Howard Fishman: ‘To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse’

[It’s been a long time since I’ve written a book review, and there are a number of reasons for that, but the big two are not wanting to fix what I think about something, for myself, because it reduces it; and not wanting to engage in spurious authoritativeness, because I can string a sentence together. But I’m starting to think that disengagement is worse, and that there is probably a happy medium, a lighter touch. Again, we shall see.]

What I want to demand, and would not be caught dead demanding, was a few swims in the sea of unsaidness. [...] For the best communication, the most satisfactory human relationship... it seems now to me that knowing and being known are prerequisites... Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known. Well, by and large it has never too much disturbed me that I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others; that, indeed, without enjoying your apparent lack of inner conflict, I often turn toward the world a face much like yours - serene (or at least strong and cheerful) and imperturbable. But with you two, whose affection I value so highly, I wish to be known better and to know you better... [...] Love - Sis. (Chapter 23)

This is Connie Converse to her brother Phil, and his wife Jean, in 1957. Her relationship with Phil is one of the central pillars of this wonderfully generous, curious, detailed biography. There are a few dark hints here and there, and the odd moment of great tenderness and real connection (the above sparks one such). On balance, it seems he did support and encourage her in life, and champion her songs after her disappearance, but he also destroyed a lot of her papers, which, when confronted by the author, he admits but does not attempt to explain. He’s the best source Fishman had, but he’s ambiguous and not a completely reliable one.

The papers are where he starts: Converse left Phil a filing cabinet with an inventory, containing her life’s work, as well as letters and other documents. By the time Fishman saw it, many items were marked ‘dumped’ in Phil’s handwriting (so it’s not even as though he was discarding secretly, or - presumably - for space, since the filing cabinet remained the same size. Was he concealing something specific? Or curating to leave the best material?) What remained showed that as well as being ‘a great unknown songwriter’ she was ‘a polymath - a talented illustrator, painter, thinker, published political cartoonist and essayist, poet, photographer, and aspiring novelist’ (Chapter 6). Apart from the songs, the filing cabinet itself was a remarkable act of organisation, and that is a theme: the major work of her post-songwriting life was ‘The War of All Against All: A Review of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957-1968’. This journal was one she edited, run from the University of Michigan, its name a deliberate avoidance of the word ‘peace’ in order to keep suspicions of communism at bay. Fishman recounts a video conference with some academics, the better to understand what she had achieved with this. ‘Research expert’ Ivan Bojanic skims it on the call and can’t quite believe what he is reading:

‘Um, you guys?’ he interjected after some time. ‘This is not what I expected. I thought it would essentially be a synopsis of each article, in chronological order. But this is analysis, this is personal perspective... [...] She took all these disparate pieces of research, from people who were studying a million difference nooks and crannies of this nascent field, and tried to create a single unifying narrative out of it!’ (Chapter 28)

But I am skirting around the main event, the songs, which I don’t want to pin down or reduce. I’ve got a lot of exploring left to do, is one reason. They swim in unsaidness, not infrequently turning it inside out. They are punctuated with pauses (‘fermata’) and tempo changes. Converse wrote nearly all of them while living in New York, and had a small but enthusiastic following who heard them performed at house concerts, some of them able to remember great chunks of the songs when interviewed for the book over 50 years later, without having heard them since. A recording of one of these performances is what makes up the bulk of How Sad, How Lovely. There’s a digital-only release of her home recordings, Musicks, with about twice as much material. Then there’s Connie’s Piano Songs, a set of more arty, ‘through-composed’ (as in, melody keeps evolving and doesn’t repeat) songs, left behind mostly as sheet music, and eventually released in this version, by Charlotte Mundy and Christopher Goddard (Phil wasn’t too keen on these, not that he had any duty to be). I’m in love with the line in ‘Trouble’ that Fishman took for his play: ‘A star has burnt my eye’. Even more in context, actually:

My bed is made of stone
A star has burnt my eye
I’m going down to the willow tree
And teach her how to cry

As he points out, this predates Johnny Cash’s ‘Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry’ from ‘Big River’ by eight years. He wonders if he could somehow have heard it. How influence can work when the original has failed to enter the big river of popular culture. Which he questions as a way of going about things:

How many more Connie Converses are there out there - marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive? And what price do we pay, as individuals and as a culture, by continuing to use fame, wealth, property, and power as our primary metrics for success? (Afterword)

Good questions, and I’d like to know what the alternatives are. Perhaps fragmentation is a feature rather than a bug, and we should just give up on the notion of a culture everyone can be assumed to have access to. Perhaps that was always an imperialist idea.

2020 hindsight

As I barely wrote anything here last year, I thought I’d go through my diary to check what might have been. It’s not a long list (I’m a slow reader, writing here encourages me to read more, when I do it), but for what it’s worth, with a quotation from each:

John McPhee, ‘Oranges’

No-one worried much about freezes. For one thing, it was an era of scientific advances in which triumph over nature seemed not only possible but inevitable. A cannon had been fired in the streets of Jacksonville in 1888 in the belief that the concussion would kill all the yellow-fever microbes in the air of the city. (pp. 94-5)

Émile Zola, ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’

        ‘I want her, I’ll have her! And if she does escape me, just you see what a place I’ll build to recover from her. Oh, it’ll be magnificent, it really will! You don’t understand what I’m talking about, old chap. If you did, you would realise that action is its own reward. Doing, creating, struggling against harsh realities and either defeating them or being defeated – all of human joy and health are there!’
        ‘It’s just another way to drug oneself,’ the other man murmured. (p. 317)

Dava Sobel, ‘Longitude’

John ‘Longitude’ Harrison was born March 24, 1693, in the county of Yorkshire, the eldest of five children. His family, in keeping with the custom of the time, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only daughter, and two of his three daughters-in-law all answered to the name Elizabeth. (p. 62)

Adam Rutherford, ‘How to Argue with a Racist’

It is therefore possible that you are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century. (Ebook, ch. 2)

Isabel Wilkerson, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’

Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had travelled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin (p. 273)

He brought his crushed velvet, jitterbug demeanor to the gray, humorless bureaucracy of a government hospital. (p. 460)

Kristin Hersh, ‘Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt’

        ‘He loves you, I can tell,’ you threw out, bored.
        ‘Sometimes I think he doesn’t even like me.’
        ‘Nobody likes you.’
        ‘Fair enough.’
        You: ‘We’re never gonna be okay cuz we got fucked-up egos.’
        ‘I don’t have a fucked up ego,’ I told you, defensive. ‘I don’t have an ego at all.’
        ‘Well, that’s fucked up.’
        ‘Oh.’
        Pitching your magazine back in the bin, you grabbed another. ‘Every hurt heals with scar tissue.’
        ‘That’s what you said about painkillers.’
        Pointing at our loved ones: ‘Whaddyou think they are?’
        ‘Oh.’ (p. 50)

James M. Russell, ‘The Forking Trolley: An Ethical Journey to The Good Place’

Some of Eleanor’s previous bad acts also point to the snares of anonymous and remote interaction with other people. She once posted her sister’s credit card details on Reddit, simply because she had told Eleanor she looked tired. (p. 52)

John Wyndham, ‘The Kraken Wakes’

        ‘But they are trying, you know, Phyl-’
        ‘Are they? I think they’re balancing things all the time. What is the minimum cost at which the political set-up can be preserved in present condition? How much loss of life will the people put up with before they become dangerous about it? Would it be wise or unwise to declare martial law, and at what stage? On and on, instead of admitting the danger and getting to work.’ (Ebook)

The Secret Barrister – ‘Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken’

Meanwhile at the National Probation Service, inexperienced, inadequately trained staff are monitoring ever-increasing caseloads of high-risk offenders in the community. One employee reported that the target culture had reduced him from seeing his offenders weekly for an hour to holding appointments once a month for an average of twenty minutes. These are the institutions we entrust to supervise and rehabilitate the most damaged and dangerous among us. At twenty fucking minutes a month. (p. 327)

