Buckle that swash!

There’s more than an element of sentimental attachment in what follows here.

One of the ailments that come with teaching is a massive reading block. It inevitably impacts at the end of a long, gruelling term. I came up with an ever-ready mood-breaker:

5. Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda

Bedford Square, WC1B, must sport more blue plaques to the acre than anywhere else in the capital. Number 41 gets Anthony Hope Hawkins, Novelist lived here 1903-1917.

Zenda appeared in 1894, and was in competition for trade with Shaw’s Arms and the Man, Dr Watson’s Memoirs of Sherlock, and Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. All of those are in the public domain, so spoil yourself.

Allegedly Hope Hawkins conceived the story as he walked home — home was with his father, the rector of St Bride’s — from a day in the Courts (his day-job was at the Bar). Then dashed off the entire effort in a month.

I’m pretty sure I saw both film versions — Ronald Colman/Madeleine Carroll/Douglas Fairbanks Jr (1937), and Stewart Granger/Deborah Kerr/James Mason (1952), though probably not in that order — before I read the book.

Not many writers successfully generate a wholly imaginary country and the term to describe such a romantic, Ruritanian, fiction. Having realised Zenda was a good thing, Hope quickly followed up with Rupert of Hentzau, a classic piece of villainy. He had other ventures into Ruritania, but none are so memorable — some are totally soppy (The Heart of Princess Osra teeters on that brink).

Given a quiet day, and no hang-over (another attribute of end-of-termitis) I’d be through Zenda in a quiet afternoon. If the reading block persisted, the follow-ups could be something like Carl Hiaasen‘s equally fantastic rendering of Southern Florida — for me — the stand-out of a good list is either Stormy Weather or Skinny Dip. Hiaasen’s ‘plots’ are somewhat repetitive; but it’s the whiff of something sinister, even Grand-Guignol I’m up for.

If that recipe doesn’t shake the torpor, it’s back to the bottle.

6. Howard Spring: Fame is the Spur

Spring was a second-generation Corkonian, born in South Wales, the archetypal ‘hauled up by his own boot-straps’. When, aged twelve, his father died, he left school to work as an errand-boy. From there to being an office boy, learning short-hand at night-school, and Cardiff Uni evening classes. That got him a job as a reporter on the South Wales Daily News. Onwards and upwards to the Manchester Guardian, just in time to be called up for service in WW1. Back to the Guardian, he wrote a piece about Beaverbrook at a public meeting — it wasn’t too flattering, but the Beaver liked a degree of edginess, and Spring became a reviewer for the London Evening Standard.

After a bit of acclaimed kit-lit, he finished his first adult fiction —O Absalom (you’ll be into the second-hand market for that) which was optioned by Charles Vidor, heavily re-scripted (by Lenore Coffee) as a vehicle for Madeleine Carroll and Brian Aherne, and renamed My Son, My Son! 

On the back of that, Spring retired from regular journalism to Cornwall and writing.

Which finally arrives at Fame is the Spur (1940).

I was walking back form TCD to the cold-water Ballsbridge basement flat, which took me past Greene’s second-hand bookshop in Clare Street (now, alas, no more). Greene’s catered for the passing trade with trays of whatever outside — typically three or sixpence for a paperback. It was there I picked up my first copy of Fame is the Spur (I’m now on my third or fourth copy, this one a 1959 hard-back reprint).

That paperback was passed around the TCD Fabians, as a kind of prophylactic, to keep us politically sound.

The story is the ideological decline and fall of Harmer Shawcross, his rise in the Labour Party, his betrayals of friends and ideals, until he reaches the House of Lords (and his only son dies in Spain). The story starts, brilliantly, at the field of Peterloo, and the capture of a dragoon’s sabre. The sabre has three lives: Sabre on the Wall, and the story recounted by the Old Warrior; Sabre in the Hand, as it is used by Shawcross as the visual aid for his fire breathing oratory, and Sabre in Velvet, when it is reduced to a display relic.

