On David Hockney

The current Times Literary Supplement carries a brief review by me of the second volume of Christopher Simon Syke's biography of David Hockney. As an admirer of the artist I'd like to ramble on at greater length about him (f not the biography) 

The beguilingly-titled ‘Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso’ were produced in the Atelier Crommelynck in Paris where Hockney acquired the sugar-lift technique, allowing him to recreate brush marks on the etched plate, and to use a single plate for multi-coloured etchings. The resulting portfolio of twenty virtuosic etchings and aquatints, all drawn directly onto copper plates during 1976 and 1977 was published in an edition of 200. I finally acquired a copy of the book during a visit to Salt's Mill outside Bradord, which houses a magnificent collection of the artist's work assembled by a boyhood friend, Jonathan Silver. 

The etchings made a great impression on me as a teenager, when, on the evening of Saturday February 4th 1978, they featured in a profile of the artist on The South Bank Show, a weekly arts programme broadcast by London Weekend Television and hosted by Melvyn Bragg, I loved the etchings and everything about Hockney appealed to me: his languid mid-Atlantic Yorkshire drawl, his expensive dandyish outfits (baggy linen suits, rugby shirts, covetable blunt-ended silk knitted ties and tennis shoes), his peroxide hair and thick-framed owlish glasses and, above all, his  'lifestyle'. 

Hockney's way of life was not just enviably American but wholly, gorgeously Californian. He lived, vividly, in a world of spacious white-walled rooms in modern buildings with, beyond floor-to-ceiling windows, a glittering blue pool surrounded by shaggy palms trees. Beyond that were sun-drenched boulevards patrolled by gliding rollerskaters, then Hollywood, and Disneyland and Venice Beach, which Hockney described as 'a sunny, naked version of Portobello Road'. I wanted all of that, and preferably with girls. That Hockney was gay never occurred to me, though it would have made no difference. He stood for freedom, for self-realisation through art - that was enough, and more than enough for me, then.

He is immensely popular today - 600.000 admirers attended his last Royal Academy show, and when Lucian Freud died in July 2011 the mantle of 'Britain's Greatest Living Painter' was bestowed (by the British press, which allocates such titles) on Hockney, who shrugged it off: 'I don't care about the greatest living painter thing,' he said, 'nor do I think life's about prizes. I'm just busy working.'

Working is what he does best, and what he does most of the time, so the challenge for a biographer is to sustain the reader's interest in a repetitive cycle of work and play. What comes across clearly in the second volume of Christopher Simon Sykes's biography is Hockney's restless energy, his tireless reinvention, his single-minded work ethic and his geeky, rejuvenating love of new technologies: Canon photocopiers (allowing single-handed production of three hundred and sixty original Hockneys in a day), fax machines, Polaroid cameras, the Quantel Paintbox, video and, more recently, the iPad and iPhone. 

'If David is tired of drawing then he'll take photographs, if he's tired of taking photographs he'll paint; if he's tired of painting he'll design an opera. He's constantly thinking he hasn't worked hard enough recently' said his friend Henry Geldzahler. Hockney admits to placing work ahead of  relationships and, while he clearly has many devoted friends, few of them seem to become or remain particular intimates. 

      

A Pilgrim's Progress is informal, gossipy, good natured and rich in quotable anecdote. I particularly enjoyed the eccentric broadcaster Fyfe Robertson's baffled encounter with a 1977 Hayward Gallery exhibition that, Hockney's paintings aside, showcased what he dubbed phoney-art: "You can condense these two words into one which has the proper flavour of contemptuous derision, Phart." This was almost forty years ago. Hockney's transition from Rake to Pilgrim over those four decades is not simply the development from footloose innocence to mellow maturity, but also from a raffish worldliness to more serious and arguably humbler priorities. Critical maulings (his flower paintings were described by Brian Sewell as 'vulgar cheap-jack daubs') are met with serene imperturbability  ('It's what I think that counts, always') and Hockney is now firmly embedded in mainstream British culture to a degree few other contemporary artists have achieved. This makes it easy to overlook his defiant, combative, principled opposition to, say, the Thatcher government's Clause 18 (banning local councils from 'promoting' homosexuality). He hates 'the fucking Blairs' is scathing about Gordon Brown ("a dreary aesthetic Calvanist prig'). (There has always been something of the reactionary about Hockney, but then all artists become reactionary about things they understand). I was touched by a 1981 letter from his mother in which she openly raises the matter of his homosexuality for the first time (Hockney was 44) and writes, sweetly: 'I'll be modern where I can!' Her son follows the same policy, and his researches into the camera lucida and return to watercolour painting in 2003 reflect his tireless curiosity and range. 

Some years ago Hockney moved from sunny LA to the seaside resort of Bridlington, where he now lives much of the year in a rather dour-looking former guest house with views overlooking the North Sea. He is presumably very wealthy indeed and I confess to a vulgar interest in how much brass he has stashed away. In fact I'd like to know much more about Hockney in general - Sykes as an insider and loyal friend doesn't give much away. 

A pinch of salt

Toby Lichtig has has written this excellent piece on the politics of Holocaust memorialisation in the current issue of The New Humanist.  At one point he writes:

According to Finkelstein – a scurrilous polemicist whose arguments need serious salination – the modern Holocaust is now little more than “an ideological representation”, invented at some point in the 1960s to service American and Zionist interests. 

I like "serious salination" - very good! It set me to thinking about that phrase, from the Latin cum grano sails - with a pinch of salt.

The 1934 Universal Studios horror movie The Black Cat (based very loosely indeed on the Poe short story) is set mostly in (and beneath)  a modernist castle built by the lunatic Austrian architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). His nemesis is Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Béla Lugosi), a Hungarian psychiatrist. Poelzig's home (where he displays dead women in glass cases) is built on the ruins of Fort Marmorus, which Poelzig commanded during the Great War. Werdegast accuses Poelzig of betraying the fort to the Russians, resulting in the death of thousands of soldiers. He also accuses Poelzig of stealing his wife Karen while he was in prison. Revemge, we discover, is a dish best eaten hysterically.

Anyway, the film reaches a mad climax in a Black Mass (which on the face of it appears to be authentic) is conducted by Karloff in sepulchral lisping cod-Latin and begins (you've guessed it) "Cum grano salis . . .", followed by a succession of ad hoc Latin phrases. All very funny and knowing for the studio heads with a grounding in the Classics.

The phrase is not, despite the commonplace attribution, what Pliny originally wrote - his actual words were addito salis grano ("after having added a grain of salt"). But the Latin word salis means both 'salt' and 'wit', so the phrase could be translated as both 'with a grain of salt' or, equally 'with a dash of wit'. 

The radicalisation of Benjamin Britten

One Saturday morning in April 1935 Benjamin Britten, aged 22, received a call out of the blue inviting him to meet 'a certain film impresario, M. Cavalcanti' over lunch near the General Post Office Film Unit's small studio at Bennett Park in Blackheath. There he was introduced to William Coldstream and signed up on the spot to work on a score for a documentary short called The King's Stamp. The young composer’s diary entries give us an idea of how exciting the transition from his family home in Suffolk to cosmopolitan Soho must have been. We have only to compare two of Britten’s diary entries, exactly one year apart:

4 October 1934
Walk - shopping - & then write all morning - with a cold and very rough & dangerous (strong currents) bathe before lunch. Mrs Chamberlain comes to lunch to talk over matters abt. Orchestra. K. Mead comes to tea, after which we play a four at tennis on Clyffe Court with Laurence and K. Gillespie. Too windy to play seriously but fun.

4 October 1935
The War [in Abyssinia] continues, enormous number of casualties – Abyssinian reverses – to general sorrow. So [No] signs of League activity as yet.  Still enormous excitement – esp. around Soho. I have lunch with a German Jew refugee – Robert Turner, a very intelligent communist – who has some interesting projects ahead.

A third diary entry comes from December that year:

Write a long letter to Mrs Chamberlain […] in defence of Communism – not a difficult letter to write! It has shocked a lot of people that I am interested in the subject!

The reaction of Kertsy Chamberlain, founder of the Bungay Orchestra, can be readily imagined. Britten was at the time becoming increasingly committed to Socialist causes, under the influence of another 'very intelligent Communist' called Montagu Slater. Being politically engagé (to use a common phrase of the period) was a hallmark of young artists and intellectuals, and this tended to express itself in commitment to left-wing causes and Pacifism. Britten, under the initial influence and tutelage of the composer Frank Bridge, would become a lifelong and rather ferocious Pacifist, retaining this commitment long after his leftish political sympathies had waned. The G.P.O. Film Unit was almost entirely staffed by left-leaning ideologues, although it was far from being the Bolshevik hotbed feared and derided by hostile critics in the press. It wasn’t only the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe that prompted a predominately left-wing response among the intelligentsia, although subsequent writers have understandably tended to focus on this. There were  many other subjects for political debate: the Japanese position in Asia, the Italian incursion in Africa (as noted by Britten), crises in the Middle East, the rise of the Soviet Union, the failures of the League of Nations, the slump in the world economy and the dismal state of things in Britain where unemployment exceeded three million – all were the concern of progressive thinkers and the cause of ‘enormous excitement – esp. around Soho’, the most cosmopolitan district of London. International politics and the fate of Europe were urgent, tragic and exciting areas to investigate, particularly by a generation with less of an interest and less of a stake than their forebears in the Empire and its overseas Dominions. There was a widely-shared assumption, especially among the young, that any hope for progress in the industrial nations lay in the development of the working classes as active and informed participants in the democratic process. This was a challenge to Establishment thinking, a challenge taken up by Grierson and members of the Film Unit.

As a film composer Britten developed the technique of onomatopoeic percussion – as in the clatter of saucepans and heard when a cartoon character tumbles down a staircase. His films were almost all fully-scored, with a direct match between image and music, and he was adept at pastiche, moving swiftly and easily between between highbrow and popular sources. 

It may be hard to believe that everything we hear on the Coal Face soundtrack, apart from the voices, is scored by Britten and recorded in the GPO’s small Blackheath studio. Every clank and clatter and rattle is scored using conventional percussion instruments and chains, drills, sandpaper, sheet metal, asbestos, whistles and so on. The clip-clop of the carthorse is of course produced by coconut shells, but these shells, Britten specified, should be of different sizes.

One might think that all this apparatus has more in common with a film studio sound effects department. Jude Brimmer has noted the ‘cartoonish’ quality in the piano arpeggio that accompanies a shot of the artist Barnett Freedman descending a staircase in Britten’s first film score, The King’s Stamp. Britten's approach is indebted to existing techniques deriving from silent film accompaniment, sound cartoons, the European avant-garde and other established cinematic conventions. Like his collaborator Auden, Britten was adept at co-opting public commissions into his own creative agenda and his genius has served to obscure the mainstream sources he freely exploited. He has sometimes been described as the originator of musique concrète, anticipating by fifteen years Pierre Schaeffer’s developments in the late 1940s, and while this may be overstating Britten’s particular achievement, we should bear in mind that he is adapting long-established techniques.

Britten’s Coal Face score is for a commentator; whistler; chorus (soprano, alto, tenor and baritone); percussion (tambourine, suspended cymbal, side drum, bass drum) and piano. For the most part the spoken commentary is meticulously scored, which would account for Slater’s rather uninflected delivery, as he is under considerable constraint in matching his words to the music. It is still hard to believe that all the non-verbal sounds we hear throughout the film are scored by Britten, whose uncanny skill in creating appropriately ‘realistic’ noises in the studio called for an extraordinary percussion score, thus:

1  side drum, block, triangle, cymbal, bass drum, gong.
2  chains, 2 coconut shells, large drill, cup in bucket of water, sandpaper.
3  sandpaper, trip gear, notched wood and wooden stick, sheet of metal and wooden mall
4  wooden whistle, small cart on sandy asbestos, small drill, rewinder, hooter, chain.

Such innovations reflect Britten’s particular genius for conjuring up suggestive and convincing aural landscapes, a random example from much later in his career being the moment in Death in Venice when the powerful ferryboat engines thunder into life. At one point in Coal Face the recorded sound of a struck cymbal is reversed to achieve a whooshing effect, intended to accompany of shot of a speeding train (but disappointingly out of synch by several seconds in every print I have seen). Britten took this idea from Jean Vigo’s surrealist short Zéro de conduite (1933), which famously included a slow motion procession of rebellious schoolboys accompanied by conventional music played backwards on the soundtrack. He saw the film at a screening in Soho Square on 31 May 1935 and his diary entry that evening praises it as ‘a perfect masterpiece, a revelation in many ways.’

Houellebecq

Michel Houllebecq, in an undated Paris Review interview conducted by Susannah Hunnewell :

I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary -important but still secondary - compared to what I tried to capture in my novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.

Houellebecq is, as usual, being provocative and mischievous. Whoever said feminism was at the root of all things PC? But there's something in what he says about the disenfranchisement of older people. One of the ways in which an older generation are persuaded to feel despised and marginalised is that their beliefs and standards are invariably depicted as prejudiced, ignorant, out-of-step or simply obtuse, and such flaws disqualify them (obviously!) from having a voice in the debate. They are always part of the problem, in a world run by and for kids.

I am (and this is a line of thought borrowed from Martin Amis) objectively less racist than my grandparents and parents, but probably more racist than my son. Because racism in its many forms doesn't just stop, suddenly, however much we wish it would. 

My feelings about Germany and therefore - in that highly unreliable 'therefore' of bloggers everywhere - about Germans, for instance, are nuanced but on the whole essentially hostile, and I'm sorry to say my son regards my views as racist. Although (and in my defence) equivocal feelings about the Germans are based not so much on race (and least of all the Nazi's sinister balls about Aryan supremacy) as on the overwhelming and undeniable evidence of history. They started it.

Favourite snatches (17)

Today's favourite snatch is a distinguished piece of doggerel which I expect you'll all know but may not have come across for a long time:

There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be -
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt
With some towels,
A slight cap
For night cap,
A hair brush,
Comb ditto,
New stockings -
For old ones
Would split O!
This knapsack
Tight at 'is back
He rivetted close
And followed his nose
To the North,
To the North,
And followed his nose
To the North.

There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see-
There he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red-
That lead
Was as weighty
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England -
So he stood in his shoes
And he wondered,
He wondered,
He stood in his shoes
And he wondered.


It's by Keats. of course, and manages to anticipate the later Eliot lines from Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

'Same old same old' as the young people say. We have to leave home, perhaps, to find out for ourselves what home is, or was.



Lines from Little Gidding © The Estate of T. S. Eliot

Dud dads

I once sat and chatted to the author Will Self as we watched our sons playing together in the sandpit on Clapham Common. We were like a couple of knackered old primates, our function on earth fulfilled, now just hanging around as gatekeepers to oblivion as our sons flourished before us.I remember telling him that I thought he'd written one of the few worthwhile things about fatherhood - the introduction to a collection of photographs by David Gamble, published in 2000 and called Perfidious Man. 

There is no shortage of really terrible writing about fatherhood. Yesterday I came across the following guff from an American publisher. Ready? 

From some of today's most critically acclaimed writers - including Dennis Lehane, Justin Cronin, Andre Dubus III, and Benjamin Percy-comes a rich collection of essays on what it means to be a dad. Becoming a father can be one of the most profoundly terrifying, exhilarating, life-changing occasions in a man's life. Now 22 of today's masterful writers get straight to the heart of modern fatherhood in this incomparable collection of thought-provoking essays. From making that ultimate decision to have a kid to making it through the birth to tangling with a toddler mid-tantrum, and eventually letting a teen loose in the world, these fathers explore every facet of fatherhood and show how being a father changed the way they saw the world - and themselves. 

"One of the first things I learned about fatherhood was that my father was right: it was hard and it kicked the shit out of your life plan."- Lev Grossman

 "I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hold him close and never let go. But we have to let go, don't we?"-Andre Dubus III 

"Bridges are engineered. Children are worked toward, clumsily, imperfectly, with a deep and almost religious faith in trial and error." - Ben Greenman 

"If you counted up the nights I've spent dancing to 'Strangers in the Night,' those hours would stretch three times around the equator."- Garth Stein 

"The most surprising aspect of parenting has been how much my pre-parenting life looks like a cloud in the rearview."- Dennis Lehane 

Contributors include Andre Aciman, Chris Bachelder, David Bezmozgis, Justin Cronin, Peter Ho Davies, Anthony Doerr, Andre Dubus III, Steve Edwards, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Ben Greenman, Lev Grossman, Dennis Lehane, Bruce Machart, Rick Moody, Stephen O'Connor, Benjamin Percy, Bob Smith, Frederick Reiken, Marco Roth, Matthew Specktor, Garth Stein, and Alexi Zentner.



These are 'today's masterful writers'? Jesus wept.

To end on a positive thought (and a suggestion to publishers who share my queasiness about the type of stuff that appears above) - is there a good book for fathers written by women?

On the Nobel Prize

Before the French author Patrick Modiano won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, beating favourites Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Haruki Kurakami, the high-street bookmakers Ladbrokes offered odds on around forty contenders. Only five of those listed were female, the favourite being the Belorussian journalist Svetlana Aleksijevitj at 7/1, while Joyce Carol Oates (16/1) and Margaret Atwood (33/1) represented the planet's anglophone women writers. That Bob Dylan was included on the Ladbrokes list (at 50/1) makes the bookies' tally of female writers even more unrepresentative of what's going on in the world of letters.

But before making any claims or judgements about such lamentable inequality and chauvinism let's look a little closer at the numbers.

The running total of Literature laureates since 1901, when the Prize was inaugurated, is 110, the apparent shortfall in recipients reflecting those years when, for whatever reason, no Prize was awarded. The first female Literature laureate was appointed in 1909 and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Swedish. Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf appears on the nation's banknotes and is, the internet insists, "most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils)". The twelve subsequent female laureates are:

1926 - Grazia Deledda (Italy)

1928 - Sigrid Undset (Norway)

1938 - Pearl S. Buck (USA)

1945 - Gabriela Mistral (Chile)

1966 - Nelly Sachs (born in Germany, fled to Sweden in 1940)

1991 - Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

1993 - Toni Morrison (USA)

1996 - Wisława Szymborska (Poland)

2004 - Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)

2007 - Doris Lessing (UK)

2009 - Herta Müller (born in Romania, writes in German)

2013 - Alice Munro (Canada)

One can't read everything, of course, and I have to confess to near-complete ignorance of most of these writers, an ignorance that extends to many of their male counterparts - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray and Henrik Pontoppidan for instance. 

If it's difficult to recall all or most or even a few of these female laureates it's because the Prize, with eerie efficiency, seems to remove all trace of most recipients from collective memory. James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Ibsen and Henry James never won the Nobel, although each of them is unquestionably more important and influential than the whole cohort of male and female Literary laureates put together. Compare them with (say) Toni Morrison, John Galsworthy and . . .  but you get my point. 

Between 1901 and 2012, Nobel Prizes in six categories were awarded 555 times to 863 people and institutions. Four of the recipients (including Marie Curie) won twice, so this makes a total of 835 individuals and 21 organizations. Of those 835 individuals just 44 were female, around 5 per cent. Here's my point, for what it's worth: female Literature laureates, although still dispiritingly few in number, form closer to 10 per cent of the total and therefore double the average. Even more encouragingly, the decade since 2004 has seen four out of eleven prizes awarded to female writers. That's not enough, but it's something.