It’s not why I read the book, but I worked for the Probation Service once, for about six months. Just temping, typing up Pre-Sentence Reports mostly, from Dictaphone tapes or handwritten notes, or (this seemed to be a new thing at the time) copying text that a Probation Officer had typed herself from a document on a floppy disk to the template, proof-reading as I went. There’s a job that probably doesn’t exist anymore. It’s interesting, if not surprising, to discover what happened to the service in the intervening two decades: ‘low- and medium-risk offenders’ got farmed out to private companies, in the wearyingly familiar privatisation narrative, to save the taxpayer money by sweeping the work under the carpet and ensuring it was done as badly as possible while still hitting those targets. There are plenty of other examples of this kind of corrosive neglect in the book, and it’s to the Secret Barrister’s credit that it doesn’t get overwhelming or overly repetitive: there’s always enough human interest alongside the institutional failures, not to mention a stout defence of the principles on which the criminal justice system in England and Wales rests. In a section which feels rather like being led on by a barrister’s speech in court must do, this ‘adversarial’ system is compared with the ‘inquisitorial’ one which is used widely in continental Europe. Adversarialism pits prosecution against defence in court, in front of a jury, and cross questioning is used to undermine the other side’s version of events. Which does sound a bit juvenile: the fiercest (most eloquent / devious / best prepared) cock will win the fight. Surely the inquisitorial system, where the aim of the state’s investigation is to establish the truth, rather than peck its eye out, is the more mature, responsible, balanced practice? Doesn’t this just highlight everything we know is bad about UK individualism and good about EU (relatively speaking) socialism?

Then comes a stunning about-face. Haven’t you been listening to how bad I’ve been telling you the state is? At following its own guidelines, gathering evidence, disclosing evidence, acting impartially under government pressure for certain types of conviction? Do you really want all that to go unchallenged? Yes, but you said all that about the UK state, which you’ve just spent a couple of hundred pages showing how badly it funds all those things. Surely in a grown-up country like Germany or France… You’ve seen Spiral, right? Oh, I see what you mean. If falsely accused, the Secret Barrister imagines asking themselves,

would I have faith in an inquisitorial jurisdiction where the state, with its variable competence and political vulnerability, controlled my fate throughout? Or would I trust the presentation of my case to an independent solicitor and advocate, and hope that twelve ordinary people, shown evidence that is relevant, reliable and fairly adduced, would find the prosecution insufficient to convict me?
        Every time the answer is the same. (p. 277)

László Krasznahorkai – ‘Satantango’

Reading this just before Easter, I wondered if there was some deliberate connection between the figure on whom most of the characters pin their hopes, Irimiás, and Jesus. The way they await his coming, to their grim, moribund village, where it always rains, and no-one besides the pub’s landlord has worked since an unspecified big employer left the area many years ago. There is something like a resurrection, too, witnessed by Irimiás. It took a while to place the action in time: an estate is mentioned, the villagers in their hovels seem like serfs, it could be the nineteenth century or earlier, but modernity does intrude now and then (there’s a truck, for instance). In the opening chapter, the lame Futaki is in bed with Mrs Schmidt, and has to get up, sneak outside and come in again when her husband arrives unexpectedly. They then argue about money. In a house nearby a doctor sits at a window drinking, observing the comings and goings of his neighbours and writing down every detail in a set of notebooks, one per person observed. He does this all day every day, and keeps doing it even after everyone has left to follow their saviour, who doesn’t see himself as anything of the sort:

God was a mistake. I’ve long understood that there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It’s only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay […] It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes. It’s a trap, Petrina. And we fall into it every time. We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks. (p. 220)

The setting, with the squalor, the rain and the mud, is reminiscent of Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel, though without the Southern Gothic flavour. The book is Hungarian, so presumably the setting is Hungary. Irimiás is resolute and mysterious, the above passage is (or seems to be) a rare moment of candour, though it’s also a pointless one, his companion Petrina being a coward and an idiot. Futaki, perhaps the most sympathetic character, has similar thoughts (he reflects on ‘this sty of a world’ (p. 145)), and provides this terrifying assessment of the defense reflex:

It was as if the real threat came from elsewhere, from somewhere beneath their feet, though its source was bound to be uncertain: a man will suddenly find silence frightening, he fears to move, he squats in a corner that he hopes might protect him: even chewing becomes a torture there and swallowing agony, so eventually he doesn’t even notice that everything around him has slowed, that he is ever more hemmed in, and then discovers that his strategic withdrawal is in fact nothing less than petrification. (p. 135)

It’s like ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ again, but in this version aspiration is starting from a lower base than for Tom Hanks’ Steve Wong. Steve wants to have fun bowling; Bartleby prefers not to do anything; Futaki wants to live, but life keeps receding (he also keeps falling over in the mud). Satantango is the end of the road for many of its characters, their only hope a man who gives them the comfort of instructions to follow, but there is nothing behind the instructions, except (it is hinted) an intention to exploit them. The only characters who do not fall into Irimiás’ trap, or the wider worldly trap he outlines above (which sounds a lot like freedom of opportunity) are the insane: the drunken, obese, obsessive doctor, and Esti Horgos, a girl abused by her family who poisons their cat and lays down to die.

Here is a sunrise, though. Ain’t that enough?

Irimiás scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side of the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army. (p. 47)

Tom Hanks – ‘Uncommon Type’

No one has typewriters anymore, none that work. But typewritten letters are special. Some folks come with letters they’ve composed on a computer they want me to type out for them and make one of a kind. Before Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, I could sit here for hours and type notes for folks lined up around the block. If I charged, I’d be as rich as a good florist. (pp. 381-2, from ‘Our Town Today with Hank Fiset: Your Evangelista Esperanza’)

Typewritten letters are special? No, no, no: handwritten letters are special. But let’s go with it for a while. In the story ‘These Are the Meditations of My Heart’, a typewriter salesman makes his pitch along similar lines: ‘You are seeking permanence’ (p. 235). Most of the characters in these stories (all of which feature typewriters in some capacity) are seeking something like that: they need something to cling to in a world in flux. Some are refugees or newly naturalised citizens; others are film stars or property magnates worth billions of dollars. Some stories are set when typewriters were current technology; most are contemporary. Most feature broken relationships, too, and there is more than a suggestion that while people will inevitably let you down, these sturdy machines, well looked after, will not. The salesman again:

        ‘They are made of steel. They are works of engineers. They were built in factories in America, Germany, Switzerland. Do you know why they are up on that shelf right now?’
        ‘Because they are for sale?’
        ‘Because they were built to last forever!’ The old man actually shouted. In him, she heard her father hollering, ‘Who left those bikes on the front lawn? … Why am I the only one dressed for church? … The father of this house is home and needs a hug!’ (p. 232)

There is a touch of Alan Partridge maleness about this: the reliance on understanding the mechanical as a substitute for understanding people.

Some variations on the nuclear family, cracked or otherwise: the boy in ‘A Special Weekend’ spends a weekend with his mother and her new partner, just prior to his tenth birthday. They take him for a plane ride as a treat, even allowing him to take the controls for a while, but he knows this is no substitute for the home life he has lost, so young. In ‘Welcome to Mars’ a young man goes surfing on his nineteenth birthday, busts his leg on his board, and in trying to get help sees something he shouldn’t’ve: his father kissing a stranger in a car. In ‘Christmas Eve 1953’ two Word War Two veterans drift further apart every year. One is a lone wanderer, and gay; the other is a family man, missing a leg but utterly settled: he loves his family and they love him, there is no longer any story. ‘A Month on Greene Street’ is better: a mother and children move into a new neighbourhood following her divorce, and she tries to avoid encouraging the friendliness and ‘Are you doing anything tonight’-ness (p. 126) of her new neighbour, a teacher with a telescope which fascinates all the children nearby, and some of the parents too. The mechanical substitute, again (isn’t that what’s bad about the internet age? People on their phones ignoring other people? Is the debate about the quality of the distraction?)

Permanence is an illusion for the rich, too, they just have more liberty to chase it, more garish ways to imagine it. In ‘The Past Is Important to Us’ a billionaire pays $6m to travel back in time to the New York World Fair of 1939. He meets a woman there who begins to obsess him, perhaps because she is so obviously unattainable, as the rules of the travel company, and the pseudo-science, dictate that he can only ever travel back to the same day, and can only spend 22 hours there each time. On every trip he manages to spend slightly longer with Carmen and her young niece Virginia, seeing the sights, eating pie, flirting. The interest comes from the variations in the scene which keeps being repeated and extended, as the seemingly spontaneous is revealed to be merely automatic. ‘A Junket in the City of Light’ is about Willa Sax, star of the wildly popular Cassandra Rampart film franchise, and the Paris leg of the press tour to promote the latest instalment, told from the point of view of her much-less-famous co-star Rory Thorpe. A news story breaks about her husband being caught high and with some hookers, and the whole circus stops dead, cancelled. Rory shrugs, does some sight seeing instead. It’s hyper-real and un-real all at once, as though in increasing the possibilities, wealth diminishes the outcomes. The only attachment worth the name in these rich folk stories is in ‘Stay with Us’, when Ms Mercury, personal assistant to a ludicrous property magnate, falls for a mechanic and quits to marry him.

Most of the stories’ settings fall into one socio-economic category or another, but there is a group of three stories which aims for more of a melting pot. In ‘Three Exhausting Weeks’ (which opens the collection), ‘Alan Bean Plus Four’ (which is the funniest thing in it) and ‘Steve Wong is Perfect’ (which closes it, and is the bleakest), four friends hang out, go on holiday, chat, say ‘atta baby’ a lot. Two are rich enough to contemplate a holiday to Antarctica without particularly considering the cost. Two work at a hardware store. One of the latter, MDash, becomes a US citizen in the first story, and has a naturalisation ceremony. The other, Steve Wong, has ‘grandparents [who] were naturalized in the forties’ (p. 3). ‘Steve Wong is Perfect’ reminded me of nothing so much as ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. In it, the four friends go bowling to celebrate a year since MDash’s naturalisation. Steve Wong scores all strikes. They go back a few more times over subsequent weeks, and it keeps happening: every time he scores a perfect 300. This gets noticed, and he is offered a $100,000 prize if he can repeat the feat on TV. As the story progresses, Steve takes less and less interest in his performance, and he refuses to engage in the hyperbole of television: ‘Like I said. I bowl for fun’ (p. 396). In fact, the TV appearance stresses him out, and he throws up in the parking lot before going on. I think what is going on is the emptiness at the heart of the American dream. In the land of the free, what if you do take every opportunity? What if your numbers do keep going forever upwards? So what?

Elena Ferrante – ‘My Brilliant Friend’

For obscure reasons [Signor Peluso] attributed his ruin to Don Achille. He charged him with having taken by stealth, as if his shadowy body were a magnet, all the tools for his carpentry work, which made the shop useless. He accused him of having taken the shop itself, and transformed it into a grocery store. For years I imagined the pliers, the saw, the tongs, the hammer, the vise, and thousands and thousands of nails sucked up like a swarm of metal into the matter that made Don Achille. For years I saw his body – a coarse body, heavy with a mixture of materials – emitting in a swarm salami, provolone, mortadella, lard, and prosciutto. (p. 36)

This, the most visually arresting moment early on in My Brilliant Friend, made me wonder if it would go in a magical realist direction, but no, it is very specifically tied to the imagination of a young girl who has been told a cautionary tale and taken it too literally. Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo live a rich imaginative life together, through their dolls, which they play with in the courtyard of the block of flats where they live, together with most of the other characters in the novel. This is ‘the neighbourhood,’ somewhere is suburban Naples in the late 1950s. Lila pushes Elena’s doll through a ground-level window, Elena follows suit, and they make their way to the basement to retrieve them, convinced that the monster Don Achille lies in wait. He doesn’t get the chance to become a real monster, making an early exit, but it’s clear that his reputation comes from his power, which comes from organised crime, so people are afraid of him. When he’s gone, the Solaras are the most powerful family in the neighbourhood: they own the local bar, and the two adult sons drive around in a Fiat 1100, picking on people younger than they are, and in at least one instance indulging in sexual abuse. There is a high degree of acceptance of this behaviour, for instance from Elena’s parents:

They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend money both at Don Achille’s son’s, and at the Solaras’, and sent us, too. And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too. (p. 163)

All this deference to grocers and barmen? Well, the neighbourhood is a small, tightly bound world. The Solaras and the Carraccis (Don Achille’s family) control the supply of food and drink, and the (commercial) public spaces. To begin with, it seems that Elena and Lila, both prodigies at primary school, are going to escape by intellectual means, but while Elena goes to middle and then high school, Lila is kept at home, and gradually abandons her early studiousness (more intense and alive than Elena’s), learning to live in the world instead of through books. She is pursued obsessively by Marcello Solara, who invites himself to dinner at her house several times a week, insinuating himself by his undisputed social power, his bullying entitlement: even after she has rejected him one-on-one, he persists, as he knows her parents won’t want to risk trouble, and in fact would welcome into their family someone wealthy, and able to help their business, which is a small shoe shop. Lila outflanks him by starting a relationship with someone of nearly equal power, Stefano Carracci. She accepts the logic of the neighbourhood, and learns to use it to her advantage. The cost of investing herself fully into her situation is her intellectual self, which she feels deeply, but is determined to leave behind, as Elena discovers when she approaches her for help with an anti-religious article she has written:

        [Lila] circled a sentence and moved it with a wavy line to the top of the page.
        ‘Can I recopy it for you on to another page?’
        ‘I’ll do it.’
        ‘No, let me do it.’
        It took a while to recopy. When she gave me back the notebook, she said, ‘You’re very clever, of course they always give you ten.’
        I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:
        ‘I don’t want to read anything else that you write.’
        ‘Why?’
        She thought about it.
        ‘Because it hurts me,’ and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing. (pp. 300-1)

Lila is the more headstrong, the more curious, the more self-possessed of the two friends, but by the end of the book she is about to settle down into domesticity, and it is Elena who is full of possibilities and uncertainties.

Robert Forster – ‘Grant & I: Inside and Outside The Go-Betweens’

It feels terrible to admit this, but I never got on with Grant’s contribution to the final Go-Betweens album, Oceans Apart. My first impression, which stuck, was that his songs were empty, prettified confections (which was maddening, as Robert’s were all brilliant). His ego, kept in check on the other two post-comeback LPs by the modest, as-live sound, inflated like a soft balloon in the vacuum of Mark Wallis’ ornate production, which failed to come close to his work on 16 Lovers Lane. This impression built on an idea of Grant as humourless and conceited, thinking of himself as a rock star, as opposed to Robert, who always had his tongue in his cheek. Then he died. What bad timing: the man who wrote incredible songs like ‘Bye Bye Pride’ and ‘Apology Accepted’, left the world with this nonsense? And why was the consensus all the other way: that he died when his life and his art were at a high point? I didn’t understand. This book is a good counter to that way of thinking. I’m unlikely to change my mind about the Oceans Apart songs, but the story Robert tells about Grant shows how fragile he was, and gives reasons for the bluster that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to forgive.

Here’s an early description of Grant at university, where the pair first met:

Outside, the world was whirring, people were doing things, conducting business. His contribution: reclining in bed in the early afternoon […] reading the latest edition of Film Comment. […] He seemed remarkably unattached from the start; his connection to the world, I was to discover, was through the things he loved, even as they disconnected him further from the world around him. (p. 29)

Nothing too tragic there, you’d have thought, and Forster says something similar of himself, imagining returning from tour with a suitcase full of books and records: ‘Well-stocked seclusion – my favourite position in life’ (p. 236). But where he settles down in later life, marries and starts a family, McLennan almost always lives in shared accommodation, a perpetual student without the discipline of study. His first serious relationship came quite late, with bandmate Amanda Brown, and the big trauma of his life was her leaving him on being sacked from the band, a consequence he had not foreseen. He spent years trying to get her back. He didn’t have the worldliness to think through the consequences, or to deal with the fallout. (Forster: ‘I wanted to say, You’re the innocent one. You’re the one left in the house crying’ (p. 219)). So he drank, and he acted the rock star. It seems likely that what could come across as arrogance was a defence mechanism, because he didn’t know how to deal with the world. And then, too, there is Forster’s bleak assessment of the underlying reason for Grant’s heart attack, and the careless living which led to it: ‘the sour condition of Grant’s soul’ (p. 330). How on earth can that be squared with his ecstatic reaction to hearing ‘Finding You’ for the first time?

Forster doesn’t let the tragedy of the end dominate the book. It’s a detailed and fair assessment of The Go-Betweens’ career, filled with period detail and wry comment. Like this thumbnail sketch when Grant moved flat:

The landlord was known as the Man with the Movable Wig, who upon discovering you were a musician would insist on playing you Switched-on Bach. (p. 82)

Or this summary of 20 years in the political wilderness for his home state of Queensland:

Like most politicians who preach God, Joh [Bjelke-Petersen] had tolerated shonky business deals, had no regard for the environment, and naturally no interest in the arts. (pp. 243-4)

On the music, he judges Before Hollywood, Liberty Belle, 16 Lovers Lane, The Friends of Rachel Worth and Oceans Apart as good records, the other albums wanting. The account of the session for Tallulah’s singles is particularly dispiriting:

With costs high and deposit paid, the best we could do was slink off to a backroom and rehearse the B sides, to be called out one by one over the next four days, like witnesses at a murder trial, and feed our parts into an unremarkable churn that were to be our singles. (p. 174)

The tug between pop potential and the actual sound of the band is one that led to some awful recording decisions, starting with 1984’s Spring Hill Fair, where the drumming which held together Before Hollywood was substituted for drum machines, and the piecemeal approach Forster describes above (I love drum machines, but they aren’t Lindy Morrison). The to-ing and fro-ing between record labels, for which the band could have been named, had they known in advance, was part of the reason for this, as was the era in which they lived, which was in thrall to recording technology (the multi-track, the sequencer) in a way which ours, curiously, isn’t. Although the catalogue is uneven for this reason, it’s interesting, too: there is always jeopardy, the possibility of being dropped by the label giving a hunger to proceedings. When this happened to Forster after his solo LP Warm Nights in 1996, he relocated to Germany with his wife, and he reflects:

As I strode the medieval alleyways in the cold, pull-the-collar-up weather, a new persona was born. Self-preserving, forgotten, withered, proud, discarded – glorious emotions, for how you imagine yourself to be is as important as talent when writing songs. (p. 276)

‘The Frankenstein Phantasmagoria’, Dundee Congregational Church & The Howff, 24th November

From Wikipedia’s entry on the Phantasmagoria:

a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons and ghosts onto walls, smoke or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. […] Some shows added all kinds of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks.

Shocks and smells aside, that is a fair description of the second half of this magic lantern show by Jeremy Brooker, assisted by his wife Carolyn: they used mirrors against the lantern’s lenses to project spooks around the church walls and roof, and the previously flat screen was drawn back to reveal several more layers, including a semi-transparent gauze, a rainbow-shimmering, swaying surface which turned out to be bubble-wrap kept moving by a fan, and at the back the contours of a body topped by a skull in the centre of the screen-space. The effect of the projections on this was quite dazzling, much of it softened by the layers so that it became purely a visual pleasure (shoegaze for the eyes, cathedrals of light), but scenes came and went too, making the body and skull more or less obvious. Alongside this, Timothy Didymus played an instrument made from twelve glass turntables and wine glasses, a kind of reverse-engineered glass armonica, but softer-sounding, as (he explained afterwards) he had leather pads pressed against the sides of the glasses, producing the sound. It was a beautiful, immersive experience: memento mori ameliorated.

The whole event was immersive, actually. It began at the nearby Howff, a graveyard in the centre of Dundee with graves from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Guide Eddie Small met the audience there, in the dark and in the rain, wearing a black cloak and accompanied by two assistants dressed as friars, with lamps, who herded us this way and that, out of the way of the traffic. Small started by explaining something I didn’t quite catch about the Howff and Mary Shelley (she dug up bodies there and made a prototype monster, perhaps?), before going on to explain that James Bowman Lindsay, inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was not buried there, but in Dundee’s Western Cemetery. What the Howff did have, was an open-air mortuary (‘people were dying to get in’), and none the people buried there had a funeral, because, he said, there were none in Scotland for four hundred years prior to 1920. Is this really true? It doesn’t pass the quick Google test, but who knows? It certainly created a nice ghostly feeling, which was only intensified by walking down a dark side street to the church’s back entrance, past a large back-projection of the reanimation scene from Bride of Frankenstein in one of its windows. In the church hall before we were permitted access to ‘the other side’ (the church itself, where the performance was), organisers Keith Williams and Matthew Jarron wore white lab coats, and the darkened room boasted an impressive array of grisly medical equipment from the university’s collection, the better to consider the way of all flesh, bone and sinew prior to the main event.

The magic lantern show, as Brooker explained in a talk afterwards, was not a re-telling of Frankenstein. Rather, it explored themes relating to the novel, using a combination of genuine Victorian slides, copies, and entirely original slides. He told us that there are no Victorian magic lantern slides telling the story of Frankenstein, so he had to be inventive, adapting and recontextualising. He said he had made seventy slides for the show (one was of the entrance to the Howff), which is an extraordinary amount of work: I hope it survives in some form, either a recording or repeat performances (there were just two over the weekend). It would definitely bear repeat viewings.

Here are some of the slides which stood out: a woman in profile, full length, looking through a door at a body against a black background (more like a medical diagram than a ‘real’ body), I think a skeleton to begin with, then with layers of muscle. Similar but more horrific was a woman in medium shot, holding a black mask in front of the top half of her face, with just the eyes showing through. All set for a masquerade. She moved the mask down, so you could see her face. Then back up, and down again, and the top half of her face had become a skull, as though the flesh of her face were itself a mask. It made me think of Mark Fisher’s discussion of horror and pornography in his essay and blog post ‘Let me be your fantasy’, which I read recently in his gigantic posthumous collection k-punk:

‘Why stop with the genitalia?’ Baudrillard asks, ‘Who knows what profound pleasure is to be found in the visual dismemberment of mucous membranes and smooth muscles?’ Cronenberg’s early work – from Shivers and Rabid through to Videodrome – is an answer to that very question. Cronenberg famously posed his own question, ‘why aren’t there beauty contests for the inside of the body?’ (Mark Fisher, k-punk, p. 64, and online here.)

There was nothing explicitly sexual about the magic lantern show (though there was a slide featuring a suggestively growing nose), but perhaps the peeling back of flesh for entertainment necessarily entails a sexual element.

There was also the fascination of: how was that done? All sorts of trickery is possible, between the magic lantern’s three lenses (allowing superimposition) and the manipulation of individual slides. But at the same time, it is all done live and there is nowhere to hide: everything is visible, blown up to screen size. There was an arctic section, with a ship in silhouette moving like a ghost from slide to slide. There was a whaling scene in which the sea went red with blood. Brooker said that this was his modern sensibility: Victorian whaling scenes tend to be heroic rather than horrific. There was a section on acrobatics, which I think was there on Brooker’s previous visit to Dundee, when he put on a Christmas show at the university. That was magical, because, to an audience used to video and computer graphics (and no longer used to overhead projectors), magic lanterns represent an entirely different way of manipulating images. It has a nostalgic feeling to it, sure, and the Victoriana is part of the appeal, but it’s also alien to see movement on a screen without Frames Per Second. The whirling phantasmagoria of the finale to this show, with its textures, layers, and its sprites and brownies darting around the periphery of our vision was something else again. Near the end of this sequence, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Death is not the End’ was played, like a pilot announcing a landing, signalling that we had strayed well beyond a story about science and the reanimation of flesh, to the territory of the soul. The screen, the entire place, was haunted.

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The Frankenstein Phantasmagoria was part of the Being Human Festival, and timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
Jeremy Brooker is chair of the Magic Lantern Society.
Timothy Didymus’ Kosmiche Glass LP (this is also the name of his wine-glass instrument) is available on Bandcamp.

Muriel Spark – ‘Memento Mori’

My second Muriel Spark novel, after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, as in that book, much of the story happens elsewhen. The peer group skewered here (‘friends’ would be wrong) are all in their seventies and eighties, and have started to receive anonymous telephone calls which tell them ‘remember you must die’. A history of infidelities going back half a century binds the group together: there is blackmail, and the frequent changing of wills as new facts emerge or are imagined. It’s all about the money. Mrs Pettigrew, the blackmailer, selects a convenient enough version of reality for herself: she has a facelift, and within a few years is convinced that she hasn’t had one. She also denies that she has received an anonymous phone call, and believes that too. The facelift is presumably what allows her to pass for a relative youngster, and in addition to seriously depleting the capital of her employer Godfrey Colston by threatening to tell his wife about his decades of infidelity, she makes a little ready money by allowing him an occasional titillating glimpse of suspender.

As the novel begins, Dame Lettie Colston, Godfrey’s sister and an overweight philanthropist, has been receiving the calls for about six weeks. She reports them to the police, and also to a retired policeman of her acquaintance, Henry Mortimer, whom she then begins to suspect of making the calls himself. Mortimer summons the targeted group to his house for afternoon tea and a denouement in which the evidence diverges in as many directions as there are witnesses: the caller is a middle-aged man, a young Teddy-boy; his voice is ‘cracked and rather shaky’, ‘strong and sinister’ (p. 146); he is foreign, or not; he has a lisp, or not; he is, in Mortimer’s case only, a she. After the guests have left, his wife reflects:

        ‘How I wish,’ said Emmeline, ‘you could have told them outright, “Death is the culprit.” And I should like to have seen their faces.’
        ‘It’s a personal opinion. One can’t make up one’s mind for others.’ (p. 151)

Mortimer is one of only three sympathetic characters in the novel, two of whom are relatively minor. The third is Godfrey’s wife, Charmian Piper, a famous novelist in her day, whose books are coming back into fashion and being reprinted, which arrests and to some extent reverses the dementia to which she is prey in the early part of the book. Amongst her confusion about who is who (she tends to think everyone is her estranged son, Eric), there is still a sharpness of perception. Talking to Godfrey:

        ‘Ah,’ said Charmian, ‘you are taking your revenge, Eric.’
        ‘I am not Eric,’ he said.
        ‘But you are taking your revenge.’ (p. 73)

He is, indeed. After many years of resentment about not being the breadwinner in the marriage, he finally seems to be gaining the upper hand with Charmian’s worsening memory: ‘he could never feel really well unless she were ill’ (p. 153). Initially, he wants to send her to a nursing home, then loses so much money through blackmail that he thinks they can’t afford it. Given a new lease of life (and money) by her re-printed novels, Charmian eventually leaves on her own terms. Her recovery is heartening, given that she is the moral core of the book, but it is kept below the level of miraculous. In one scene, when Godfrey and Mrs Pettigrew are both out (she following, wanting to control him), she prepares her own afternoon tea in an agonising scene which makes it clear how dangerous this is, at the limit of her physical capacity. Carrying the tray is beyond her, so she makes many trips between kitchen and living room, taking the items one by one.

Charmian’s former maid, Jean Taylor, is the third sympathetic character (it is interesting that two of them are working class, in a story mostly about the rich), and her bed in an NHS geriatric ward contrasts with the private room her former employer has at the nursing home. She is visited by Lettie, and by Alec Warner, a tragi-comic presence, a Casaubon, who is collecting behavioural evidence for the long-term study of the elderly which he intends to be his life’s work and legacy: several times he sends letters to characters making shocking, gossipy revelations and asking them to take their pulse and report back. Miss Taylor sees exactly how ridiculous he is:

She had discerned, after many years, that his whole approach to the female mind, his only way of coping with it, was to seem to derive amusement from it. When Miss Taylor had made this discovery she was glad they had never been married. He was too much masked, behind his mocking, paternal attitude – now become a habit – for any proper relationship with a grown woman. (p. 62)

It’s possible that his research could reveal scientific truths about ageing, but in observing, he has quit the field of human interaction (she might advise him, ‘remember you must live’). Charmian is quitting it slowly, as her memory goes. Godfrey was never much interested in it, he just wants sex and power. Mrs Pettigrew just wants money. Miss Taylor finds herself in posh isolation, a servant with a fine critical mind after years of sharing her employer’s intellectual life. No one is comfortable, no one has reached contentment by virtue of having lived a long time: the squabbles of a lifetime continue to the end.

April to September

I keep reading books and not writing about them. Which isn’t really the idea, is it? See also: November 2011. It isn’t the Kindle’s fault this time, as that is tucked safely on a shelf, too late for its bashed screen, but it works fine if you turn the light off. However, its time (or certainly its peak) seems to have passed, and books are books once more. Since To Kill a Mockingbird, I’ve read Mike Barnes’ Captain Beefheart, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life…

Octopuses in at least two aquariums have learned to turn off the lights by squirting jets of water at the bulbs when no one is watching, and short circuiting the power supply. At the University of Otago in New Zealand, this became so expensive that the octopus had to be released back into the wild. (p. 55)

… Elif Batuman’s The Idiot…

I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of. […]
        ‘Do you see yourself as one of the dispensable people?’
        ‘The point is I don’t want to get involved in that question, and it’s all most people want to talk about. The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat – it’s really limited.’ (p. 142)

…some of Bill Drummond and Mark Manning’s Bad Wisdom (I got disgusted), some of Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt (which was on Kindle, actually), some of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (also on Kindle, also unfinished), some of Lloyd Clark’s Arnhem (second attempt, unfinished again), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which fits the Hark, A Vagrant! characterisation of its author to a T:

beside my abandoned wretch of a husband, the base, malignant Grimsby, and the false villain Hargrave, the boarish ruffian [Hattersley], coarse and brutal as he was, shone like a glow-worm in the dark, among its fellow worms. (p. 346)

…and Claire Tomalin’s A Life of my Own, which has pointed in so many different directions (Karl Miller, Michael Frayn, Samuel Pepys) that I’m in a quandary over what to read next. A nice sort of problem to have.

I think I’d probably have done better at finishing those books if I’d written posts on them, and it could have been a good set of posts too. On the other hand, one wants to be free to flit about.

Harper Lee – ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

[Spoiler alert: usually I try to avoid discussing the endings of books, but here it seemed unavoidable.]

One Christmas I lurked in corners nursing a twisted splinter in my foot, permitting no one to come near me. When Uncle Jack caught me, he kept me laughing about a preacher who hated going to church so much that every day he stood at his gate in his dressing-gown, smoking a hookah and delivering five-minute sermons to any passers-by who desired spiritual comfort. I interrupted to make Uncle Jack let me know when he would pull it out, but he held up a bloody splinter in a pair of tweezers and said he yanked it while I was laughing, that was what was known as relativity. (pp. 86-7)

Fiction is often the spinning of the yarn in order to reveal the splinter. Narratives drift in a certain direction, either leading the reader to a conclusion, or providing the framework for an argument which could lead in several directions. To Kill a Mockingbird uses the yarn of childhood innocence to pick at the festering splinter of racism in 1930s Alabama, and it does it in the main by showing the genteel end of white society (the respectable inhabitants of the town rather than the country bumpkins), set in their ways, living alongside black society only insofar as they employ black people as servants: the splinter is well hidden, only perceptible to the young, who have yet to absorb the prevailing attitudes of their time and class.

Jem was scratching his head. Suddenly his eyes widened. ‘Atticus,’ he said, ‘why don’t people like us and Miss Maudie ever sit on juries? You never see anybody from Maycomb on a jury – they all come from out in the woods.’ […]
        ‘Well, what if – say, Mr Link Deas had to decide the amount of damages to award to, say, Miss Maudie, when Miss Rachel ran her over with a car. Link wouldn’t like the thought of losing either lady’s business at his store, would he? So he tells Judge Taylor that he can’t serve on the jury because he doesn’t have anybody to keep store for him while he’s gone. So Judge Taylor excuses him. Sometimes he excuses him wrathfully.’ (p. 244)

Well-off whites outsource the responsibility of judgement to the poor, and since it is the poor whites who live in close proximity with black communities, it is they who, fed by trickle-down resentment, insult and abuse them. Mayella Ewell, the lonely and mistreated daughter of drunkard Bob, assuages her condition by making advances to Tom Robinson, a black labourer and young father, whose daily walk to work takes him past the Ewell house. She asks him to fix things in the yard at first, and then, having bribed her siblings into making themselves scarce, she asks him into the house and makes a pass at him. Her father, returning at the wrong moment, spots them through the window and intervenes, chasing off Tom and savagely beating Mayella. This then becomes a charge of rape against Tom, who is also blamed for the beating. The court case is the talk of the town, and Scout and Jem gradually become aware of a wave of public disapproval directed against Atticus, whom Judge Taylor has appointed the defence lawyer in the case. It’s a very distanced way of telling the story: the basic facts of it emerge slowly, and the characters involved in its defining scene are flung to the periphery. It’s not a story about the victim (Tom), or even the perpetrators (Mayella and Bob), but about the layers of society above them: the internal struggle within well-off white society between those (the majority) who want to see the black man executed for having broken a taboo the rules of which prevent the instigator from being blamed, and those (Atticus, Judge Taylor) who know this is wrong and make a valiant attempt to sway justice in the direction of justice, based on such slivers of conscience as they can encourage in the jury.

Most of the time, this is a book about growing up: from Scout’s first day at school to when she’s eight years old and dresses up as a joint of ham for a pageant (she fluffs her entrance, so is a failure as a ham actor – I wasn’t sure if the pun was intentional). She plays in and around the house with Jem, and Dill, a friend from out of town who spends his summers with an aunt in the same street. They become obsessed with a neighbour who never leaves the house, Boo Radley, who becomes a kind of ghoul in their imagination, but is actually very tolerant of their unwanted attentions, leaving small presents for them to collect in a hole in a tree in his yard (‘Two Indian-headed pennies, chewing gum, soap dolls, a rusty medal, a broken watch and chain’ p. 267). He is white, of course, or he couldn’t be a neighbour, but his constantly absent presence is almost certainly a comment on a society living alongside people it chooses to never really see, and on the paranoid myths the mind will construct around the unseen. His only appearance in the novel is right at the end, when Bob Ewell, eaten up by rage at Atticus for the things he accused him of during the trial of Tom Robinson, attacks his children on their walk home in the dark from the pageant. He leaves Jem with a broken arm, and crushes Scout’s chicken-wire ham costume, which fortunately protects her long enough for Boo Radley to come to their rescue.

In the wake of this attack, with Jem safely in bed, sheriff Heck Tate and Atticus debate what to do about the aftermath: Bob Ewell lies dead under the tree from behind which he sprang, a bread knife thrust under his rib cage. Did Jem do this? Did Boo? Did Bob fall on the knife? For a while Atticus insists that this killing must come to trial, such is his belief in the law and due process. The sheriff is against this, seeing that justice has already been served, and seeing also the injustice of bringing the reclusive (now heroic) Boo Radley into the limelight of a trial. And so the yarns of the book pull in opposing directions: Atticus is a moral ramrod for most of its length, but the final pages show that he is not unswayable in his devotion to the law. It, and society, are arguably moving in the right direction (evidence for this: it took the jury a long time to make the wrong decision about Tom Robinson), but at a glacially slow pace. The novel makes a powerful case against segregation, but more than that, its purpose is to show how racism can sustain itself within a society, how entrenched it can become within its structures. That, and the power of youthful idealism against it.

John E. Smith (with illustrations by Annabel Wright) – ‘The Robert Stories’

In the dying days of Melody Maker, I tore one issue to pieces in frustration at the lack of any content worth reading, with the exception of a short interview with Annabel Wright of The Pastels towards the back, which I kept, in which she talked about her connection with Stephen being founded around their being the two ‘committed Swell Maps fans’ in Scotland. Something like that. Now she has illustrated a book of stories by her father about his childhood in a suburb of Birmingham in the 1950s, and I wonder if that background played into her admiration for Swell Maps, who came from Birmingham. In any case, it’s strange (and wonderful) to think of that city having a place in Pastels pre-history, though it makes sense in the light of Wright’s previous city-based artwork. Here, the cranes and riverscapes of Glasgow are replaced by terraces, brickwork, a suburb-centre with a Boots, ’50s cars and buses, Victorian buildings. Some of the drawings use perspective, and are very detailed (like the terraces above); others are more impressionistic (like the graveyard used to play Cowboys and Indians in), or design-oriented (floral aprons are great throughout). There is a river, but it has a concrete bottom, so it’s hardly the Clyde.

In each of these eight brief stories three young boys get up to mischief, and the smallest of them, Robert, who is never the initiator but always a keen participant, always seems to come off worst. John is the one who suggests things to do to while away an hour after school; Alan (his brother) is something like his second in command; Robert (from across the street) is the fall guy, even when there is absolutely no need for one. In ‘Robert and the Matches’, the three of them build a den on some waste ground and pretend to be explorers. One day John brings along some matches so they can have a fire, but it gets out of control and has to be put out by the fire brigade. They escape without getting caught, but just to be on the safe side John gives the matches to Robert, and then:

as his mummy folded his trousers the box of matches dropped out. ‘Where did you get these matches, Robert? You know it is dangerous to play with matches,’ she said sternly.
        ‘John gave them to me when the den caught fire,’ said Robert.
        ‘You naughty boy! You must never play with that John Smith again,’ said his mother. (p. 26)

Other chapter titles include ‘Robert and the Apples’, ‘Robert and the Greenhouse’ and ‘Robert and the Gunpowder’. With each one you sort of know what’s going to happen in advance: Robert’s going to get caught stealing apples / breaking glass / blowing something up, and the joy of the stories is in the unexpected way he invariably finds of doing just that. He has an irresistible knack of landing himself in trouble, when it wasn’t his fault, and when it would be the easiest thing in the world simply not to confess, but this never seems to occur to him. Then again, his mother doesn’t enforce her command that he ‘must never play with that John Smith again’, so he doesn’t suffer too much for his honesty.

The stories are great to read out loud: I tried them out on S., who loved them (in hysterics within 30 seconds most of the time), and my 3-year-old nephew, with whom I got deep into discussion about why the boys had tucked their jumpers in and filled them full of apples, which tends to be his way of absorbing a story.

The sad background (not mentioned in the text) is that John has Motor Neurone Disease, and the book is both a way of preserving his stories, and of raising money for MND Scotland. Available from Monorail.

Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber – ‘Harpo Speaks!’

Susan Marx’s illustration for chapter 14, ‘Croquemaniacs of the World, Unite!’

On page 89 of his autobiography, while still in his teens, Harpo Marx finds himself in the middle of a murder ballad:

A week later Mrs. Schang finally sobered up. She had absorbed so much gin it stopped having any effect, and this seemed to make her madder than ever before. She came in the back room and grabbed me off the piano stool. ‘Get in the buggy, out front,’ she said. ‘You’re driving tonight.’
        By the time I got my derby and got in the buggy she was already there, waiting for me. Then she told me to run to the kitchen and get a meat knife. When I did, she slit her pocketbook and stuck a pistol and a pint of gin between the cover and the lining. She said to get going, and fast.
        I asked where we were going. Mrs. Schang said, ‘Keep driving east until we get to the Pot O’Gold. I’m going to kill Louie Neidorf.’
        I didn’t know who Louie Neidorf was, and I didn’t care. I had never seen anybody fire a gun before. The prospect was so thrilling I could hardly hold the reins.’

