I came across Edward Marston, a new-to-me author the other day, and was impressed enough by his prolificity to have a go at one of his period detective stories. Marston has published over forty detective novels, all historical, as befits someone whose background is as a historian. What attracted me particularly to The Queen’s Head was that it was the first of a series set in Elizabethan London, with the central figures all members of a fictitious actors’ company. The combination of the historical period and the theatrical setting sold me, and I was not disappointed.
Our protagonist is Nick Bracewell, the book holder of the Earl of Westfield’s Men, and the setting is immediately after the defeat of the Armada. After an opening vignette describing in gruesome detail the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the action centres around the search for the killer of one of Bracewell’s actor colleagues. The execution scene, seemingly unrelated to the main plot, does have resonance later.
Bracewell is a likeable detective figure. Modest and unassuming, he is the key member of the company, holding the one complete copy of the play text, calling the scene changes, organising the stage hands, arbitrating between disputing players, and keeping the vanities of the Brian Blessed-like principal actor, Laurence Firethorn, in check. He was on Drake’s circumnavigation, but apart from that, his life before joining the players is a mystery, to which even his landlady / lover is not privy. There was an air of Elizabethan Theatre 101 about some of the scene-setting sections, but I am hoping that this is because it’s the first of the series. Clearly Marston (a good name for a writer on Elizabethan theatre) is a man who has immersed himself in the period. What’s more, he once ran his own theatrical company, so he writes from experience.
This is undemanding fare, but pleasant to read. Marston manages to make his dialogue seem authentic without any excessive fol-de-rollery. The outcome was not entirely a surprise, but the climactic scene is a tour-de-force, as danger stalks the company’s performance at court.
I see the series in now up to number 16, so I’m way behind. Onwards to the next volume.
What to do about the rising tide of human population? It’s quite simple, really. Here’s a neat solution, to be applied in a Utopian future republic:
Procreation is the triumph of the living being over death; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, it is not only in his child but in the dissemination of his thought, the expression of his mind in things done and made, that his triumph is to be found. And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity–beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge–and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things…. The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding of such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in the world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominable proceeding.
Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? All the useless weak people will be exterminated, leaving the earth to the beautiful healthy ones. What’s more, many of those expendable people will be black, or brown, or yellow:
Most of the human types, that by civilized standards are undesirable, are quite willing to die out through such suppressions if the world will only encourage them a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they do not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dread it. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that the men of the New Republic will deliberately shape their public policy along these lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land legislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter on the move; they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out of a child, so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation for the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child the first charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world. Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by the products of the security it creates. The development of science has lifted famine and pestilence from the shoulders of man, and it will yet lift war–for some other end than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finally cruel and horrible reproduction.
Appalled yet? These passages are from H.G. Wells’s book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, published in 1902. Yes, Wells, usually considered a beacon of rationality and scientific truth. I was led to this book by reading John Carey’s 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses, which sets out to show how the literary intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed the common masses. I knew that Pound (a fascist) Lewis (a fascist sympathiser) and Eliot (an anti-Semite) had some deeply unpleasant views, and that many modernists were also snobs, but I hadn’t realised the depth of their contempt for the common man and woman. Carey shows how much some of these writers owed to Nietzsche, and how pervasive their attitudes were. Writers who, one might think, would have some empathy with the working class are shown to be rabid advocates of a societal structure that would keep them vigorously suppressed. Here’s D.H. Lawrence on education: “General education should be suppressed as soon as possible” so that boys can learn manly crafts and girls domestic skills. “There should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at all. The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write–never.” In this way, the state will avoid the curse of “a helpless, presumptuous, news-paper-reading population.” Carey also reminds us of Woolf’s dismissive attitude to Joyce, ” a self-taught, working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating…I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy.” That contemptuous reference to the board schools – the schools set up after the education acts at the end of the nineteenth century, which offered some sort of schooling for the first time to ordinary children – encapsulates the snobbery of the intellectuals in the face of the rise of an educated working class. Carey explores the way that the intellectual elite conceived of the masses as a poisonous, semi-human swarm, ripe for extermination, so that a more beautiful earth could be left for people with artistic taste, like, well, themselves…
The fury of the intellectuals is turned on the new popular media the masses embraced, particularly the cinema and newspapers. Even cheap editions of the classics come under fire, since they enabled the working person to experience the literature that had hitherto been the province of the elite. Carey shows how the newspapers, considered utter trash by people like Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, actually offered serious intellectual sustenance. Tit-Bits, reviled by the Bloomsberries, contained a weekly 40,000 words, with no illustrations. It included extracts from classic authors such as George Eliot, Carlyle, Macauley, Poe, Ruskin, Hawthorne and others. A new weekly poem by an established poet was a feature. It serialised the early Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s hardly the Daily Star, then, but to Eliot, Gissing, Woolf et al, it represented the end of civilisation as they knew it.
