century. And when I say by Stalinism, Stalinism imposed that heroic way of looking, so there had to be a Stalinist hero, but this way of seeing has filtered down: Kier Hardie is looked on in this way by Labour people. She’s there, under bombardment, during the middle of the Commune and she goes to a church and simply decides, because, frankly, she’s got slight problems with reality…
KW: …maybe that’s the only way to treat it.
PM: She basically walks into the church and decides that every time a shell goes over she will play one of her own voluntary compositions on the organ. So much so, that the guys on the battlements come down and order her to stop because she’s attracting shellfire. She’s made up a composition in her own mind – The Organ Plus Shellfire. When she’s on Noumea, she’s doing the same stuff. She tries to organise an orchestra of Kanak instruments for the French settlers to play. And she embraces it, because she’s a musician: that’s another thing that attracted me to her. We know that people like Debussy, Duparc, Satie, were obsessed with quarter-tones. Louise Michel heard the Kanak people singing in quarter-tone and tried to notate it, tried to engage with it, tried to teach them to sing in tones and semi-tones. She is an early musicologist of the South Pacific. And to be that, and a barricade fighter, and to come back to France, and then just decide, well, fuck it, I’m going to do it again, is extraordinary. She goes on the demonstration in 1883; she’s in prison again for three years – it’s just the indefatigability of her. Since writing LWODF, I’ve discovered other figures like this, but I think she stands, quite rightly, as this almost-beatified working class hero from the mid-century, precisely because she is not…
KW: …in the mould of the heroic worker…
PM: …the so-called heroic worker. In the Spanish Civil War the first Franco-Belgian battalion formed in the International Brigade, named itself the Louise Michel Brigade. But the bloody Communist Party came over and a) disowned it, and b) changed it to something like the Maurice Thorez battalion [Thorez was a communist leader who called for an end to the wave of strikes organised by syndicalists in France in 1936], something ridiculous like that. They didn’t want Louise Michel. But what did those workers mean by doing that? They mean: we are fighting for personal liberation, not just for some ideal. I think they absolutely understood that.
KW: And the power of her waywardness, as opposed to the discipline of the Party line.
PM: It’s the power of waywardness and the power of illogic as well. She’s relentlessly illogical. The more I’ve read of her you see she’s influenced, as well, by the storytelling of the Kanak people. Weirdly, you now realise, if she’s sitting in a pub in Brixton in 1880 talking to a bunch of anarchists at the London Conference, she’s probably telling them stuff about Kanak culture. All that gets lost in workers’ history. There’s a lot more to do to rediscover it.
Louise Michel – Paris Commune, 1871; Jules Girardet, ‘Louise Michel harrangues les Communards’
Monica Ali, In the Kitchen – TLS
Throughout the twentieth century novelists across the Atlantic from Fitzgerald to DeLillo had it in mind to write ‘The Great American Novel’, a book roomy enough to encompass the nation but sturdy enough to face the questions it posed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century is something similar happening here? Even if ‘The Great British Novel’ seems an unlikely frame for our enduring national ambivalence (and the novels often overflow that frame), the desire to contain multitudes, and to show the difficulty of negotiating so much difference, has been the driving force in ambitious works by Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Kamila Shamsie, in Monica Ali’s fêted debut, Brick Lane, and now in her latest offering, In the Kitchen.
Ali charts the fate of Gabe Lightfoot, an “executive chef” at a Piccadilly hotel which has undergone many makeovers since its heyday in the Twenties when Chaplin and Coward ambled through the corridors, but in recent times failed to fix an identity – a degree of uncertainty evident in its many wrong notes (chandeliers like “ugly, bejewelled dowagers”; silk, not fresh, flowers). Like Gabe himself, performing in the hotel to encourage a couple of chancers – a Blairite MP and a businessman – to invest in his own restaurant, The Imperial has lost its way.
In the kitchen, at least, Gabe knows who he is: a Londoner by election, looking at Damian, the only other English worker, and thinking “Don’t let the side down, lad”. The phrase is one of his father’s, whose lessons in how “to be a man” course through Gabe’s mind before being batted away as inappropriate for his cut-throat world where you wait to see “all the angles” before making your play. Though the double-dealing troubles him, apart from the irritation he feels for those who have not quite adapted, who retain the tang of home – Oona’s West Indian mothering, Victor’s Moldavian street hustle – he regards the staff he commands benignly, as a kind of culinary United Nations. But détente proves illusory, and Gabe’s life begins to unravel when Yuri, a Ukrainian night porter, is found in the cellar, naked and blue in a pool of blood.
From such a beginning Ali lulls us into thinking this will be a conventional-enough murder mystery. But to the familiar tale of a life in the big city “spinning” out of control, she brings what Orwell called the “power of facing unpleasant facts” (‘Why I Write’, 1946), dissecting the body politic with great acuity – and humour – and confronting unpalatable truths about our selfishness and complicity.
The London tale opens into a bitter debate between North and South when Gabe returns to the remnants of his family: an ailing father, once a proud mill worker beaten by the casual destruction of his craft and community; a senile “Nana” full of stories about “Pakistans” living like vermin in the roofs of back-to-backs, and a brassy sister, a single parent mum, who has borne the burden of their mother’s mental illness and early death.
Against these pungent northern characters Ali sets the ghostly figure of Lena, one of the hotel’s agency workers and connected somehow to Yuri. She has taken a rather more literal beating, but does not complain, does not emote, barely breathes, in fact. And her blankness and brokenness are seductive. Gabe takes her in, a casual kindness, but fails to tell his girlfriend, masking his intentions from himself. So he slips into bed with this “insubstantial” woman, she resigned to paying a price for sanctuary, he “worshipping” her angular contours like a Braque painting, his Lena-in-pieces, a mystery to be solved. The meaning of her inscrutability, of course, is as palpable as the bruises on her body: she has been trafficked for sex. And the story Gabe must expose is not hers, nor even Yuri’s, but his own.
Inevitably the sense of fellow-feeling Gabe enjoys, endowed by the city in all its variousness, wears away: when he scratches beneath the surface he finds just how feeble is his understanding of those around him. A casual drink with a Liberian worker uncovers the story of a child soldier who played football with a woman’s head. The vertigo of such a moment, like the brutal truth of his relationship with Lena, lead Gabe into crisis. Falling from his life into “another dimension”, his sense of self now also in pieces, he winds up working with a troupe of immigrant labourers, anonymous as any gastarbeiter, digging onions from the earth in a field in East Anglia.
Back in London, finally Gabe acts, trying to be the honourable man his father wanted, but he fails absurdly. “Are your hands clean?” his boss demands when Gabe lashes out; while the cashmere clad MP warns that resistance leads only to ruin. Which indeed it does. “Things…fall apart” Ali recites in her opening paragraph, and maybe, she suggests, this is not the worst outcome: to face the rough beast in the mirror even if it means bringing the world down around us.
This is a version of a review that appeared first as ‘Fellow Feelings’ in the TLS, April 2009.
Anita Brookner, Strangers – TLS
“Objects that had started to die, living room pianos, clothes more than five or six years old, fashionable places that had begun to lose their lustre.” These were the things Walter Benjamin noticed the flâneur had an eye for, luring him onto the street in pursuit of anything off-key or out of date. In Anita Brookner’s latest novel, Strangers, (at 80 her prodigious work-rate shows no sign of letting up), Paul Sturgis is similarly drawn to the street and spends much of his time tramping pavements. Unlike the flâneur, though, he notices little of the world around him and what he does see, disappoints. Exasperated with London’s stony skies he cries out for more life. But as the twin poles of his existence are these featureless strolls and an empty flat, glum and oppressive as death’s waiting room, he has little chance of finding it, particularly when his head is full of ‘the next big thing’ (a phrase Brookner adapted from Henry James for a 2002 novel) – perhaps the only big thing in a lonely, uneventful life spent working in a bank. Always out of step with the living, Sturgis now feels poorly placed to die. But unlike Stendhal who had a relative at hand when he collapsed in the street, he will have to rely – and you can feel Brookner reaching for the cliché – on the kindness of strangers.
That life and death should come down to matters of etiquette is not unusual in Brookner. There are women writers who find freedom in bohemia, making themselves at home in no man’s land, but her novels insist on the wretchedness of those designated beyond the pale, “the disqualified”, as she calls them in Undue Influence. For these illegitimates, decorum – behaving in the approved manner – is not just a matter of form, but goes to the heart of one’s viability. And like Christina Stead (albeit a more fiery and political writer) she is unromantic about exile, sensing the disorders suffered by the unloved and unregarded.
Hers, admittedly, are strange outsiders – the white, well-to-do of Belgravia, Marylebone, Fulham or, in Sturgis’s case, South Kensington. It is only in a handful of her 28 novels that characters are identified as Jewish, connecting her typically bereft and inert figures to the legacy of the holocaust. Here, the only clues to Sturgis’s self-absorption, his “ineradicably solitary” habits, are a gloomy childhood that lingers in dreams, and the filial duty that scuppered his life: once steered to the bank by his father, he abandoned the study of art. Brookner, herself, did no such thing. She built a distinguished career as an art historian (Slade Professor at Cambridge, Reader at the Courtauld, Fellow at King’s College), but she was caught in the net of the past, telling the Paris Review: “I was brought up to look after my parents…They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood, and I felt I had to protect them. Indeed that is what they expected.”
In Sturgis’s case, obedience to the will of his parents has left him stripped of his own; his desires mere velleities, childishly wished for but rarely acted upon. And like a child, he is narcissistic: look at me! is the constant demand, even if it’s only muttered under the breath. There is one familial tie, Helena, a “pseudo-relative” whom he visits periodically, their relationship a Brooknerian mix of delicate consideration and power-play. Neither warms to the other and neither tells the truth about their meagre lives, but they maintain the association because it’s all they have. When she dies unexpectedly he casts around for companionship. But the candidates only confirm his stasis: a younger woman whose breezy superficiality and insensitive demands represent the intolerable future; and an old flame who originally rejected him as “too nice” – a character assassination that has stayed with him through the years – and who exposes the futility of going “back to the beginning”. He flits back and forth to France, trying to shake himself up, and the novel ends with him poised again to leave. Ultimately, though, it is not lack of opportunity that keeps Strugis “bounded in a nutshell”, but an unwillingness to see beyond himself, (he thinks of living “the life of the mind”, but even art turns him back upon himself).
There are moments when Brookner’s study of alienation and implausibility brings to mind the existentialists. As in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, inanimate objects grow human and menacing (the flat becomes “minatory”); and humans, machine-like, a collection of emptied-out gestures (“the same actions, performed at the same time, on similar days”). But despite her admiration for the European novel, her refusal of consolatory fictions (Brookner doesn’t do happy endings), and for all her pursuit of the marginalised, she remains wedded to the English tradition, to what Lorna Sage once called the “irresponsible innocence” of realist writing. Uninterested in the universal, however, with her characters’ refusal to find more room or better options for themselves, she cannot claim Stead’s achievement: that her obliquity made her ubiquitous.
In Stead’s novels the outsiders are often on the wrong side of history (on the side of the angels, that is), but in Brookner, too often people appear to exist outside history, untroubled by material questions or even the winds of change. “The times have been so unsettled” is a rare comment on the world out there (a reference to the upheavals of Paris 1968) in Incidents in the Rue Laugier. And, fatal in a realist frame, in Strangers there is the wrong kind of implausibility: Sturgis, an ex-banker, is ludicrously innocent in money matters, while women are talked about as “emancipated” or “modern”. All this wraps the narrative in the kind of anachronism that marks so much of Brookner’s fiction, and it is not of the kind a flâneur revels in. For her, there is no frisson in being out of the ordinary; performance is a sign of bad faith, not play; and freedom tends to overwhelm rather than liberate. Yet her cramped and doomy books are wracked by struggle – futile though it seems. The last words in Strangers are the modernist battle-cry, “Making it new”. But even as he raises this banner, Sturgis doubts whether his bid for the future is any more than an “airy notion of exile”: “this vision of his life in Paris had now dwindled almost to invisibility.”
This is a version of a review that appeared as ‘Fragile People’ in the TLS, 27.2.2009.
Anita Brookner, Strangers; R.B. Kitaj, The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin), 1972-3
Laura Beatty, Pollard – TLS
The heath and the wood: are these the most revealing landscapes in Northern storytelling? Shakespeare’s imaginative terrain, as always, seems definitive: the heath in King Lear, that great existential wasteland on which man is exposed as a “poor, bare, forked animal”; and the enchanted wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where humans forget themselves while fairies romp and plot.
In Laura Beatty’s intriguing first novel it is the “teeming” wood that presides. Anne, just fifteen, a lardy, clumsy, moonfaced girl, wanders out of her cramped house and into a new life under the trees. Days pass, and then weeks, but no one comes looking. She finds a pollarded tree and builds a makeshift shelter from branches and bin bags. For a while she raids the family home, foraging for food and tools, but soon her keys won’t turn the lock. Is Anne too dim to realize she’s been cast out, or simply denying her family’s cruelty? Years of bullying have given her the dogged, submerged quality of the victim, and though she comes to know the wood, she has little sense of herself. Nor does she ‘develop’ in any conventional manner. It is a mark of Beatty’s ambition that, without alibi or manifesto, she allows her character to retain this creaturely mystery.
What is certain is that the wood provides refuge for Anne and, with trial and keen observation, food (there are scraps left by visitors, berries and nuts, and in the surrounding fields she learns to milk cows and trap rabbits). Perhaps as important, it gives her the example of survival – the graft and cunning it requires. She grows to admire her scavenging competitor, the yellow-eyed fox. But this is no fairy tale. The return to nature means enduring starvation, solitude, the “hard and pinching fist” of winter. This materialism is apparent in the wood’s adaptability: it has survived man’s workings (the pollard itself is a symbol of resilience and cooperation); and in Beatty’s inlaying of the language of the wood (glen, rides, fossick, scrimmage, hoick, scratty, scuttle), with the junky chatter of modernity.
As the wood fills with bikers, dog-walkers and rangers, Anne brushes up against other lives. Steve of the dump, whose world of recycling parallels her own thrifty existence; and a puckish lad who mesmerizes Anne with his quick movement and gold-flecked skin. Steve is a “Falklinds” veteran, divorced and living with his chair-bound mother. Anne thinks him possibly the planet’s “only kind man”. With the tact of the oddball or outcast, this rough pair make room for her, sharing their giant breakfasts and putting her to work stripping furniture or salvaging parts. Their kindness draws her out: she senses the beginning of something like hope. But when the old woman dies, Steve’s mate stitches him up with his ex-wife. The family emigrate, the dump closes and, once again, Anne is abandoned.
Beatty, who has previously written a biography of Lillie Langtry and a children’s book about Anne Boleyn, is well-versed in female outlawry. This fictional Anne, though, in escaping the world, has none of the intellectual purpose of, say, Jane Bowles’s Serious Ladies. But her eccentricity, like theirs, undermines the realism of the writing. Beatty responds with a circular design, resembling the rings in a tree-trunk: a Prologue tells of Anne’s end as a bag lady atop a mountain of rubbish; while the Epilogue returns us to the beginning, when Anne was first “taken”, under trees threaded with light, ecstatic in “a storm of glitter”. And slicing through the novel is a Chorus of Trees, indifferent witnesses to human behaviour.
The message is clear: the wood will not mind if we destroy it, but we will.
This review first appeared under the title ‘Wood in a Wood’, in the TLS, 10.10.08.
Laura Beatty, Pollard
Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer – TLS
It’s a peculiar feeling, to read a novel set in the house where you grew up. In the summer of 1963 my family moved to 30 Princes Road in Heaton Moor, a suburb of Stockport. When we descended on that blistering day, there were eight of us: parents, grandparents, a brother, two sisters, and me – not quite four years old. I can still unspool the moment of arrival. Shooed from a house and garden covered in tea-chests, my sibling gang spread out across the road - bare toes to the hot tarmac - surveying our new domain. It’s the first memory I can be sure of and it’s born of paradox: the sensation of being at once a stranger and at home. A similar uncertainty about one’s place, and therefore one’s meaning, hovers about Towards Another Summer, Janet Frame’s ruminative novel about what a writer risks – silence, exile and isolation – in the name of self-discovery.
The Princes Road house had passed down in a chain of Guardian families. Earlier occupants included the Fays, Shrapnels, and Moorhouses – whom we ousted from the four bedroom Victorian semi – Geoffrey, his New Zealand wife, Jan, and their two children. This “novel-length autobiographical essay” is the product of a weekend Frame spent there, the winter before our arrival. She was 38 and had been away from New Zealand for six years, travelling in Europe, settling finally in London, but still struggling to acclimatize to the drabness, the unremitting negative of soot and snow. Her trip ‘up north’ was preceded by trouble with the novel she was working on, The Adaptable Man (published eventually in 1965), and by a self-imposed stay at the Maudsley Hospital. Hoping to escape these tribulations she accepted an invitation from Moorhouse, who’d interviewed her in London, sensed her at odds and out of place, and extended friendship.
For Frame, too, the house in Princes Road was a house of memory. The book’s protagonist, Grace Cleave, is lodged in the absent grandfather’s bedroom, surrounded by maps and relics from home. Looking out of her frosted window (there is no central heating; only matting on the floor) to a world etched in black and white, she summons another country – warm, coloured, lit up – that is both her antipodean home, but also the imaginative pull of the past: “What am I doing on this side of the world?” Grace wonders.
Although she considered the book “embarrassingly personal”, and put it aside for many years, its dialectical magic seems to have worked in the way Frame intended. The effort of eking out her past to confront herself in the present pulled her back from the abyss, solving the problem of whether she would be an English or New Zealand writer (she boarded the Corinthian for home a few months later), and, more importantly, returning her to the synthesis of writing itself – a “no man’s land”, as she envisages it here, the only place she could do as she pleased: “run, dance, shout, starve, [even] die.” A freedom she exercised in subsequent novels, stories, poems, and most powerfully in the autobiographical trilogy she wrote in the 1980s – To The Island, An Angel at My Table, Envoy from Mirror City – for which this book broke ground.
But does Towards Another Summer succeed in its own right? Written in a hurry, between March and May 1963, it’s one of those odd cases in women’s fiction, scarcely a novel at all, that despite its tenuousness – or rather because of it – demands attention. Providing little in the way of the novel’s conventional consolations, it is virtually plotless (immigrant woman spends weekend with strangers, thinks of home, nothing happens), but lurking behind this modest edifice is something stronger, something willed and crafty.
Grace begins in fledgling awkwardness, already a “successful lady author”, yet painfully ill at ease, even in the book-strewn disarray of her host and his young family. As the weekend progresses her ineptitude turns into something more concerted. She names her condition – she is “a migratory bird” – and her animal strangeness takes on Nietzschean qualities of perversity and pride. Grace discovers in her bird’s eye view powers unavailable to the mere mortal: “Her words flowed, she was excited, she could see everyone and everything.” This delirious flight into the imagination increases as she retreats from social interaction – refusing to say what is on her mind for fear she will be forced into “the stain” of cliché, or misconstrued. She moves “farther away from the human world”, coming precariously close to insanity.
Such female beastliness places her, of course, inside the House of Fiction, even if only in the women’s room – those unheimlich nether regions, usually located in the outhouse, basement or attic. As children, she and her siblings discovered the Brontës, styling their homemade novels and poems on those of the Yorkshire clan. The myth-making held up in unimagined ways: the premature deaths of two sisters, a “wild”, epileptic brother, isolation and brushes with madness, all reinforced the identification. So it’s not surprising when she gets to England she casts her northern sojourn in broad, Brontëish strokes. Rather than the clipped golf course the road actually stopped at (with a clubhouse that didn’t admit Jews), she imagines this very suburban street backing onto a moor (Heaton Moor/Geoffrey Moorhouse); the winter is “ice-edged”; the doors chained; and the two children appear like “tiny moving candle-flames” in their white nighties.
At the end of her turbulent weekend Grace stands alone in the attic. Not quite Brontë’s madwoman, but like her, something less than fully human – a bird-woman. In this disguise she can find her way home at last. But the nest she has feathered is also a trap, keeping her “silent, apart from all human beings”. Quite whether Janet Frame, a poet of the uncherished and the obscure, intended this as a warning or a seduction, is uncertain. But her lingering image of a migratory bird, a fabulous dreambird – redolent of soaring imagination, but also of flight from human indifference – is one that generations of women writers have wrestled with: “She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.”
This is the original version of a review that appeared in the TLS in August 2008.
Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday – TLS
Not by accident does an Irish writer set a novel in Dublin, over the course of one June day, with a character called Molly as the centre of attention. Deirdre Madden’s purpose, in her seventh outing (nine if you count recent detours into children’s fiction), remains elusive, however.
This day unfolds in the mind of an unnamed narrator, a dramatist struggling to bring her latest play into existence. Ideas flit about: the work might have something to do with animals – there’s a hare she’s chasing down, then a lost dog. But, lodged temporarily in the house of her friend, the actress, Molly Fox, and surrounded by Molly’s possessions, it is to her life, and that of their friend Andrew, that her thoughts keep straying. She has known them since studying at Trinity twenty years earlier, and for Andrew, a television art critic, and refugee from violence in the North, she harbours an unspoken, scarcely acknowledged desire. (Even in Molly’s house, though, she is denied the chance to say at last, “yes I will Yes”.)
Alongside Ulysses, Madden proposes another precursor: Adam Bede bookends the novel, and there is something of the attention-seeking Hetty in Molly, whose heart has also been if not entirely “shut up…against her fellow creatures”, then made wary by her mother’s departure on her seventh birthday. But it is in the book’s tone and taste that Eliot is most influential. A birthday gift for Molly of a chess set is indicative: “Everything about it – its small scale, its concealment and intricacy would delight…”
From Eliot, too, comes the drama of learning through suffering – both Molly and Andrew have overcome abandonment: Molly, the loss of her mother; Andrew, his brother, murdered by paramilitaries. But while Molly is unable to reconcile with her mother, Andrew eventually re-engages with his family, having “won through to some kind of moral knowledge”. What’s being described is progress rather than fundamental change, consonant with the old bourgeois view of independent identity. The narrator, for example, discovers in the case of Molly’s difficult brother, that personality, and the “disturbance” which beset it, are quite distinct: “distress lay over him like a grey veil, obscuring who and what he was, but not changing his essential self.”
Such ideas might not be out of place in a nineteenth century novel but they sit oddly in the middle of Madden’s exploration of modern identity. Her choice of characters – Andrew the TV presenter who “only really comes into his own when he is being filmed”; Molly, the actress; the playwright narrator; even a film star and fan – all point to some notion of performance. Despite several references to Wilde, though, Madden seems ill at ease in this territory. She makes various stabs at it – there’s a revelation of our “kaleidoscope” nature; a Heisenbergian notion that our relation to other people (or animals) changes them; and Andrew’s lecture on memorials and remembrance – but his uncertainty only muddies the water.
The problem is that Madden displays no grasp of the intellectual history of the self, nothing to suggest how we arrived at this self-conscious, self-infatuated present. (A gift-bearing “lost” granny who opens the book, and recurs as the fan at the end, is only gestural.) Anachronism leaks into the language, too. The narrator talks about “tosh”, but also warns Andrew, he “should get out more”. Moreover, people are always changing their tune, blood tends to be thicker than water, youth is invariably wasted on the young; indeed, originality is more uncommon than you might imagine. Against this, there is a defence of cliché: “Unlike many in my circle I think I have always understood the value of formulaic conversation and how it can make for real communication.” But banality needs to be more knowingly deployed if it is not to be simply deadening.
As the light drops (we will not be straying into Nighttown) we are back with the animals and two final symbols of the self’s artificiality and obscurity. The narrator looks at the fake cow Molly has placed at the bottom of her garden, whose presence has irritated her all day, and watches as a hedgehog, “Inscrutable, mysterious…disappeared into the shadows”. Over the ‘phone she tells Molly: the play isn’t going well; maybe she’ll write a novel. It’s a coy ending, but it can’t undo the sense that Madden’s subject, like the hedgehog scurrying out of sight, has got away from her.
This review first appeared under the title ‘One Day in June’, in the TLS, 22 & 29.8.08.
Molly Malone on Grafton Street
Rock Against Racism Archives
In 1977 I dropped out of college and started working for Rock Against Racism. I was seventeen and called myself (I wince at the thought) Irate Kate. I began as a volunteer but soon became RAR’s first paid worker and the youngest member of its national executive. After RAR imploded in the early Eighties – as community groups tend to, and, anyhow, having achieved many of it goals – Red Saunders, the chief instigator, powerhouse and propagandist behind the organisation, held most of its archives in his photographic studio. But an arson attack in 1991 destroyed all his professional documents and negatives, and with these, much of RAR’s record.
I left RAR in 1981 as the central collective was tearing itself apart over differences about the way we should proceed (an argument, as I recall, between becoming more corporate and professional, or returning to the grass roots and staying outside the mainstream – and inflamed as these things often are by personal animosities). I had organised a benefit with UB40 at the local fleapit in Brixton; sensing RAR had run its course, and wanting to get into film, I went to work in this cinema, then known as The Little Bit Ritzy. When I walked out of the RAR office I had with me a bundle of material – a minor act of kleptomania born, in part, of a desire to salvage some of RAR’s heritage as the centre unravelled. Given the fire, I’m glad I took what I did.
Today there’s a new group, named after one of Red’s brilliantly direct and encapsulating slogans – Love Music, Hate Racism. In 2008, thirty years on from the first RAR Carnival in Victoria Park, LMHR hosted an anniversary concert with some of the original performers who’d made it through (Tom Robinson, Paul Simonon, Jerry Dammers, Poly Styrene, Jimmy Pursey), and new acts who understood that the battle against racism needs continual reiteration and reinvention.
Despite this renewed activity, however, there is still very little in the public eye about what kind of outfit RAR was at the outset: what we meant and what we did. Some of the original players were peripherally involved with the recent Carnival and there’s an embryonic website intended to publicise RAR’s aims and achievement, but it’s not yet fully operational. There’s also a film, put together by Alan Miles, a London firefighter and self-taught documentarist; someone working on a doctoral thesis about RAR at the University of East Anglia; a book, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism by Ian Goodyer; and a website with a rather cursory RAR timeline. None of this material, however, comes from those who were centrally involved in RAR in its first incarnation. Of these, only a few have talked and written of – or visually advertised – their participation: Red, ever the travelling salesman, has a slide-show he presents at events around the country; the polemicist and East End doctor, one of RAR’s leading extollers and explainers David Widgery, published Beating Time: Riot’n'Race’n'Rock’n'Roll in 1986 - though it’s perhaps more properly considered as an account of anti-racist battles in the Seventies than an official history of RAR (here’s a further article from Widge, published in Radical America about the original Carnival); Lucy Toothpaste (aka Whitman), another key contributor to RAR’s magazine Temporary Hoarding, wrote about RAR and RAS (Rock Against Sexism – which she set up subsequently), in ’68-’78-’88: From Women’s Liberation to Feminism, 2008; in the same year there was A Riot of My Own, an exhibition of photographs, layouts and designs from the image-makers whose stylish, incendiary graphics were at the heart of the RAR project: Syd Shelton and Ruth Gregory; and from Hull RAR there’s a great a exhibition of posters put together as part of the bi-centenary celebrations of the abolition of slavery.
Then, earlier this week, prompted by the sight of a reunited Gang of Four (once a stalwart of Leeds RAR) on Jools Holland’s all-embracing BBC2 show, Later, I unearthed some of that material from the RAR office (including an interview that Lucy Toothpaste and I conducted with three of the Gang in 1979). What I intend to do now is upload some of this onto the net – either here on my blog or on the ‘original crew’ website: there are letters from enthusiasts up and down the country – and then around the world as RAR spread internationally; copies of RAR’s clarion-calling magazine Temporary Hoarding; information about various campaigns, tours and products; and communiqués from local RAR groups (at our peak there were 52 active groups and clubs running from Ayr to Launceston, Liverpool to Newcastle).
If there’s anyone who was active in RAR, who played for RAR or helped organise gigs, who has memories or stories to tell, or memorabilia to hand, please get in touch. I’d like to put together a chronology of gigs, carnivals and rallies, as well as a social history of the kind of sui generis organistation RAR was – how we made it up as we went along, the energy and effort that went into our successes, the reasons for our collapse. I’ll try and put down some of my own recollections but I’ve an unreliable memory and know my view of how things were is partial. So, if anyone out there has counter-memories, or thoughts to the contrary, please let me know.
www.retirementconcept.com – Canada
There were two roles Bette Davis wanted and never got. Like every other white actress at the time she wanted to play Scarlett O’Hara, the part suited her temperament to a tee. Stormy, headstrong and liable to indignation, she had a characteristic way of talking that combined good diction (summer stock in Ibsen taught her to emphasise every word), with an imperious drawl. Together they produced her trademark note of defiance, the much imitated, “nevah”. Who else, she demanded, was so well equipped to play the fiery Southern belle?
Actually she was a Yankee, hailing from Massachusetts, but not from money. She’d “come up the hard way” and it made her a “hell-raiser”. The battle with obscurity gave her a taste for theatre: it’s her sense of the dramatic, of being engaged in power play that defines Bette Davis. She even coached her children to call her “Mother Goddam”. Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed her command performance in All About Eve, preferred “Popeye the Magnificent”; the legend on her gravestone is his, too: “She did it the hard way.” All the bombast, however, did not necessarily get Davis what she wanted: for instance, that role in Gone with the Wind. When Vivien Leigh won the battle of the belles it was further proof that in Hollywood, if you were a woman, beauty invariably triumphed over brains or bravado. It certainly didn’t seem a logical decision when the part could have been written for her: “It was insanity I not be given Scarlett. But then, Hollywood has never been rational.” Or maybe the trouble was this: Hollywood’s rationale just wasn’t her own.
The other character she had a yen to play, a rather more surprising choice, was Alice in Wonderland. In 1938 Davis wrote an article for Good Housekeeping called ‘You Don’t Have to be Beautiful’. In it, she recalls the verdict of her first make-up man: “A fat little Dutch girl’s face, and a neck that’s too long.” Her father was just as encouraging: “Let her be a secretary. Bette doesn’t have what it takes to be an actress.” It taught her from the start to roll with the punches (of which there would be many) and turn what she had to her advantage: “I looked exactly like the Tenniel drawings of Alice; long neck, blond hair, and big eyes.” And she had Alice’s mutability. At just 5 foot 3, Davis was little but could dominate a frame, appearing larger than life. Unlike the stillness of some actresses, she had real kinetic power. Edith Head, the great Hollywood costumer, observed, “She had an especially long stride, so it was always important her skirt didn’t inhibit the way she walked.”
To a degree, the men were right: when Davis arrived at the station in Hollywood the driver from Universal left without her, he hadn’t seen anyone “remotely like an actress”. It was only stating the obvious to say she wasn’t a beauty, with the exquisite mask of a Dietrich, a Garbo or a Lamarr. “I had no hope of looking like Garbo, but even so they gave me her eyebrows and hairdo. Awful!” The problem, as the moghuls saw it: she lacked mystery in the European vein, but neither was she buttoned up like the girl next door. Her wit betrayed her. She had too much intensity and appetite. Four husbands and numerous lovers (including Howard Hughes; the songwriter Johnny Mercer; and her favourite director, William Wyler) were evidence of that. As was her claim to have named that little lump of metal, ‘Oscar’: “When I saw the award’s rear end, it reminded me of my husband’s. Both flat.”
She wasn’t just sexually restless, many of her performances display a turbulent mind. While Bogart or Cagney might sneer at the world, Cary Grant and Mae West wink at it, Bette Davis’s eyes were the most subversive in Hollywood: filling the screen with great pools of doubt. Her haughty look threw out a challenge, as if to say, “Is that the best you can do?” But instead of finding roles to suit her scepticism, the studios tried to mould her to their idea of what a woman should be. Wanting success, she let them alter her looks, but when they tried to change her name she put her foot down: “Bettina Davies, if you please! Heaven forbid!” As early as 1935, E. Arnot Robertson, recognised there was something different about this long-striding, foot-stamping virago: “I think Bette Davis would probably be burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet.” Her response to this inhibiting world was to adopt the posture of a fighter. Her autobiography opens in full battledress: “I have been at war from the beginning. I rode into the field with sword gleaming and standard flying. I was going to conquer the world.” But conquering the world was a job for the boys, the province of Clark Gable or Errol Flynn. In the movies just about the only profession open to a woman was the business of being a woman. As far as that went, there wasn’t a cliché Hollywood left unturned. (Even when war came and girls were suited and booted, the plot usually rested on the crisis in femininity that work engendered.) So Davis set about exploring the territory of narcissism. Trying her hand at just about every female stereotype, she personified in her acting all the trouble with women.
Her first film, Bad Sister, in 1931, was quickly followed by Ex-Lady (1933); Front Page Woman (1935); Satan Met a Lady (1936); Marked Woman, That Certain Woman (1937); Jezebel (1938); The Old Maid (1939); June Bride (1948); The Star (1952); The Virgin Queen (1955), and even Eve herself (1950) – the title role may have been Anne Baxter’s, but the film was most definitely all about Davis. Then, at a time when less determined actresses had given up the ghost – going into seclusion like Garbo, to protect an image of their perfect young beauty – she had a rare third act. With Baby Jane (1962), Sweet Charlotte (1964), and even, Pretty Peggy (1973), Davis created out of the spectre of the woman who never grows up a whole new gallery of horrors. In white mask paint and smeared lipstick she flaunted the role every woman succumbs to sooner or later: drag, with its underlying suggestion that the whole show has been nothing but a travesty. To cap it off, some sixty years after her first appearance as the Bad Sister, she made her final curtain call, playing in – what else? – The Wicked Stepmother.
In many films the plot turns on Davis’s desirability – which means, as a woman, her plausibility. It’s a problem all actresses have to engage with: some escape by playing celestial or androgynous figures free from the gravity of sex; others collude and play the coquette. But Davis was alone in letting you know she knew she was judged, and that it made her indignant. In her turmoil we see what it is to have one’s existential credibility constantly called into question. Many critics have misread this drama in her performance as neurosis, regarding her as an actress veering between hysteria and ham. David Thompson has her “at once hysterically mortified and daring us to admit that she was not attractive”. But her mortification, I’d suggest, has more to do with the humiliation she was subject to as a woman, than anxiety about her looks. She had, after all, been publicly admonished by a judge as “a very naughty little girl” when she took Warners to court for failing to provide her with strong enough roles. Of course, as the ‘Mother Goddam’ tag shows, she was aware of her reputation, and what it meant: “Being hysterical is like having an orgasm.” she teased. “It’s good for you.” Because what after all are the alternatives? Take it like a lady? No, make a fuss she said, and enjoy the drama while you’re at it. Perhaps this is why so many men find Bette Davis irksome, and why, even today, she commands respect among women.
None of it was easy. She lost the court case against the studio, but won the moral argument, consolidating her reputation as a force to be reckoned with. When, in her fifties, the roles dried up she took action again, advertising for work. She clung on hard because she knew what her career had cost – the failed marriages, unwanted abortions, and a daughter who, like Joan Crawford’s, produced a monster mommie memoir. But she survived these betrayals and those of her own body: plastic surgery, a mastectomy, not even a stroke could fell her. She was a Nietzschean force, once saying: “I always had the will to win.” But she also told “the awful truth” about being a working woman, calling her autobiography, The Lonely Life. When a 15 year old fan, Betty Perske, (aka Lauren Bacall) wrangled an audience, Davis cautioned against acting: “I have two Oscars on my mantelpiece but they don’t keep you warm on winter evenings.” This (American) emphasis on hard work had none of Garbo’s nonchalance: she was a star, but far from ethereal. Even at the height of her fame she could be seen around Hollywood driving a station wagon, wearing jeans, picking up the groceries. By 1948 she was America’s highest paid woman but success never tempted her into self-mystification. Asked if she’d ever had an out of body experience, Davis replied, “Out-of-body indeed! More like out of one’s mind!” Her voice “twanged with impertinence” (Christina Stead) – that’s what you’re hearing when she delivers her most characteristic line: “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”
The insolence of someone like Bette Davis, her snarling manners and lightning comebacks, could be tolerated, enjoyed even, when it seemed a measure of America’s growing confidence. But as fascism advanced in Europe there were many in Hollywood going over to “the side of the angels”, some of them travelling alongside, a few actually inside the Communist Party. The studios did their best to control their employees, binding them to seven year long “slave” contracts, as Davis termed them. But the knowledge you could be kicked out in the cold, the furs drop from your shoulders, only sharpened Hollywood’s banter, making the dialogue crackle and hiss: “Malice in Wonderland”, Salka Viertel quipped (one of many émigrés in the colony and Garbo’s sometime lover and scriptwriter). When Gene Kelly’s wife, Betsy Blair came to town she noted the divide: there were rats gnawing at the base of the palm trees. Davis was a long way from joining the Party, but she was one of the “premature anti-fascists”, selling war bonds for Roosevelt, and dining occasionally with visitors from the Soviet Union. Alvah Bessie of the Hollywood Ten, describes a comic meal in which a battle of wills ensues over soup. Davis, bored of the speeches, calls for her fur and rises to leave. Kalatazov, the visiting director, is unused to such interruption. He places “both hands on her shoulders”, and roars, “Sit down!” But she rises again. Addressing the comrade with queenly condescension, telling him, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful time”, before sweeping out.
When the war did finally arrive, Davis, embarrassed by the irrelevance of the ‘women’s pictures’ she was making, got together with John Garfield and set up the Hollywood Canteen, a club for soldiers waiting to be shipped off to fight. Cary Grant donated a piano and Duke Ellington played it; Crosby and Sinatra sang; Dietrich, Lamarr, Gable and Crawford played hostess, as did Olivia de Havilland and her sister Joan Fontaine. The stars came down from the skies and it must have seemed like heaven on earth. A uniform got you in the door and fed for free; black and white mingled on the dance floor (when there was trouble Davis said, “we played the Star Spangled Banner and that would stop it”); while the rich and famous washed dishes and scrubbed the floors. It was just the kind of utopian activity that provoked the Right into associating anti-fascism with communism.
The club closed in 1945 and within two years the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was sitting in Hollywood. Four years later Garfield was called as a witness. He refused to name names, but repented in writing. The following year, at 39, he was dead of a heart attack. Davis did not involve herself in the aborted movement to challenge the HUAC (led by Bogart who protested and then recanted; signing away his dignity in a hotel room). But a decade later she made, Storm Centre, the first film to depict what was happening under McCarthy. Based on the true story of a librarian dismissed for refusing to remove communist material, it wasn’t a very good film, but it showed, as the words inscribed on her cigarette case said, that “an actress is more than a woman”.
At the moment of Bette Davis’s centenary how does she stand up to the current crop of stars? Well she’s a lot more red-blooded and rebellious than the well-behaved, pale-skins they serve us today. They positively droop by comparison: the Gwyneths, the Nicoles and the Cates. But evidence that some of our more left-field actresses have a hankering to emulate her greatness came at this year’s Academy Award show when Tilda Swinton ripped of the Oscar joke, saying the statue reminded her of her agent’s “buttocks”. This time around the remark was a little more risqué: the backside in question not belonging to her husband. She doesn’t have a husband. But she does have two lovers (one for the brains and one for the rest of her). Perhaps it was admiration for her domestic arrangement, even more than her acting skills in the rather muted Michael Clayton, that gained the Academy voter’s approval. Indeed, the biggest debt Swinton owes Bette Davis may be for encouraging her ambition not only as an actress but also as a woman.
This is the original text of an article that appeared in the Guardian on Bette Davis’s centenary, 5.4.2008.
In her introductory essay to this volume of essays on Christina Stead (the first to appear by various hands) Margaret Harris observes that “Quite the most unusual feature of Stead’s career is the separation of its two major phases by a period of thirteen years [between 1952 and 1965] during which she was writing constantly but unable to get published.” But the mid-century hiatus was a common feature of many writer’s lives, particularly for women. Rosamund Lehman spoke of feeling “posthumous” when, after the war, people began to read her books again, and Jean Rhys, perhaps the most celebrated example of this phenomenon, found her career re-ignited by Francis Wyndham, in just the way that Stead’s was resurrected by Stanley Burnshaw and Randall Jarrell when they brought The Man Who Loved Children back into print.
Nor was the thirteen year gap in Stead’s publishing history uncharacteristic of her career: her purchase on the literary world was always precarious. A peripatetic life accounts for some of the problem, never settling into a national canon, endlessly changing publishers. Added to this was the fact that much of what Stead had to say in her novels and stories was deemed unpalatable, their politics and their ferocity often out of step with the prevailing climate, so that, even when they were praised, her books never really took hold and were soon forgotten. As Elizabeth Hardwick noted in 1955, ”The dust seems to…settle rather quickly upon the works of Christina Stead.”
Stead was well aware of the fate of combative writing like her own, and perhaps this is one of the reasons she procrastinated for so long over the publication of I’m Dying Laughing, her tour de force about American politics and the decline of communism, which she continued revising towards the end of her life (it was only finally published after her death). In this brilliant and unconsoling novel, Emily Wilkes - struggling with the collapse of her political and literary idealism – is warned of the fate of writers whose politics offend the mainstream. Their books are condemned to be unread: “Socialist literature was full of the most exquisite masterpieces, sealed in silence, rarely translated.” (It’s a destiny which eerily anticipates the fate of I’m Dying Laughing.) Emily is advised by a learned comrade to “go back to” those overlooked masters Blake, Voynich, Diderot, Voltaire, Marx and St Just, a novel about August Blanqui, the memoirs of Mademoiselle de l’Epinasse. And, for once, this passionate American, horrified by all ideas of death and defeat, is not put off by the graveyard association of these great works:
…with eager, inflamed face, her hair blowing in the invisible currents of the room, and the breezes of her own ardent life, [Emily] declared she was going to read every one of them, a new life had come to her.
It is a vision of the resilience of literature in the face of censorship and disregard, an assertion that echoes Auden’s assessment of the relationship between writing and politics, that even if “poetry makes nothing happen: it survives…/A way of happening, a mouth.” In an interview with Thomas Keneally in 1977, Stead told him that “the dreadful thing about literature” is that a writer “dies and people forget about him – it doesn’t matter who it is, it takes a hundred years to dig him up.” But if she was not resigned to the idea of her novel being “sealed in silence”, interred in a tomb of neglect, then Stead suggests in her final novel that, like Auden, she had faith in the survival of literature, in the possibility of it being dug up and speaking again to inspire some new rediscoverer like Emily.
For a generation of readers lost literary classics were rediscovered when in the Seventies feminist publishing houses began reissuing their work. Margaret Harris talks of “the systematic recuperation of Stead” at the hands of Virago (who not only republished out of print work but published I’m Dying Laughing for the first time. ) Today, however Virago, like so many independent publishing houses, is a subsidiary of a larger group, Little Brown and Co., themselves a part of the Time Warner empire, and Stead’s canon languishes largely out of print in England. The picture in America is similarly bleak, and even in Australia, where, along with Patrick White, she is considered the country’s most important twentieth century writer, her work is not fully available. It is in this context that Harris’s book makes its appearance.
In an essay from 1982 which concludes the collection, Angela Carter, thinking about Stead’s history of being overlooked and undervalued, suggests that perhaps hers was the kind of talent that thrived on neglect. It’s a characteristically strong and perverse reading; making your meaning out of their disregard, willing yourself out of obscurity and illegitimacy, and is delivered without a hint of the victim mentality that both these writers found repugnant and frequently warned against. Carter quotes Blake to explain the intellectual cast of Stead’s novels: “Pity would be no more/If we did not make somebody poor”. But while it’s possible to argue, as Carter intends to, that if more attention had been paid to Stead’s writing in her lifetime, she may have become a less interesting and transgressive writer, reigning in some of her raw power, vitality and waywardness (“rich and Strange” Barnard Eldershaw call her in their contribution), it has to be countered that, under the pressure of critical dialogue, some of her formal sprawling collapses, the failure of architectonics, might also have been brought under control. More important however is that while Carter’s is an existentially powerful reading, one of Nietzschean overcoming (the kind practised by Stead’s heroine-avatars, Louis and Theresa, in her autobiographical novels The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone), it still goes against the grain of Stead’s most constant theme in her writing: the cost of exclusion, her Marxist view of bohemia not as a place from which one can unilaterally make new meaning, but as rank and deforming, a place of nihilism and eccentricity, lost to the ‘real’ world.
Carter, it has to be said, is the only critic here who seems fully comprehending of Stead’s writing, confidently handling her meaning and mode: no other piece quite holds Stead in her entirety. Perhaps this is as one might expect: one of the most knowing and iconoclastic writers of her generation, Carter read Stead with delight and recognition, finding her a rare progenitor. But the broader failure is important, indicative of the fact that Stead is still not well understood, that critics, even today, labour under the idea that her work is mysterious: uniquely unaccountable and indecipherable. Harris’ s choice of title bears this out; it is taken from Seven Poor Men of Sydney (Stead’s first written, second published novel) in which an inmate in a lunatic asylum believes he can find that magic phrase that will, Harris says, “decode apparently unintelligible hieroglyphic texts.” Approaching Stead in this way courts, if not insanity, then certainly a frustration, she argues, adding that Stead has been best served by “contemporary critical practise which considers a text as a process of signification and erasure that resists closure and denies certainty of unequivocal interpretation. ” This sounds conventional enough in terms of today’s critical parlance but I think it masks a substantial failure, one which this collection – significant and welcome as it is – reflects. Since I believe this is the crux of the matter in the present state of Stead criticism, I want to focus on it here.
Harris’s book concentrates, by and large, on Australia which has generated most Stead criticism. There are contributions from North America, but earlier perspectives from Elizabeth Hardwick and Randall Jarrell are missing, as well as recent work by Edmund White and Vivian Gornick, and, from England, Lorna Sage’s important essay on The Salzburg Tales. Michael Wilding seems the most obvious Australian omission. After Harris’s own useful introductory survey of work on Stead to date, the pieces included begin in 1938 with M. Barnard Eldershaw – who are full of insight about Stead’s unmasking of social convention, but confused by, and critical of, the stylistic transition between The Salzburg Tales and The Beauties and Furies. From the Sixties there is a championing essay by R.G. Geering, who became Stead’s literary executor, and a thoughtful analysis of the influence of Nietzsche by Dorothy Green; in the Seventies Terry Sturm argues that Stead created a new form of realism, abolishing the private-public dichotomy inherent in bourgeois and socialist realism, while Susan Sheridan discusses For Love Alone form the perspective of second-wave feminism.
The bulk of the writing, however, is from the last twenty years and in these, critical authority is taken from the usual suspects: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Irigary, Deluze and Bakhtin. In Fiona Morrison’s essay on I’m Dying Laughing as menippean satire, Bakhtin works well, and could be made to work harder: he makes sense historically because his writing comes out of the same nexus of concerns: Stead shares his interest in people’s art forms, democratic dialogue, and carnivalistic subversion and excess. But he is not read here in any sense as part of the communist tradition – there is only one contribution which seeks to place Stead in this way, and that, Louise Yelin’s essay on Stead’s banking novel, The House of All Nations, while containing interesting background material on Popular Front politics, suffers at times from a lack of nuance. For example, she is surprised by Stead’s admiration for capitalist production, seeing this, rather simply, as anti-Marxist. Yet in Stead’s impressions of her first visit to America in 1933, she wrote of its brand of capitalism as a rough “scramble for boodle”, which declares itself with a brazenness that any Marxist would find fascinating: “This acute worship of Mammon is something marvellous, incredible as the gold halls of Babylon.”
Diana Brydon, in her essay, asserts that for Stead “context is all”, and yet the influence of communist thought upon Stead’s writing and its interactions with her other interests and antipathies is still underestimated and under-explored: there are nods here in the direction of Marxism – it’s hard to avoid the fact that Stead was a communist who wrote continually about leftwing characters – but these don’t inform enough of the writing at a deep level. No one mentions Zhdanov, whose crude ideas about literature and society were in the hair and heads of most leftish writers of Stead’s generation, or Lukacs, the grandest communist literary critic and, as such, a bearer not of the magic phrase, but someone whose body of work could illuminate many of the issues which exercise Stead critics in these pages, informing questions of style and form – her development from fabulist to what Carter calls, “rough-hewn” realism; her suspicion of interiority and consequent emphasis on (externalising) speech; her attitude to sexuality: Yelin talks of Stead’s “homophobia”, Morrison of her “gynophobia and misogyny”, while Denis Brown, in an essay on Cotter’s England, comes close to collusion with Stead’s prejudice, but none provide the necessary context of prevailing attitudes among the left.
Perhaps the most important way in which a Marxist perspective could help to create a better understanding of Stead, is in her complex attitude to bohemia, the idea of which runs throughout her work: Brown’s essay, for instance, is enlightening on cults and folklore, but fails to show how Stead’s novel treats these – as many communists of the time did – as examples of the kinds of mysticism generated in exclusion, seeing bohemia as a childish and dangerous denial of material ‘reality’. Similarly, Virginia Blain, using Barthes to read A Little Tea, A Little Chat as decadent satire, night have strengthened her argument if she’d been able to relate it to ideas about decadence which were part and parcel of communist ideology. Only a year after Zhdanov’s notorious onslaught on ‘decadent’ bourgeois literature, Stead, reporting from the 1935 International Conference of Writers for the Defence of Culture in Paris, is writing in a similar vein: describing contemporary authors in the West presiding over “the last corruptions of capitalist decay”. Although such ideas were most crudely and forcefully put by Stalinists, they were also an important part of the broader left critique of capitalism. It is perhaps hard for us to understand this now that Barthes’ delight-in-decadence is our common fare, but in order to see the way in which Stead’s writing enacts the drama of the twentieth century, it’s important that both approaches are heard.
To say there is a gap in understanding, of course, is not to call for reductive or rigid Marxist readings, nor is it meant as part of the often reactionary attack upon structuralism and poststructuralism. Indeed, a measure of Stead’s prescience is the degree to which she foresees some of their concerns: for instance her representation of the forceful personalities of both the tyrannical father and the rebellious daughter in The Man Who Loved Children anticipates Foucault’s understanding that “power…comes from everywhere”; and her hunch about the importance of “creative error” and accident in writing has something in common with Barthes’ ideas about exposing a text’s seams, faults and flaws, just as her suspicion of language in authority prefigures his rejection of grand narrative. But problems arise when critics start with structuralist and poststructuralist insight and read it back into Stead, rather than the other way around: it’s a response which makes her look weak, as if in need of some other, higher authority.
Margaret Harris’s collections of essays contributes in large part to mapping Stead’s critical history, bringing together for the first time pioneering work that sings the praises of a writer others have ignored or dismissed (as well as the essays mentioned there are fine contributions on The Man Who Loved Children from Shirley Walker, Ken Stewart, Judith Kegan Gardiner and Hazel Rowley), but it also reveals how much there is still to be done. More is needed to help us understand why a writer as talented, energetic and intelligent as Stead is still without a secure place in the canon, still slipping from view. Her notion of writing as a place of struggle, a war zone of ideas might inform this: Stead talked of her child’s hand wrapped around a pen and making a fist, and in the middle of her career she wrote that art should “indicate the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse.” What’s needed are readings which represent the precise nature of this struggle, showing how Marxist ideas about “the judgement of history” (I’m Dying Laughing) coexist and do battle in her writing with the apprehension of a more complex and multifarious world that disperses power and erodes authority, readings which describe the contest in her work between pluralism and commitment, between the individual and history.
This review appeared in Southerly, 61:2, Halstead Press, 2001.
Christina Stead in Virago Modern Classics
“Openings bring out all one’s inhibitions”, Lorna wrote in her spidery hand on the first page of my doctoral thesis. She was my supervisor - the reason I went to university in Norwich, and the reason I remained for so long in a city I never felt at home in. Before submitting my panel documents I sent her a draft of the papers; I was concerned about the beginning which seemed the weakest part. Her response was full of characteristic insight: understanding precisely all the difficulties and reservations in writing, yet encouraging you to go ahead, to start, somehow and somewhere, to have your say.
I first met her in London in the early Eighties. She was sitting at a kitchen table with a noisy, laughing group of women that included Angela Carter, Grace Paley, and other writers and editors from Virago Press. There were a few men there, too, but the women coming together was the reason for the gathering, and they knew it, expressing it in the degree and quality of attention they paid one another, leaving the men to fend for themselves, skirting around the edges of the debate.
Which is not to say this generation of women shunned the company of men, or turned their back on the centre ground – something which at that time, in my early twenties, I hazarded. I was living in a squat in Brixton with a medieval history student. She proceeded to drop out, crop her hair, find work as a plumber’s mate and refashion herself as a lesbian. It was a career path typical of its moment and milieu when many middle class women decided to pursue the role of outsider. For those who found themselves convincing in the part there were rewards: greater freedom and even (on a limited stage) a sense of power.
Looking back on that night I see myself as a stroppy, disaffected young woman facing a group of older, much grander figures who seemed to represent a new order. So I argued with Lorna and the others about the degree to which their conversation - delivered on behalf of the sisterhood - neglected those still on the margins: black, working class and gay women.
A decade later when I met her again, coming to study at the University of East Anglia, she told me what she remembered of that evening was how “bloody-minded” I had been, and I was left wondering about the meaning of her remark – whether this was a quality she admired or not. When I got to know her better, I saw that it was, and particularly so in women. But, on reflection, I was right about the degree of ambiguity in her judgement, there was a measure of chastisement: because passion or bloody-mindedness was not enough, this needed to be coupled with intellectual rigour, as she demonstrated continually.
I was wrong, however, about the extent to which Lorna had become an establishment figure. Her authority was undeniable but she retained the edginess of an outsider, an air of not being to the manner born, of someone who was (I think this was her most characteristic expression) making it up as she went along. I thought she represented the best of the kind of teaching the English department at UEA offered – not in thrall to any one school of thinking but capable of delivering responses to literature that were individual and eclectic, passionate and rigorous. So I was amazed when, in 1994, a junior member of faculty told me she would not make a good referee because by many people she was not considered “a proper academic”.
Her concentration upon journalism over ’scholarly research’ contributed to this myopic view, and was perhaps in part responsible for the university’s tardiness in appointing her a professorship. But what mattered to her was the quality of her work and she was not a snob about where it appeared. Indeed, writing in a democratic space and reaching a wider audience would have been part of the appeal. I remember her speaking in seminars of her admiration for jobbing writers like Anthony Burgess – who wrote to pay the bills, who supported themselves by living on their wits, who felt no contradiction in writing seriously and prolifically.
In her obituary of Burgess in the TLS she is approving of his disapproval of the “costiveness” of certain writers: Joyce, who Burgess much admired, was still “a scrounger” living off others, while Forster “could be relied upon to provoke scorn for several reasons at once: mystificatory reverence for Art, snobbish resentment of one’s audience, and a kind of stinginess with one’s talent”, which Burgess, she said, “seems Freudianly to have associated with anal retentiveness.”
Perhaps literary stinginess – the withholding of talent – seemed like such a sin to Lorna because experience had taught her the high price demanded for nourishing and developing it. “Think about the cost of exclusion” she scribbled in the margins of my PhD on Christina Stead. The solidarity she and Angela found among feminists in the Seventies and early Eighties was real, and reinforcing, but at the end of both their lives I think there was anger that, despite advances made, they still found themselves out on a limb. “I don’t even get the bloody sympathy vote” Angela railed when, dying with cancer, she failed once again to be shortlisted for the Booker prize. And Lorna’s fury at dying prematurely seems to have re-ignited her sense of alienation, as if her body’s conspiracy was just the final twist in the world’s plot against her.
Her autobiography reveals from the outset how much of an embattled outsider she felt herself to be. When I first read Bad Blood I was troubled by what seemed a disproportionate sense of outrage in relation to what she had to overcome – there are many who struggled against harder odds. (For instance, when demobbed after the War, my uncle was among a generation of working class men accepted at university for the first time – in his case to read Modern Languages. His father, a gardener, had so little idea of what this meant he bought him a schoolboy’s geometry set.)
But I now think Lorna’s sense of being apart was inescapable, her anger entirely consonant with her understanding of what the plot meant: that being canny as a woman was what made you, in a sense, uncanny, homeless. And the cleverer you were, the further it put you beyond the pale. Like Yossarian in Catch 22 she took it extremely personally.
Yet this was not a position she made capital out of. She had no time for the kinds of mysticism often generated in exclusion, nor for the performance of invalidity that infected the lives and sentences of many women writers and critics. What she admired in the women she wrote about – all of whom also struggled with the feeling of outlandishness, the inability to be fully representative as writers – was their refusal to be hemmed in by circumstance. In a typically acute review of Christina Stead’s work she wrote with admiration, “she was scornful beyond anything of poverty of aspiration…everyone should want elaborately and richly.”
Lorna Sage’s life and career seems exemplary, not only because she was a brilliant, stylish, unorthodox teacher, a generous supporter of her students and colleagues and a wonderfully perceptive editor of their work, but because of her determination not to be excluded. Like Stead, she would “not be fobbed off with less than the best.” The irony is that while she may never have felt herself a true insider, she had, with Vic [Sage, her ex-husband], her literary comrade, become the head and heart of the department in which she worked, and her death leaves us all bereft. Perhaps a fitting tribute would be for us to become, as Lorna described Stead’s characters, “expert wanters”, demanding more of ourselves and of the world in which we live. Such a strategy, of course, involves the risk of self-exposure and rejection. But if carried out in good faith, it might lead instead to self-realisation and liberation – the project upon which Lorna, in every word she ever wrote, was intent.
A version of this article appeared as ‘Why I Believe…Lorna Sage Inspires by Example’, in the Times Higher Educational Supplement on 19.1.2001.