There is a clip of a newspaper story included in the photo section, reporting the arrest of the gang, which Harpo suspects was enabled by a tip-off from Louie Neidorf, who in the event (possibly tipped off himself) kept clear of the Pot O’Gold that evening (it even sounds like the Bucket of Blood from Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’). This is the most brutal, low-life anecdote in the book, but not the only one which makes you wonder ‘can this possibly be true?’ The other is the story of how Harpo undertook a tour of the U.S.S.R. in 1933, and was asked by the U.S. ambassador to smuggle some papers taped to his leg when he returned home, which he did. This story is even more gripping, set up with a tricky entrance to the country, when he is suspected of bringing in roubles from an unofficial source, so when he leaves, this time with something genuinely to worry about, it is almost unbearably tense. Both of these stories are somewhat at odds with what I thought I knew about Harpo, so I checked in Joe Adamson’s book on the Marx Brothers, and the Russian episode doesn’t feature (at least, it’s not in the index or between Horse Feathers and Duck Soup), but he does say this about his early years:

To hear Harpo tell his life story in the book by Rowland Barber, you would think he wandered through his salty boyhood of gang fights, hostile police, meatless meals, irate landlords, roughhouse saloons, painted women, murderous madams, fast-moving swindlers, killers and thieves in the same serene state of semi-delight he later lavished on the Algonquin Hotel and his grapefruit ranch. (Groucho, Chico, Harpo and sometimes Zeppo, p. 23)

That’s a great book too. Motor-mouthed in a way Harpo Speaks! is not, more in the spirit of Groucho. When it gets to the bad Marx Brothers films at the turn of the 1940s, it becomes hilariously indignant: Adamson’s response to The Big Store is to spend the best part of a page listing other films around the same time with the word ‘big’ in the title. Harpo doesn’t mention The Big Store at all in his book, and doesn’t even talk about the good films very much. He says The Cocoanuts was simply a filmed show, with ad-libs discouraged because they made the crew laugh (a sound-proof booth was installed to get around this*), and the brothers had to be locked up so they didn’t wander off; after that, the next time he mentions a film it’s to say that they were getting into a rut by the time of Duck Soup (what a rut!), from which Irving Thalberg rescued them with A Night at the Opera. That might be it for film mentions. I’d thought he might bring up Love Happy, which was very much his project, or the LPs he made with his son in the 1950s (these are mentioned in an afterword by that son, William Marx). But no, the focus is on the years of touring (powered by his mother, Minnie, who got him a harp to add class to the act), on his great friendship with the critic Alexander Woollcott, and on his marriage to Susan Fleming, at the grand old age of 48. In a way, he’s right: the twenty years in vaudeville before The Cocoanuts came out in 1929 (when Harpo was 40) were what made The Marx Brothers: their characters were already a fait accompli by then.

As well as the Algonquin crowd with whom Harpo spent most of his time towards the end of the 1920s (Woollcott, Herbert Ross, Dorothy Parker et al.), he also visited the Randolph Hearsts, at Sam Simeon, which is interesting for the glimpse it gives of what became Xanadu in Citizen Kane (a better 1941 film than The Big Store):

The dining hall in the San Simeon castle was grand enough to have suited King Arthur and all his knights and all their ladies. When you came into dinner, ten-foot logs were blazing in the fireplace and hundreds of candles were burning giant silver candelabras. Candlelight flickered against the historic battle flags that flew from the beams, against the gleaming top of the seventy-foot-long banquet table, and on the little islands of glassware that dotted the length of the table. Each of these little islands was composed of a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of horseradish, a diner-type sugar dispenser, a water glass full of paper napkins, and pepper shakers in the shapes of Mickey and Minnie mouse. (p. 293)

All of which is barely to scratch the surface of this expansive, warm-hearted book. Harpo often alludes to himself as the listener of the Algonquin set, and his book is full of interest in the people around him (he attributes the same quality to Woollcott), and full of the practical jokes he played on them too. He seems to have been someone people liked to have around, who could lighten any situation. He’s such a joy to watch on screen, but this book only adds to his charm: it’s a relief to discover he didn’t have his head in the clouds all the time, and that his persona was a way of dealing with (and improving) the world, rather than a way of avoiding it.
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* A myth, according to Wikipedia, which points out that all talkies used sound-proof booths.

John Wyndham – ‘The Day of the Triffids’

Talking of apocalypses, here’s one from 66 years ago, before the Cuban Missile Crisis, but after Hiroshima, and very definitely of the modern technological era. Rockets have led to satellites, and these, thirty-odd years before Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project, led to speculation:

From time to time there would be a panicky flare-up of expostulation when reports circulated that as well as satellites with atomic heads there were others with such things as crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds, but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there.

Factor number two feels more contemporary still:

Every year we were pushing the northern limit of growth for food plants a little farther back. New fields were growing quick crops on what had historically been simply tundra or barren land. […] For food was then our most pressing problem, and the progress of the regeneration schemes and the advance of the cultivation lines on the maps was followed with almost as much attention as an earlier generation had paid to battle fronts.

It is technology which allows this expansion to happen, and the novel’s narrator, Bill Masen, is a biologist working in a related area. His speciality is triffids, tall walking plants with lethal stings, but also source of a new wonder oil which has replaced fish oil on the food market. They have been around since his boyhood, when he was stung by a small one, and are, he says, ‘the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings’ (Russian meddlings, he hints). The impetus behind triffid farming is commercial rather than existential, though: it is the fact that triffid oil can undercut fish oil that brings it to dominance, and brings about all the triffid nurseries which cause so many problems when it happens.

I was surprised that it – the moment when the world stops functioning – is not caused by the triffids at all. Green lights are seen in the sky, and for everyone who does see them they cause blindness. The blind are easily picked off by triffids, who can feed on the bodies once they have decayed sufficiently. There is also a mysterious plague which wipes out a large proportion of those who escape the triffids. For a monster talking over the world, the triffids are having an awful lot handed to them on a plate, I thought. This, though, is the point: technology creates many dangerous things, manageable under normal circumstances, but take away that crutch, and they can get out of control. Bill suspects that both the wave of blindness and the plague (a bit like typhoid, but with a shorter incubation period) are the result of the weapons satellites malfunctioning. The triffids simply take advantage.

Within a very few weeks, England (and we are to presume the wider world) is reduced to a skeleton population of scavenging survivors, who live initially on supplies raided from cities, but later move to the countryside to avoid the plague. While Bill is still in London, he faces a dilemma to either help the blind to scavenge, and prolong their lives by a short while, or desert them with an organised group of mostly sighted people, with the idea of setting up a community than can survive long-term. He chooses the latter, but is kidnapped with the rest of the party in a raid organised by Wilfred Coker, who forces them all to look after a group of the blind, handcuffed to minders. Once forced, he has enough humanity to continue to look after his group even when free of the minders, abandoning them only when plague gets them and it is pointless to stay. Coker realises the error of his hard-line tactics, but there is another group which continues militant, using Brighton as its base, and intending to build up an army in order to conquer other depleted countries at the first opportunity. This is the real cynicism of the book: not that technology can go wrong, but that even reduced to a stump, the human race would still contain that contingent (about 5%, Bill reckons) convinced that it knew best and was entitled to stamp its authority on the majority.

In London, Bill meets and falls in love with Josella Playton, notorious author of ‘Sex is My Adventure’ (perhaps the most modern touch of all – that, and the gentrified farm house in the commuter belt), but loses her during Coker’s raid. Much of the rest of the book is the story of his search for her, but late on comes this description of a blind man taking a walk to the village shop, which is the most effective account of triffid terror in the book:

Most of the next day Dennis devoted to contriving a kind of helmet for himself. He had wire net only of large mesh so that he had to construct it of several layers overlapped and tied together. It took some time, but, equipped with this and a pair of heavy duty gauntlet gloves, he was able to start out for the village late in the day. A triffid had struck at him before he was three paces from the house. He groped for it until he found it, and twisted its stem for it. A minute or two later another sting thudded across his helmet. He could not find that triffid to grapple with it, though it made half a dozen slashes before it gave up. He found his way to the toolshed, and thence across to the lane, encumbered now with three large balls of gardening twine which he paid out as he went to guide him back.

There is plenty that is daft here: not least, mobile plants that kill for food but can’t actually eat it until it has decayed, by which time they are probably somewhere else (though Bill does say that in common with insects, ‘Separately they have something which looks slightly like intelligence; collectively it looks a great deal more like it’). People committing suicide on a mass scale immediately they realise they are blind. The blindness, caused by looking at the sky at the wrong time, affecting quite such a large proportion of the population (weren’t any of them inside?) There is definitely something in this, though:

My first tentative trip [to London] I took alone, returning with cases of triffid-bolts, paper, engine parts, the Braille books and writing machine that Dennis so much desired, the luxuries of drinks, sweets, records, and yet more books for the rest of us. A week later Josella came with me on a more practical search for clothing.

Sarah Bakewell – ‘At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails’

As is well known, Martin Heidegger was a Nazi for part of his life, and refused to issue a categorical renunciation after the Second World War. Given that, it is amazing what he was against:

By ‘machination’ he meant the making-machine-like of all things: the attitude that characterises factory automation, environmental exploitation, modern management and war. With this attitude, we brazenly challenge the earth to give up what we want from it, instead of patiently whittling or cajoling things forth as peasant smallholders or craftsmen do. […] Moreover, we rarely use what we take at once, but instead convert it to a form abstract energy to be held in reserve in a generator or storehouse. […] When something is placed ‘on call’ or in ‘standing-reserve’, says Heidegger, it loses its ability to be a proper object. […] If we are left alone ‘in the midst of objectlessness’, then we ourselves will lose our structure – we too will be swallowed up into a ‘standing-reserve’ mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term ‘human resources’ as evidence of this danger. (pp. 182-3)

He was interested in experience at a very basic and individual level (the craftsman hitting a nail with a hammer, the moment when the nail bends and things go wrong), but he wasn’t so interested in people. Rather than ponder this (yes of course it’s a contradiction in terms), I’ll just point out the similarity of the above to the argument Naomi Klein makes in This Changes Everything about the move from water mills to steam power during the industrial revolution, which is precisely about human resources. Coal and steam were initially a ‘tough sell’, she says, as water was free and the larger wheels produced more energy than a steam engine could. The deciding factor was that coal powered factories could be situated in cities, ‘where there were gluts of willing industrial workers, making it far easier to fire troubleshooters and put down strikes.’ She argues that energy production needs to become geographically determined once again, through solar, wind and other renewable sources: not, it is true, in order that humanity can save itself from objectlessness, but, more straightforwardly, so that humanity can save itself. Which is about as existential as you can get.

Objects interested Jean-Paul Sartre too, in a slightly different way:

Sartre knew very well that we can lose sight of the sense of things. […] Many such moments occur in Nausea, when Roquentin finds himself flummoxed by a doorknob or a beer glass. But for Sartre, unlike for Camus, such collapses reveal a psychological state: they are failures of intentionality, not glimpses into a greater truth. (p. 151)

Camus sees a great emptiness, and Sartre a call to action; but he, like Heidegger, was drawn to a political ideology (Marxism, in his case) which denies individuality: ‘For Marxists, human beings are destined to progress through predefined stages of history towards a final socialist paradise’ (p. 256). Sartre struggled to reconcile Marxism with existentialism, particularly following the Soviet put-down of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, but for Camus it was more straightforward:

he did not think that history led to a single inevitable destination, and he did not think that there was such a thing as perfection. As long as we have human societies, we will have rebellions. Each time a revolution overturns the ills of a society, a new status quo is created, which then develops its own excesses and injustices. Each generation has a fresh duty to revolt against these, and this will be the case forever. (p. 257, a summary of The Rebel)

Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes ran a review of The Rebel criticising it as ‘an apology for capitalism’, and he also wrote Camus a long letter about it which ended their friendship. Bakewell is scrupulously even-handed in her account of this, just as she is on the importance of Heidegger’s philosophy versus his Nazism. She points out that Camus’ essay came at a very sensitive time politically (it was published in 1951), and was clearly intended to be anti-Communist, when the re-making of the world in the wake of the Second World War hung in the balance of two ideologies.

The world had fallen to pieces, but for that very reason almost anything could now be done with it. (p. 165)

Going back to Klein again, this is exactly what her ‘shock doctrine’ idea consists of: smash everything up, grab the pieces for profit. Sartre’s fury at The Rebel was due to its undermining of the alternative scenario: grab the pieces for the social good.

At the Existentialist Café is a tale told in a personal, engaging way, with frank opinions on the readability of the texts concerned. It weaves together philosophy with biography and historical context (cafés, jazz and zazous, the smuggling of unpublished papers from occupied territories), and follows How to Live in its attractive use of illustrations amongst the text. Bakewell despairs of Sartre’s abandonment of editing in later life, though his first novel Nausea is something of a key text, as is Being and Nothingness. In contrast, Simone de Beauvoir remained readable throughout her life, and The Second Sex ‘can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement’ (p. 210).

She showed how choices, influences and habits can accumulate over a lifetime to create a structure that becomes hard to break out of. Sartre also thought that our actions often formed a shape over the long term, creating what he called the ‘fundamental project’ of a person’s existence. But Beauvoir emphasised the connection between this and our wider situations as gendered, historical beings. She gave full weight to the difficulty of breaking out of such situations – although she never doubted that we remain existentially free despite it all. (pp. 215-16)

Finally, the book calls for a reappraisal of the existentialists for the purpose of ‘breaking out’: it is tempting to think of ourselves, in our increasingly computer-networked world, as ‘out-of-control mechanical dupes of our own biology and environment’ (pp. 318-19). Is this an excuse not to act, to abdicate from ethical choice and responsibility? You can swim with the tide, you can (as per Quentin Crisp) swim faster, you can tread water, you can drown. Or you can make another metaphor up, and go your own way.

While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive

It may be the natural ageing process, a helpful Quietus reappraisal, The Mountain Goats’ electric piano-led homage ‘Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds’, but more and more frequently it seems to me that The Sisters of Mercy’s 1990 album Vision Thing is one of the most vital records around. It may be those things, but it is also the dire state of politics, headed up by Trump, whose election Eldritch hinted may even tempt him to record again. It would be great if he could bring the venom he oozed into the veins of Bush Snr to bear on the current president. Then again, it’s no stretch at all to simply transpose the album’s title track to now:

It’s a small world and it smells bad
I’d buy another if I had
Back
What I made
For another motherfucker in a motorcade

The narrator in the song shifts between having been paid for (as above) and having paid for (‘Take back what I paid’) the assassination of a US president. It’s obvious from ‘motorcade’ that the allusion is to JFK, but who is to say if he is the target on both occasions? One interpretation of the song could be that the person who made his fortune from a contract for killing Kennedy blew it all having a later president done away with. They’re all just another motherfucker in a motorcade. Some worse than others, with Trump the mother of them all. Typically, ‘motherfucker’ in Eldritch’s usage is razor sharp, and relates to the bad-smelling ‘small world’, which the president intends to exploit for all the oil he and his oligarch chums can get, and is the most surprising turn of this dark, dirty, gasoline-guzzling song: it’s actually eco-friendly. To the bridge:

What do we need to make our world come alive?
What does it take to make us sing?
While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive
One million points of light
One billion dollar vision thing

The ‘vision thing’ bit relates to Bush’s search for a palatable cause during the 1988 election campaign (obviously you can’t campaign on motherfucking, you have to have a cover story). Maybe the wall across Mexico is Trump’s vision thing. Theresa May’s vision thing is Brexit. ‘While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive’ though… the next world? There isn’t going to be any next world. We only have one. Eldritch is pointing this out at the same time as summing up right wing environment policy (‘waiting’), at the same time as drawing Bush’s cynicism across the sky in the only terms he would be able to understand (‘one billion dollar’), and illustrating too the paucity of imagination of a Republican trying to grasp what the good things of life might be, for no other reason than drawing voters in and legitimising motherfuckery. It’s dizzying and brilliant, and once you’ve taken it in, the song’s opening couplet, which at first comes on like macho rock bravado, transfigures itself into a protest against greed and ridiculous consumption:

Twenty five whores in the room next door
Twenty five floors and I need more

This only really hit me in the light of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, which argues powerfully against consumerism and the model of economic growth at all costs upon which the modern western world and free market capitalism are based:

Free market ideology may still bind the imaginations of our elites, but for most of the general public, it has been drained of its powers to persuade. The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be.

Deregulated industry is never going to give us the emission reductions we need to prevent catastrophic global warming, she argues: legislation is the only way. Society can change, government can take back control of the things it needs to in order curb the market, and ultimately, this would restore the values we should have had all along: fairness and quality of life over profit. The bottom line would no longer be the bottom line. I’ll return to this book, but wanted to note, for what it’s worth, in advance of the general election this week, that Labour want a state which provides more than opportunity for its citizens, which doesn’t let people down for not earning enough. Money always matters, but wealth is not a moral quality. Don’t vote for a motherfucker on Thursday.