Cary is particularly acute on the attitude to the clerk, who epitomises the new order. He finds numerous disparaging accounts of this new breed of man, and his close associate, the typist. Eliot’s description of the sordid sexual encounter between the “young man carbuncular” and the “typist home at tea time” in The Waste Land has always struck me as gratuitously snobbish, but I now see how widespread was this level of revulsion at the very thought of these working people, who consumed tinned food and lived in flats. Much better that they should all be done away with.
Carey’s book is an eye-opener. Not only does he expose the vile attitudes of the modernist elite, he also makes a very persuasive case for the work of Arnold Bennett, famously rubbished by Virginia Woolf in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Bennett emerges as a thoroughly decent man, a champion of education and improvement. To my shame, I haven’t read any Bennett, and my only knowledge of his work is of a dimly-recollected seventies TV dramatisation of Clayhanger. More volumes for the To Be Read pile…
To the Burgess, for an excellent adaptation of the master’s rather obscure early novel, the film rights to which were once held by Francis Ford Coppola.
Here’s my review, posted at the IABF site.
The footnotes – and there are plenty of them – in Kevin Jackson’s brilliant account of Modernism in 1922 are printed in a fetching purplish shade. I wondered, as I read, enthralled, whether this was a subliminal allusion to Eliot’s phrase from The Waste Land, when Tiresias observes the assault by the clerk on the young typist:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting…
Even if that isn’t the intention, it’s very effective – as well as being pleasing on the eye, it makes a welcome visual distinction between the main text and the supporting apparatus. Given the extensive nature of some of the notes, in which Jackson offers contextual and biographical information on his extensive cast of characters, separating the notes visually makes sense.
[digression: when a cocktail bar called The Violet Hour opened near us, I thought someone must be an Eliot fan, but the quotation on their menu was not one I was familiar with. It turns out that someone called Bernard deVoto wrote what he risibly called a “cocktail manifesto” in which the following description of the cocktail hour occurs:
“This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections grow and valor is reborn.”
It doesn’t have the menace of the Eliot line, but presumably Mr DeVoto pinched it from Tom, and that’s fair enough, considering how much Tom pinched from others.]
Constellation of Genius is one of those brilliantly simple ideas that seem so obvious once someone else has come up with it: it’s an almanac of the peak year of Modernism, 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses. The year is reported chronologically, arranged in twelve (obviously) chapters, with an introductory scene-setting account of the state of play at the start of the year, and a fascinating ‘Aftermath’ section which deals with the post-1922 careers of the main players, and many of the minor ones too. Each month chronicles the events in the lives of the artists, writers, composers, film-makers, and others who might loosely be said to have formed the avant-garde of the time. Although the focus is mainly on the Anglo-American modernists, with Joyce and Eliot dominating, the scope is very broad, with datelines (also in violet) ranging from New York to Prague, Moscow to Cairo, Tokyo to Granada. Across this global stage strut a dazzling array of characters, vividly portrayed by Jackson: just a few of the figures covered are Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Lorca, Hemingway, Forster, Proust in literature; Chaplin, Fairbanks, Eisenstein, Murnau, von Stroheim, Lang in film; Wittgenstein, Russell, Bateson in philosophy; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Gershwin, Louis Armstrong in music; Dali, Breton, Picasso, Matisse, Man Ray in art; an astonishingly diverse supporting cast, as well as cameos from the major political figures of the time, from Lloyd George to Mussolini, with peripheral appearances by Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.
The ambition of this book is to be commended, and Kevin Jackson has fulfilled that ambition brilliantly, producing a narrative that really manages to convey the flavour of that extraordinary year. The diary format works to his advantage, allowing the reader to discover the development of a particular event in stages, such as Eliot’s efforts to launch the Criterion, juxtaposed with often completely contrasting threads, but all of which contribute to the accumulated sense of an incredibly rich artistic milieu. What really struck me, though, was the domestic detail, often about money – Pound’s efforts to get people to subscribe to a fund to support Eliot, Woolf hoping she could sell her copy of Ulysses for £4.10s, Hemingway marvelling at how luxuriously he could live in Paris because of the exchange rate after the war, Joyce forever seeking patronage. The interconnections between the artists are mapped meticulously, often giving rise to some highly entertaining accounts of chance encounters – Proust and Joyce failing to agree about truffles, or Forster trying to prevent Hardy doing his “Grand Old Man of English Letters” shtick. One method used repeatedly is to give very precise details of the whereabouts of the participants – Woolf isn’t bitching about Katherine Mansfield in Bloomsbury, she’s in a bed that’s been moved to the lounge at Hogarth House; Cocteau isn’t holding court at a Paris night club, he’s at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.