1. INTRODUCTION: CRISSCROSS
I’m sure Angela Carter would have been pleased to hear that the hottest thing in pop music these days are two young mixed-race American rappers who wear their trousers back to front and call themselves ‘Kriss Kross’. Carter’s last work of fiction, Wise Children – in the spirit of the novel one could call it, perhaps, an old bird’s eye/I view of the social, cultural, imperial and sartorial history of the century now ending – is itself patterned with intersecting tracks and grooves that are made by her characters ‘crossing, criss-crossing’ the globe, by the zigzagging lines of familial and artistic descent that reaches across and into their lives; and by the writing itself, which passes through – often parodying – many genres and styles, yet remaining something completely authentic and its own.
2. FAMILY AND CULTURE: TWIN PEAKS
Wise Children is the story of ‘the imperial Hazard dynasty that bestrode the British theatre like a colossus for a century and a half’, and its bastard progeny, Dora and Nora Chance, identical twin girls who are illegitimate twice over: by birth, because their father, Melchior Hazard, denies his paternity of them time after time, and by profession, where, as a novelty act, they dance the boards in music hall, appear briefly as extras in an ill-fated Hollywood musical, and finally undress (though never beyond the G-string) in seedy postwar strip show like ‘Nudes Ahoy!’ and ‘Nudes of the World’.
The story is told by one of these lovely bastards, Dora, the wise-cracking, left-handed southside twin sister who rakes over more than a century of family romance and history. As in all the best modern fiction, the action takes place in just one day. A special day, however: it is the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday, which happens also to be Dora’s and Nora’s own – this year their seventy-fifth. It is the birthday and centenary, too, of another set of twins, Melchior and Peregrine Hazard, father and uncle (but which is which?) of these performing sisters, ‘The Lucky Chances’. The double-faced Hazard/Chance family is served up to the reader as a model for Britain and Britishness, obsessively dividing itself into upper and working class, high and low culture. And just as Dora proves these strict lines of demarcation to be false within her own family, so, too, her story shows the reader how badly they fit the complexity and hybridity of British society and culture.
It is relatively easy (and Carter has a lot of fun doing this) to show how we foster and exploit binary oppositions in culture in order to justify the domination and exclusion of others, and to sustain elite privilege in society, it is a much more complicated thing to respond to the fiction, the romances – family and otherwise – which we have built upon the idea of legitimacy and illegitimacy. Master of the dialectic is William Shakespeare, whose ‘huge overarching intellectual glory’ dominates the English literary canon and whose work, like Carter’s own, is brimful with ideas of doubleness, artificiality and parody. In Wise Children Carter not only weaves Shakespeare’s stories in and out of her own, she also reminds us of the extent to which his words and ideas impregnate English culture and life: his face is on the £20 note that Dora doles out to the fallen comic, Gorgeous George; and contemporary television programmes that poach their names from him like The Darling Buds of May, May to September and To the Manor Born, all make pointed, if somewhat disguised appearances in the novel.
Part of what attracts Carter to Shakespeare is his playing out of the magnetic relationship of attraction and repulsion that exists between the legitimate and illegitimate, between energy and order. This occurs most famously, perhaps, in the sliding friendship of Prince Hal and Falstaff. Near the close of her story, Dora tries to reimagine one of Shakespeare’s cruellest moments: what if Hal, on becoming king, had not rejected Falstaff, but dug him in the ribs and offered him a job instead? What if order was permanently rejected, and we lived life as a perpetual carnival? These questions are not answered directly (and I will return to her implied answers later), but this challenge to order, to the legitimate world, is made throughout the novel. When Dora describes Nora’s first sexual experience, she warns the reader not to:
run away with the idea that it was a squalid, furtive miserable thing, to make love for the first time on a cold night in a back alley with a married man with strong drink on his breathe. He was the one she wanted, warts and all, she would have him, by hook or by crook. She had a passion to know about Life, all its dirty corners, and this is how she started…(p.81)
Wise Children, then, not only challenges legitimacy, it is also a celebration of the vitality of otherness. Paradoxically, though, because the legitimate and illegitimate world rely upon one another’s mirror-image of difference through which to define themselves, such a celebration of illegitimacy necessarily implies a valorisation of the system which produces outcasts. Knowing this, one of the questions Carter asks us in the novel is: What, then, should a wise child do? Revel in wrong-sidedness and, therefore, the system that produces it, or jettison the culture of dualism altogether? In answer, Carter’s wise – though now somewhat wizened – child, Dora, pulls off the sort of conjuring trick that her Falstaffian Uncle Perry is famous for: she manages both to have her cake and eat it, to revel in her wrong-sidedness, to sustain her opposition to authority, and yet to show that the culture and society she inhabits is not one of rigid demarcation, but has always been mixed up and hybrid: Shakespeare may have become the very symbol of legitimate culture, but his work is characterised by bastardy, multiplicity and incest; the Hazard dynasty may represent propriety and tradition but they, too, are an endlessly orphaned, errant and promiscuous bunch.
3. CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
(i) ‘High’ Culture: William’s Word
The Hazard family is a patriarchal institution, but its father figures (Ranulph and later his son, Melchior) find their authority deriving not from God, but from a Shakespeare who has come to seem omnipotent in the hegemony of British culture, to embody not only artistic feeling but religious and national spirit too: for Ranulph, ‘Shakespeare was a kind of God…It was as good as idolatry. He thought the whole of human life was there.’ By becoming, each in his own generation, the ‘greatest living Shakespearian’, Ranulph and then Melchior assume a kingly status themselves. Having so often rehearsed the role of Shakespearian prince or king, these actors take on the mantle of royalty itself: ‘the Hazards belonged to everyone. They were a national treasure.’
At a late stage in the family’s history, mirroring the collapse both of empire and royalty, the imbrications of ‘The Royal Family of theatre’ make them appear as vulgar and commercial as our latter-day House of Windsor. Like them, the Hazard dynasty becomes national sport, soap opera masquerading as news. But in earlier times this regal troupe of players are not only commodities for the country (‘national treasure’), they are agents of Britain’s colonial ambition. Before the fall of the House of Hazard, Ranulph’s evangelical zeal for spreading the Word of Shakespeare is so great that he ‘crosses, crisscrosses’ the globe, travelling ‘to the ends of the empire’ in his efforts to sell the religion of Shakespeare and the English values he represents:
Ranulph. He was half mad and thought he had a Call. Now he saw the entire world as his mission field…[in] the family tradition of proselytizing…the old man was seized with the most imperative desire, to go on spreading the Word overseas. (p.17)
In Tasmania, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Montreal, Toronto, Alberta and even Gun Barrel, North Dakato, Ranulph Hazard’s travelling theatre troupe meet in their audience a passion for self-fashioning as great as Shakespeare’s own. As a consequence, they leave in their wake around the globe a string of towns called Hazard.
Throughout Wise Children Carter celebrates the vital and carnivalesque in life. ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ is Dora’s refrain, but she is aware of the effect that the enthusiasm and self-absorption of carnival can have upon others: aware, too, of the ways in which power can be harnessed by a dominant group and brought to bear upon a weaker one. So she celebrates the craziness, ‘a kind of madness’, that drives old Ranulph to travel the world taking Englishness to foreigners, yet deftly shows how intimately connected are Shakespeare’s cultural domination and British imperialism.
Carter’s connecting of art and religion reinforces this idea: Ranulph sees it as his ‘mission’ in life to perform Shakespeare throughout the world in order to persuade other people of the greatness of the Bard’s words, just as missionaries took the Bible and tried to persuade ‘natives’ of the truth of God’s Word. Ranulph Hazard’s theatre troupe literally follow in the steps of religious evangelicalism – his ‘patched and ravaged tent went up in the spaces vacated by travelling evangelicals’. They perform in ‘wild, strange and various places’, and their costumes are ‘begged or improvised or patched and darned.’ Cultural hegemony may have been an important part of the imperial vision, but acting, Carter reminds us, has always been an illegitimate profession: peripatetic, thrown-together, made-up and sexuallcy ambivalent in Central Park, Estella plays Hamlet in drag). Theatre, and particularly the theatre of Shakespeare, has played its role in colonising the minds of other countries, but it is also a potentially destabilising and subversive force.
(ii) ‘Low’ Culture: Gorgeous George
‘Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy,’ sighs Dora, meaning both that it has a classier pedigree than comedy and is associated with the classes rather than the masses. Carter’s qualification, however, points to her conviction that, like everything else in life, art form (choosing to write comedy rather than tragedy) is a question of politics. ‘Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people,’ she says (taking in the process, perhaps, a swipe at Martin Amis whose comedies often are).
Dora first encounters the comic Gorgeous George when she is thirteen, entertaining the masses on Brighton pier. Uncle Perry arrives unexpectedly in Brixton with a carload of good things to eat and drink, and pack the ersatz Chance family (Dora and Nora, Grandma and one of Perry’s many foundlings, ‘Our Cyn’) off to Brighton for the day. There they find George, a combination of Max Miller, Frankie Howard (‘Filthy minds, some of you have’) and Larry Grayson (’Say no more’), he comes in the tradition of the holiday camp entertainer and his jokes are endlessly insinuating, every phrase or object carrying with it some double, sexual meaning. Sex is everywhere and with it, therefore, the possibility of incest. Reflecting England’s fallen status, George’s jokes mock ideas of strength and purity, and fuel paternal anxiety about redundancy and impotency. His comedy is parodic and slippery and perfectly timed, and his punchline, when it’s finally delivered, is a withering attack on a foolishly deluded old patriarch who thinks himself the greatest stud around: the son, taken in by his father’s boasts of promiscuity, becomes worried about committing incest with some unknown bastard offspring, but his mother tells him not to worry because, after all, ‘E’s not you father.’ B-bum!
George’s final coup de grâce, after singing ‘Rose of England’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘God Save the King’, and ‘Rule Britannia’, is to strip off before his dazzled audience and reveal a torso tattooed with a map of the world: ‘George was not a comic at all but an enormous statement.’ But even a statement as blatant as the pink- (for British colonies) dominated world (Dora smartly picks out Ireland, South Africa and the Falkland Islands) emblazoned across the body of this latter-day St George is fraught with ambiguity. Unlike St George of old, Gorgeous George no longer wins battles and rules the waves; he merely represents the idea of conquest. He is a walking metaphor, an effete mirror-image. George shows us an empire falling; having once dominated the world, this Englishman can now be master of only one space: his own body.
George’s decline, like the British Empire’s, continues apace. Dora encounters him once more as an anachronistic Bottom (his kind of peculiarly English comedy doesn’t travel) in the Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a debacle over which Melchior presides, and in which she and Nora have bit parts (they play Mustardseed and Peaseblossom). Finally, back in London, George ends up hitting rock bottom: Dora, catching a glimpse of his pink tattoo, recognises him in the pathetic street beggar who approaches her for the price of a cup of tea.
(iii) Fallen
If Shakespeare provides English literary culture with a model for plurality, it is in Milton, particularly in Paradise Lost, that we find a model for dualism in the world, a dualism resulting from the patriarchal and monistic vision of Christianity. One of Dora’s refrains (she has a few up her sleeve) is the Miltonic phrase, ‘Lo, how the mighty are fallen’, which is both a silly semantic joke and a serious intimation of the world she inhabits. Many of the descriptions of fallenness in Wise Children are specifically Miltonic or Christian: for instance, both Melchior and Peregrine are figured as Godlike and Satanic. Peregrine lands into the lives of the naked, innocent, unselfconscious and therefore Eve-like Nora and Dora as Adam arrived on earth: out of nowhere. And it is of Adam that Dora thinks when she sees him, because this is to be her First Man, the man who, like the fallen angel Lucifer, will first seduce her. In the same way Melchior, ‘our father’ who ‘did not live in heaven’ but who, God-like, is worshipped by the girls from afar, is also given a Satanic side: he appears ‘tall, dark and handsome’ with ‘knicker-shifting’ eyes, dressed in ‘a black evening cape with a scarlet lining’. Later he is Count Dracula (a late-nineteenth-century Satanic pretender), ordering Dora and Nora to carry dirt over from Stratford – as Dracula had carried it from Transylvania – to scatter on the Hollywood set of his film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In Hollywood, the English colony represents a parody version of the once great Empire, playing Disraeli, Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale. Just as in Ranulph’s generation English theatre was shown to embody the nation’s imperial strength, so now the film industry in Hollywood symbolises America’s new role as a world power. Melchior’s attempt to produce a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his way of trying to conquer Hollywood, ‘his chance to take North America back for England, Shakespeare and St George.’ But the trip to Hollywood is presaged by the burning down of Melchior’s manor house, and with the English theatre symbolically erased in the fire, ‘the final degeneration of the House of Hazard’ ensues. Ultimately we find Melchior’s son Tristram, the ‘weak but charming, game-show presenter and television personality, last gasp of the imperial Hazard dynasty’, presiding over an S/M game show.
(iv) The End
The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed as I am, in any other preceding time or place. I am the product of an advanced industrialised, post-imperial country in decline.
It is typical of Carter that unlike many modernist writers she sees in the decline of empire – to adapt Brecht – not the death of bad old things but the birth of good new ones – her own liberation, for instance. Symbolising the newness that the death of the old might now bring into being, Wise Children is scattered with what Salman Rushdie, in a short story, called ‘the eggs of love’ . Dora’s and Nora’s bottoms jiggle like hard-boiled eggs; there are dried eggs during the war and smuggled black-market ones; Scotch eggs that landladies put out for supper; and in the snow, Dora sees egg-shaped depressions.
This is a cuspy, millennial novel, and ‘millennia’, Carter believes, ‘always gets strange towards the end’. Part of Wise Children’s strangeness is due, perhaps, to the disconcerting sense of beginnings and possibility at the moment of ending, of death. The story’s finale has a riotous celebration for the now-centenarian Melchior and Peregrine, after which Dora (who, at seventy-five has herself been thinking about calling it a day), finds that she and Nora have suddenly had motherhood thrust upon them. They toddle home – these unmarried, non-biological and overage mothers – ‘Drunk in charge of a baby carriage’.
Death has a strong presence in this book – not just the end of empire or the death of the patriarch, which Dora is happy to let go, but a sense of the presence of death in the midst of life. Dora is someone who wrestles with this, a spirited fighter who refuses to grieve for long, or give in to defeat. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery’, our autodidact narrator recites from Jane Austen. Dora’s optimism derives from both a moral and a political sense of duty learned at her grandma’s knee, whose often-recited maxim, ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst’ lies on the map somewhere between Gramsci’s ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ and St Augustine’s ‘ Don’t presume, don’t despair’. Neither she nor Nora sheds a tear at the news of their beloved Tiffany’s death, though both are heartbroken by it. ‘Life must go on,’ says Nora, refusing to be engulfed by despair.
One of Wise Children’s characteristic inversions of the supposed order of life is that no one dies of old age, all are ‘untimely’ deaths – the only ‘true tragedy’, Dora says wisely: Grandma, hit by a flying bomb on her way to the off-license; Cyn’s husband, killed in North Africa in the war, and Cyn herself succumbing to the Asian flu of ’49 (the cat to the cat flu of ’51); Dora’s lover, Irish, makes his last exit in Hollywood caused by too much booze and a ‘dicky-ticker’; finally there is the apparent suicide of their godchild, the young, mixed-race Tiff, who, Ophelia-like, seems to have made her suicide a watery one, into the bosom of Old Father Thames. But this is just one of the instances in which – to use Edward Said’s phrase – Carter ‘writes back’. Her Ophelia does not give in to patriarchal abuse (by committing suicide in Father Thames): like Carter she, too, imagines herself as ‘a new kind of being’, and in the end it is she (the illegitimate outsider) who lays down the new rules of play for the Hazard dynasty.
4. A LOOKING-GLASS WORLD
(i) Pluralism and Difference
In Wise Children, Carter is able to suggest a jumbled, impure multi-culture, while showing clearly that class, racial and sexual elites which seek to exclude otherness are still a powerful and conditioning force. A reader of Foucault, Carter fully understood the way in which the dualistic structures that belong to the dying past – to Christianity, patriarchy and empire – are still extant in the present. By showing Shakespeare at the heart of English culture, as the ‘author of our being’, father to both the Hazards and the Chances (legitimate and illegitimate share his birthday), Carter is arguing that plurality and hybridity are not simply conditions of modernity, products of its wreckage, but have always existed and are characteristic of life itself. From this it follows that she does not see in plurality, as many postmodernists do, a nihilistic loss of value; rather, an existential acceptance of the facts of life and death in which contradictions are a sign of hope, and difference has to be negotiated rather than fought over as if there were only one place of rightness, one correct way of living that must be identically reproduced the whole world over. This is something that Dora’s grandma knows innately – feels it, as Dora does, ‘in her ancient water’. When, in wartime, she waves her stick in the air at the bombers overhead, she recognises that war is a result of patriarchal insistence upon monism: men fight to wipe out women and children (whom ‘she knew they hated…worst of all’ – because they are most other); but forever locked in some recidivist oedipal struggle, they fight, as well, to stop younger men stealing their thunder, to stop them taking away their distinguished mantles of poet or god.
(ii) Glasshouse Fun
But while men continue to fight wars, to battle for absolute control of land or language, Carter tells us we live now in a world of endless refraction. The days when a looking-glass reflected just one wicked witch, one absolute image of otherness, are gone. Now we have cinema, television, radio and video splintering the world ‘in a gallery of mirrors’ , a glasshouse of perpetual reproduction. Our relationship to these multiple, often contradictory reflections, especially for women, is as important and as determining as our relationship to other people. It is this awareness, critics like Lorna Sage have argued, that defines much of Carter’s work and makes it unique.
In Wise Children, however, the glasshouse is not the house of horror, the bloody chamber we have peered into with Carter so often in the past. These characters are not the glassy, fragile forms of some of her reworked fairy stories, eternally caged by images not of their own making. Dora’s narrative is a much freer, bouncier one, with a resilience that comes from a new kind of resourcefulness. Perhaps we have now lived long enough with our own shadow selves, Carter seems to be suggesting, that we are at last learning how to gain some control over them. Dora is a toughie, a survivor and a canny self-observer, and is not imprisoned by her female sexuality or the multitude of images of femininity that surround her. Rather, she seems like one of Shakespeare’s bastards, Edmund, determined not to let the Dionysian wheel of fate settle her life, but to find in the chance of her wrong-sidedness neither shame nor restraint, but opportunity. Because of this Dora is able to enjoy her own body, and the bodies of other women too. Maybe one of the meanings of the twins is a rather Laingian one: the idea that one need not be afraid of one’s image, but should embrace it, love it instead. Like the autoerotic Dora and Nora, one can ‘feast’ on oneself. (However, this enlightening idea finds it dark equation on the Hazard side, where the family seal is of an animal devouring itself – a pelican pecking at its own breast. This is because in a value system that is monistic, self-love – as I suggested above in the case of Ranulph and Melchior – inevitably implies incest or its correlative, cannibalism.)
5. FAMILY VALUES AND FAMILY SECRETS
‘Dread and delight coursed through my veins. I thought, what have I done..’ Perhaps part of the reason for Dora’s dread and delight when she momentarily wonders whether, as a young girl, she had fucked her Uncle Perry, has to do with the idea of gaining power not with a man’s weapon – his strength; but with a woman’s – her sex. One way for Dora, the outsider, to gain access to power and legitimacy of ‘the House of Hazard’ is to fuck her way inside, or at least to bring it to its knees by transgressing its laws of order and hierarchy: uncles are not supposed to have sex with their nieces, particularly when they are only thirteen – Dora’s age, it finally transpires, when Peregrine first seduced her.
Wise Children is like the proverbial Freudian nightmare aided and abetted (as Freud was himself) by Shakespearian example. Dora’s family story is crammed with incestuous love and oedipal hatred: there are sexual relationships between parent and child (where this is not technically so, actor-parents marry their theatrical offspring – in two generations of Hazards, Lears marry Cordelias); and between sister and brother (Melchior’s children Saskia and Tristram). And there is oedipal hatred between child and parent (Saskia twice tries to poison her father, and she and her twin sister Imogen are guilty of either pushing their mother down a flight of stairs or at least of leaving her there, an invalid, once she has fallen); and between parent and child (‘All the same, he [Ranulph] loved his boys. He cast them as princes in the tower as soon as they could toddle. ) Nor is Dora’s name accidental. In another example of ‘writing back’, Carter’s Dora, unlike her Freudian namesake, suffers very little psychic damage from lusting after her father (she ‘fell in love the first time she saw him’) or her uncle, or a string of father substitutes (men old enough to be) with whom she has affairs. The fact that it is the female (sisterly) body which seems most erotic to her (the nape of Saskia’s neck, Nora’s jiggling bottom) is for this Dora a cause for celebration, rather than self-hatred. Her half-sisters, Saskia and Imogen, fare less well in the game of family romance. On hearing her father, Melchior, is about to marry her best friend (another form of incest), ‘Saskia’s wails approached hysteria, whereupon Melchior smartly smacked her cheek…She shut up at once.’ It is because of this betrayal, and her father’s silencing of her anger, that Saskia takes revenge by seducing the couple’s son and her half-brother, Tristram.
Ironically, then, it is the legitimate daughters, Saskia and Imogen, who end up emotionally crippled by their family relationships (though this, perhaps, is a reflection of how rotten the family has become). These weird and troubled sisters might have received greater attention in Carter of an earlier vintage, but here Dora asserts: ‘I refuse point-blank to play in tragedy.’ Perhaps because in dealing with illegitimacy in the past, particularly female illegitimacy, Carter, in her highly wrought and self-conscious work, had sometimes aestheticised pain, even death, now, facing her own, she wanted to face it more squarely or not at all. ‘We knew nothing was a matter of life and death except life and death.’
Dora’s story-telling is a spilling of all the family secrets, bringing the skeletons out of the closet and exposing them to bright lights. This is a comment in itself: no more family secrets, no more lies, no more illegitimacies, Dora seems to assert, yet there is a powerful and unresolved tension in Wise Children between the idea of family secrets and family romance. As the Hazard/Chance family has been shown in the novel to symbolise the broader culture, so too, there is a tension between a desire for openness and equality – a world without secrets of bastards – and the seductive pull of romances from unofficial places, stories from the wrong side of the blanket, form ‘the wrong side of the tracks’.
6. HOW SHE WRITES
Mikhail Bakhtin argues that language is inherently dialogic because it implies a listener who must also be another speaker. It’s a proposition that Carter, the iconoclast, agreed with and tried to illuminate in her writing: ‘A piece of fiction is never static. I purposely try to make what I write open-ended, “user-friendly”.’ She demonstrates this in Wise Children by employing a first-person narrator (a form, she said, that men were afraid to use, because it was too revealing). Carter’s mouthpiece, ‘I, Dora Chance’, speaks to her reader as if she expected him or her to reply: ‘There I go again! Can’t keep a story in a straight line, can I?’ At the beginning of the book Dora tells us that she is writing her autobiography on a word-processor on the morning of her seventy-fifth birthday, but the vernacular force of her speech is so great that later she magically appears to transcend the written word, becoming, instead, the old bird who’s collared you in the local boozer:
Well, you might have known what you were about to let yourself in for when you let Dora Chance in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor, accost you in the Coach and Horses and let her tell you a tale. (p.227)
Dora’s a reader-teaser, endlessly drawing attention to herself by postponing the moment of revelation (‘but I don’t propose to tell you, not now…’) or prodding her reader into paying attention because ‘Something unscripted is about to happen’. She’s also a demythologiser, keen to let her reader in on the tricks of the trade: a chronicler not just of the Hazard and Chance families but of fashion through the ages – talking about brand names, she says: ‘If you get little details like that right, people will believe anything’. As with this last sentence, her gist is always more than surface level, and a huge part of the fun of reading Wise Children lies in seeing how far you can unpack the layers of meaning. How far too, you can unpick the words of others that have been woven into Carter’s/Dora’s own. There is Shakespeare everywhere, but other writers also: Milton, Sterne, Wordsworth (‘If the child is father of the man…then who is the mother of the woman?’), Dickens, Lewis Carroll making an appearance as a purveyor of ‘kiddiporn’, Samuel Butler, Shaw, Dostoevsky (‘My crime is my punishment’), Henry James and Tennessee Williams (‘They lived on room service and the kindness of strangers’) are just a random selection.
Like any postmodern novel worth its salt, Wise Children not only steals freely from other literary texts but also takes from the texts of other people’s lives and uses these too. In Hollywood, Carter has a field day. Armed, I’d say with the dirt-dishing Kenneth Anger , she has a roster of stars making guest appearances – sometimes as themselves, sometimes in various kinds of drag: featured players are Charlie Chaplin ‘hung like a horse’, Judy Garland (Ranulph’s wife is known as Estella ‘A Star Danced’ Hazard and was ‘born in a trunk’), Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and his wife Adele, Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler, Jessie Mathews, Josephine Baker, Jack Warner, W.C. Fields, Gloria Swanson, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles (‘old buffers in…vintage port and miniature cigar commercials’), Clark Gable, Howard Hughes, Ivor Novello and Nöel Coward (Dora’s and Nora’s first dancing teacher is called Mrs Worthington), Daisy Duck with her missing back molars (it enhances the cheekbones) is a mixture of Lana Turner and Jean Harlow, ending up like Joan Crawford in TV soaps giving ‘good décolleté’. Daisy’s ‘peel me a prawn’ line is Mae West’s ‘Beulah, peel me a grape’ from I’m No Angel, and her Puck, with a ‘face like an old child’, is Mickey Rooney, who starred as Robin Goodfellow in the original model for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Erich von Stroheim is the model for Genghis Khan, the whip-cracking, jodhpured director with a penchant for cruelty and steak-eating orchids, and Dora’s alcoholic, scriptwriting boyfriend, Irish, is an amalgam of many writers – Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West and William Faulkner – finally succumbing to the abundant alcohol and indifference doled out in equal measures by the studio system. There’s a veiled portrait, too, of Brecht in Hollywood, whom Dora employs to teach her German and likes because he’s one of the few people she meets out there who aren’t terminally optimistic: ‘What I say is, fuck the bourgeoisie.’
Wise Children has songs, too: music-hall and patriotic war songs, jazz and pop. And good and bad jokes: as well as Carter’s own (‘Why are they called Pierrots?…’Because they do their stuff on piers’), she pastiches older camp comedians like Frankie Howard and Larry Grayson, and picks up on the more recent Thatcherite humour of Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’, turning it into Tristram’s ghastly catchphrase ‘Lashings of Lolly’.
If her sources of material are eclectic, so too is her method of writing – Carter trips lightly through many styles and genres: she is an expressionist who paints ‘a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black…’; a magical realist, a student of Hawthorne, Nabokov and Borges, wreathing Perry in magic butterflies; a graffitist scratching ‘Melchior slept here’ across her page; and a montage Surrealist: ‘She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast.’ Carter is a conjuror baiting her audience – ‘All in good time I shall reveal to you how…’; a romance novelist who knows where the big bucks are to be found – ‘Romantic illegitimacy. Always a seller’; a teller of tales – ‘If you believe that …’; and wise old wives’ tales. She’s a re-teller of fairy stories – ‘Once upon a time…’/’It had come to pass…’; and autobiographer and ‘inadvertent chronicler’, farceur and tragedian, fabulist and ‘rival realist’ – Sage’s phrase for Carter’s through-the-looking-glass world.
But just as this is a wise book, knowing about culture, history and politics, it is also a childlike one. The house at 49 Bard Road that Dora and Nora live in all their lives is reminiscent of the kind found in English children’s stories. Its large musty room and odd-striking grandfather clock, (mysteriously) absent father and mother, and presiding grandmother left to eke out the rent by taking in strange boarders, are all staples of the genre. Oprhaned children are free children – free of the sexually proscribing authority of their mum and dad, at least, so perhaps the (Wildean) habit of rather forgetfully losing your parents in these stories (as it patently is in Wise Children), is strategic: a way of allowing characters a little more space in which to fashion themselves.
Finally, as well as employing all these styles in her own writing, Carter shows us how a familiarity with many ways of seeing is a part of the modern condition: Dora is not only a passive observer of different genres, she also employs them to shape her own world. She does this to heighten experience, but also self-consciously, even paradoxically, to gain a sense of the constructedness of life by turning people into actors. For instance, when Estella leaves for America she imagines herself in a scene from a movie, and when Melchior, at the age of twelve, absconds from the home of his ‘dour as hell’ puritan aunt, he does so as a character from a children’s story, as Dick Whittington.
7. THE ANXIETY OF PATERNITY
(i) Literal Fathers
The question of paternity arises everywhere in Wise Children. Just ‘what does a father do?’ and ‘what is he for?’, Dora asks. And well she might, given the example of the Hazard men, all of whom disown their children in one way or another. Ranulph leaves his twin sons Tristram and Gareth, fatherless, abandoning them when he shoots their mother and himself in a lovers’ quarrel; Melchior and Peregrine, learning from their father’s example, are equally forgetful about their fatherly responsibilities. Melchior forgets to love his children, and when he remembers, it’s the chilly, arm’s-length affection that the wealthy inadequately bestow on their young. He denies paternity of Dora and Nora altogether, of course – the bastard girls he sired with his landlady one night in Brixton. (Perhaps the reason Grandma creates a romance out of her origins and out of Dora’s and Nora’s is to protect them from their repudiating father, to allow them the freedom of making themselves up rather than being determined by Melchior’s dismissal.) His brother Peregrine, a lavisher of all kinds of love, while watching wistfully after Saskia (and this is ambivalent – are his feeling for her sexual or fatherly?), denies his paternity of both her and her twin sister Imogen.
At the end of this line, Tristram stands no chance as a parent. Not, that is, until his lover, Tiffany, fights back, makes demands upon him, setting down preconditions for his fatherhood. What Carter hints at here is that it is the absence of practising fathers that causes so much grief and confusion: meaning that fathers, having never properly experienced fatherly feelings, often confuse them with sexual ones – hence the tradition of marrying your daughter, of Lears loving Cordelias, in the Hazard family. In the same way, absent fathers are mysterious fathers, which is why these enigmatic creatures become, for their children, the object of such longing and romance.
However, it is the errant behaviour of fathers that creates, among the Hazards and the Chances, so much opportunity for the breakdown of order, for transgression. It seems that in some way fatherly absence is what creates the carnival. That men are such recalcitrant parents stems from their carnival instincts, a sense of narcissism (Peregrine is far too self-involved to be able to give himself permanently as a parent); selfishness (Melchior is more interested in his work than in his children); and a desire not to be controlled or determined within a family order which limits the patriarch just as it confines women.
(ii) Literal Fathers
Such fatherly ambivalence, Carter suggests in Wise Children, might be rooted not only in carnival selfishness but in the anxiety of paternity: the eternal ‘gigantic question mark over the question of their paternity’. It is this forever unresolved uncertainty about their role in biological creativity that has led men to create a mystique around artistic, and especially literary, creativity: as critics like Gilbert and Gubar have shown, the anxiety of paternity translated into the anxiety of authorship. Here, however, Carter seems to be arguing that women, whose role in biological creativity is not in doubt (‘“Father” is a hypothesis but “mother” is a fact’), should now begin to shrug off the male anxiety that they, as writers, have been made to assume, and stop asking question such as ‘Is the pen a phallus?’ Dora does not romanticise or transform sex into something other than it is (which is what men do in their mystifying of the creative process, to cover their feelings of inadequacy); she enjoys it for what it is. A straight-thinking woman, Dora would never mistake a pen for a penis.
8. CARNIVAL GIRLS AND CARNIVAL BOYS
As I suggested above, the Bakhtinian idea of carnival is central to Wise Children. In particular, Carter plays out ideas about sexuality’s relationship to the carnivalesque transgression of order – a transgression that is, according to Bakhtin, at once both sanctioned and illegitimate. Jane Miller has argued in a collection of essays that because of the breakdown of all barriers, particularly linguistic and bodily ones, that carnival entails, women do not appear in Bakhtin’s work as distinct from men: carnival’s amassing experience, which collapse laughter with fear, pleasure with nausea, where the world become ‘infinitely reversible and remakeable,’ ends up denying female difference. The reason Miller tenders for ‘the inability of even these writers [Bakhtin, Volosinov and other Formalists who are interested in power] to make gender difference and sexual relations central to their work’ is that they are limited by their ‘particular history and their own place in it’. What Carter seems to suggest in Wise Children, however, is a prior problem. It is not just a question of Bakhtin denying difference, denying ‘those pains and leakages that are not common to both sexes’, but that women and carnival might, ultimately, be inimical because female biology and the fact of motherhood make women an essentially connecting force, while carnival is essentially the celebration of transgression and breakdown.
Without entering into the debate about whether transgression can be revolutionary if it is sanctioned by authority perhaps it is in this seeming paradox in Bakhtin’s argument – that carnival’s transgression are both allowed and disallowed – that we can see how well suited a model carnival is to masculinity, and how ill suited it is to femininity.
Although some women in Wise Children possess characteristics that might be thought of as carnivalesque, it is a man, Peregrine, who embodies it: he is ‘not so much a man, more of a travelling carnival’. Peregrine is red and rude, a big man and, in the classic Rabelaisian manner, a boundary-buster, growing bigger all the time. To Dora and Nora he is the proverbial rich American uncle, a sugar daddy whose fortunes dramatically rise and fall but who, when he is in the money, spreads his bounty around with extravagance and enjoyment. He is a big bad wolf of an uncle, too, a randy old devil who seduces the pubescent Dora when she is just thirteen. He is a multiple man, and his multiplicity makes him as elusive as the butterflies he ends up pursuing as a lepidopterist in the Brazilian jungle: to Dora and Nora ‘He gave…all his histories, we could choose which ones we wanted – but they kept on changing, so. That was the trouble.’ He is a contradictory presence, a very ‘material ghost’, in whom Dora sees all her lovers pass by as she and he make love at Melchior’s tumultuous birthday party.
If Peregrine’s history is unknowable because he is so multiple, Grandma’s origins are unknown because she refuses to reveal them: ‘our maternal side founders in a wilderness of unknowability’. Grandma arrived in Bard Road at the beginning of the century with no past but enough money to set her going for a year. She is a mystery woman, dateless, nameless, ‘She’d invented herself, she was a one-off’, just as later she invents her family. And like Perry, she is a woman of contradiction, a naturist who happily reveals her naked body to the world, yet speaks with an elocuted voice, a disguise that sometimes slips as she forgets herself and ‘talks up a blue streak’. She and Perry get along famously – they are kindred spirits who joke about the idea of their being married.
Estella, Dora and Nora’s ‘real’ grandmother, also come close to one of the few descriptions of womanhood in Bakhtin’s work (‘she represents…the undoing of pretentiousness, of all that is finished, competed, exhausted’): Estella’s ‘hair was always coming undone…tumbling down her back, spraying out hairpins in all direction, her stockings at half-mast, her petticoat would come adrift in the middle of the street, her drawers start drooping. She was a marvel, and she was a mess.’ And through her affair with a younger man, Estella is the undoing of Ranulph’s old order. But unlike Perry, who is able to skip away from all his sexual transgressions, Estella is destroyed in the Othelloesque orgy of jealousy and retribution that ensues from her affair.
In the same way, Saskia is a force who wreaks havoc, but like Estella she, too, pays a price. If Saskia’s disruptiveness is carnivaleque, there is little of the carnival’s laughter in her. Saskia’s anger, as it commonly is in women, is directed to the domestic sphere of food and cooking. As a child she’d played a witch in a production of her father’s Macbeth, ‘but she’d shown more interest in the contents of her cauldron than her name in lights’. In later life she continues to be an ‘unnatural’ witchy woman who, rather than nurturing, seems intent upon poisoning people. From the age of five, when she’s seen under a bush devouring the bloody carcass of a swan, to her twenty-first birthday party, when she serves up a duck ‘swimming in blood’, her conspicuous consumption of meat is perhaps some sort of profane attempt to maker herself feel legitimate, to be flesh of her father’s flesh. But finally, Melchior’s marriage to her best friend forces Saskia to recognise herself as a terminal outsider and, unable to gain the love she needs from her father, she sets about poisoning him instead. (Conversely, the motherly Grandma, who repudiates men, is an avid vegetarian: ‘she’d a passion for salads, it went with all that naturism. During her strictest periods, she’d make us a meal of cabbage, raw in summer, boiled in winter.’)
The Lady Atalante Lynde, Melchior’s first wife, after falling downstairs (or was she pushed by Saskia and Imogen?), comes to live in Dora and Nora’s basement, and is rechristened Wheelchair in honour of her new invalid status. Once at Bard Road she seems to undergo some sort of transformation: losing her upper-class tightness, she becomes another bawdy, bardy woman: she asks a grocer ‘Have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber, my good fellow?’ But her transformation isn’t only psychological. Rather like Flann O’Brien’s bicyclists, or one of Bruno Schulz’s fabulous creatures, Lynde passes through a ‘migration of forms’ – the woman becomes her wheelchair, or at least, they become a part of one another. Welded together they now, like twins, contain something of the other’s personality. After a breakfast of bacon, Dora describes Wheelchair as ‘nicely greased’.
All these women, and Dora too, have elements of carnival in them, but none of them personifies it as Peregrine does. Perhaps this has something to do with carnival’s relationship to order. Carter has argued that in the ‘real’ world, ‘to be a woman is to be in drag’. If in the carnival world, by putting on masks and being other than we are, we transgress the order of the ‘real’ world, then what does this play-acting mean for women who, in the ‘real’ world, already exist in a duplicitous state of affectation? The idea of carnival seems to presuppose a monistic world: the experience of femininity contradicts this, implying that the ‘real’ world is itself a place of diversity, of masks and deception.
We can understand better the idea of carnival being both licensed and illicit if we see how masculinity operates within it. In Wise Children the anarchic solipsism of carnival allows a forty-year old man (Peregrine) to seduce/rape a thirteen-year-old girl (Dora). It could be argued that patriarchy relies upon such masculine transgression of order as a reminder and a symbol of the very force which shores it up. This is what Carter seems to be saying in Wise Children about the function of war in society: that patriarchy legitimates the violent disorders of war in order to sustain itself. Attractive as carnival’s disorder can be to women who have been trapped by patriarchy, when women become the object of this disorder – as they are in war, or in rape, or in ‘kiddiporn’ – then the idea of carnival becomes much more problematic for them, and their relation to it becomes an inevitably ambivalent one: as with Estella and Saskia, carnival is as likely to defeat women as it is to bring down order.
9. BRINGING THE HOUSE DOWN
Nora and I were well content. We’d finally wormed our way into the heart of the family we’d always wanted to be part of. They’d asked us on the stage and let us join in, legit. at last. There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we’d lived in different rooms. (p.226)
At the end of Wise Children, when Dora and Perry are having sex for the last time (‘you remember the last time just like you remember the first’), Dora fantasises about what it would be like to bring the house down, to fuck it away in some glorious carnival orgy of destruction. She toys with the idea, sensing the excitement of exerting such eradicating (warlike) power. In the end, though, Dora decides that this is not something she wants to do, because although her historical house has sometimes been a painful place to live in, a place from which people have tried to eject her, it is also where her history, her story, lies. Bastard that Dora is, this is a house that she has built too. (That the house is a metaphor for the literary canon is quite clear. Should those left outside trash the house of fiction, or try to renovate it?)
For all Dora’s carnivalesque enthusiasm, and despite her part in conjuring the fantasy world of illusion, of having lived amidst the ‘bruising dew-drops’, she’s always been able to tell the difference between what is real and fake, between what is tragedy (untimely death) and what isn’t (a broken heart). In an interview in 1984 Angela Carter said that she was essentially ‘an old-fashioned feminist’; her preoccupations were with the material condition of women: ‘abortion law, access to further education, equal rights and the position of black women’. On pornography she said: ‘I don’t think it’s nearly as damaging as the effects of the capitalist system.’ Dora, too, is of this materialist persuasion:
wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away either.
Do you hear me Perry?
No. (p.221)
Perry cannot hear Dora because at some level the irrational, possibilising, illusion-making carnivaler cannot entertain the ordered, hard ‘real world’. But just as Dora would not throw away the historical house of order, she would not banish the chaos of the carnival either. Because it seems to her ‘as if fucking itself were the origin of illusion’, and in this carnival world of illusion – in fucking, laughter and art – there is the possibility to conceive of the world differently, to break down the old. There are ‘limits to the power of laughter’ – the carnival can’t rewrite history, undo the effects of war or alter what’s happening on the ‘news’. And there is no transcendence possible in life, Carter tells us, from the materiality of the moment, from the facts of oppression and war. But carnival does offer us the tantalising promise of how things might be in a future moment, if we altered the conditions which tie us down. It is only the carnival which can give us such imagined possibilities, which is why the creative things that make it up in life are so precious: laughter, sex and art.
Dora’s art reports from both sides of the tracks, chronicling a history of exclusion and opposition, but also of wrong-sided exuberance. She ends her story, and her day, with Gareth’s new babies, pocketed deep inside the folds of Perry’s greatcoat (carnival bringing newness into the world). As ever in the dialectical Hazard/Chance family, they turn out to be twins, but this time the old sexual divisions are broken, for this latest double-act signals a change of direction – these wise children are ‘boy and girl, a new thing in our family’. And who knows where such a strange combination might lead? With this challenge, Angela Carter signed off. Leaving the reader, in the best Bakhtinian fashion, holding the babies. But if we attend, we can hear her out there riding Dora’s wind: ‘What a wind! Whooping and banging all along the street…The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild.’ Listen, wise children, can’t you hear her shouting to us: ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’
Notes
1. Spring 1993
2. Angela Carter, Wise Children, Vintage, p.19.
3. If this seems rather to schematising a response, then I call in my defence Carter herself, who often iterated the idea that she intended her fiction to have direct political meaning: ‘My characters always have a tendency to be telling you something’ (Omnibus, BBC1, 16 September 1992); ‘in the end my ambition is rather an eighteenth-century “Enlightenment” one – to write fiction that entertains and, in a sense, instructs’ (Contemporary Writers: Angela Carter, Book Trust for the British Council, 1990); ‘I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business’ (Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in Michelene Wandor [ed.,], On Gender and Writing, 1983).
4. Omnibus
5. ‘All art is political and so is mine. I want readers to understand what it is that I mean by my stories…’ (unpublished interview with Kate Webb, 15 December 1985).
6. Martin Amis, Other People, Penguin, 1981.
7. Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’.
8. Salman Rushdie, ‘Eating the Eggs of Love’, The Jaguar Smile, Picador, 1987.
9. Interview with Mary Harron: ‘I’m a socialist, damn it! How can you expect me to be interested in fairies?’, Guardian, September, 1984.
10. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, 1993.
11. Foucault makes this argument in many of his works. It is a particularly strong theme of Discipline and Punish, Penguin, 1975, and The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Penguin, 1976.
12. Omnibus.
13. Contemporary Writers, Book Trust.
14. Carter gets the wheel of fate into the novel by having Tristram spin a wheel (of fortune) on his S/M game show.
15. This is an idea which permeates all of R.D. Laing’s work, but is the cornerstone of The Divided Self, Pelican, 1965.
16. It would take another full essay to delineate all the Freudian and Shakespearian connections in Wise Children. Here, I am just trying to indicate the extent to which they penetrate the novel.
17. Angela Carter died of cancer on 16 February 1992.
18. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on carnival is to be found in Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Manchester University Press, 1984; and The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press, 1981.
19. Contemporary Writers, Book Trust.
20. There is a pub called the Coach and Horse on Clapham Road, equidistant from where Angela Carter lived in Clapham and the road where we might suppose that Dora lives in Brixton. Not Bard Road, of course (this is Carter’s invention), but Shakespeare Road, which – with Milton Road, Spenser Road and Chaucer Road – runs off Railton Road and parallel to Coldharbour Lane. Coldharbour Lane was the place known traditionally for providing digs to the theatrical profession: it is there that Marilyn Monroe’s chorus girl lives in the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Railton Road was the heart of the area known as the ‘Front Line’ before the riots of 1981 and 1983, after which Lambeth Council knocked down half of it. When, later in the novel, Dora says she prefers the heat of Railton Road at half-past twelve on a Saturday night to the freezing country house of Melchior’s first wife, she is both making a political statement – choosing the culture of the colonised over that of the empire-builders – and talking about the relative culture of these two groups. At Lady Lynde’s house she is offered lousy food and a cold bed. On a Saturday night on Railton Road, Dora would have found blues parties, drugs, booze and many other people who felt ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’. [The rather tatty Irish pub, The Coach and Horses, is now called The White House ,and had been turned into a fancy nightclub with bouncers at the door and stretch limos in the street. – KW 2009]
21. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Bablyon, Straight Arrow Books, 1975. [No doubt Angela was aware that Anger played the Indian prince in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Hollywood version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - the inspiration for the one she writes about here. – KW 2009]
22. Contemporary Writers, Book Trust.
23. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, Yale University Press, 1979.
24 Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture, Virago, 1990.
25 ibid.
26. ibid.
27. I’m thinking here of the New Historicist writing on Shakespeare, and of Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody, Methuen, 1985.
28. Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Picador, 1980.
29. Omnibus.
30. Interview with Mary Harron.
This essay first appeared soon after Angela Carter’s death in 1992, in a book edited by the woman she once told me was her “best friend”, certainly her strongest critic, Lorna Sage. In an updated edition, with a new Introduction by Ali Smith – one of a generation of young novelists who claim Carter as an influence – the book’s publisher, Virago, have inverted the title. I’ve added a couple of new notes.
Milos Tsernianski, Migrations – Guardian
In this rather wild and lyrical novel the sounds of Serbia are plangent and unremitting; men and women sing a duet where the “doleful sorority” of soldiers’ chanting, and the “keening and howling” of women – half-crazed when their men leave for war, mad with grief when they fail to return – answer one other. No picnic you may think, but if you’re looking for a little light reading, a novel about Serbian history is hardly the place to turn. That Serbia can never be released from its warring history is the point of Migrations’ leitmotif of “an endless blue circle”, seen first by Vuk Isakovic as he lies on the banks of the Danube waiting for battle to begin. Serbian laments, Tsernianski reminds us - those of a fighting stateless nation - echo through the ages.
First published in 1929 by one of that truculent nation’s most influential writers, Migrations is set in the middle of the 18th century, at a time when Serbian soldiers were fighting under the Austrian army against the French and the Prussians, and their families were being used to colonise the Krajina (the same borderland being fought over in Bosnia and Croatia today), to create a buffer zone capable of holding back the Turks.
The novel traces three lives over a disastrous year – Isakovic, a worn-down soldier leading his regiment of “savage, blood-thirsty men” across Europe’s frontiers; his younger brother, Arandjel, a predatory merchant; and Dafina, Isakovic’s wife, whose affair with his brother-in-law precipitates a bungled abortion that leaves her bleeding to death.
Migrations is a lyric, a form that feeds off the emotions, and Tsernianski’s use of it here (the writing is flamboyant and ripe) offers little to help the contemporary reader make sense of the spectacular brutality of the Serbian soldiers. Dafina does slightly better in this respect: although her femininity (“those quivering breasts, those strong thighs”) is as one-dimensional as the super-virility of Isakovic’s marauders (“What men! What hairy men!”); her infidelity is shown to arise out of frustration at being always left behind as a woman, waiting for men and powerless to act.
Sexual warfare frames all of the novel’s important relationships, most obviously fuelling the tensions between the Orthodox, Serbian soldiers and their Catholic, Austro-Hungarian rulers. With Maria Theresa sitting on the throne, the Viennese court at first seems directly at odds with Isakovic and his brutish men; the courtiers are strange and exotic creatures with “great shrubs of flowers, feathers and painted faces, bared breasts”. But in the face of these rococco displays of feminine power, the Serbian warriors – given to punching horses and cracking open men’s skulls with their bare fists –become oddly emasculated, succumbing to the seductive artificiality of their effeminate rulers.
Like his wife before him, Isakovic starts to feel himself powerless to control his life or that of his men. Deracinated and despised, the Serbians find their nationhood looked upon as “an obscure thing, in whose existence the imperial officers did not feel the need to believe.” Encountering a sort of premature existential despair, as the exiled and displaced have throughout history, Isakovic bemoans the futility of life. Sick of his endless border-crossing and its constant dislocations, the hope Isakovic clings to – the star in his “endless blue circle” – is an old Serbian dream, one final migration taking him to a home in “boundless, snow-swept Russia”.
There’s no point in looking for an explanation for the sorrows of Serbia in Tsernianski’s novel. Reading Migrations, I was reminded of Milan Kundera’s argument that the lyric was a form one should regard with suspicion because while its intensity of feeling is beguiling, it is also intoxicating. Perhaps what we need from Serbia today is writing that is more dispassionate, a little cooler.
This review appeared in the Guardian as ‘Sad Serbs’ on 13.12.1994.
Milos Tsernianski [Crnjanski], 1898
I interviewed Michael Ondaatje in October 1992. He had just published The English Patient and was in Norwich for the annual UEA writers’ festival. We met at the Station Hotel, a gloomy building overlooking the River Wensum, and talked for an hour or so in its deserted foyer lounge - the only distraction, as I recall, a parade of swans drifting by outside the window. Their sinister elegance made a fitting backdrop for a writer whose work, to that moment, had been full of Dainty Monsters (the title of his first collection of poetry in 1967), paradoxical presences suggesting a dualism never fully reconciled, but marking him out and making him a pertinent, rather tantalizing subject: a poet of intimacy and the mysteries of the human heart, but also one intent on the multitudinousness of life. Much of our discussion (about the uses of lyricism or emotion in writing, about multi-stranded story) reflects this. My memory of the afternoon is a little hazy. I had a streaming cold and expected to be shown the door the minute I started sneezing. In the event, Ondaatje was friendlier than I had a right to expect, at the end of our conversation scribbling down the name of a herbal medicine he thought I should try.
KW: Gunter Grass talked of migration as the defining experience of the twentieth century, being the most common, and I wanted to begin by asking you about your own – from Sri Lanka to England, and from England to Canada. You were eleven when you arrived in England, what did it feel like?
MO: It was pretty much a culture shock for me.
KW: Had you visited before?
MO: No, I’d never left. My main image was of a country that was always under snow. The few photographs I’d seen had snow in them so it was quite a shock when I arrived, I think in September, to find there was no snow. But there was this culture shock which happened to me twice in one decade. The first, to England was stronger, because I didn’t want to come here and go to school.
KW: Was it a boarding school?
MO: No I wasn’t a boarder, luckily, I think that’s what saved me. Some of my family were here so I had my daily life, and the Sri Lankan connections were still there. I was only a boarder for the last year so I didn’t feel cut off from the life I’d lived as a child, which was not so much grand, as just very free and all over the place. But it did feel strange. I remember the first day of school was a nightmare, all these odd customs and rules and pieces of clothing.
KW: And the cold, did it bother you? I remember Wilson Harris, who I interviewed for a film, telling me when he came here from Guyana he found the changing seasons so exotic.
MO: Well it was exotic. And I got totally caught up in it because I had to forget my past: in order to deal with the present I had to forget my past.
KW: You said once you felt England seemed like a place where if you began a job you’d have to stay stuck in it for the rest of your life, a very static place, and this was why you decided to move on to somewhere else.
MO: Yeah. I think when I finished school I felt like that. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. I just didn’t want to do what seemed possible to me here at the time. It was pre-Sixties, pre-Beatles, so it was a couple of years before eveything changed. And it felt like we were at a certain level that seemed a nightmare to me. We had no money and no contacts or even real skills as far as we knew. So it was a job in a chartered acountant firm or something like that, which I knew nothing about.
KW: And what about the other kids at school? What sort of a place was it?
MO: It was a real mixture, a public school, one of the early Eleven Plus ones. It was not just the aristocracy or anything like that. [Ondaatje went to Rugby College.]
KW: And why did you make your escape to Canada?
MO: My brother [Christopher, who became a business man and philanthropist] had been earlier.
KW: Salman Rushdie talked of his school days at Rugby [another of England's grand public schools] and of the advantages he had there, being hybrid – being mixed and complex enough to grapple with modernity. Do you feel the same?
MO: Well I think he’s right. But I still don’t feel capable of grappling with modernity – even if I am a hybrid! It certainly makes it easier to be aware of the ironies of place, though. You do have a double vision. I guess that’s what he’s talking about, though I don’t know that it necessarily teaches you, or gives you the gift of being able to deal with it. A person from one location who’s seven generations at that location is just another kind of person, someone who grew out of a place and can write a book like Ulverton. Then there are those who can deal with a place as this strange mixture.
KW: Maybe there’s a difference between someone like Rushdie who’s Anglo-Indian, trying to reconcile two distinct cultures, and someone like yourself who’s family were widely mixed over three hundred years.
MO: Right, mine is more complicated. Even when I go back I’m still not quite sure what the hell we were. I spent a day with one of my family members telling me about our background. It was just a strange thing, involving Holland and the French Revolution and even more complicated than I thought – he didn’t know who the hell he was!
KW: In Running in the Family [an autobiographical work of 1982 about his extended family in Sri Lanka] you talk about this group of people who were distinct from the English community there. Was yours a very closed community?
MO: No. It wasn’t a community to do with race at all. It was a nice mixture. There was a sort of class system I expect, but it was complicated. I was reading a piece in the Guardian about the burghers in Sri Lanka, saying I was not a burgher because I had Tamil blood, which is perfectly true, and they saw that as a block for me. The burgher class is another complicated thing – Dutch colonial. But it felt very free. I just didn’t feel any limitations when I was growing up.
KW: What about the situation with the Tamils then? Were you aware of it?
MO: No. You had very different kind of Tamils. There were those who lived in Jaffna, and those in Columbo who were part of a [broader] culture that I was a part of: I was part Singhalese, part Tamil, and this other mixture.
KW: Which writers have influenced you?
MO: It is a very eclectic group really. When I began to write I was reading Yeats and then much later and more obviously, [William Carlos] Williams. I think someone like Marquez wasn’t an influence but was a little delight, more of a recognition.
KW: And when you were younger?
MO: I used to read anything – pot-boilers, spy novels. I didn’t read any poetry, I didn’t read any serious literature.
KW: And what about the reading you had to do for school? Did you see it as an imposition?
MO: Shakespeare? No, I loved it. I had an odd career at school because I was very good at English. Then O Levels happened and I did well in English but failed Maths, and the system they had to deal with this was to make me drop English and take Maths. So I didn’t do English at A Level. It was totally frustrating. So what happened to me then was I read on my own: the Ian Flemings as well as Sartre.
KW: What about the relationship between writing and research in your work – is there a pattern? I wonder, for instance, with regard to The English Patient [1992], how far did you conceive of the story before you began your research? Or did you just begin reading around and feel your way through it?
MO: Both, I guess. That period [the Second World War] always interested me. I’d read stuff in the past but not in the light of working on a novel, so I began the book with some common knowledge of the desert exploration and the war. But it usually begins with the mystery of knowing who is this person in the plane [this is how The English Patient starts] and then gradually you’re writing. It happens simultaneously. I don’t spend six months researching a chapter and then six months writing it.
KW: There is often in your writing a sense of things gathering in the dark and looming out at you. Is that something you do consciously, to reflect the discovery of character?
MO: No, it just tends to happen [laughs]. I mean I wasn’t even aware of it until the end of In the Skin of A Lion [1987] where there are several scenes like that. And, of couse, there are some in this one [The English Patient] too.
KW: But even as early as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid [1973] there are descriptions of strange bodies surrounded by total blackness. And that seems to be an image of the way the writing happens.
MO: Perhaps it might be to do with the fact that sometimes I’m just not sure what’s beyond the candle flame. It’s almost like we wait for the scene to emerge, or the plot to emerge, or the character to emerge. So it may be a subconscious thing of…
KW: …framing?
MO: Yeah.
KW: I was thinking of the Formalist notion of ‘making strange’. If you surround everything with this blackness, perhaps that’s a way of making people re-look?
MO: Yeah, see the scene in a different way. No, I don’t really think like that. I’m not really thinking of the reader when I’m writing those things. It’s much more to do with me trying to clarify something. Or a boy at the end of a dark field coming towards the light - something like that. And often in those scenes I don’t really know what’s at the other end. So it’s a surprise to me as to what’s going to happen.
KW: There’s a passage in In the Skin of a Lion about the men who work as dyers. People of different races stand in vats of different colours. You say: “this is a scene I could paint, but it would be wrong to paint the scene because what you would be doing would be aestheticising what’s happening”. You not only given us the scene, you give a lot of information about the harshness of the situation for the workers. I wonder, do you think this is a danger - here, of course, it’s one you address directly – a danger of aestheticising or making pretty in your very lyrical kind of writing?
MO: I think there is a danger of that, for sure. And it always worries me. I’m very conscious of the photograph which doesn’t really capture anything except this image, whether it’s a blur or whether it’s an interesting face. But what does it say in the end? What does this painting say in the end? So it’s almost like each scene is another version of the photograph, or from a different angle, or trying to get at some kind of understanding or context.
KW: But even by giving a series of shots rather than one, that still doesn’t necessarily convey ‘hard’ or material information.
MO: No, no, it doesn’t. Often not at all. And there’s a context of history, or a social context of language sometimes that gets hidden, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m conscious of that and know it’s a problem but I’m not sure how to solve it yet.
KW: But, then, often behind the argument against aestheticism lies authoritarianism – a sense of what the novel should be. And your writing challenges these limits. It’s about stretching any pre-determined notion of fiction. Do you think the novel has endless possibilities or are there limits to how far you can push it?
MO: Well there may be limits but I don’t know what they are yet [laughs]. One is always trying to go a bit further. And I think that you’re right in their [some critics] belief that the novel is a novel of ideas, where there’s a secure narrator who tells us what to think, which I don’t like very much. In that sense, in my work there may not seem to be an intellectual point of view, but to me it is there - by connecting the dots, perhaps.
KW: Maybe it’s laziness, a fear of having to make that connection for themselves?
MO: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. It always surprises me when a reader sees a certain character in a certain way as just being pyschologically unrealised when, to me, that person is realised a lot more psychologically than in the average novel when we’re told that this person comes from this kind of family and therefore he is this kind of person. I never believe those things. Because in some odd way, where we come from does not really affect how we think of ourselves. I think we’re influenced a lot more by small things, by small habits that we create ourselves – a horrible moment on a bridge [this is a scene from In the Skin of a Lion] - all those things govern us.
KW: Is this the the old tension in art between energy and order? There’s an intensity in a lot of your images, and maybe if you’re not going to impose an authoritarian narrator or guide then the tension between the two poles slackens in some way.
MO: I think the narrator is there, in some sleepy way [laughs]. It’s there. The problem is that you don’t want to be too shaped. In fact some people think the books are too shaped.
KW: In an interview on the Late Show [BBC 2] with your fellow Canadian, Michael Ignatieff, he put it to you that your novels don’t cover the full range of human experience, particularly, he felt, they lacked any sense of evil in people. There was perhaps some implication in what he said, that you aren’t writing a real man’s novel like Amis or Mailer, you aren’t wrestling with the tough stuff. Is writing in a lyrical or magical vein, do you think, somehow antithetical to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”?
MO: I do see evil in us a lot, but I don’t see it in individual humans. I see it more when groups form, or p0litical groups form - I’d say these are the villains. It’s something outside.
KW: You don’t have any idea of inherent evil?
MO: No, I don’t think so. It may also be an element of not wanting to. I’ve tried to write about [laughs] evil characters and I get bored with them. It’s so uninteresting. I don’t want to waste my time on those guys.
KW: So would you say, then, this political belief that human beings are not inherently evil is knitted to the lyricism of your writing? That such writing can’t …
MO: …deal with evil? Well I don’t know because hopefully the books are not just lyrical. There’s also a sterness of information or a baldness of facts I put in sometimes, but it’s more subtle. For instance, someone like Lord Suffolk [a character in The English Patient] seems to be a genial, amiable person, but in a larger context, he’s not. So it’s a more subtle judgement. We see him walking across a field and the way he behaves with Kip he seems quite pleasant and likeable. I was liking him in those scenes. That’s the problem we have: someone who we like can be traitorous or worse. It’s hard sometimes to separate these things. I mean, Patrick [from In the Skin of a Lion] doesn’t understand that at the very end of the book, he’s not political: the gestures he makes are more personal than political.
KW: And yet Alice [a political agitator in In the Skin of a Lion]…
MO: …yet even she doesn’t really influence Patrick: he’s altered by her, but he’s not altered by her.
KW: Philip Rahv wrote a book about the two sides in American literature - the Palefaces and the Redskins. His division between Jamesian sensibility and Whitmanesque energy perhaps doesn’t fit now so well, but you can still make an argument for a two-sidedness in North America today, with writers like you and Louise Erdrich on one side, and Auster and Pynchon on the other.
MO: I think it’s just a matter of the way you see things. Someone like [John] Berger was very interesting to me and his statement, “Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one”, I think that’s what in a way unconsciously I’ve been writing, that’s why I use the quote [as an epigraph in In the Skin of a Lion], because it is that kind of multi-voiced portrait. There’s no one specific narrator in the book, it shifts. In a way, in In the Skin of a Lion, Hana is the gatherer of the story and in this one [The English Patient] maybe it’s Caravaggio. [Hana and Caravaagio are the only figures to appear in both novels.] There seems to be always a character in the book who is gathering or detecting his way towards a portrait, or making a mosaic or a collage or something like that. It’s not just one photograph or one person.
KW: [Milan] Kundera was quite suspicious of the notion of the lyric in the novel and compared the poet to the revolutionary in the sense of them both being treasonous. The surrealist Paul Eluard talks about the alignment of what he saw as aesthetic and political intoxication, and there being in both a refusal of the real.
MO: That’s interesting. I actually came to the novel a bit late. So I can only write the kind of novels I write at the moment. I don’t think someone like Amis can write only the novels he can write: I’m just not sure he’s interested in writing different kinds – but I suspect he is, I know I am. I did not think I could write a book like The English Patient when I first began to write. I never even imagined writing a book like that or In the Skin of a Lion. So to go from the lyric form to a larger sequence of poems, and then to Billy, that is half-prose, and then to a sort of a novel [Coming through Slaughter, 1976, about the jazz trumpeter, Billy Bolden], it’s trying to enlarge this sphere of what is possible. I don’t see myself as writing the lyrical novel, it’s just what I can write. The lyricism may be the way I can get, not towards lyricism, but the way I can get towards an emotional state in the characters. I would prefer to replace the word ‘lyrical’ with the word ‘emotional’. Because I think that’s what we are governed by, or affected by: we make decisions in moments of excitement or terror or passion or whatever it is. We also make intellectual, more reasonable judgments, too. But what interests me is that kind of emotional depth.
KW: There are influences of cinema and music in your writing. There’s that often repeated remark about writing that aspires to the condition of music, hoping to achieve an emotional truth.
MO: Yeah, but I think one of the problems when using a sombre or a lyrical music is we get to an emotional state, but it’s only someone who doesn’t get to that state, who is on the sidelines, who will say, “Yes, it is a beautiful piece of music”. The intent of the musician or the composer is not to write something beautiful, but to reach that emotional state. It’s lyrical in the sense that there’s no naturalistic baggage there. But that’s just because I want to write a three hundred page novel and not a six hundred page one. I do have a much larger physical landscape, even if it’s just in my head. Or sometimes it’s on paper and then it’s a case of seeing how much I can remove from the story and how agilely. It’s like a stage set. You know if you have too much on a stage set it takes four minutes to change a scene. So it’s also to do with that speed of thought.
KW: Which is elliptical, as cinema is?
MO: Well in cinema it can take you three days to make a cut, and the cut takes what? – a second. I think it’s more like a theatre with very few props.
KW: You’ve made films yourself…
MO: …documentaries. That’s all I’ve done.
KW: I see that somebody is adapting The English Patient. Are you going to be involved? What are you feelings about that?
MO: I think I have to give it away. I can’t watch over my shoulder the whole time. One part of me is fascinated, the other part is worried about it: you have to remake it and every rule of narrative changes, it’s a completely different art form to a book. I know people have talked about the influence of film on my work but, to be quite honest, I don’t really see it that much, apart from the obvious influences we’ve all got.
KW: But in In the Skin of a Lion you talk about about the cinematic tropes of fate and timing.
MO: But that’s the silent movie. Before words.
KW: And yet those qualities seem strong in your writing.
MO: Maybe that’s true. It’s certainly true in that book about fate. Yeah, I believe in fate, sure.
RAR Stall – Alexandra Palace, London, 1979
Gang of Four Interview – TempoRARy Hoarding
This article originally appeared as ‘The Gang of Three/Quarters’ in TempoRARy Hoarding, Issue no 9 (June/July 1979), so-called because we spoke only to Andy, Hugo and Dave: Jon was absent, I don’t recall why. The interview was conducted by myself and Lucy Toothpaste on 28.5.1979, the day after the group had played at the Lyceum Theatre in London. It’s interest now, I think, lies largely in the extent to which issues of authority and control dominate the conversation. Lucy, Andy and Hugo seem to have been thinking about structuralist notions of power and ideas of commodification – Hugo eventually left the Gang for an academic career in the States. It’s hard to imagine a band today being quite so theoretical or self-reflecting about what they’re up to on stage or in the recording studio. There’s also a sense of the strength of grassroots organisations up and down the country - how much activity punk’s DIY ethos generated at this time - from building your own PA or starting a band, to putting on a gig or setting up a record company. And you get a an idea, too, of the way in which RAR - and bands who played for RAR - struggled to challenge those kids caught up with the National Front. It’s easy to forget now how common it was to see the NF at all kinds of gigs in the Seventies, pop music really was a battle-ground and the atmosphere could be menaacing, often the street fighting of fascist and anti-fascist demonstrations was carried over into the club, pub or town hall where gigs were held. It wasn’t only bands like Madness that drew large number of fascists – I recall a gig of theirs at the Hope and Anchor in Islington packed with Seig-Heiling teenagers – but all kinds of punk and new wave acts, even avowedly anti-racist ones like the Ruts, Mekons and the Gang of Four.
Kate: From the outisde the groups in Leeds seem to present themselves as fairly cohesive, more so than in other areas.
Lucy: The Leeds RAR Club is one of our most active, it’s always got something going on.
Hugo: Yes, that’s the great strength about it. In an organisation as young as it is - a non-professional thing - you’re bound to get some friction and some stupid things going on, but the fact that it has kept going so long is great. [In fact, Leeds RAR, despite combusting on a couple of occasions, stayed the course longer than most, hosting one of the last big Carnivals attributable to RAR mark one, with the Specials in 1981.]
Lucy: Do you think the RAR Club has had an affect on the music scene in Leeds?
Andy: Yes, it’s provided a venue.
Hugo: There’s a lot of bands which wouldn’t otherwise have had the chance to play, except the odd wine-bar gig.
Andy: And it gets them out of the continual pub crawl.
Dave: And the F Club. It’s a rotten place.
Lucy: That’s for political reasons though, isn’t it?
Dave: It’s a mixture. The club’s not very well run, I don’t think.
Kate: Who runs the F CLub?
Hugo: John Keenan. There’s a lot of shit flung at John Keenan.
Dave. Yes, some of it sticks.
Hugo: A lot of it sticks, and rightly so, but I respect what he would like to do. He’s trying to do some good things, but he’s not going about it in the right way.
Kate: What is he trying to do?
Hugo: Provide a good venue that people can enjoy, at a decent price, and put on good bands. His platform is, “This isn’t a political venue, it’s just a musical venue.”
Kate: How did all the problems start with bands like The Dentists?
Andy: Well that’s the key thing, it’s a cop-out really, because he allows it to be a meeting ground for the NF. This is the old argument that we’ve had with Keenan. When we played there we’ve had NF pulling us off the stage, and the Mekons have had them marching, Seig-Heiling round the hall and things like this. And we said to Keenan, it’s just not on, and we haven’t played there since.
Kate: You feel he ought to take action to stop certain bands like The Dentists playing there?
Andy: To stop certain people going in. It’s perfectly clear who they are, but he just lets them go in.
Hugo: And they go down to the F Club basically to terrorise people, just to cause trouble or to create a heavy atmosphere. There’s always somebody being threatened, or there’s heavy looks. At the Poly, they can come and go and you don’t really notice them.
Kate: Did Keenan start it by putting those bands on, or did they start going down there first and then bands like The Dentists appeared?
Hugo: The Dentists kept on hassling to get a gig. They sepcifically said, “We’re not political, give us a chance”, and went on at him until he did give them a chance.
Kate: Were their lyrics as inflammatory as they were reported to be?
Dave: They’re supposed to play songs like ‘Master Race’.
Andy: But that’s only a shade away from what Iggy Pop was singing about, though, or any early Seventies glam-rock. Of course, that’s a criticism of Iggy Pop too.
Lucy: But also there is a different political climate, so that if you sing that sort of song now, you’re consciously identifying yourself with the NF. But to get back to the RAR Club, you say that it has provided a venue for bands – but do you think it has had any affect on either the bands or the audience, politically?
Hugo: Well, I think on the audience level it’s mixed. There’s a lot of kids involved politically, but on a very naive level. I sometimes feel they’re not really that clued up about what it’s all about – apart from the very basic things of: NF are the bad guys and we’re the good guys. Most of them wouldn’t know a hint of difference between what racism is and fascism is. And I feel sometimes it’s just that identity thing , you know. ANL or RAR becomes the alternative to going to watch Leeds, or being a skinhead, or National Front member. It feels just like another gang sometimes.
Dave: When we played on April 1st I went to the meeting beforehand and the young kids especially looked a bit vague. But what I did like – I was very impressed that they were actually being organised to do something.
Andy: Well, it’s providing a situation that they’re learning in.
Hugo: Yes, but is that learning process being thought about by RAR?
Andy: That’s what RAR’s about, as far as I’m concerned.
Hugo: Yes, but does it do the job efficiently?
Andy: Yeah, sure. There’s Temporary Hoarding for a start.
Kate: What further ways are you suggesting of educating them? Apart from the music and getting involved themselves?
Lucy: I think there ought to be mnore discussions about racism.
Hugo: Yes exactly. What is it really all about? What do the NF really stand for? You need more than just a quarto size sheet with six main points about what they think. Explain a bit of history about it, and difference between fascism and racism.
Kate: But you can’t do that in a gig situation. You can’t have somebody standing up and start to do that. The only situation you can do that in is a meeting, and it’s hard to get kids to come to meetings.
Andy: I think Temporary Hoarding does it perfectly.
Hugo: I don’t. I think it could be better.
Lucy: It would do it better if it was distributed better. But I agree, actually, that often TH doesn’t have enough basic stuff about racism and oppression in general.
Hugo: Another thing about Leeds RAR Club, where they sometimes let themselves down, is they do a bit of leafletting, and they get their main points down and then there’s “Fuck the National Front” written in a corner, or “Pogo on a Nazi”, something really stupid like that, which is unnecessary.
Kate: But that’s the kind of slogans that ANL was running, and whether it’s good or not, that’s what’s mobilised so many people.
Lucy: No, I don’t think slogans do mobilise people, they’re what they use when they can’t think of anything better. I think what mobilised people was having bands, and showing that it was more fun. I don’t think slogans are fun at all.
Hugo: Slogans are things to put on badge, or shout, that’s all.
Lucy: It’s difficult though, isn’t it? There’s all the practical difficulties of running a club apart from the politics, and there’s a shortage of people.
Hugo: And there’s the internal politics against the Poly.
Lucy: Yes, and then there’s the question of the political astuteness and experience of the people who are involved in that area.
Hugo: And given all that, Leeds RAR are fighting an uphill battle. That they’ve kept going so long is really encouraging.
Lucy: It seems like they’re really on the frontline as well. It seems much more urgent in Leeds than in some other places, where there isn’t that direct threat of the NF.
Kate: What do you feel about your own role locally with RAR?
Andy: We can just help keep RAR going. When they got badly in debt, we did that big gig for nothing.
Dave: That’s one of the best ways we can help.
Hugo: They help bands who need help. And as a band, maybe we can do the same.
Kate: What about the free gig you did at the weekend?
Hugo: People kept on saying, “Oh, you never play Leeds”, so we said, “All right, we’ll do a free gig at the University Tartan Bar”. And then somebody from Bradford asked if we could do a RAR benefit for people in Bradford who got arrested at the Leicester anti-NF demonstration. So what we did was, we had a voluntary collection. We got £80, and we’re going to split it 50/50 between Southall Community Centre and the Bradford fund.
Kate: So who paid for the gig?
Hugo: We did. We paid for everything.
Kate: What PA did you use? You haven’t got your own PA have you?
Dave: No we have to hire one – about £100.
Kate: Did you have problems with loads of people wanting to come in?
Hugo: Yes. It was absolutely sardine-packed.
Dave: It was just chaotic. People went out to the toilet and couldn’t get back in.
Kate: Was it a good gig? Did you enjoy it?
Hugo: Yes. It was potentially a bit heavy, but the audience all really enjoyed it, there were no fights. Down at the front they all linked arms so there was no danger of people getting thrown forward.
Dave: The National Front were there.
Hugo: Yes, about seven of them. And someone said that one of them came past the collection box about three times and threw his coppers in.
Andy: Well that’s the thing, they’re sort of coming and going.
Hugo: And that’s where the strength of a gig like that lies.
Dave: That’s right. They don’t really know where they stand. But if they come to a gig like that and see what’s going on, maybe they’ll think about it.
Hugo: There was no advertising about it being a benefit gig. All we did was, when I came to do the talk-over, I just said, “This is a free gig, but there’s a catch”, and I was expecting a lot of moaning. But when I explained where the money was going, everybody started cheering.
Dave: Nineteen people put in pound notes.
Kate: When we were queuing up last night outside the Lyceum, there was a bunch of blokes covered in Gang of Four badges, Ruts badges, Mekons badges…
Lucy: …and Union Jacks…
Kate: …and they had a whole load of British Movement stickers. They had ‘Anarchy’ signs next to NF badges. And they were plastering the outside of the Lyceum and all down the Strand with these stickers – “Ban red riots, not legal marches”; “Curb the Communists”.
Dave: It was the same when we plated Eric’s [a club in Liverpool]. These two guys came out of the door, making sure we could see them, putting stickers on the door. I went to see what they were and they said, “British Movement – send 10p for a leaflet”.
Kate: They don’t even give you a free leaflet! But think what a dilemma they must be in, when they’re standing there with all their Gang of Four badges and everything, and you come on and play your music.
Hugo: Well it’s better to put them in a dilemma and try to make them think about it, than just beat it into them.
Lucy: Now we’ve come on to what I really want to talk to you about, which is what you’re trying to do with your music and words and performances, and how much effect you think you have on people?
Kate: We were wondering how much your lyrics relate to those kids, for instance?
Lucy: Well, you can’t hear many of the lyrics anyway.
Hugo: That’s always the same with rock music – but ultimately the ideas that we’re trying to put across in our songs are backed up by our artwork and, hopefully, by what comes across in interviews. It’s not just the song, it’s not isolated.
Andy: Also, if you hear it a few times, you start getting the lyrics.
Hugo: And ultimately when we put an album out, you can sit and listen to it all day and work out the lines!
Lucy: Are you going to write the lyrics on the sleeve?
Andy: Some of them, the ones that are difficult to decipher, so that you can sit and ponder them.
Dave: Yes. We always say we’re in complete contrast to someone like Tom Robinson, who is a bit sloganising with his music.
Andy: When Tom Robinson’s going on about, say, “Sing if you’re glad to be gay”, it’s pretty obvious what he’s talking about, and it almost puts forward homosexuality as a marketable commodity, as an idea which needs promotion. [Like many people, Andy seems to have missed the fact that the song is ironic.]
Kate: Couldn’t you say the same thing about your songs about Ireland, for instance?
Andy: No. Well possibly in the case of ‘Armalite Rifle’, but not ‘Ether’. Do you know ‘Ether’?
Kate: We heard it last night but we couldn’t make it out - we just kept hearing words like “Long Kesh” and “torture”.
Andy: Yes. What happens in that one, as you probably noticed, is that Jon is singing about people’s aspirations to a life-style - how they’d like to live their lives in private away from all the forces of society.
Dave: And meanwhile Andy’s going on about [internment]…
Andy: …It’s just putting the two ideas in conflict.
Hugo: Which might sound a bit bitty…
Andy: It intentionally sounds very bitty. It’s like the jarring of two things. He sings, “Locked in heaven’s life-style”, and I go, “Locked in Long Kesh”.
Hugo: You can’t separate your private life and your political business.
Andy: And I think that’s a good form for it: him singing one thing, and me singing another. We’ve also got very different voices: mine’s very blergh, and his is almost tuneful. It works on lots of levels. But, then again, as you say, it’s difficult to hear bits of it, and that makes it tantalising. But hopefully if you come a few more times…
Lucy: That seems to make a comment about your performance as a whole. There you are, singing about armalite rifles or whatever, and we’re all dancing around to it in the Lyceum, which is an odd experience.
Andy: I don’t see that as a contradiction. I see the dancing, and the enjoyment of the music, as a way of expressing your unification really, as an audience. The dancing is like joining in with what we’re doing on the stage . You’re not celebrating the armalite rifle by dancing, you’re agreeing with the attitude being expressed.
Lucy: Well you hope so, at any rate.
Andy: Or else you’re just dancing, yes. But presumably you’re dancing because you’re enjoying it, and in that song the lyrics are very clear. It’s been out on record for a long time.
Dave: Everybody, virtually, was singing along with that one, which means they’ve got the lyrics in their heads. So surely it’s quite clear they know what they’re dancing about. I mean, we could have written a poem and put it in Temporary Hoarding, and it wouldn’t have been as effective, I don’t think. To see a thousand people jumping up and down and singing it must be better than having people just read and then discard it, because they’re more likely to remember it.
Andy: And it’s partly the social thing – all doing it together.
Lucy: I found the white lights on the audience a bit aggressive, specially as they were used so much. Where I was standing it was really blinding.
Andy: I wanted them to be lower down, so that the light shone straight out.
Hugo: Instead of spotlighting the band, it was spotlighting the audience.
Andy: Yeah, well the audience were getting it right in the eye.
Dave: We haven’t worked out the light show at all. The lights come with the PA, and we talked to them to tell them what we wanted.
Hugo: But the only way really is when you design your own lightshow to take on tour with you. When you turn the lights on the audience, on a very plain level, it’s nice seeing faces, rather than just the front row.
Lucy: What leads on from that is the whole thing about the power which a band has over the audience. We wanted to know what you felt about that.
Andy: It’s quite complicated. There’s a lot of things about it which bother me, about being in a position where you’re dictating the format.
Hugo: It’s a little bit distrubing that people are so completely malleable.
Lucy: Yes, it’s terrifying.
Andy: And us exploiting that as well?
Dave: I felt completely immersed with the audience myself last night.
Kate: Do you feel a lot more confident now? You certainly struck me, since the RAR tour, as having got a lot tighter, and seeming a lot more aggressive on the stage than you were.
Hugo: Well the RAR gigs were a bit like one big party. They were like a celebration of unification.
Kate: So what was your feeling at the Lyceum?
Dave: I felt that we had sold out the Lyceum and, for us, without an LP out or anything, that was pretty good going. I felt that the audience deserved…
Hugo: …it’s not that we didn’t give everything at RAR.
Kate: No, but it was different.
Andy: For a start you’ve got a stage about three t imes as big as usual.
Dave: That stage makes you move. There’s no way you can stay still.
Lucy: You just spontaneoulsy felt like careering around?
Dave: If the audience is having a good time, and the sound’s alright on stage, everything works – it’s just releasing energy.
Kate: Did you feel you had power over us?
Andy: No.
Lucy: I think you do have it though, even if you don’t feel it. If you’re in the audience, the people on the stage do exert power over you, whether you as performers feel it or not.
Hugo: Well I don’t think we abuse it.
Lucy: No, I don’t think you do.
Andy: I think what you’re saying here is, there’s an atmosphere of aggression.
Lucy: No it’s not just aggression. I think it’s volume, and the fact you’re higher up than we are.
Hugo: Well that’s the age-old problem you’re up against, however much you try to close the gap.
Lucy: Yes but it’s a particularly critical problem for a band who want to be anti-hierarchical, isn’t it?
Hugo: Yes. But you have to be on a different level so that everybody can see. I mean, you are performing. I hate not being able to see a band. At the Lyceum where there is a big geographical difference between the stage and the floor, a lot of bands will play to that, and exploit it.
Lucy: I wanted to mention, when you play for Rock Against Sexism, as you have agreed to do in the summer, it might be quite controversial, not for personal reasons but because of the instituion of rock – it being a male thing historically. I think there might be people in the audience who would feel uncomfortable.
Andy: I would completely agree with that.
Lucy: There we would be, in the same situation, with four men having power over us.
Andy: And specially as you’ve pointed out that it is aggressive – which is supposedly a male sphere.
Lucy: Have you thought about how you would do it, if you might modify it? This isn’t a test or anything! I’m just intereseted to know what you think.
Kate: Modify what – appearance or words?
Lucy: For example, when you come out from behind the drumkit, Hugo, what might you say? There will be a Rock Against Sexism banner behind you, of course. And I hope we would do it in such a way that everybody would be aware what the gig was for.
Hugo: Well I don’t think there will be any doubt about that.
Lucy: No. Some of them will just have come to see the Gang of Four.
Hugo: Yes. That’s what you’re up against. But surely that’s the point of putting a band like the Gang of Four on. You’ll get the people who have just fcome to see us, and then perhaps the reson for the gig will sink in.
Lucy: Yes that’s the point: how do we get it to sink in?
Andy: They’ll see four blokes behaving in the normal rock structure.
Lucy: Yes. Looking really strong.
Hugo: We don’t behave in the normal male rock structure.
Andy: Just by having four blokes we’re in the normal male rock structure. Okay, so we don’t adopt macho rock posturing.
Hugo: So what do we do about that? Have we got to get a girl in the band? Does that make it any better?
Dave: But we’re not arguing about rights and wrongs – we’re just saying it’s a problem.
Lucy: Rock Against Sexism have a policy of having at least one all-women band on the same bill as an all-male band. And then if you had a jam at the end, with a lot of women on the stage, and you from the Gang of Four - I think that could be quite powerful.
Hugo: Isn’t there a danger that some people will see Rock Against Sexism as an organisation just for women?
Andy: I don’t think so. I think it’s quite clear that it’s for men and women.
Lucy: There has been quite a lot of confusion actually. But as the months go by, RAS will emerge for what it is.
Hugo: And it’ll develop and pull away from the more obvious ties with RAR.
Lucy: In many ways RAS is not going to be so spectacular as RAR, because working in youth clubs and schools and that sort of thing is not going to catch the headlines. But it would be really worthwhile if just one girl learns to play the guitar. We did a talk and some schoolgirls were there and said that in the boys’ school next door there were drumkits and guitars, whereas the girls had flutes and triangles.
Hugo: It’s not just one girl learning to play the guitar, but one boy who won’t think girls can’t do it.
Lucy: That’s right. And we’ve had lots of letters from boys who’ve read about it in Blot [the school student's magazine], and I find that really encouraging.
Kate: We’ve left quite a few things out, like the way the Gang of Four change instruments.
Lucy:; That’s right, It goes back to the thing about power and hierarchy, and I do think it’s really great when you swap around. In a way, I wish there could be more of that.
Hugo: Yes, I’d like to do it more. But if one makes too much of a thing of it, maybe the stress would come on what multi-instrumentalists we are.
Lucy: I think it’s particularly strong when Hugo comes out from behind the drumkit because drummers are so stuck in a static position. Usually you can’t even see the drummer because the lead singer is always standing in front.
Andy: The important thing is the idea that the drummer is supposed to be the thick one and about all he can do is hit things. Only here, he actually comes out and opens his mouth.
Kate: How did that evolve? Because the Mekons do a similar thing, don’t they, with different singers, for example?
Andy: We used to have meetings with the Mekons to talk about things – from building the PA to what we were doing with the music in general, and this is something we talked about right from the start.
Hugo: Anyway, the first Mekons gig had Andy on drums, and Mark playing bass guitar. He just put his fingers somewhere on the neck and went like this – there weren’t any specific roles.
Andy: Also, in the songwriting situation, we all contribute to what we’re doing. The usual thing for bands is that someone will come in with a song, everyone else will be shown what’s required, though they’ll add their personal touches to it, and that’s it. Whereas with us, we rarely come in with even an idea. It would be helpful if we did a bit more! I mean, we just sit around and it’s really boring and then it escalates and we start to get quite excited.
Hugo: Then, half an hour later, you’re really excited. Then you kick it out.
Kate: Do you all write lyrics?
Hugo: No. On the whole the lyrics tend to be by Jon.
Lucy: But do you all criticise them and change them?
Hugo: Oh yes. Nothing is sacrosanct whatsoever.
Andy: It gets chased around as people come up with ideas.
Lucy: And you change things after you’ve performed them as well?
Dave: Oh yeah. You might not recognise them. ‘Ether’ went through drastic changes. I think it’s good. There are so many bands and you just hear their set again and again and it’s always the same. But we question everything.
Kate: You did a couple of new songs last night - ’Ether’ and ‘Guns Before Butter’.
Lucy: Kate thought that was ‘Scones Before Butter’.
Hugo: Buns and Rubber!
Kate: Did Fast Product [a Leeds record company] play any part in developing and helping any of the Leeds bands?
Hugo: It started with the Mekons. Bob Last of Fast asked if they wanted to make a record – which was totally ridiculous and funny, because the idea of the Mekons doing a record at that time was outrageous. But they did. So we thought we’d best get in there, and for months we were pushing and hassling. Eventually we got to do it.
Kate: Was there already a caucus of bands in Leeds or did Fast or RAR help to develop that?
Dave: There were a lot of bands, but there wasn’t any developed relationship between them. Our relationship with the Mekons was quite cooperative. We built our own PA with them. We did everything together, rather than working in competition.
Hugo: But that arose simply from the fact that we were all friends before the ideas of bands became really concrete.
Kate: So it doesn’t extend to any of the other bands?
Hugo: Yes it has done. Delta Five have come out of it. Other bands have been involved, like the Butterflies.
Lucy: In that case it does sound as if there is quite a strong relationship between the bands – and you get the impression from outside Leeds. Do Fast only promote one-off things?
Andy: You’re mainly talking about Bob Last when you talk about Fast. And I don’t think he sees Fast as a long-term thing for any group. His idea was just…
Hugo: …a springboard for bands.
Kate: What do you think about the Fast concept of packaging - the polythene bags with bits of ornge peel and stuff like that?
Hugo: Well, like Jon said, to charge 70p for plastic bags full of rubbish, and get away with it…
Kate: …it’s very clever.
Andy: You get a lot for that though.
Dave: Yes, but you don’t get much. (Laughter). I mean, it looks a lot, but you get a 12 inch single, and you get a fold-out wrapper for the single, which has a picture of the band, and you get a plastic flesh disk, which is jist a round 7″ disk with “FLESH” stamped on it, and that’s it.
Andy: It’s a sort of New York 60s pop type of operation. Andy Warhol started it, that’s all it is: trivia, the commercialisation of objects. The bits in it aren’t that important. It’s just the idea he’s charging for. It’s a straightforward artist/consumer relationship, but it’s disguised a bit.
Lucy: It’s very perverse because he’s making a comment on consumer society, but still making cash out of it.
Andy: Well surely to make money out of it is just the logical extension.
Lucy: Yes but he’s criticising it at the same time: “How silly you are to pay 70p for a bag of rubbish”.
Andy: I don’t think it’s, “How silly you are”. I think it’s, “How clever you are to get the point”.
Hugo: People who don’t get the point are silly but they don’t know it.
Lucy: Well I think either way you’re silly really.
Hugo: I think he’s just trying to extend the role of the record company, trying different things,
Andy: Well I disagree with you. I don’t think he is actually trying different things at all. I think he’s working in the stereotypical pattern of the small businessman with very flash marketing techniques, which is what small businessmen have to do. He’s not changing the role of the record company.
Lucy: He’s just making it more obvious though, isn’t he? He’s saying, normally when you pay out 70p, you’re paying for rubbish. And here it’s explicit – it is literally a bag of rubbish.
Hugo: Well it’s not ‘Fast Records’, it’s ‘Fast Product’, and I think he’s trying to stress that.
Lucy: Tell us about EMI.
Hugo: They gave us some champagne last night.
Dave: We started negotiating with companies round about November/December. And we more or less outlined what we wanted at that stage: we weren’t going to compromise on a deal.
Andy: Virgin wouldn’t let us do our own artwork.
Hugo: So they were out.
Andy: Radar were a great improvement all round. But we discovered that Radar was likely to be bought up within two years, so that we’d suddenly find ourselves in WEA. EMI stepped in at the last minute, accepted all the conditions and offerend an extra one or two percent on the royalties. Their A & R man who signed us, Chris Briggs, is very keen that we do what we want to do.
Hugo: He agrees with us, he supports us.
Kate: What happened about the single? You ended up putting ‘Tourist’ out, didn’t you?, but EMI wanted something else?
Andy: You remember ‘Elevator’? It’s just a neither here nor there thing, with quizzical lyrics, pretty straightforward really. And we were going to put it out, just to get rid of it, on a B-side. We started recording it, and then me and Dave were thinking, “Oh Christ, we can’t put that out”.
Lucy: You felt embarrassed about it?
Andy: Yes. It was like a betrayal, you start putting out dross.
Dave: The Fast EP was three really good tracks.
Andy: And this would have been a sudden drop in standards.
Kate: Did EMI use the argument about it being a popular song, and you should use it to get to a wider audience, as they did with the TRB and ‘Motorway’?
Hugo: They didn’t actually pressurise us to use it.
ANdy: But that is exactly what our manager Rob said. That it’s a tactic. But it’s just crap. You increase your market by putting out a pop record which has got a wide base in the public, then once you’ve got your audience, you do the subversive things.
Hugo: Then you lay on the weird stuff.
Kate: What happens in the future, then, if you start having disputes with EMI? Say you want to put something out and they say no?
Dave: There’s a lot of clauses in the contract that we fought for.
Andy: The contract went backwards and forwards between us and our lawyers and EMI, and round and round loads of times.
Kate: So there’s no way they can stop you putting out what you want to put out?
Andy: Yes. It doesn’t just depend on good faith, it’s all there in writing. They can veto things, but once they’ve accepted your demo, they’ve got to put it out. We’ve got a clause which says if they don’t put it out within forty days, the contract is terminated.
Kate: But if they don’t like the record they don’t have to publicise it do they?
Hugo: But they’re cutting their own throats if they do that.
Kate: You seem to have more control than anyone else has managed to get.
Lucy: Have you got to produce x number of LPs?
Hugo: There’s a minimum commitment of one LP each year, and two singles this year.
Dave: Compare that to the original Virgin contract which was for eight LPs in five years and millions of singles.
Andy: And inevitably if you’ve got to do that sort of quantity…
Dave: …it’s going to be rubbish. But you’d never do it in five years, I don’t think. So you’d have to re-sign, because you owe the company product, and you can’t go anywhere else.
Lucy: And it’s bound to rip the band apart, isn’t it, that sort of pressure?
Kate: What kind of help have they given you? Did they give you an advance to go on tour?
[There is much argument here as to how much their advance is. As far as we could make out, they've had £15,000 so far, as the first instalment of £250,000 over five years.]
Hugo: If our royalties exceed that amount, we get more; if they’re less, it’s their loss. But our advance was relatively small compared to people like the Clash who go for £75,000 right at the start, and they’re going to see nothing. They’re broke, they’ve got no money coming in from CBS, because their royalties haven’t reached the level of their advance yet.
Andy: A lot of bands get their advance, spend it, and then haven’t got the money to record their albums.
Kate: Are you on a wage now?
Dave: Yes, £30 a week each. The roadies get it and the manager gets its too – all the same. We can’t afford to pay ourselves more, that’s a £210 a week bill.
Hugo: We’ve bought a van, we’ve bought new gear, we’ve paid off old debts.
Lucy: Do you feel relieved now it’s all settled?
Dave: It’s a bit of an anti-climax actually.
Hugo: It’s a slight relief, but the real work starts now. It takes certain pressures off, but it puts other pressures on.
Kate: When you tour in the autumn, are you going to arrange it yourself or go through a promoter?
Hugo: We go through Asgard agency. We tell them where we want play and they get us the gigs – they don’t tell us where we’ll be playing.We work out the itinerary between us, avoiding the places that are nasty, hopefully, or where they won’t…
Lucy: …where they won’t let skinheads in? What about the Lyceum last night?
Andy: I don’t think we were really that happy with the Lyceum, for those sort of reasons - and the sound.
Kate: You’ve got quite a bit of control over the records, what about touring? Some promoters are known pretty much as crooks. What do you feel about working for people like that?
Dave: You tell me a promoter who’s dead straight.
Hugo: You have to face up to the problem. If you want to play in London, where do you go?
Kate: There are other ways.
Hugo: Yes, but there’d be a lot of work involved.
Kate: What I’m saying is that you saw it as a priority to keep control as regards EMI. Do you see control over gigs as a priority too? Obviously not.
Hugo: Well when it comes to a tour…
Dave: …we’ll have to be a lot more rigorous.
Kate: Rough Trade, for example, are not just the first independent label to get a record in the LP charts, they’ve also organised their own tour for Stiff Little Fingers.
Andy: Yes but Rough Trade have put bands on at the F Club.
Kate: You wouldn’t consider promoting your own tour?
Andy: You just go to Asgard and you say this is what we want and get it.
Hugo: Whereas if you go to a promoter they do everything for you, wipe your nose, your arse, they set up the whole thing.
Andy: For something like a one-off gig here and there, you physically can’t do everything. But when we do the tour we’ll spend a lot more time working things out.
Kate: Last night at the end of the gig I was talking to a girl who came up specially from Leeds and she was really upset. She was trying to get backstage to get her coat and they wouldn’t let her through. What do you think about the fact that the bigger you get, the more distanced you’ll get from your fans?
Dave: But we don’t stay backstage. People think it’s a wonderful environment, but it’s really terrible.
Hugo: If you have easy access backstage it becomes totally inefficient, things get stolen, people get in the way.
Kate: But the more famous you get, the more people will want to talk to you, take your time.
Dave: But we just drink in the bar at gigs. No one comes over and swamps us.
Hugo: We were wondering round the Lyceum the whole night. If they get used to seeing you as you build up to becoming more famous, it becomes less of a thing.
Andy: People do come up and say hello.
Hugo: There’s less of a personality cult about us than some other bands.
Kate: But the more interviews you get in magazines like the NME, even if you don’t present yourself as stars, it will happen.
Lucy: We were going to ask you about your relationship to interviews, particularly after that interview in the Melody Maker. What did you think of that?
Dave: Well that was different, with Mary Harron, we all know her. She was building up a dossier on us for quite a while, she came to a lot of gigs.It wasn’t a direct interview situation like this.
Hugo: She’d seen the band, she talked to us a lot and eventually collated a whole load of things together, out of which she wrote a dissertation in which she mentioned the Gang of Four a few times. She wrote a lot about art and music critics.
Lucy: And “stripped away the structuralist jargon”. What did you think about the final product?
Hugo: I disagree with a lot of what she said.
Kate: You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to have aesthetic control with EMI, but what do you think about interviews? I know it was different with Mary because you’ve known her for a long time, but the typical one-off interview, where somebody can come and meet you just once and then say whatever they want?
Lucy: Possibly misrepresenting you.
Kate: Harron’s arguments about what you were saying – she seemed to be drawing conclusions that didn’t necessarily follow.
Hugo: Well this is the gamble you always take doing interviews, because of the personality of the interviewer – they can mould it around when they come to write the article.
Andy: The point is that different meanings are constructed out of discourse really.
Lucy: Aha! Here’s the structuralist jargon.
Andy: I mean it arises out of people’s own contribution to the ideas.
Lucy: Exactly. But we started out by saying you’ve got your system of control over your art-work, but you can’t keep control over what goes in the music press, and that is also a part of the promotion of the band, isn’t it?
Andy: Yes. But people have a right to voice their opinions about us, right? It would be terrible if we determined what people said about us.
Hugo: Yes. And if we demanded to see copy before it was printed. You must accept that it’s a gamble, but after each interview you do you learn to be more specific. That big inteview in Sounds with Dave McCullough, it was fairly straightforward, then he went back and completely twisted it all round, subservient to his own ideas.
Andy: As long as you don’t misquote us it’s fine.
Lucy: But quite often they do.
Hugo: In a way, the press is also having an affect on the audience. Sometimes a misconception can happen in an interview with a band and it gets bigger and bigger in articles which follow.
Andy: Bands get misrepresented, that’s an inevitable thing. But in the end, the truth gets out. It’s a self-correcting process because something happens, and the next time you’re at pains to point the thing out.
Kate, Jo, Tom – Right to Work March, 1979