The parallel is not, I feel, Ramsay MacDonald — though aspects of that life are appropriated. More closely, I’d suggest Philip Snowden. The powerful sub-plot is women’s suffrage.

If I ever had to do the Desert Island Discs single book test, it might well be this one — partly for the decency, partly for the memories.

7. Gore Vidal: The Best Man

I was looking for a political fiction to go alongside Howard Spring, and I ended up reaching for another drama script.

This one sidled up to me, circuitously. I saw the Henry Fonda/Cliff Robertson movie (1964): I think that was at the Capitol in Princes Street (just off O’Connell Street).

I saw most of the parodic implications (Vidal himself wrote the film adaptation), but — again, and much later — it was a cheap paperback resale that gave me the script. I have it her: First printing, 1964, well ‘foxed’, but holding together remarkably well for a mass-paperback of that vintage.

The story is a Presidential convention. There are two thrusting candidates, both have ‘secrets’. They work those out in the script. 

One, the JFK/Nixon hybrid (Joe Cantwell — note the implication of the surname) is opportunist and cynical. The film gives him a run in an open-top limousine, scattering index-cards — ‘Buy him … burn him’. The other is William Russell, principled (up to a point — his marriage is a sham), taken from Adlai Stevenson, who was twice seen off by Ike. They have to convince the ex-President, Art Hockstader, of their qualifications. Hockstader is the wise old owl: part Ike, part rustic Harry Truman. 

This gives us fine scenes:

Hockstader: Bill, do you believe God?

Russell: Do I … ? Well, I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Hockstader: Here, that wasn’t what I asked. I’m a Methodist and I’m still askin’: do you believe there’s a God and a Day of Judgment and a Hereafter?

Russell: No. I believe in us. In man.

Hockstader (nods): I’ve often pretended I thought there was a God, for political purposes.

Russell (smiles): So far I haven’t told a lie in this campaign. I’ve never used the word ‘God’ in a speech.

Hockstader: Well, the world’s changed since I was polickin’. In those days you had to for God over everything, like ketchup.

That last bit has annealed itself to my brain-cells.

And:

Cantwell (evenly): If Russell doesn’t withdraw before Wednesday, I am going to see that every delegate gets a copy of his psychiatric report. I’m going to ask him if he really feels that a man with his mental record should be President of the United States. Frankly, if I were he, I’d pull out before this (indicates papers) hits the fans.

Hockstader: Well, you are not Russell … to state the obvious. And he might say in rebuttal that after his breakdown he served a right rough period as Secretary of State and did not show the strain in any way.

Cantwell: One of the psychiatrists reports that this pattern of his is bound to repeat itself. He is bound to have another breakdown.

Hockstader: You and your experts! You know as well as I do those head-doctors will give you about as many different opinions as you want on any subject.

Cantwell: I realise that, which is why I am going to propose that he be examined, before Wenesday, by a nonparisn group of psychiatrists to determine if he is sane. […]

Hockstader: Wow! You sure play rough, don’t you?

Inevitably Russell‘s adultery and Cantwell‘s gayness  (oh, c’mom! this is 1960!) eliminate each other. So the dark-horse, third-party comes through and takes the nomination.

But I doubt we are finished with Gore Vidal.

[Anyone complaining about formatting should go to blogger, where I posted the original]

The 4.04 for Forfar will leave from platform four …

Ah, that old one, the mythical announcement at Edinburgh Waverley, and in a plummy Morningside contralto. But, after a quantum of perspiration, I have arrived at …

4. T.H.White, The Once and Future King

This features here for a very particular reason. It was probably the first ‘grown-up’ novel I read and relished.

I am the man my mother made me, so I read. Christmas and birthdays guaranteed those Dent classics, as sold by Woolworths. One or two may turn up later.

I had for years plundered the ‘juvenile’ shelves of Wells branch of Norfolk Library Service. Next door but one to the post office. Both still in the same buildings. Back in my day the shelves were topped by taxidermied birds in glass cases. I see they’ve now gone for topiary in pots outside.