Reading this book reminded me of reading Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia – the same breadth of interest, the same verve in the language, the same eye for the telling detail, and a few overlapping figures. And like the James book, this one leaves me with much more to explore. I do have some quibbles: illustrations would be a great improvement in a second edition (surely there’ll be one?), as would some attention to the dates of Hardy, who’s granted eighteen extra years, and Wells, who’s docked ten. And I’d have liked a mention for May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriett Frean. But these are really very minor matters, and must not detract from a really excellent piece of work, which should be devoured by anyone with an interest in twentieth century culture.
Maybe that new edition will have another item in the bibliography: serendipitously, as I sat down to write this, I noticed a reference to a new book on Modernism – At the Violet Hour. Looks interesting!
To Cromford, in the Peak district, largely to visit the excellent Scarthin Books, a rambling, old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, crammed with bibliographic treasure, and a very pleasant café to boot. Acting on instructions from ‘er indoors, and taking account of the overcrowded bookcases Chez Topsy, we emerged with just one book – City of Ravens by Boria Sax. This Sax cove is well-represented in the home library, since his books are usually about the representation of animals in literature, particularly European, an area of scholarly interest to she-who-must-be-obeyed. Isn’t Boria Sax a great name for a scholar? It exudes a kind of mittel-Europa or Bohemian sensibility, I think. I wonder if he is a relative of the inventor of what Homer Simpson calls the Saxomophone?
This little book is a fascinating account of the ways in which birds of the corvidae family are associated with omens, prophecies and other dark doings. Sax’s account of the legend of the ravens of the Tower of London, which forms a kind of centrepiece in this short book, is fascinating. I – and you, I suspect, dear reader – always assumed that the legend that England would fall if the ravens disappeared from the tower was one steeped in antiquity. Sax, however, puzzled that he could find no reference to the ravens in medieval or seventeenth-century literature, and maintaining a scholarly scepticism to the non-footnoted official guide, discovered that the birds were actually introduced in the late nineteenth century, and that the “legend” dates from as recently as the Second World War, when, in the Blitz, England might well have fallen.
This startling nugget is one of many in a volume that ranges from Anglo-Saxon to the present day, referring one moment to The Mabinogion and the next to James Joyce, by way of Harrison Ainsworth and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The book is academic, in that there is an extensive bibliography, and it is clearly a work of painstaking scholarship, but it is not dry; Sax is happy to add a personal touch, and to write in an accessible and sometimes humorous way. His career has not been that of a conventional academic, as his quirky website confirms, but his books on the area of animals in literature and mythology are authoritative. This lovely little book is a great addition to his canon.
Slack blogging around here of late, but I haven’t been completely idle. There was a blog for my Modernism students, which is still current, and available here. New posts to follow shortly.
Back in November last year, my birthday weekend was spent in Amsterdam. We chose Amsterdam because we’d never been there, and because my friend Dipika Mukherjee was hosting the European launch of her novel Thunder Demons there. Dipika is professor of linguistics at Chicago and Shanghai universities, an affiliated Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in the Netherlands, and also writes poetry and fiction. I suspect she doesn’t sleep.
Thunder Demons is a fast-paced thriller whose initial premise is based on an actual event, the mysterious murder of a Mongolian model in Malaysia. Although the work is clearly fiction, the use of a similar murder as the starting point for the action allows Dipika to explore the murky world of Malaysian politics in the context of a swiftly-unfolding story that centres on the intertwined lives of an airport worker, Agni, and an expatriate researcher, Jay Ghosh, who is returning to Malaysia at the prompting of the sinister Colonel S. Although the novel is set in contemporary Malaysia, and the action takes place over the course of a week, the plot delves back into Malaysia’s colonial past for some of its key details.
At one level, this is a love story, but at another it’s a discomforting examination of the state of the nation fifty-odd years after independence. Dipika, who is originally from India, and is married to a Malaysian national, writes tellingly about the tensions that lie beneath the surface of the “truly Asia” Malaysia of the tourist brochures. This is ultimately a dark, occasionally shocking story of political chicanery, casual brutality and racial tension. The thriller aspect makes it a page-turner, but the deeper themes remain long in the mind after the dramatic conclusion.
The novel isn’t available in the UK, but can be had from Amazon US and the usual online sites.
