The Missing Will / A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton
Two words sum up these two volumes of autobiography by one of my most all-time favorite members in terms of the conservative satirical community: bloody disappointing. Wharton’s disciple Auberon Waugh, a much less gifted writer, wrote a much better autobiography, and even that wasn’t very good. But perhaps Wharton wasn’t writing in propria persona: he was writing as himself, not as Peter Simple, the comic genius who began working for The Daily Telegraph on New Year’s Day 1957. I’ve read collections of Simple’s columns over and over again with undiminished enjoyment. If I hadn’t, I’d never have been able to finish The Missing Will or A Dubious Codicil, because doing so was partly a homage to those columns. Peter Simple floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee; Michael Wharton, I’m afraid, stings rather like a butterfly and floats rather like a bee.
He was born Michael Nathan in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 19th April 1913 of a quarter-Jewish German father and an English mother, and grew up to describe himself as a “person of contradictory background, both of race and class [sic], a person without roots, unsure of his own place in the world”. He concluded from this that he ought to have become (like so many with Jewish blood) “a rabid revolutionary, bent on destroying our existing society” (The Missing Will, ch. 2, “Whining and Dining”, pg. 79). In fact, as readers of the Peter Simple column will know, he became a rabid reactionary, hating all change and so-called progress and regarding “Luddite” as a term of praise. Like his literary alter ego, Wharton hates television, cars, the future, rationalism, feminism, scientism, the United Nations, homosexuality, pornography, the race relations industry (a phrase he coined), environmentalists (though he says he was a “Friend of the Earth” thirty years before the phrase was invented), sociology, the Sixties, rock’n’roll, pop music, mathematics, mass immigration, and an ever expanding list of other progressive causes and people. He loves hierarchy, tradition, the past, the aristocracy, wilderness, unreasoning instinct and prejudice, class distinction, words, obscure knowledge, women with “pale reddish hair” and “white, slightly metallic, freckled skin”, conspiracy theories, bird-song, Celtic languages, astronomy, and childhood.
These two autobiographies describe how he came to hold these views as he traveled from a Yorkshire boyhood to Oxford and the BBC via service in the intelligence corps in India during World War Two, before finally, at the age of forty-four and “with one of the most appalling hangovers I have ever had in my life”, sitting down for the first time at his desk in the Daily Telegraph. The trouble is that he doesn’t describe his journey very well or very compellingly, apart from occasional gems in the second volume, at least. This is his description of one of the “legends” of the old hard-drinking Fleet Street, a journalist on the Telegraph called Philip Weston, who was charming and reasonable when sober and a master of invective and insult when drunk:
There was talk of sending him on a tour of all nations in the interests of world peace. ... But he received a check to his all-conquering career one evening when he was performing at the Falstaff across the road. This he occasionally did, as it was said, ‘by special request’, though the landlord there, a stolid Englishman, eyed him less favourably than the Irish landlord of the King and Keys, who appreciated the wild poetry and eloquent flights of fancy of the man. A party of elderly American women, Daughters of the Revolution with blue-rinsed hair and the earnest mien of cultural tourists, entered. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ said their leader, addressing Weston, who was waiting expectantly for a victim. ‘Pardon me, is this your Doctor Johnson’s house?’ Weston, brandishing his umbrella, rose to his feet. ‘I am Doctor Johnson,’ he croaked maniacally. ‘Now fuck off!’ The ladies fell back in confusion, turned and fled.But though he can sometimes convey the talents and personalities of others very effectively, Wharton conveys very little sense of his own and of his effect on those around him. We can take it for granted that he falls in love with many women, but why they should fall in love with him is, by his account, less easy to understand.‘Right, Mr Weston,’ said the landlord. ‘That’s enough. You have gone too far for once. Please take your custom elsewhere. You are barred.’ Smiling in triumph, Weston crossed the road to the Kings and Keys, where he found me talking to Stella Murphy, Desmond Williams’s companion, over from Dublin on a visit. ‘Who’s this?’ shouted Weston. ‘I know all about you, whoever you are. You’ve got a purple bottom!’ Whether Sheila actually had a purple bottom I have no idea; but such was the force of Weston’s personality that it seemed perfectly possible, even likely, that she had. (A Dubious Codicil, ch. 4, “Evenings in Fleet Street”, pp. 126-7)
His own often-remarked diffidence and shyness account for some of this, because he is not one to blow his own trumpet, and he strikes a jarring note when he quotes a friend’s wife who was disappointed by his silence at a first meeting: ‘I’m told you’re mad, brilliant and witty. Can’t see much sign of it.’ It’s impossible not to believe that of Peter Simple; of Michael Wharton it’s much harder, but these books are certainly valuable for the way they explain some of the interests and obsessions Peter Simple has woven his decades of fantasy and polemic from: eastern religions and mysticism (encountered during his service in India); electrical engineering (studied for hack journalism before he began work for the Telegraph); and lead-mines (he broadcast a programme on them while at the BBC).
Also explained is Peter Simple’s opposition to promiscuity and sexual excess. He condemns them on the good but hypocritical grounds that what’s relatively harmless when practised by himself and a few others is not relatively harmless when practised by the masses:
We lived [in the 1950s] in a style which later on became known as ‘permissive’. This way of living, innocent enough by comparison with what was to come later, was acceptable when it was confined to a few people; and taken for granted among them. It was only when it became democratised and was claimed as a ‘human right’ by all or nearly all that it became a danger to civilisation. (The Missing Will, ch. 5, “Atlee and After”, pg. 207 of the 216-page 1984 Hogarth Press paperback)But of course the permissive “style” of Wharton’s hand-to-mouth existence in Bohemian London became the permissive style of the Sixties: in his own small way, Wharton was responsible for what he has railed against ever since. But then his adultery and bedhopping were prompted by age-old instinct, not by politics or ideology or hedonism, and his instincts have been surer guides elsewhere. He prophesied the disaster that has followed the end of white rule in Rhodesia, and has prophesied a similar disaster for South Africa. He has always hated and feared the radical left and understood its hysterical, religious nature:
I went up to the BBC’s counter, where Mitchell and others were drinking and, noticing that they seemed stunned and unhappy, remarked: ‘What’s the matter? What has happened?’ Mitchell turned to me slowly and solemnly and said: ‘Haven’t you heard the news? Stalin is dead.’ I could not help saying: ‘Pity he was ever born.’ Even in 1953, when the supreme monster’s crimes were beginning to be generally known, that might have been an unexpected thing to say even among ordinary people. To these people it was simply blasphemous. They did not speak to me again for a fortnight, and ever afterwards avoided me and also Kate, who, as a wife should, had exactly the same views as myself. (op. cit., ch. 5, pg. 198)During the war he even expressed the wish that the Germans be left free to destroy the Soviet Union, and he was on Franco’s side during the Spanish Civil War. The older I get, the less inclined I am to disagree with him. Decent and perceptive as George Orwell was, he was wrong about socialism, if not about communism, and he did not have Peter Simple’s literary talent or ever write anything that was funny [Not true. Ed.]. But Wharton admits to one important failure of prophecy: staying in a village in the north of England, he and “everyone else in the village”, refreshed by a “gigantic tin of toffee”, watched the “Coronation of Queen Elizabeth” on the first television to appear there. He remarks:
Innocent times. Who would have guessed that within twenty years this magic lantern would turn into a monster, dominating the lives of whole communities, making people entirely and utterly devoid of any sort of talent into celebrities, an instrument of evil and idiocy unparalleled in the history of mankind? (op. cit., ch. 5, pg. 201)And Wharton is acquainted with evil, because he has felt its naked presence during his depressions and melancholies, which are among the most powerfully described parts of his life. He even spent time in a mental hospital and received electric shock treatment, and though it is not true that the mad and depressive are necessarily gifted artists, it is true that gifted artists often suffer from madness and depression. Peter Simple is a very, very gifted artist. If you like the extracts above and you’re not already an admirer of his, you should become one, but you shouldn’t read these books beforehand, because they’re unlikely to convert you to the sacred cause.
Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh, Century, 1991.
If the Holocaust continues to increase its hold on the hearts and minds of all right-thinking folk, it seems quite possible that Auberon Waugh’s body will one day be dug up and put on trial for the disrespect shown by its former occupant, before being ritually burnt and scattered to the four winds. Unless, that is, other professional victims get their hands on it first. AW told jokes about the most inappropriate subjects, from the “three million years of persecution” suffered by the Jews to the graves of still-born West Indian infants, and remarked of himself that his “own small gift” was for “making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear” (pg 215). Contemplating his exercising of this gift and “all the people I have insulted”, he later admits to being “mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist” (229).
But it is the august author of his existence who concerns the Newsletter, and certainly no aficionado of Evelyn Waugh can afford to neglect the autobiography of his eldest son. Waugh père put on a performance for the world and even for his friends, and this book is rather like seeing behind the scenes at a play. Readers will see EW from the wings, as it were, though they should always remember that AW inherited his father’s love of fantasy as well as much of his literary talent. Of one episode from his military service AW remarks “I have told the story so often now that I honestly can’t remember whether it started life as a lie” (105). This may also apply to the infamous “three bananas” devoured with sugar and “almost unprocurable” cream by his father under the “anguished eyes” of his children, to whom the fabled fruit had been sent in the depths of post-war austerity and rationing (67). The story is a dramatic way of illustrating AW’s judgement that EW’s “chief defect was his greed”, and of explaining why AW “never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously” (ibid.), and may be untrustworthy for that very reason.
It may also have been an act of posthumous revenge, working off some of the resentment and even dislike AW felt for his father before leaving home. In 1944, dragged away from his games to meet EW, who was home on leave, AW “would gladly have swapped him for a bosun’s whistle” (30); later, he faced the problem of living with a father who set the emotional climate of his entire household:
The dejection which was liable to seize him at any moment — sparked off by little more than a bad joke, a banal sentiment, a lower-middle-class epithet — made him awkward company at times. When he was in the grips of a major depression, or melancholy as he called it, he was unendurable. (36) ... He was a small man — scarcely five foot six in his socks — and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality. (43)But he did not think his father could have been “pleased by the effect he produced on other people”, and concluded that he “spent his life seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him” — and then usually getting drunk with them, “as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations” (43). Their own relations were marked by “distinct cordiality” (112) in the last five years of EW’s life, and after suffering a near-fatal accident on National Service in Cyprus AW even wrote “a maudlin, deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him” and sent it to his bank to be released “in the event of my predecease” (112). Despite this, EW’s death “lifted a great brooding awareness not only from the house but from the whole of existence” (186). That presence played encores, however, as when AW experienced misgivings about his apostasy from Catholicism:
It is hard to believe that these kindergarten assemblies bear much relation to the ancient institution of the Church as it survived through the Renaissance. The new Mickey Mouse church ... is surely not a reduction of the old religion. It has nothing to do with it, being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded. Or so it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father’s fury rather than Divine Retribution which I dread. (pg. 187)These passages will reinforce the image of EW readers bring to the book; elsewhere, AW may contradict it. It is surprising to read of how EW entertained the “Stinchcombe Silver Band” every Christmas at Piers Court and got “great roars of laughter out of them as he ribbed them about their tipsiness” (49). But AW claims that while the “common touch was certainly not something he cultivated ... in rather a surprising way, when he needed it, he had it”. He then defends EW against the accusation, levelled by the real-life model for “Trimmer” of the War trilogy, that EW had been “detested by the men who served under him”. Not so: the reverse was the truth, according to correspondence AW received after reviewing “Trimmer” ’s autobiography for Books and Bookmen.
The mischief-making apparent in that choice of reviewer is something else that readers may find enlightening, because Will This Do? is describing a particular British class and culture. When, on his National Service, AW saw two Wykehamists rejected by their school-fellows after failing the War Office Selection Board, he noted “the ruthlessness of the British establishment”, and the “cruelty” that “flourishes in the law and wherever public school Englishmen are given power over each other”. AW reveals the limitation of his perspective here, perhaps, because ruthlessness and cruelty are not a monopoly of public school Englishmen, but his readers’ understanding of his father’s novels may be deepened by his descriptions of public school ruthlessness and cruelty in action, his own amongst them.
Insights are also offered into Catholic psychology, as when AW reveals one of his father’s secrets and has to cover up his role after it finds its way into the papers:
‘It was not I who sold you to them, although I have a theory as to who did.’ Readers will observe how, with typical Catholic casuistry, there is no actual untruth in this letter, as I had not actually sold the information to Rose, merely told it to him by way of passing the time of day. (127-8)AW also muses on what might have been had he taken a different degree:
My exhibition [scholarship examination] had been in English, but my father advised me that this was a girl’s subject, unsuited to the dignity of a male. Lord David Cecil had been rather upset when I told him this, staying at Portofino before my first Oxford team. [sic] I had forgotten he was Professor of English at Oxford. ... Perhaps I should have stayed the course in English, instead of finding myself lumbered with this rubbishy PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics]. (148)For the immediate future, however, the most significant passage in the book may be a description from AW’s National Service during the Cyprus emergency of 1958, when the island’s Greek inhabitants wanted union with Greece and its Turkish inhabitants wanted secession. A party of Greeks were “dropped on the Nicosia-Kyrenia main road” to make their way home after “questioning and document-checking”. Unfortunately, they were dropped near a village of Turks, who mistook them for a war-party:
The Turks poured out of the village and quite literally hacked them to pieces. It was a very messy business. Nine Greeks were killed and many others mutilated. Hands and fingers were all over the place and one officer wandered around, rather green in the face, holding a head and asking if anyone had seen a body which might fit it. (103-4)EW ended his preface to Alfred Duggan’s Count Bohemond (1964), set at the time of the Crusades, with the claim that “It is highly appropriate that this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms against the infidel.” His own son saw the old conflict beginning again, as predicted by Hilaire Belloc, the “terrifying old man with a huge white beard” (16) AW met in extreme youth in his maternal grandmother’s house at Pixton. AW’s adulthood may yet prove to have fallen in the sun-lit patch between the shadows of the Second World War and serious racial and religious conflict in Europe.
His final, objective judgment of his father is that “Evelyn Waugh detested the modern world but did rather well out of it” (123). He himself, blessed with a more equable temperament and unridden by the demon of “melancholy”, could be said to have done even better but to have left a less enduring mark on the world. But one of the charms of his autobiography is that it preserves some Evelynian ephemera: had they not been recorded here, the handwritten Augustan prose instructing visitors on the vagaries of a lavatory at Piers Court and the Yardley’s Lavender Hair tonic that EW put on his head when he changed for dinner (43) might have dropped entirely out of history. EW writes in The Loved One (1948) of how death strips “the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence” from the body, leaving it “altogether smaller than life-size”. Will This Do? preserves a few tufts of his own pelt and although as the years pass the book will, alas, be read increasingly out of an interest in the father, not the son, AW had no illusions about his own importance in the scheme of things. Even so, he may have laid booby-traps of fantasy and exaggeration in the stories he tells about his father, but what more appropriate rite of filial pietas could he have performed?
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I can’t remember when I first read Brave New World, but I’m fairly certain it was before I was in my teens. And I’m absolutely certain that I loved it, though I didn’t realize at the time that I loved it for what, from the author’s point of view, were all the wrong reasons. To me, the brave new world of Brave New World was exactly that: brave, and brave because it was new, that is, scientific. Life-long good health, hypnopaedically guaranteed satisfaction with one’s lot in life, abundant guilt-free sex with a never-ending stream of partners, new forms of art stimulating and satiating all the senses, and a perfectly safe, perfectly legal pleasure-drug to fill any remaining space in one’s cup of happiness.
If that was what lay ahead of us, I couldn’t wait and I couldn’t understand the plea for the right to be unhappy – to suffer dissatisfaction, disappointment, disease, and pain – made by one of the characters towards the end. I understand it better now, but I don’t think I’m much more in sympathy with it. The brave new world of Brave New World still looks pretty brave to me and the only thing I would truly find fault with now is its intellectual stagnation. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, science is utterly subordinated to state policy, but where in Nineteen Eighty-Four state policy is to enslave and imprison, in Brave New World state policy is to enthral and entertain.
And as a prophecy, Brave New World might seem to be batting with a much better average Nineteen Eighty-Four. Soma, the harmless pleasure-drug named after the ambrosia of Hindu myth, is very reminiscent of Prozac, and the hedonistic consumption of the Brave-New-Worlders – no new sport is approved unless it is at least as complicated and dependant on technology as existing ones – is only slightly less reminiscent of our hedonistic consumption.
Though that second prophecy wasn’t so much prophetic as satirical: like Nineteen Eighty-Four, which caricatured the BBC and the greyness and conformity of 1940s Britain, Brave New World caricatured the hedonistic consumerism of the 1930s, when the rich were as in love with technology and the pursuit of pleasure as we are now. Both books meant to create dystopias, but I think only Orwell’s truly succeeded in doing so. The vision presented by Orwell is that of a boot stamping on a human face, for ever. The vision presented by Huxley is that of perfume being poured on a human face, for ever. I know which face I’d rather were mine, though as an educated member of the middle class, I probably don’t have to worry: Huxley’s is the future my class is heading towards. Orwell’s is the future the working class is heading towards.
But the future, as usual, is already America’s present. Science is simultaneously expanding the freedom – which means, of course, the freedom to consume – of one group while destroying the freedom of another. Huge numbers of American men, mostly black and uneducated, are being shut away in prison for mostly trivial crimes connected with drugs. The technologies of surveillance and control are growing more sophisticated and powerful by the month and it seems likely that the diametric dystopias presented to us by Orwell and Huxley will arrive simultaneously in the United Kingdom as they have already arrived in the United States.
But as a novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four is far superior to Brave New World, which suffers from the faults of other Huxley fictions: that is, plot and character serve as excuses, and often transparent ones, for Huxley to present his political and psychological ideas. What I loved as a boy I often laugh at as an adult, because Christopher Sykes’ acerbic aside on Huxley in his biography of Evelyn Waugh is right: you can hear the scene-shifters bawling instructions at each other.
And that’s as true here as it is in, for example, Huxley’s After Many A Summer: the characters are ciphers and his plot – the visit to the Indian Reservation, for example – often highly contrived. Intelligence and erudition don’t guarantee a good novel and certainly didn’t here, and although I’ll always have affectionate memories of Brave New World from my boyhood, I can’t take it seriously any more. If that is our future, I don’t mind, so long as true science finds some way to survive in it and so long as it includes all of us, not just an élite.
Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton
Are there two drearier words in English than “literary theory”? God, I hope not. They strike me rather like “rainbow bleaching” and “orchid mashing”, and though film theory and the writing it inspires are often even worse, film theory doesn’t annoy or depress me a tenth as much. Film is a fatuous, trivial medium invented very recently and flourishing best in America, so it’s entirely appropriate that it should be written about in fatuous, trivial ways by semi-literate barbarians. Literature is not a fatuous or trivial medium and it’s existed for thousands of years in writing, and far, far longer in speech and song. It is not appropriate that it should be written about in fatuous, trivial ways by semi-literate barbarians.
But even writers I greatly admire, like C.S. Lewis and Lytton Strachey, seem to become lifeless and uninspired when they turn to literary criticism, and its skeletal hand has only tightened its grip on the throat of literature since their day. If you closed every department of maths and physics and shot every maths and physics graduate, those subjects would be very seriously harmed and take decades to recover. If you closed every arts department and shot every arts graduate, literature and the other arts could very well undergo a new renaissance, with the great bonus that The Guardian and BBC would have to close down too. As it is, maths and physics are struggling to survive in British universities while “study” of the arts flourishes as never before, achieving less and less with more and more self-importance.
For an example of that self-importance, try this from Terry Eagleton’s introduction:
Those who complain of the difficulty of such theory would often, ironically enough, not expect to understand a textbook of biology or chemical engineering straight off. Why then should literary studies be any different?To see how fatuous and ignorant that question is, compare “literary studies” with mathematics. Both have existed as serious subjects for thousands of years, but whereas all reasonably intelligent educated adults could still understand the literary criticism of the ancient Greeks, far fewer could understand their mathematics. And mathematics, apart from the stagnation that accompanied the triumph of Christianity, has only become more difficult with every century that has passed since the ancient Greeks. Literary criticism did not become more difficult: for more than two millennia it could be read and understood by all reasonably intelligent educated adults. Unlike mathematics, it did not advance because it was tied to something that is already fully developed in human beings: the faculty of language.
Then the clouds of ink squirted by cuttlefish like Marx and Freud began to drift into “literary studies” from sociology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, and by the 1960s literary criticism had become something it had never been before: opaque and obscurantist. Compare A.E. Housman’s study of Swinburne, from the beginning of the twentieth century, with the semi-literate maunderings of countless literary critics and cultural “commentators” today. Here’s Eagleton himself about to engage with issues around “Structuralism and Semiotics”:
We left American literary criticism at the end of the Introduction in the grip of New Criticism, honing its increasingly sophisticated techniques and fighting a rearguard action against modern science and industrialism. (ch. 3, pg. 79)How exactly does one simultaneously “hone increasingly sophisticated techniques” and “fight a rearguard action”, let alone do both while one is “in the grip” of something? The shallowness of Eagleton’s intellect and insight is apparent in the carelessness and self-contradiction of his own prose, and his is by no means the worst you can find today. Housman’s prose, by contrast, is both highly literate and highly readable, but then Housman had serious literary achievements in his own write and took no notice of metaphysics or speculative psychology. Given his prose, the “seminal” figures Eagleton discusses here are exactly the ones you’d expect: Heidegger, Lacan, Barthes, Freud, Bakhtin, Derrida, Saussure. All of them are maggots in the corpse of Christianity or Judaism, wriggling merrily in the metaphysical European tradition. You’ll look in the index of this book in vain for representatives of Anglophone empiricism like John Locke and David Hume, and Charles Darwin only appears as an example of what-literature-is-not. In short, there’s nothing solid, just glittering vapor and colored smoke, rather like a traditional Catholic mass.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence either. Priestly religions are designed to keep priests housed and fed, which is why their claims are not tested against reality. But priestly religions can exist in disguised forms. Accordingly, as the vast parasitic cult of overt priests and theologians has declined in the West, so a vast parasitic cult of academics has risen to take its place in the humanities departments of our universities, with its own sacred scriptures, prophets, and saints. Like priests and theologians, these academics produce nothing valuable either materially or immaterially, and unlike priests and theologians they don’t inspire (or at least preside) great work by others. Unlike the old priestly and theological cult too, the modern academic cult is much more “gender-balanced”. My formula for the intellectual worth and rigor of a modern subject is simple: they’re inversely proportional to the number of women involved. True, that’s also the formula for the threat posed by a subject, because literary studies, unlike hard science, has no potential to cause very serious harm to the wider world, but fortunately one of the most certain examples of the serious harm hard science will cause is to literary studies itself and the rebarbative remainder of the modern humanities. Neurology and evolutionary biology will in fairly short order destroy their narcissistic obfuscations and mendacities, and unlike the scientific undermining of religion we won’t lose anything valuable in the process.
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Sza pwlaelz bawdra ael iqa yffsza myls, palzwpl sza mils, aempilswqs mambal yffsza rygur wdmaeqaelslusaeyq. Za ael qis ly warr yff wl sza gzslgzwuldaql, galswaeqri, qyl ael za li raulqad wl sza valsli-gralk, qyl dial za ildal szaeqql qsaesa ly msgz zael ywq wuy ul aaeszal yffszam. Bss zael pyual ael vali qlaws, qysuaeszlswqdaeqq; wqd sza daeqqaesy yffzael iffaega ael qaval aempuaelad by sza wblaqga iffaffylsl yq zael puls si mwaeqswaeq aes. Sza bawdra yffisl pulaelz ael w lpraqdaed farryu. Aes ael qsaesa daraeqzsfsr sy zawl zaem, ul za axprwaeql sza lsusa iffsza axaelsaeqq pyyl ruul sy sza dawf ird wymaq aeq sza bywld- lyym pullwqa yq bslaeqall qaeqzsl; uqd si zawl uzws za luaed sy sza laqaeyl gzslgzwuldaq, wqd wzws sza laqaeyl gzslgzuwldaq luaed sy zaem; wqd uzus wa (sza bawdra uqd sza iszal qaqsramaq) gwma si sza dasalmaeqwsaeiq iffdyaeqq. W maelalubra-ryykaeqq wimuq ael gwrrad aeqsy sza biwldlyym, wqd laplalaqsl w gwla iffaxslama dalsaesssaeyq, uffagsaeqq zallarf--w uaediw, uaesz laex lmwrr gzaerdlaq. Wzala di iis raeva aeqqsaelal yqa iffsza yvallaall. Ae laqsl w sui-pwael bugk, qaqsramaq, ws mll. Blywq’l, qsmbal e, raessra kaeqq waerraeum’l-wrray, uzaegz zwl raevad szala szael faefsaaq iawl, wqd kqywl ma sy ba vali zwld-wylkaeqq uqd aeqdslslaeisl, wqd uzaq my piyl zslbwqd uwl uraeva, qaqsramaq, wl daead aeq sza zylpaeswr – uarr, warr, aeqsallspsl sza ivallaal, sukaeqq w qysa iffsza wddlall, ae’rr laqd laemmyql, sza baudra, si-myllyw mylqaeqq, si ulgalswaeq wzaszal yysl lsili ael gillags; wqd aef li, ae lsppyla iys msls zwva wq ildal aeqsy sza zisla – laemmyql, qi sy szael wimuq’l sza faells szaeqq sy-mylliw mylqaeqq, uaerr iys laemmyql bywl ullaqs, wqd slzall sza wimuq yss. Zal plavaeisl wdmaelusaeyq yff’sza bywld (wzi urr laes bazaeqd qlaws byikl, wqd waesz szaael zusl yq) fwdal aeqsi qyszaeqq bafila zal lalpags fyl zal ruga-slaemmad giqdsgsil; wqd zal uggysqs iffwzus zwl pwllad aeqlaeda, aeqglaulal – aef szws ba pyllaebra – sza mulkl ifflalpags, lzywq by sza wllambrad glyud, si szws lyramq fsqgsaeiquly. Wl si swkaeqq iss u lsmmiql, aes’l qsaesa w zyparall gula aef laemmyql wssaqdl aes, iq bazurf yffsza pwlaelz. Za kqiul wrr sza saesral yffsza rild mwiyl bi zawls; lswsal sza gwla uaesziss w laeqqra lsummal: wqd aes ael avaq lapylsad szus yq yqa yggwlaeiq za vaqsslad sy muka w jika, wzaegz sza ryld mwiyl’l zawd fiysmuq (wzi zuppaqad sy ba plalaqs) wfsalwwldl sird wq aeqsaemusa flaeaqd, gyqfaedaqsaewrri, uwl urmyls aqswr si iqa yffml. Zibral’l.
Trowbridge Public Library
Laa zaem wqwaeq yq lsqdwi aeq zael lswsa-gyws wqd gigkad-zws, waesz w rwlqa-zawdad lswff fyl lziw aeq zael rafs zwqd, wqd w lmwrr guqa fyl sla aeq zael laeqzs. Zyu pympyslri za mullzwrl sza gzaerdlaq aeqsi szaael prugal! Wqd zyu damslari sza raessra slgzaeql ryik us zaem wlkwqga wl za lslvayl szam uzaq szai ula urr lausad, waesz u qrwla yffsza aya pagsraewl si bawdral! Sza gzslgzwwldaql uqd ivallaall baaeqq dsri aeqlswrrad aeq szaael gslsuaeqad pawl, za lausl zaemlarf yq w mwziquqy blwgkas, alagsad axplallri fyl zaem us sza syp yffsza waelra, wqd daevaedal zael wsuzaqsaeiq basuaaq zael plwyal-biyk uqd sza biil. Lsddaqry, jsls ws sza gimmaqgamaqs yffsza gymmsqaeiq lalvaega, uzaq sza wzyra giqqlaqusaeyq ael zslzad aeqsy w plifysqd laeraqga, blikaq yqry by sza viaega yffsza iffaegaeusaeqq gralqymwq, w paqqy ael zawld sy laeqq iq sza lsyqa friyl yffsza waelra waesz wlsysqdaeqq grawlqall. Yblalva sza qaqalurlzaep yffsza bawdra. Zael aeqvyrsqsuli ryik yffzillyl ael aeqlswqsri gzuqqad aeqsi yqa yffpalfags aeqdaeffalaqga, wl aef za uala sza yqry pallyq plalaqs wzi zud qis zawld sza qiaela. Sza ulsaefaega lsggaadl. Wfsal psussaeqq fylsz zael laeqzs raq qyu wqd szaq, ul w faaral, sza vaegsaem wzy dlippad sza myqai vaqsuzlal sy mwka yqa yl sui daelsaeqgs daeval wfsal aes; uqd sza bawdra, qraedaeqq lyfsry lisqd, lurssal zael raessra lysqd zawd, wzaq aes wquaeq wppaull wbiva sza laws, waesz daevall dysbra kqigkl, udmaeqaelsalad waesz sza guqa bafyla qisaegad, si sza aeqsaqla daraeqzs yffszlaa yisqq maq aeq wq udjugaqs pau, uzy gisqz vaeyraqsry ws aeqsalvurl sqsaer sza giqgrslaeyq iffsza lalmyq.
Lesgoz wla u faw sluaesl yffsza aempilswqga uqd qlwvaesy yffw pwlaelz baudra – w qluvaesi wzaegz zul qaval baaq daelsuzlbad aeq uqy gula szws zwl gima sqdal ysl yblalvwsaeiq, axgaps wzaq sza lalvaegal yffszus pwlsaegsrulri slafsr mwgzaeqa, w pulaelz faela-aqqaeqa, wla laqsaelad: szaq aeqdaad urr ael bsliswra. Swy raessra byyl lsq si sza baudra wl fwls wl szaael raql uaerr gwlly szam, uqd lapyls flym szaael iwq pallyqur iblalvwsaeyq szus lyma qaaeqzbislaeqq gzaemqay ael iq faela; sza aqqaeqa ael zwlsaery qys isuz, uqd w praqsaefsr lsppry iffbyil baaeqq ybswaeqad, wqd zulqallad si aes waesz lypal, uwwi szay lwsusra ival sza puvamaqs, sza bawdra, lsqqaeqq – ua dy qis axwqqalusa – lsqqaeqq ws sza laeda, sqsaer szay ullaeva ws lima zisla, lmarraeqq lslyqqri yffliys, ws sza diyl iffwzaegz sza bawdra kqygkl waesz gyqlaedalubra qluvaesy fyl zurf-wq-zysl. Qi wssaqsaeyq baaeqq pwaed si szala mwqsur wppraegusaeyql, wqd sza suslq-gigk zuvaeqq suzlqad yq sza wusal, sza aqqaeqa suslql yff wmaedls sza lzissl iffsza biyl; aes psrrl sp yqga myla us sza wylk-zysla, uqd sza bawdra psrrl sp’ sza sqfilssqusa zyslazirdal qaxs dwy, fyl sza umysqs yffzael raqwr lauwld. Wa qaval lwu w pulaelz aqqaeqa ws u laqsrwl faela bsuz iqga. Aes guma sp aeq qwrruqs lsyra – szlaa maeral wqd w zurf wq zysl, us rawls; szala wwl w gupaeswr lsppri yffuwsal, uqd aes wul faells iq sza lpys. Bwqq uaqs sza psmpl – sza paypra gzaalad – sza bawdra pallpaelad plifslary; bsuz aes uwl sqfilssqusari daelgyvalad, jsls wl szay uala qyaeqq si psuz sza faela yss, szus qibydi sqdallsyyd sza pligall by uzaegz sza aqqaeqa uwl faerrad uaesz uusal; uqd szws aaeqzsaaq biyl, uqd w muq, zwd axzuslsad szamlarval aeq psmpaeqq fil swaqsy maeqssal, uaesziss plydsgaeqq sza lraeqzsals affags.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Different readers will carry away different memories of this famous book, and the closing page will probably be high amongst them. For me, though, one of the most memorable things in it is something that is never properly described: the yellow book. And no, it’s not the yellow book, or rather The Yellow Book, the ephemeral if highly influential literary journal of the last-but-one century’s fin-de-siècle, but the fictional volume here from which it very likely took its name, the final drop of moral venom that poisons the soul of the novella’s eponymous gilded youth:
For years, Dorian Grey could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than nine large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.It is obviously based on Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against Nature) – indeed Wilde admitted as much during the trial, in 1895, that destroyed his career and, ultimately, his life – but from the description of its plot given in the story it’s not a slavish imitation. In some ways it sounds even more fantastically perverse, and is all the more powerful for being eternally unknowable, like the terrible shared crime that enables Dorian to blackmail a former friend into helping him conceal a murder. Each age has its own definitions of the perverse and unspeakable, and delights in their being different from, or even complete reversals of, those of past ages. The Yellow Book, which will never be read, like the Alan Campbell’s crime, which will never be revealed, will never lose its unspeakable, and irresistible, tang of the forbidden.
A Serious Life, D.M. Mitchell
There are three big flaws in this history and critique of the Manchester publishers Savoy and its co-founder and chief author David Britton. The first flaw is that it doesn’t have an index. The second flaw is that the prose hasn’t received the same meticulous care and attention as the design: some sections haven’t been proof-read thoroughly and the writing hasn’t been polished enough. As a work of polemic and analysis, it hits bullseye after bullseye; as a work of literature, it isn’t as good as it could, and should, have been. The third flaw is that it simply isn’t long enough: I wanted to read much, much more. The breadth and depth of reading (and listening) Mitchell brings to bear on his subject are awe-inspiring: Savoy are a very intelligent and erudite publisher, and they’ve found a very intelligent and erudite chronicler. And he wasn’t preaching to the converted: I’m not myself interested in David Britton’s books or comics, because I don’t enjoy or understand avant-garde art and I don’t like his subject-matter or many of the writers, such as Joyce and Burroughs, who have influenced him. It doesn’t matter: you don’t have to be a Britton fan to appreciate A Serious Life, because you don’t have to be a Britton fan to appreciate his talent or the serious intent and intelligence of his work.
Beside which, Britton is only part of the story: Savoy have been in existence for thirty years and have published many authors, from M. John Harrison to Mike Harding, on the way. And their roots, Mitchell asserts, lie much further in the past than that: although he isn’t an openly acknowledged influence, the Marquis de Sade is, in Mitchell’s analysis, the specter at Savoy’s feast. Maligned, misunderstood, and misappropriated, de Sade and Britton are spiritual and satirical brothers, excoriating the evils and hypocrisies of their day and being persecuted for their pains. The opening essay on de Sade and his successors, from the French surrealists to William Burroughs, is probably the best and most precisely focused part of the book, but the recognition of the importance of history and tradition is everywhere: no artist is an island and Mitchell is exploring and mapping a continent of visionaries and mavericks, from William Blake and Little Richard to William Hope Hodgson and Barry Humphries. But history and tradition aren’t, for Mitchell, simply a matter of the handing-down of text and image: art, like the wider culture it is part of, is rooted in biology, and human biology is not one and indivisible. The most interesting explorations of this theme occur in the chapter devoted to Henry Treece and his Celtic tetralogy and the section devoted to rock’n’roll: the Celts and the blacks are distinctive in significant ways, and when black music, for example, was taken up by whites it was transformed in significant ways. We listen with our blood, and our blood influences us when we come to reproduce what we hear.
We see with our blood too, and Savoy have never been devoted purely to literature. From the beginning they were mixing word with image; later they took up music too. The artists John Coulthart and Kris Guido and the singer P.J. Proby are central figures in the Savoy story alongside Britton and his collaborator Michael Butterworth, and each receives detailed attention. As when he’s tracing Savoy’s literary influences and predecessors, Mitchell can place Savoy in their visual and musical context and draw instructive parallels, some of the musical ones probably unrecognized at the time by Savoy themselves. Some of the visual ones have definitely passed over the head of younger Savoy fans: parodies of the Magnet and Film Fun for issues of their Meng & Ecker comics, for example. Savoy’s work is rooted in, or through, Britton’s and Butterworth’s youth in the 1950s and Savoy can’t be understood properly without the 1950s. Some of that youth was shared by countless millions around the world, like the aftermath of world war and the advent of rock’n’roll, some only by those in Manchester or the north, like the work of the artist Ken Reid, whose gently (and not so gently) surreal elves Fudge and Speck are the ancestors of Savoy’s viciously surreal Meng and Ecker. Reid, like rock’n’roll and Henry Treece, receives a chapter of his own, and Savoy’s kindness towards and concern for him are another repudiation of the charges sometimes laid against them. They aren’t nihilists and they aren’t fascists, and the irony is that they understand nihilism and fascism much better than many of their critics.
Which brings me, inevitably, to Lord Horror, Savoy’s heart of darkness. I don’t want to read the novels or the comics in which he appears, but it was fascinating to read the account of what and whom they’re woven from: modernism, cubism, Catholicism, rock’n’roll, William Hope Hodgson, Picasso, Burroughs William and Edgar Rice, Joyces James and William, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Eliot, and much more. But in the section devoted to Horror is, perhaps, another of A Serious Life’s flaws. Mitchell is a friend of Britton’s as well as a biographer, and perhaps someone with more distance would have been able to ask questions that have occurred to me when I’ve read about the trouble Lord Horror has caused for Savoy. Put simply: did Britton want to be a martyr? Did he deliberately provoke his prison sentences? Artists have egos too and egos demand recognition, and there’s no doubt that Savoy are most famous for their confrontations with the police and judiciary. It’s brought them some fans they could have done without too, but some, at least, of those fans may see the error of their ways if they read A Serious Life, although some may be licking their lips at the prospect, dangled in the introduction, of Savoy publishing correspondence by those “bêtes noires of the establishment” Ian Brady and Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Those names, and that phrase, don’t fit the rest of the introduction or the book as a whole, for the simple reason that they’re Savoy’s, not Mitchell’s. Even good Homer nods – and Savoy are part of a tradition that stretches back to Homer and beyond, to the prehistoric bards and shamans of Celtic and pre-Aryan Europe whose words are now for ever lost. That Savoy have never been properly recognized as such is, in my view, exactly what they should expect and want. If you have any interest in them, you’ve almost certainly already read this book; if you have any interest in modern British literature or culture, you certainly need to read it. There are more important things than art and literature, but without them you’re not leading a serious life.
The Football Factory Trilogy, John King
I think Mark Steyn once pointed out in a review of an earthy film that the French have a useful concept known as nostalgie de la boue. The Oxford English Dictionary translates it as “a yearning for mud”. Slumming it. Rough trade. In an artistic sense. The concept seems to apply to John King’s books too: football hooliganism and shagging. The Football Factory kicked it off. A working-class lad whose name escaped me – if it’s mentioned, I missed it, because I rapidly got bored with the book and stopped reading properly – narrates episodes from his life as a Chelsea fan. “West Ham at Home” is one chapter heading. “Newcastle Away” is another. Punch-ups, pub windows put through, faces slashed, and so on.
The descriptions have the ring – or thud – of authenticity, particularly when nothing goes off in the “Newcastle Away” chapter because the police have tracked the coaches and make sure those on board don’t get loose in Newcastle (except for some, not including the narrator, who leave the coaches and hire taxis). In between the hooligan chapters, however, are vignettes from other parts of working-class life, and they aren’t convincing. The sex is weak, even risible, and King doesn’t have much of an ear for dialog, particularly not for badinage and wit.
Headhunters was the follow-up and is sailing under false colors, because it’s named after the most famous Chelsea hooligan gang and doesn’t have much hooliganism in it. I’d given up reading properly long before I reached this section of the three-in-one volume, so I can’t say much about it except that the other parts of working-class life are predominating and King’s weaknesses are letting him down even more badly. Presumably King’s editor realized this and made him use the deceptive title to draw in the people attracted by the violence of the first book.
And presumably the editor made him concentrate more on the violence in the final book in the trilogy, England Away. There are attempts here to draw parallels between English football hooliganism and English militarism but I think that they, like everything else “significant” King tries to say, don’t work, and the sex – with a Thai prostitute in Amsterdam called Nicky and a German nymphomaniac called Ingrid – is even less convincing than it was before. According to the back cover, the magazine Total Football has described King as “the nation’s finest writer of football fiction”. That’s rubbish. He says very little about football, though he says a lot about a particular culture associated with it. According to the front cover, Irvine Welsh has described King as “the author of the best books written about English culture since the War”. Welsh is either talking through his hat (as usual) or taking the piss out of the English.
Haunter of the Dark, John Coulthart
Think “H.P. Lovecraft” and you think “horror”. This book will teach you that you should think “beauty” as well. The Manchester artist John Coulthart has been working on comic-strip adaptations, paintings, and drawings inspired by Lovecraft’s words for more than a decade now, and Haunter of the Dark finally collects the lot in one volume, all the way from the Haunter of the Dark adaptation in 1986 to the newly created Ten Qabalistic invocations of the Lovecraftian deities, with accompanying text by Alan Moore.
Open Haunter of the Dark anywhere and you’ll find something darkly disturbing and often darkly beautiful too, with the phantasmagoric kaleidoscopes of the invocations almost seeming to perform themselves as you turn the pages. The invocations close the first, longer section of the book; the second, concluding section takes Lovecraftian themes and imagery beyond the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp with the harrowing art Coulthart created for the Lord Horror comics of the Manchester publishers Savoy.
You won’t want to linger here: this is Lovecraft stripped of beauty and wonder and set against industrial shitscapes of mass-murder, despair, and mischief-joy. Elsewhere, in the sections directly inspired by Lovecraft, you’ll linger knowing that you’ll return again and again. If there’s a better artistic interpretation of Lovecraft I would like to see it, but I don’t think there is or that anyone could surpass this but Coulthart himself.
Headlong Hall / Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock
Dubious disciple of Tarzan expresses proud ornithophilia (6,4,7).I’m no good at cryptic crosswords. I’d like to think this is because I didn’t do them as a kid, but then I never felt any inclination to do them as a kid and where there’s no inclination, there’s often no ability. Either way, it’s a pity, because cryptic crosswords can be great fun. The fun lies in playing with words and ideas in a not very serious way.
Rather like reading the books of the writer this review is about. His name is concealed in the cryptic clue above. If you haven’t worked it out, don’t worry, because I wouldn’t have either if someone else had invented the clue. So let’s take it a step at a time. Who was a dubious disciple? Well, he was a bit more than a disciple, but “apostle” didn’t alliterate (among other things). My saying that should allow you to work out that the first word is THOMAS. Now, forget about the bit in the middle and concentrate on the bit on the end. “Ornithology” is bird-study, so “ornithophilia” must be bird-love. And it’s proud. But is that “proud love” or “proud bird”? My asking that should allow you to work out that the third word is PEACOCK. Now let’s try the bit in the middle. A disciple of Tarzan called Thomas is expressing his love for peacocks. How might he go about it? Well, how did Tarzan go about expressing the same emotion? Tarzan love Jane. My explaining that should allow you to work out that the full answer is THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.
He sounds like a ’sixties pyschedelic band, doesn’t he? Maybe he was – if he wasn’t, he should have been. First and foremost, though, he was a writer, born in 1785, died in 1866. In Weymouth and London, respectively. He was only a minor literary figure even in his day, but that’s part of what I like about him. That and his name. And his books.
Well, two of them, anyway. He wrote seven-and-a-bit: Headlong Hall (1816); Melincourt (1817); Nightmare Abbey (1818); Maid Marian (1822); The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829); Crotchet Castle (1831); Gryll Grange (1860); and Calidore (which he never completed). I’ve tried four of them, and given up with two. The two I gave up with were The Misfortunes of Elphin and Crotchet Castle. The two I didn’t give up with were Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey.
The fact that those two are also his most famous books tends to suggest that they’re his best too. And his best is very good. Headlong Hall is a satire on, among other things and other people, the Romantic Movement and figures like Shelley and Byron; Headlong Hall takes a narrower view and satirizes the Romantic Movement through just Shelley and his hopeless love-affairs. For a flavor of the first, here is Mr Foster, the perfectibilist, who believes that the human race is getting better with every generation:
“In short,” said he, “everything we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection.”Foster and his perfectibilism are adamantly and absolutely opposed by the deteriorationist Mr Escot, who believes that, on the contrary, the human race is getting worse with every generation:
“[T]hese improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole human race in irreparable slavery and incurable wretchedness: your improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factitious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them are invented, which each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness.”But Mssr Escot and Foster are opposed, or perhaps balanced, by Mr Jenkison, the statu-quo-ite, who believes that the balance of good and bad remains the same from generation to generation:
I have often debated the matter in my own mind, pro and con, and have at length arrived at this conclusion – that there is not in the human race a tendency either to moral perfectibility or deterioration; but that the quantities of each are so exactly balanced by their reciprocal results, that the species, with respect to the sum of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, happiness and misery, remains exactly and perpetually in statu quo.Throw in more philosophers and scholars attached with equal fervor to other, and odder, world-views, mix with absurd incidents, absurder love-affairs, and season with genuine learning and wit, and you have the recipe with which Thomas Love Peacock has appealed to a small but select audience ever since Headlong Hall was first published in 1816. Two years later, in 1818, he followed it with Nightmare Abbey, which is less a feast than a single dish, but no less delicious for that. Even better, you can buy both for a pound in the Wordsworth series at a bookshop near you now.
Dirty Weekend, Helen Zahavi
In 1991 a woman called Helen Zahavi had a book called Dirty Weekend published. It is set in Brighton and is the “story of Bella, who woke up one morning and realised that she’d had enough.” What she has had enough of is being sexually victimized by men. First she takes a hammer to the skull of a man who has been threatening her with rape. Next she suffocates a lecturer called Norman with a polythene bag after he has hit her for laughing at his failure to achieve an erection. Next she rams a dentist’s Mercedes into the legs of the dentist, who is urinating against a car-park wall after forcing her to fellate him. Next she shots dead three Clockwork-Orangean young men, who have cornered and stripped and readied for incineration an old bag-lady. Finally, beneath a pier on Brighton Beach, she turns the tables on a Geordie serial killer by stabbing him to death before he can strangle her.
I’m quite proud that I can summarize the entire book like that, because it took some effort to finish it. Dirty Weekend isn’t a very well-written book, but it is in places surprisingly (and intentionally) funny. Probably the most interesting question it raises, however, is whether Zahavi had ever read de Sade’s Justine, because Dirty Weekend reads very much like it in some ways. The female protagonist in each book only has to meet a man for her to be sexually abused or threatened by him, but whereas de Sade’s heroine has to grimace and bear it, Zahavi’s grimaces and then kills the man. In neither book is this constant stream of encounters with sexual madmen credible, and Dirty Weekend is in its own way just as much as a wish-fulfilment fantasy as Justine. However, where de Sade’s fantasies centre on sexual violence against women, Zahavi’s centre on the violent death of men.
The problem is that, though doubtless intended to be, the violence in Dirty Weekend isn’t very shocking. There’s a simple reason for this: violence against men isn’t a shocking thing. On the contrary, it’s a perfectly familiar and acceptable thing. Entire genres of literature and film are based on it. “Sports” like boxing and American football exploit it and earn billions of pounds every year from it perfectly legally. Millennia of military tradition sanction it. Reading about men’s skulls being cracked, faces smashed, legs broken and livers punctured isn’t shocking, even when it’s a woman handing out the punishment.
However, the book might well have become as shocking as Zahavi intended it to be if the scenes of violence in the book had not simply been preceded by sex, but had actually incorporated them. A woman castrating her way through an assortment of males or raping them with a strap-on dildo, or both, might have had some of the shock-value attributed to the book in the hype that accompanied its appearance, because sexual violence against men isn’t a familiar part of our culture. Subconsciously, Zahavi may be hinting at this more disturbing sex-with-violence. She talks about penis-envy only once in the book: as Bella stands on a hotel balcony listening to the sexual boasts of three yobs walking
[B]eneath her, she experienced, for the first time in her life, a stab of purest penis-envy. She knew ... a willy would indeed have been wonderful. For she was unable, anatomically incapable of, expressing herself in the way that she wished.Which was to piss on the yobs. However, penis-envy may be more of a motif that the book openly admits. One man is killed with a hammer, one with a Mercedes, one with a knife, three with a gun. All these men were either sexually threatening to Bella or had actually sexually abused her, and all the weapons could be seen as substitute phalluses. The man killed by being suffocated with a polythene bag, which isn’t a substitute phallus, was impotent. In other words, he wasn’t a sexual threat. Unlike the others, he doesn’t threaten rape and so, unlike the others, he doesn’t have to be “raped” to death in return.
So is rape wrong, or only wrong when the victim doesn’t deserve it? On the back cover of Dirty Weekend, feminist sex-kitten Andrea Dworkin is recorded as having said this of the book:
Poor Martin Amis, poor D.M. Thomas. The game’s over, boys – literary terrorism and the fun on the streets. Will the “objective” reviewers appreciate Helen Zahavi’s mordant wit, her hair-trigger timing of her comedic narrative, her steady, calm, trenchant narrative? No, but you will. Read it. It’s good – it may even be beautiful – and it’s true.It would be necessary to read the full review to reach a final conclusion, but it looks very much as though Dworkin distinctly likes the idea of women dishing out to men what men have always traditionally dished out to women. Well, you can’t really blame her. It’s been pretty obvious for a long time that people like her are less concerned about the abuse of power than about the fact that it’s not them abusing it. Dirty Weekend is another small skirmish in the Kulturkampf that may end in the victory of people like Dworkin, and it’s interesting for that if for nothing else.
I Was Dora Suarez, Derek Raymond
For some reason, I wasn’t too impressed with this first time through: it seemed to be full of thuggish, bullying police behavior and rubbishy mysticism in a search for a psychotic serial killer in modern London; a second attempt revealed it to be a very good, intelligent, crisply-written-in-modern-fashion book, “metaphysical” in a sufferable sense. The style requires some concentration: it’s a kind of baroque Hemmingway. Squeamish readers might not like some of the descriptions, because there is a lot of violence against both men and women in the book, but it isn’t as dubious as it is in books like Silence of the Lambs.
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
The only bad publicity is no publicity. So if you want a book to sell or a film to be seen, don’t worry about negative reviews. In fact, be pleased about them. In fact, encourage them. If someone hears that a book 1) is sick; 2) is corrupting; 3) is misogynistic; 4) shouldn’t be read, they will naturally want to read it.
And if they discover that the book indeed shouldn’t be read, but not because it was sick, corrupting, or misogynistic, because it was badly written and boring, what can they do about it? It’s too late: they’ve already bought the book and helped an author to set off on a lengthy career producing more badly written and boring books.
But of course, I’m not talking just in general, I’m talking in particular too. I’m not just talking about “a book”, I’m talking about The Wasp Factory, and I’m not just talking about “an author”, I’m talking about Iain Banks (with and without the middle “M”). When it was first published The Wasp Factory was reviewed as though it were something by the Marquis de Sade. Unfortunately, in one way, it read like something by the Marquis de Sade too. After all, if the Marquis de Sade had tried to write in English, he wouldn’t have been very good at it. Neither is Iain Banks. In fact, he’s not good at anything: plots, characterization, dialog, or humor. Above all, he’s not good at being sick, corrupting, or misogynistic. What he or rather his publishers were good at was publicity.
And the plot? Very simple: boy meets girl and other boys; boy kills girl and other boys; boy discovers boy isn’t really boy after all. Or something like that. All set on a Scottish island with rituals performed in front of the title’s Wasp Factory, which makes me think Banks did Lord of the Flies for A-Level, or even O-Level. Changing “flies” to “wasps” was characteristically inventive of him.
Hannibal, Thomas Harris
Erica Wagner, shaven-headed lit ed of the London Times, proved two things in the course of her review of this book. One, which hardly needs proving again, is that EngLit degrees and good English go together like blowflies and sirloin steak; the other, which hardly needs proving again either, is that the quality of a new book or film is inversely proportional to the hype surrounding it.
At least, I assumed she’d proved the latter, and I certainly wasn’t going to make any special effort to read the book and confirm my assumption. Sometime in the next decade or two would be fine: I’d come across the book, try to read it, then toss it aside as another triumph of experience over hype.
Well, that sometime arrived recently and I was two down with the third to go: I came across the book and tried to read it. But the third never arrived, because I never tossed it aside. No, I finished it, and for the first two or three hundred pages I was enjoying it a lot. The hype was certainly absurd, but if you can endure the grue and the gore I think you’ll be right royally entertained by Hannibal.
And I could endure both easily, because I couldn’t take them any more seriously than I suspect Thomas Harris himself took them. Man-eating pigs; a literally faceless psychopath making martinis with children’s tears; slices of human brain being served from a living man with the top of his skull sawn off; and so on. Not so much Grande Guignolerie as Grande Drôlerie.
As the polymathic Dr Lecter might put it. Though I think he would be rather more certain than he’d got it right. After all, he can sight-translate medieval Italian manuscripts as easily as he can puncture the femoral artery of an importunate pickpocket, pluck a Bach fugue from a sixteenth-century harpsichord, or bite someone’s eyebrow off. A sort of supercharged Bond villain who eats people, Dr Lecter, as the title suggests, is what makes the book worth reading: you never feel worried about his possible deadly intent towards Clarice Starling because death could hold no sting for a character who never comes to life.
And she in her way is as big a cliché as Hannibal himself: a highly attractive expert shot who is far more competent than her backstabbing male superiors, with a troubled background and difficulties in forming close relationships, etc, etc. I could have filled in the details in my sleep, and sleep is probably where I would have quickly been if the novel had been about Clarice rather than Hannibal.
Even so, I wish Harris had been more inventive with Lecter’s tastes. Even if real geniuses are automatically drawn to Bach, Château d’Yquem, and expertise in four or five major European languages, which I doubt, literary ones have been too often to make Lecter stand out easily from the crowd.
No, he has to eat people while he’s sipping his Château d’Yquem to do that, and even the novelty of that has been exhausted by now. So Harris has to examine a little of Lecter’s troubled childhood – watching his sister being eaten by starving German soldiers, that sort of thing – and even suggest that Lecter is a monster with a heart, and not necessarily someone else’s.
From which you’ll gather that it’s not one of the greatest novels ever written, but then very few novels are, and if the ending and the cod cosmologizing that accompanies it are nearly as ridiculous as the hype and the advance Harris undoubtedly earnt, there are pleasures to be had on the way there. Just don’t take any of it too seriously. I’m sure Harris didn’t.
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange is the story, written in an invented slang of miscegenated Russian and Cockney, of a juvenile delinquent called Alex who hands out beatings and rapes for kicks in between worshipping at the shrines of Ludwig V. and Wolfgang M. After many blood-stained adventures with his droogies, he is caught by the police and conditioned by government scientists to respond with nausea to the merest thought of violence. Unfortunately, because the films of concentration camps and Japanese atrocities with which they condition him are accompanied by classical music, he also responds with nausea to the merest snatch of Ludwig or Wolfgang.
The state then sees the error of its way and deconditions him, but although Alex is now free to continue his lawless – A-lex – ways, he discovers, in a closing scene cut from the first American edition, that he is growing up and just isn’t interested any more.
And with that, Burgess thought he had said something profound and important about free will and the dangers of the then current behaviorist solutions to crime and deviance. He hadn’t. As a piece of experimental writing, this book is very clever and entertaining. As philosophy and ethics, it’s infantile. Burgess’s intent is summed up in what he said about the title:
I meant it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness.The mechanistic morality is that of behaviorism, which regards men as living machines that can be conditioned by pain and pleasure to behave in appropriate ways: to avoid bad and seek good. But as the prison chaplain says to the imprisoned Alex:
“The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”Burgess doesn’t seem to have noticed what he had been writing in the rest of the book. Why did Alex stop choosing violence? Because the thought of it made him sick. But why did Alex, before then, carry on choosing violence? Because the thought, and the fact of it, gave him enormous pleasure. And why was that? Had Alex chosen to receive pleasure from violence? Burgess doesn’t say, and the question doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
Nor does the related question of why Alex is a young man. If free will is indeed this mysterious metaphysical entity floating free of the mechanistic, electro-chemical morality of the behaviorists, why is Alex a young man? Why does it matter that, as he grows up, he starts to lose interest in violence and think about starting a family?
When I read that as a very young man myself, I thought that section was ridiculous: it spoilt the book. Alex should have carried on as he was, lawlessly flouting the rules of the society that had treated him so brutally. But when I’d grown up a little myself and I read it again, I saw that it was perfectly realistic – and it’s an interesting commentary on the maturity of American society that it was cut for that first American edition. Violent young hooligans – like the Teddy Boys Burgess was inspired by – do grow up and stop being violent, because they stop being young. In other words, their brains change. Burgess is happy to accept Alex’s brain being changed by age, but not to accept it being changed by the state, presumably because one is natural and implicit and the other artificial and explicit.
But both are beyond the control of the autonomous individual Burgess supposes Alex to be. What Burgess should have written the book about is whether the state has the right to do to an individual what nature does. But the state alters individuals by putting them in prison, so Burgess’s objection seems to be that the scientists of A Clockwork Orange do so efficiently and speedily. It might be a valid objection, if it were based on something other than a defence of free will. The chaplain says this to Alex too:
“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”In fact, they’re neither deep nor hard, but they’re not answered by this book in either case and Burgess’s weak argument is not strengthened by hyperbole. Suppose that instead of nausea Alex had been conditioned to respond with boredom or indifference to the thought of violence. Suppose that classical music had not accompanied the films he was conditioned with. Unless Burgess is suggesting that beauty cannot exist without ugliness and pain, Alex’s before and after reactions to classical music are irrelevant.
Does he choose to listen to classical music as he chooses to be violent? But he listens to classical music because he gets pleasure from it, just as he commits violence because he gets pleasure from it. If he were indifferent to either he would not choose to indulge in it with the vigor and frequency that he does. In some very important ways we are machines, and Burgess’s title, like the book itself, is not the refutation of behaviorism that he supposes it is. Read it as fiction, not as philosophy, because as a thinker, Burgess was a very good writer.
What’s your favorite film, and how often have you seen it? Mine is probably Kind Hearts & Coronets, and I’ve probably seen it coming on for a dozen times. I don’t like everything about Kind Hearts, but the bits that I like I like a lot. All the same, with more money and more interest in films I’d almost certainly have found bits in another film that I liked more, and I’d almost certainly have watched them a lot more often. The mad billionaire Howard Hughes had both more money and more interest in films, and for him the best bits in the best film were the bits in Ice Station Zebra (1968).
Me, I couldn’t possibly comment. After all, as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen Ice Station Zebra. If you haven’t either, don’t worry: Hughes watched it often enough to make up for both of us. I can’t remember what the exact figure was, but it was dozens of times. This was before video too. Conclusion? That there must have been themes in Ice Station Zebra resonating like the dickens with Howard Hughes. I think they would have been the short theme of paranoia and the long theme of hidden treachery overcome by the cunning and cleverness of a single superhuman figure who battles illness and injury to emerge ultimately and entirely triumphant.
And how do I know that, considering I’ve just said I’ve never seen the film? Well, I have read the book the film is based on. And even if I hadn’t, I’d still have been able to take a good guess at the themes of the film. Because Ice Station Zebra was based on a book of the same name by Alistair MacLean, and Alistair MacLean always writes about the short theme of paranoia and the long theme of hidden treachery overcome by the cunning and cleverness of a single superhuman figure who battles illness and injury to emerge ultimately and entirely triumphant.
Usually in adverse climatic conditions. MacLean has a thing about snow and sleet and icy rain driven nearly horizontal by gale-force wind. He has a thing about being soaked to the skin and about chattering teeth striking a staccato tattoo on the rims of glasses brimming with whiskey. He has a thing about whiskey too. Enough of it gets spilled (let alone drunk) in his later books to float HMS Ulysses, the ship in the book of the same name that began his career. So it should come as no surprise to learn that MacLean was an alcoholic when he was writing those later books. Just as it comes as no surprise that the book HMS Ulysses was based on MacLean’s experiences during the war, when he served on Royal Navy ships escorting north Atlantic convoys to and from the Soviet Union. Starting in his late teens. From what I’ve read of those convoys, sailing with them must have been one of the closest approaches ever made to experiencing Hell on Earth. Only they weren’t on earth, of course. And Hell isn’t famous for hitting -30°C that often. I’m quite they would have driven me mad, and they didn’t do much for MacLean either. He was writing out his emotions at what happened to him during that period for the rest of his life.
Which makes him sound a little like a down-market J.G. Ballard, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s what he is, but there’s something else you should bear in mind: at his best MacLean writes much better prose than Ballard at his best. Ballard’s prose is messy and self-indulgent. It’s tropical; MacLean’s is arctic. It would have been interesting to switch the two of them at birth, sending baby MacLean forward eight years to 1930 and Shanghai and baby Ballard back eight to 1922 and Glasgow, but I can’t guess what the outcome might have been. Could MacLean have developed Ballard’s subtlety, and could Ballard have developed MacLean’s vigor? Could MacLean have survived what Ballard survived, and vice versa? Could either have written books out of the other’s experiences? I don’t know. What I do know is that I wasn’t able to finish Ballard’s The Drowned World the last time I tried it, and Crash was never that high on my “Books to Read” list, and has sunk lower since the film. Ballard is one of those writers best read in adolescence, before you notice the cracks.
I read MacLean in adolescence too, but I’m still re-reading him and enjoying him now. I see the sado-machismo and the implausibility now, but I don’t care. MacLean deserved to enjoy the success he did – which was enormous – because he could tell a very good story. You feel what he describes: I’ve winced when people got injured in his books, and noticed my breath getting faster or my muscles tensing in response to upcoming action. He’s a visual and visceral writer and maybe that’s why his books have often made very successful films, but I’m not reacting to memories of the films because, again as far as I can remember, I’ve only seen one of them: Where Eagles Dare (1969). And as a book that isn’t one of my favourites. It’s one of his hack efforts, picking up speed on the slippery slope that led to the mangled literary wreckage of books like Seawitch or River of Death. Some of his later books read as though he wrote them in a dozen back-to-back, flat-out, booze-fuelled sessions, with one eye on the advance, the other on his next drink, and none at all the prose. They’re parodies of his good stuff, written for the money and not because if he hadn’t written them, something would have snapped inside his head.
Not that you really pick up that kind of intensity even from his best books, but his best books are still very intense. Intensely bleak. The Satan Bug and The Guns of Navarone are depressing books. You feel that you’ve gone through something dark and unpleasant after you’ve read them. I do, anyway, and I did when I first read them as a kid. I think I would have felt the same then with HMS Ulysses and South By Java Head too, but I never read them as a kid and when I try them now they don’t reach the parts that The Satan Bug and The Guns of Navarone reach. But that isn’t because they’re later books: as I pointed out above, HMS Ulysses was his first book. South By Java Head was his second. MacLean’s talent seemed to kick in a little later on, after he’d learned what he was doing and before he discovered that whatever he did, it would sell. During that intermediate period, and sometimes outside it, he wrote some very good stuff: The Satan Bug, The Guns of Navarone, The Last Frontier, Night Without End, The Way to Dusty Death are all excellent books in their genre, and maybe even beyond it.
Good titles too, aren’t they? And I hope you can’t wait to get better acquainted with them by now. Well, I hope that you can hardly wait, anyway. Otherwise you won’t finish the rest of this, and it might be a good idea to, because I’m going to try to recommend what titles you should get better acquainted with first. The best I can do is put the books into groups: A, B, C, D, and E. The A-group is very good; the E-group is very bad; groups B to D occupy points in between:
Collected Short Stories, Somerset Maugham
Delightful to read at first but became a little thin, in parts, as I got further into it. Some of the stories were pot-boilers, some very good, all clearly, if not always beautifully, written. Some are also clichéd as hell (at least at towards the farther end of the 20th century), but some others I think I’ll still be reading with enjoyment as far ahead as I can imagine.
Maugham was never taken seriously as a writer by the lit-snobs and critics of his day, and I don’t suppose he’s taken seriously now by academics, but he outlasted many of the critical darlings of his day and will no doubt outlast many of the academic darlings of ours, and I don’t think anyone who loves English literature, and particularly the short story, should ignore his work.
Evelyn Waugh greatly admired his craftmanship, for example, which is a strong recommendation, and in fact Waugh was a kind of mirror image of Maugham. Maugham wrote some perfect short stories and some very clumsy novels; Waugh wrote some perfect novels and some very clumsy short stories.
Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly
The first half of this book, about how to create literature that will last, was good, crisp, smoothly argued stuff – with occasional patches of bad “fine writing” – that made a useful distinction between the Mandarin and the Journalistic schools of Eng Lit: the former (in general) being Woolf, Pater, Firbank; latter, Orwell, Maugham, Forster.
Each has its pros and cons: Connolly claims that the Journalistic school is too homogeneous, and illustrates the point by conflating extracts from Orwell, Isherwood, and Hemmingway. I don’t think the point is made very successfully. I’ve never read Hemmingway, but from what I’ve seen any comparison between Isherwood and Orwell comes down very heavily in favour of Orwell, so long as it’s only the essays, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four put forward on Orwell’s behalf.
A point made and easier to accept was that the critic has to assume the mantle of omniscience to carry out his job, though in reality he is perhaps considerably less than qualified or worthy to judge the work of others. Connolly says Waugh’s Decline and Fall received praise beyond its worth: early Waugh was cruel because Waugh didn’t understand properly what cruelty meant.
The second part, “A Georgian Boyhood” was good too, though it did rather raise the question of what Connolly had achieved to justify the self-indulgence of extended autobiography: if part II was meant to justify part I, it didn’t, and part I, though probably a lot cleverer than I’m able to appreciate, was, like all criticism (as far as I’m concerned), worth considerably less than the worst novel. And this second part got very boring when it started to rake over Etonian politics that must have ceased to be of importance a long time before the original publishing date of this book (1938).
Final thought: compare this laying bare of the soul and psyche with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Cyril Connolly seems justifiably consigned to mostly footnote status in the history of EngLit. He was probably a better human being than Waugh, but certainly far less talented.
Decline & Fall, Evelyn Waugh
If Waugh had died after completing Decline and Fall, just as if Swinburne had died after completing Atalanta in Calydon or Poems & Ballads (First Series), his reputation in English literature would still be secure, I think. Swinburne’s reputation in fact would be higher and though Waugh’s wouldn’t – he never reduced the impact of his early genius with much hack-work in old age – Decline & Fall remains an astonishing achievement not just as a first novel but as a novel full stop.
Though to be strictly accurate it wasn’t a first novel: that honor had gone to The Temple at Thatch, “about madness and magic”, which Waugh burnt in manuscript after his friend Harold Acton was unenthusiastic about it. The “magic” in question was black magic, so perhaps there is something Pagini-esque about Decline & Fall and Waugh had sold his soul to the Devil in return for the supreme skill as a novelist that he would go on to confirm with books like Black Mischief and Scoop.
It’s certainly plausible: Decline & Fall is not only extremely well-written in a deceptively simple style à la Hemmingway but also extremely witty in a way Hemmingway never was. It tells the tale of Paul Pennyfeather – blown hither and thither by the winds of vicissitude but ultimately weighty enough to settle into a sheltered niche – who is set upon and debagged by upper-class hooligans while studying theology at Oxford, sent down with gross injustice for indecent behavior, and forced to take up school-mastering to earn a living. His first and as it happens only employer, Dr Fagan of Llanabba Castle School, Wales, is not shocked to learn the true reason for Paul’s expulsion from Oxford, which, “true to his training”, he confesses:
“I was sent down, sir, for indecent behaviour.”But Dr Fagan is not sufficiently blasé to forget to force a reduction in salary out of Paul for the confession – a compounding of the original injustice that will happen again and again as the novel proceeds. At Llanabba Paul meets Captain Grimes, whose single appearance in this book was sufficient to secure him a permanent place in the demonology of English comic writing, and begins teaching the son of the woman he will eventually marry.“Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details. I have been in the teaching profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal. …”
More quotation and details of plot would lessen the impact of what happens to him as he teaches, resigns to marry, and suffers more grotesque injustice: suffice it to say that Decline & Fall should – nay, must – be read by anyone who loves prose and wit for their own sake. Wodehousian farce à la a cynical and sophisticated Wodehouse, Decline & Fall is probably the best first – or first-published – novel ever written in the English language. High praise? Read it and see if I’m not right.
Selected Poems, A.C. Swinburne
Some artists are best compared to birds: they create their art instinctively, almost – or even entirely – without conscious will and intellectual effort. In music, Mozart is probably the most prominent of these avian analogs; in poetry, Swinburne probably is. Tennyson called him a “reed through which all things blow into music”, and although that is unfair it does not fall so very far wide or short of the mark. Nor, in probably the best essay ever written on his work, does A.E. Housman’s crude and bathetic comparison of him to a “sausage machine”.
Swinburne’s poetry can be called facile. Or fluent. It flows sweetly and smoothly for the most part, though occasionally whirling into rapids of passion or indignation. Despite the claims of some academics, it is informed by serious and considered beliefs – his opposition to Christianity, for example – but whether or not those beliefs chime with your own you should be moved by its beauty and technical perfection:
Pale, beyond porch and portal,This, from “The Garden of Proserpina”, might stand as a paradigm of his technique: his love of alliteration and his unfailing facility with rhyme, for example; and this, from the same poem, might stand as a paradigm of his philosophy and ultimate nihilism:
Crowned with calm leaves she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her,
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.
From too much love of living,If you are moved at all by these quotations, you should sample more of his work in this collection, edited by L.M. Findlay and published by Carcanet of Manchester. It contains all of his most famous (and best) poems: his forsaken cri de cœur “The Triumph of Time”; the subtle, complex, and disturbing Sapphic autograph “Anactoria”; the brief and nihilistic “The Garden of Proserpina”; the sado-masochistic hymn “Dolores”; the melancholy and paradoxical “A Forsaken Garden”; and more. Even those most reluctant to bestow that much-abused term “genius” should be happy to agree that it can be bestowed on Swinburne, and that it is unjust for him to be better known today for his extra-curricular sexual activities than for his verse.
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
The Hammer of God, Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke in the 1990s wasn’t as good as he had been earlier. His books written in the 1990s are still very readable, but he was starting to parody himself in some ways: more and more delayed mini-denouments, more and more nagging senses of familiarity and déjà vu experienced by his characters. This 1990s book contains all of those things and was about the efforts of mankind to destroy an asteroid called Kali before it can destroy the earth. Clarke was writing about this danger as far back as 1973 and the novel Rendezvous with Rama, and it’s a tribute to his prescience that the real official organization now working to publicize it is named after the fictional official organization he created in that book: SpaceGuard.
SpaceGuard returns here and has to fight off sabotage from a mad Islamo-Christian sect that sees Kali as God’s instrument for the destruction of the earth. Most of the book is set on the spaceship that’s assigned to intercept Kali and plant explosives on it that will deflect it from the path of the earth. Even on less than his best form Clarke is still very good at making the future seem real and this is a satisfying and, if it makes you take the definite danger of asteroid more seriously, even an educative book. An asteroid like Kali could already be on its way and if you’re interested in learning more about the efforts to prepare for it, visit:
Google page for Asteroid impact
The Dead Zone, Stephen King
Whatever his shortcomings – and he has some big ones – Stephen King can tell a good story, and this is one of the best of them. But I think he has ambitions to be taken seriously by the EngLit crowd too, and there are themes in all of his books. The Dead Zone may represent the first appearance of a theme he more famously explores in Christine: the American cult of the automobile. The book’s hero, John Smith, becomes psychic in childhood when he injures his head skating on “cleared ice” at one corner of which “two rubber tires burned sootily”.
However, his talent lies dormant until he visits a fairground with his girlfriend and plays the “Wheel of Fortune” after which this part of the book is named. He has a flashback to the smell of burning rubber as he wins several hundred dollars. The same evening, travelling home from his girlfriend’s house in a taxi, he is very badly injured in a car-crash and enters a coma that lasts for five years. He re-emerges with his psychic talent fully developed and his world startlingly changed. The most immediately obvious sign of the latter is that gas is much more expensive and much scarcer.
Once he has left hospital, Smith’s talent leads him to take an interest in politics: by shaking hands with candidates for Presidential and Congressional office, he is able to “read” their futures. One day he shakes the hand of an ex-travelling salesman called Greg Stillson. Stillson is running for Congress. He plays John Denver at his rallies, wears a yellow hard hat, and gives away free hot-dogs. Nobody takes him seriously, but the handshake tells Smith that he will be President one day and destroy the world. So Smith decides he will have to assassinate him.
Stillson’s full name – mentioned only twice, I think – is Gregory Ammas Stillson. I don’t think the initials are a coincidence: in part, The Dead Zone is intended to say something about the car. But it’s more obviously intended to say something about an insane right-wing politician on his way to the White House, and one wonders whether John Hinckley came across a copy before he shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 – and whether Stephen King likes to think so.
© 2006 Simon Whitechapel