The old order changes …

The day finally came when I felt the juvenilia no longer provided. I turned to the back end, S-Z, of the adult fiction shelves. And plucked out White, fresh from the press and a first-edition.

More than slightly timorous, I approached the check-out and presented my book and a distinctively-coloured (and I feared discriminatory) child’s card. It was accepted, without question. I shot home with 677 pages to devour (I know because I have here a copy, sadly a ‘seventh impression’ and dog-eared at that, from a school library long consigned to oblivion).

All and sundry know the first of the tetralogy — The Sword in the Stone — because Disney adapted it. But the film doesn’t do credit to the accumulated detail of White’s 1950s text (the tetralogy is an expansion of separate and simpler tales he’d written in the 1930s). By the time I reached Chapter 3, and Merlin’s cottage, with Archimedes the Owl, I was engrossed. Chapter XIII, with the Wart tranformed into an ant, and the anthill a parody of totalitarianism (and seemingly digs at Orwell), taught me early political science.

The third book in the sequence, The Ill-made Knight, has a nice analogy:

Lancelot ended by being the greatest knight King Arthur had. He was a sort of Bradman, top of the battling averages. Tristram and Lamorak were second and third.

But you have to remember that people can’t be good at cricket unless they teach themselves to be so, and that jousting was an art, just as cricket is. It was like cricket in many ways. There was a scorer’s pavilion at a tournament, with a real scorer inside it, who made marks on the parchment just like the mark for one run which is made by the cricket scorer today. The people, walking round the ground in their best frocks, from Grand Stand to Refreshment Tent, must have found the fighting very like the game. It took a frightfully long time – Sir Lancelot’s innings frequently lasted all day, if he were battling against a good knight – and the movements had a feeling of slow-motion, because of the weight of armour. When the swordplay had begun, the combatants stood opposite each other in the green acre like batsman and bowler – except that they stood closer together – and perhaps Sir Gawaine would start with an in-swinger, which Sir Lancelot would put away to leg with a beautiful leg-glide, and then Lancelot would reply with a yorker under Gawaine’s guard – it was called ‘foining’ – and all the people round the field would clap. King Arthur might turn to Guenever in the Pavilion, and remark that the great man’s footwork was as lovely as ever. The knights had little curtains on the back of their helms, to keep the hot sun off the metal, like the handkerchiefs which cricketers will sometimes arrange behind their caps today.

Knightly exercise was as much an art as cricket is, and perhaps the only way in which Lancelot did not resemble Bradman was that he was more graceful. He did not have that crouching on the bat and hopping out to the pitch of the ball. He was more like Woolley. But you can’t be like Woolley by simply sitting still and wanting to be so.

Probably today the Bradman and Woolley business wouldn’t work, but it was just right, late 1950s, for a young teen. 

The Arthurian legend is the ‘matter of England’ and so part of my psyche. Whenever Tennyson and Le Morte d’Arthur cropped up in the classroom the latent Ham in me couldn’t resist — 

So all day long the noise of battle roll’d 
Among the mountains by the winter sea …

Bedivere fossicking around before consigning Excalibur to the lake, and the stagger down to the barge on the mere. The class would be looking at me, wondering how close to lacrimosity it took me: I was usually able to control myself:

Long stood Sir Bedivere 
Revolving many memories, till the hull 
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn, 
And on the mere the wailing died away. 

Gawd, but I nearly disgraced myself, again.

All that for just one book, one addition to the list — but an important one for this developing reader.

Counting to a hundred …

I’m fully aware I neglect this web-site. And that inertia has been greatly exacerbated by the inability to operate wordpress through a Safari browser.

Still, I’m seeking a way to fill space and occupy time.

I’m going to emulate, and I hope improve the multitude of webpages which tell us, with one or another level of credibility, the hundred books we all should read. Correction there: there cannot be a canonical list of the books anyone should read. My choice is subjective, the result of sixty years as a reader (and before that it was Biggles and worse). Give anybody a decent library, and turn that individual loose, to choose and reject.

Most of those definitive efforts are wholly vacuous. A dead give-away is listing both Hamlet and the Complete Shakespeare. I’m not convinced I’ve done the second of those — it was only in the last year or so I attended a performance, and then read the text (which was significantly different) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. I’d argue that one is as much John Fletcher as yer ackshul Uncle Bill Shagsper.

But let me get him out of the way to start.

1. Julius Caesar

I give this one priority because it was the first that really ‘got’ to me. 

I’d been fed Midsummer Night’s Dream in a mixed-class at Fakenham Grammar School (now defunct, for good or ill). Perhaps it was all those fairies that were supposed to ‘sell’ this to a captive audience, but it didn’t ‘sell’. Only decades later, when a daughter was doing that play for A-level, did I go back and have another try. That’s when I came across the editorial suggestions that MND is a deep political satire. Which opens a proverbial can-of-worms — but that wasn’t presentable to early adolescents.

Then, for Irish Leaving Cert, we had to do a deep-ish study of Julius Caesar. Which meant learning large chunks of text. This time it all came together. If ever a play was made for all times and all societies, it’s this one. The characters are well-defined. The issues are authoritarianism, ambition, loyalty and opportunism. Assassination is a blood sport that constantly interrupts the flow of history. The structure of the play is impeccable: it fits Freytag’s pyramid precisely:

2. Antony and Cleopatra

I swear if you cut me, I’d bleed A&C. I had to teach it to two groups in two college years. That meant for sixteen hours a week I lived and breathed it. Without realising, I can still place much of the text, even to a particular page of the New Arden edition.

I’d maintain one of the funniest scenes in all Shakespeare is the one on Cleopatra’s tomb (the close rivals for that distinction are the two ‘assisted suicides’ in J.C.) . I could never read those without corpsing.

Judy Dench once reckoned the most difficult speech in all the corpus was Cleopatra’s ‘O!’ — and she does it repeatedly.

For sheer political cynicism there’s always Antony in J.C. and Octavius in A&C.

You may notice I don’t list any of: 

• King Lear, which is based on the most eccentric pretext of a decaying monarch dividing his kingdom, has plenty of gore, includes the (unconscious) hilarity of the cliff-top scene, and comes with a truly gooey ending.
• Hamlet, if only because Omlette is far too complex for my mind (or those of the many critics) to fully comprehend. On top of which the treatment of Ophelia is even more gynophobic than Katerina in Shrew (for which, see below).
• Macbeth, because the play is so incomplete it barely holds together (we clearly have the shortened version, for royal entertainment mainly). I cannot truly engage with any of the characters — each is incomplete, and lacks real depth. The witchery is too crude for words. And I’ve had to teach it to the unwilling far too often.

3. Kiss Me Kate

Fair enough, unlike the above, not really a text.

It is, though, so wonderfully structured it is exemplary.

Kate/Katerina/Lilli is a remarkable part, and demands an equally-remarkable actor. In the original, in 1948-9 on Broadway and then in London, she was [Eileen] Patricia Morison — just one generation out of Belfast, and feisty with it. I saw the 2001 London transfer (after 9/11 did for Broadway) with Marin Mazzie and again the 2012 Chichester transfer, with Hannah Waddington.

To make the thing work, Kate/Lilli has to be in control all the way through — something the Kathryn Grayson/Howard Keel MGM movie doesn’t consistently achieve.

There was a magnificent moment, one worth borrowing, in the 2013 Toby Frow Globe production of Shrew which made the whole farrago make perfect sense. In the first meeting of Katerina and Petruchio they exchange a mutually-knowing look (Beat … Beat …), as if each is recognising a worthy opponent.

And, with Kiss Me Kate, there are always the superb lyrics of Cole Porter.

Now, on with the motley, and some fiction …

Just bloody impossible

The latest upgrade to wordpress makes it totally unusable under Safari.

I don’t see myself continuing this blog under those constraints.

Back to blogger.com?