Yesterday was graduation day at Edge Hill for students in my department. It was great to see them all together, in their academic robes, and to be part of the ceremony. This year’s ceremony was different to most, in that we awarded an honorary degree to Mayer Hersh. As a survivor of Auschwitz, he would be remarkable by any standards. That he has dedicated the latter half of his life to educating people about the Holocaust, particularly through the Holocaust Educational Trust. makes him even more so. My colleague Prof Kevern Verney made the presentation, and Mr Hersh then made a very moving and and thought-provoking response, in which he recounted his experiences.The ceremony can be viewed here, and an interview is available here.
To be in his presence as he recounted how his life changed irrevocably when Germany invaded Poland the day after his thirteenth birthday, was a privilege. Many in the audience were moved to tears by his speech, at the end of which he received a standing ovation, something I’ve never witnessed at a graduation ceremony.
Too often, universities give honorary degrees to people because they are celebrities. In this case, we honoured a truly worthy figure, who, in the face of unimaginable cruelty, had dedicated his life to fighting prejudice. Never forget.
To the Burgess to see Kathleen Jamie talk about her new book of essays, Sightlines. I have long admired Jamie’s poetry, but in the essay form, I think she has found her true métier. The previous volume of short prose pieces, Findings, was a delight from start to finish: Sightlines is better. Both titles give a clue as to what is contained within – these are essays of observation and reflection, mostly, but not completely, of the natural world. What strikes the reader is the originality of the observations, particularly of the relatively mundane. She has a knack of seeing things from a startlingly original perspective, and she is able to communicate that vision in clear, sinuous language that delights and entertains.
The launch event was well-attended, and was set up, rather awkwardly I thought, as an interview with readings. Early on, though, Kathleen Jamie took control, and the questions became more like prompts for the next passage to be read. The scope of this, as with the previous volume, is wide. As well as the treatment of landscape, particularly of her native Scotland, the book chronicles Jamie’s investigation into the strange landscapes of cell biology seen through a hospital microscope, the Aurora Borealis, and the sight of a group of killer whales on the hunt.
She announced before the first reading that her journey to Greenland, detailed in the first essay in the book, was occasioned by a carpe diem realisation that she had reached middle age without seeing an iceberg. Her account of the journey takes in both the natural beauty of the land- and seascape, as well as the trials of a rough sea voyage. She reads with great clarity – not always the case when authors read their own work – and evokes the scenes she describes effortlessly.
The final reading was the dramatic account of the sight of killer whales off the coast of Rona, the island forty miles of the coast of Scotland, once inhabited, but now deserted, like St Kilda. In this essay, Jamie moves seamlessly from the ominous description of the whales’ arrival to the almost slapstick scene where the members of the groups she is with run around the headland chasing the whales as they hug the coastline below in search of prey.
The book is a delight, the photographs complementing the vivid writing. Each essay leaves the reader feeling that something has been illuminated in a rare and poetic way. This will sit on my shelf next to George Mackay Brown, than which I have no higher praise.
It’s already March, and I haven’t posted this year. I haven’t been completely in hibernation, though – in fact, I’ve quite a lot to report on, so I will start by offering some thoughts on a gig attended last night, and I’ll try to pick out some highlights from the last few months in subsequent posts.
To the Ruby Lounge with ‘er indoors to see and hear Nashville’s Silver Seas. A Twitter comment by Danny Baker, whom God preserve, led me to check this group out, and their work has had, as they say, heavy rotation chez Topsyturvydom since. The line-up for this tour is the core members Daniel Tashian as the front man and guitarist and Jason Lehning on keyboards, with a rhythm section of the impressively bearded Lex Price on bass, and David Gehrke on drums. And they can play! In the awkward space of the Ruby lounge, they soon had a an audience of, shall we say, largely mature people bouncing around and singing out as they ran through a selection of songs mainly from the Chateau Revenge album.
The music is bright, intelligent pop. There’s nothing particularly demanding about it, but Tashian certainly knows how to construct a memorable song, with lyrics that are by turns urbane and wistful. The music is characterised by driving guitars, often ethereal keyboard sounds, and occasional Beach Boy-esque harmonies. The songs have melodies, hooks, and rarely last more than three minutes or so – perfect pop songs, in other words.
Half way through the gig, Tashian announced they had worked up a cover version, and launched into an upbeat rendition of Daydream Believer, accompanied lustily by the audience, in commemoration of the Mancunian Davy Jones. A perfect choice.
My friend Knappsterino often films at venues like this down in Bristol. I noticed several people doing just that, so doubtless the results will be up on YouTube soon. Meanwhile, someone posted a bit of Daydream Believer from the Glasgow gig:
Update: Here’s “Kid” from the Ruby Lounge gig, complete with irritating tossers talking through it:
