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.”
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”!
(John Muckle has reminded me there’s a George Jones song, circa 1955, called, ‘Burn Your Playhouse Down’, expressing similarly fiery sentiments.)
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 she 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.
“Part of Me”: Madness and the Clash on How to be English
A version of this review of Suggs and the City, Headline; and Marcus Gray, Route 19: The Clash and London Calling, Jonathan Cape, appeared in the Guardian on 19.12.2009 as ‘Clashing Cultures’, and on the Guardian website as ‘Suggs in the City by Suggs’.
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 the English, in the grip of a cultural cringe that has lasted 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! and their musical influences spread to Latin America and the Middle East) 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.
Javier Marías: An Unrealised World
Javier Marías is a writer keen to remind us, as many novelists are, of what exists but gets lost; also, more unusually, of what never was but might have been. This is not necessarily a cause for lament. In an essay from 1995, ‘What Does and Doesn’t Happen’, he argues that the significance of absence (the unrealised or impalpable) is often – unsurprisingly - overlooked. The son of a philosopher who wrote on Cervantes, Marías’s thinks of what doesn’t happen, suggestively, as a sign of our amplitude and potential, rather than the result of creative failure or lack of wherewithal.
He began his own career as a translator, and his characters, “people who are renouncing their own voices”, are often translators or interpreters. In the first half of the last century many modernists pursued ideas of disavowal and obscurity – think of Jane Bowles’s Serious Ladies and the “moral value” they attribute to their willed excursions into the unknown. Perhaps Marías’s current success is a signal that we are once again rejecting the here and now and becoming interested in potential, unrealised worlds. Could it be that in these over-stuffed times, renunciation is making a comeback?
We all have at bottom the same tendency…to go on seeing the different stages of our life as the result and compendium of what has happened to us and what we have achieved and what we’ve realised, as if it were only this that made up our existence. And we almost always forget that…every path consists of our losses and farewells, of our omissions and unachieved desires, of what we one day set aside or didn’t chose or didn’t finish, of numerous possibilities most of which – all but one in the end – weren’t realised, of our vacillations and our daydreams, of our frustrated projects and false or lukewarm longings, of the fears that paralysed us, of what we left behind or what we were left behind by. We perhaps consist, in sum, as much of what we have not been as of what we are, as much of the uncertain, indecisive or diffuse as of the shareable and quantifiable and memorable; perhaps we are made in equal measure of what could have been and what is.
Rock Against Racism Archives
In 1977 I dropped out of college and started working for Rock Against Racism. I was eighteen 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). 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 simple 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 reinvention and reiteration.
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 (not seen it/unfamiliar with Goodyer); and a website with a rather cursory RAR timeline.
Of those involved in RAR in its original form only a few have talked and written of – or visually advertised – their involvement: 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 – see sidebar). 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 not only partial but probably, at times, simply wrong. So, if anyone out there has counter-memories, or thoughts to the contrary, please let me know.
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:
John Berger: “…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!”
Will Self: “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.”
Michael Moorcock: “I think Cyclomotors is my best book of 1997 and a real bit of quality in a fairly bleak landscape.”
Tom Raworth: “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.”
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, whose 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 had 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”.’
Form and Cruciform: Angela Carter Through the Dark Woods
The Ipswich murders, as the British press called the murder of six women over the course of a few weeks in February 2006, were doubly horrific – for the deaths themselves, but also because attached to the woefully familiar scenario was a feeling of inevitability, as if somehow the women had been doomed. At the trial, the Queen’s Counsel, Peter Wright, described in his opening statement how they were killed, probably by asphyxiation, stripped naked, and dumped in some out of the way place. The third and fourth victims, he added, were “posed in a cruciform shape”. The press, looking for headlines, quickly seized on Wright’s remarks about the positioning of two of the bodies, and soon just about every report included that word, “cruciform”. But alert as they were to its titillating effect, no one seemed interested in speculating on the meaning of the image, nor the source of its power.
Three years later and the press have left little in their wake attempting to explain the women’s awful deaths. More than forty years ago, however, in her debut novel, Angela Carter did just that – and more. In Shadow Dance, published in 1966, she exhumed the rotten plot of the crucified woman, the martyred girl, in order, finally, to lay it to rest. Her desire in writing was to defuse those myths and mystifications holding us in their grip. First among these, at that time and place, was the narrative of Christian martyrdom. In her novel, a young woman is found dead in an abandoned house. Like the Ipswich women, she has been undressed, her throated striated with “deep black fingernails”. To complete the tableau, there are candles, “long waxy tears”, lighting four corners of a table on which she has been arranged, laid out in the form of a crucifix.
Although one might consider her a prophetic writer, Carter did not ‘foresee’ the Ipswich murders. But she did grasp 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 ‘real’ murders forty years later. And it explains, too, the 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 ago, two girls working the streets – they were 16 and 19 – 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 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 it was again, that nauseous feeling: 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 know 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 know, from the outset, how the story will 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 anger: 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 (and for two subsequent novels ). 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: she was sick to death of the female victim. To counter this, she developed a different kind of plan, a flight of fancy, in which she would nail and then eliminate her. And she executed this in a novel incandescent with anger at the waste of women’s lives. “Never again. Never”, Carter declared in Shadow Dance.
So what better moment to revisit this book? When faced with a news ‘story’ like 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. (In interviews she often cast herself in this didactic role: “My fiction has a tendency to be telling you something.”) If it seems a vulgar thing, to read off from real life – and real deaths – the meaning contained in imaginary ones, then I apologise. But the only alternative to contemplating what happened to those young women who were left dead in scrubland or dumped in a stream – and hundreds of others like them – 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 the post-war world, 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, which keeps them so bowed down, and which accounts for their nostalgia-tinted world, all sepia browns and sunset blush. There is guilt-ridden Morris, who looks like an “an El Greco Christ”, an impotent junk man fit only for scavenging in the past; and 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 slashed 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 so 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 that 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 material 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 – or at least scrape out the dregs and polish the glass up a bit: Carter was a great believer in new wine in old bottles.
It is not just the plot of her novel that finds an echo in what happened in Ipswich. There are character resemblances, too. Peter Wright, the QC, said that the murderer killed when his girlfriend worked the nightshift, stopped when she was sick at home, and resumed when she got better. A divided man, evidently. And another instance of life imitating rotten old art. 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 and Stead, 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 un-natural 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 (new wine in old bottles again): 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 (the foetuses in jam-jars, etc). 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 ?”, (a precursor to the kids’ ‘whatever’ riff of today). So what if she’s carrying a murderer’s baby? It’s hers, not his, and she will love it without foreboding – whatever. 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 well 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 to us: 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 understand their deaths, make sense of acts the press are telling us are “senseless” and “unfathomable”. Despite what Hollywood would have us believe, looking to the murderer for understanding is futile. Carter makes a better guide. Her writing, in the end, is designed to help: it works like a talisman. As Margaret Atwood saw, above all other writers, she is the one bestowing the “magic token you need to get through the dark forest.”
Michael Ondaatje Talking “From a Different Angle”
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 echoing a dualism never fully reconciled, but marking him out and making him an instructive, pertinent, but also rather tantalizing subject: an odd mixture of the old-fashioned and new-made, a poet of intimacy and of the mysteries of the human heart, but also one intent on the multitudinousness of life. Ondaate seemed, then, something rare among contemporary writers: a romantic postmodernist. Much of our discussion about the uses of lyricism or emotion in writing, and about multi-stranded story, reflects this – and dates the interview (such ideas are now commonplace); while the abrupt shifts in conversation - many avenues are opened but not pursued - make the piece rather scrappy. But I think it’s worth including here not least for the way in which it tries to grapple with contemporary arguments about the possibilities of novel writing. My memory of the afternoon is a little hazy. I had a streaming cold and expected Ondaatje to show me the door the minute I started sneezing. In the event, he was friendlier than I had a right to expect, and at the end of the interview scribbled down the name of a herbal medicine he thought I should try.
KW: Gunter Grass talked of migration as the most common experience of the twentieth century 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 one in England was stronger because I didn’t want it – 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. But it did feel very strange. I remember the first day of school was a nightmare, all these strange 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 he found England so exotic, coming from Guyana – just the way the seasons change.
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: And were you cut off from your immediate family for that period?
MO: No, because my mother and brother and sister were all here. I was only a boarder for the last year. 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.
KW: You said in one interview that 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.
KW: And why did you make your escape to Canada?
MO: My brother had been earlier.
KW: Salman Rushdie talked of his school days in England, and of the advantages he had 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 fell 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 Ulverton¹. 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 much more complicated, that’s probably true. 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 it was 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. Whan I began to write I was reading Yeats and then [William Carlos] Williams, more obviously. But that was much later on, about fifteen years after I began to write. 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 something imposed on you?
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 and 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, in 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 and so forth. 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 in 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 perhaps. 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 dyers, where 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, and 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 kindof understanding or context.
KW: But even by giving a series of shot 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.
KW: The question is of the lyrical effect overwhelming the intellectual crunch.
MO: Yeah. I think that’s a problem and I’m not sure how to solve it yet.
KW: But then often what I’ve thought is behind that argument is authoritarianism – a sense of what the novel should be. And your writing is in some way about stretching this limited 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 intellecteual 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 charater 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 and energy 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 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 with your fellow Canadian, Michael Ignatieff, he put it to you that your novels don’t cover the full range of human experience, particularly that they lacked any sense of evil in people. There was perhaps some implication that you aren’t writing a real man’s novel like Amis or Mailer, 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 Rahv² used to talk about their being two sides in American literature - the Palefaces and the Redskins. Although his division between Jamesian sensibility and Whitmanesque energy doesn’t fit now precisely, you could make an argument for a similar two-sidedness in North American writing 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. 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, as opposed to a lyrical state. 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 it 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 also quite like cinema – elliptical?
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, 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.
————————–
¹ Adam Thorpe, 1993.
² Rahv was a Marxist critic who wrote initially for New Masses and co-founded Partisan Review in 1934. The essay I’m referring to is ‘Palefaces and Redskins’ (1939), Image and Idea, 1948, in it he describes the redskins as concerned with “the lowlife worlds of the frontier and big cities”. Ondaatje has written books about Billy the Kid, Buddy Bolden, and Toronto’s immigrants and criminals.
Victor Lodato’s Savage Sideshow
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, fierce, 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.
Mathilda Savitch’s weakness lies not in the audacity of writing that gets under the skin, but in a tendency to over-press themes: Blakean contraries, the animal-human, textual self-consciousness, might all have been more effective if less hammered. 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 putting the reader off. 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 novel, which skims along so satisfyingly, powered by Mathilda’s determination to reach the truth about her sister’s death, at its end, simply drops like a stone. And Lodato, ever-aware of what he is doing, wonders if the Watchers will be dissatisfied with the outcome. He finally 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.
Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch, 2009
Downturns and Uprisings: An Interview with Paul Mason
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 [see in the sidebar under PRINT]. 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, where he’s found himself talking to all kinds of people under the sun.) 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 peoples’ 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 you-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 f rom]? 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 wondered when you were talking about 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, but 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: But 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 book.
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.
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 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.
Open Drawer Policy
The name comes from something Henry James said in The Art of Fiction, 1884: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” It’s meant as an injunction: pay attention, look out, be alert; but might also be thought of as encouragement to the losing side; or, contrarily, an expression of doubt - Nothing Is Lost? - a come-off-it to the fantasy that a place on the fringe (in this case, somewhere on the outer edges of the blogosphere) can mitigate loss or waste.
Not that this, by rights, is a blog, because there’s nothing impromptu – no log of incidents as they happen, no record of ideas as they occur. Rather I’m using WordPress as a place to collect writing, a drawer of sorts, but one that anyone can peer into, should they wish. In it, there are (or will be): current and past articles – some commissioned, others written off the cuff; interviews and outtakes (Angela Carter, Jim Ballard, Wilson Harris and Thomas Keneally are still out there and waiting to be tracked down); remnants of projects past, signs of enthusiasms present; and interspersed with the words, photographs that, for whatever reason, have a particular pull.
Kate Webb lives in London. She is a writer and critic.
leave a comment