On Hamlet

From 2013, some thoughts on Hamlet, and Hamlet.

The Hamlet Doctrine is a collaborative book by the philosopher Simon Critchley and his wife Jamieson Webster, who is a psychoanalyst. The title comes from Nietzsche, although it puts me in mind of Salman Rushdie's witty suggestion for the title of a Robert Ludlum version: The Elsinore Equivocation. 

It's a collection of short pieces, some brilliantly illuminating (on the subject of mourning conventions, for instance), some quite silly. Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Lacan and - yes - Nietzsche are all roped in, but it strikes me that while a psychoanalytical or philosophical approach to the play certainly enriches our knowledge, it may not add to our understanding.

In a Guardian article about their book the authors say, rather weirdly "The banal, biscuit-box Shakespeare needs to be broken up and his work made dangerous again."

'Biscuit-box Shakeapeare'? No, me neither. There's a glaring typo on the first page which augers ill ("I say there shall be no mo [sic] marriage"), the prose is uneven and there are rather too many threadbare hipster colloquialisms - has Hamlet really 'lost his mojo'? I mention this because I hope the authors would be equally impatient if I blundered into their respective fields and wrote things like "Wittgenstein was a well brainy dude" or "Freud had a thing about sex". Tone, see?

A more pervasive weakness is that the authors settle on and adhere to one entirely conventional interpretation of both Hamlet and Hamlet (although one that only gained currency in the early 20th century), namely that the Prince is banjax'd by indecision and that it is his failure to act that leads to his tragic downfall.

Yet by the final curtain Elsinore is a necropolis, proof that Hamlet is certainly capable of decisive action - ask Polonius.  

Gertrude poisoned, his usurping uncle Claudius both stabbed and poisoned, while Laertes and Hamlet himself are both stabbed with the same poisoned rapier. Practically everyone dies apart from Horatio and Fortinbras. Of course if Hamlet acted immediately on hearing from the ghost of his father that he should avenge murder most foul, the play would be over in ten minutes. Then where would we be?

The Hamlet Doctrine is full of good things, although nothing as memorable as these lines from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which Rosencrantz (or possibly Guildenstern) consider how best to question the Prince:

"To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?"

On Ernie Lotinga and T. S. Eliot

There's an elaborate sculpted frieze above the entrance to the Odeon Cinema at the quiet eastern end of Shaftesbury Avenue. It's only fully visible from the far side of the street, which is for some reason the least frequented stretch of pavement in all of central London. The next time you're passing make a point of crossing the road and looking at the frieze for a while - it's worth the effort.

It was designed by Gilbert Bayes for the opening of what was then known as the Savile Theatre in 1931 and depicts ‘Theatre Through the Ages’, from Greek tragedy to Punch and Judy. It's described in great detail by Chris Partridge on his fascinating blog Ornamental Passions. Below is the eastern end of the frieze, with figures in modern dress, including a line of chorus girls.

Lotinga (extreme right) on the Odeon frieze

Two other figures represent the Twentieth Century, or at least that third of it which had passed at the time of its making. The first is Sybil Thorndike as Saint Joan, a role she played in the George Bernard Shaw play that was something of a 1930s sensation. Another figure is surprising - T. S. Eliot's favourite comedian, Ernie Lotinga. I briefly mentioned Eliot and Lotinga in my review of the third volume of Eliot's letters for the Literary Review earlier this year. Eliot praised this once hugely popular but now completely forgotten music-hall performer as 'the greatest living British histrionic Artist, in the purest tradition of British Obscenity'. I'd never heard of him, so I looked him up.

Lotinga (1876-1951) was a big star in the 1920s and 30s and married for a time to Hetty King (1883-1972), a celebrated male impersonator. Her real name was Winfred Emms and, while it's an exaggeration to see them as the Brad and Angelina of their day, they were certainly very famous and you can see two short clips of them larking around together in public here, accompanied by a recording of Hetty singing. The first is from 1916 and appears to be shot in the grounds of a military hospital - a morale-boosting concert for wounded soldiers home from the Front? The second is a 1926 trick film showing Hetty in female and male guises, a music-hall Tiresias. Fascinating.

Hetty King en travestie

You can also see a clip of Ernie on stage in a 1931 production of My Wife's Family, a broad farce in which he would appeared on and off much of his career. Click here and wonder at his uncanny resemblance to Eliot.

Eliot wrote 'fragments' of Sweeney Agonistes in the late 1920s and published them in one volume in 1932. I wonder whether he had Lotinga in mind when he created the marvellously sinister lead character - "Every man wants to, has to, needs to, once in a lifetime, do a girl in". When I read this short play I now hear Lotinga's oddly effeminate déclassé voice.

More about these 'Fragments of an Aristophonic Melodrama' tomorrow, perhaps.

Revelation Apocalypse

The poet and performer Aea Varfis van-Warmelo has been a regular contributor to A Leap in the Dark since the first (on February 29th this year, when she performed Apollinaire's modernist poem Zone in English and French and appeared in a new performance piece by the poet Amy McCauley. Since then she has dazzled audiences with some extraordinary bilingual performances of poetry including French and English versions of Beckett's last poem Comment dire/What is the word.

Here's a link to a bilingual prose poem she performed at a recent Leap, Revelation Apocalypse, as it appears in A) GLIMPSE) OF), an Athens-based independent journal which publishes works by contemporary writers and artists.

Mr Electrico

A Leap in the Dark: Mr Electrico 

As part of the 4th July programme of A Leap in the Dark I read the following remarkable text, taken from an interview with Ray Bradbury.

Mr Electrico is a minor character in Bradbury'novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. and although the author always insisted he was real, scholars never could confirm his identity. Then, in a 2010 interview by Sam Weller for The Paris Review, Bradbury told the story of how he met the original Mr. Electrico. It's a breathtaking memory:

He was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end.

The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn’t know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself. I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks—a little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear—and I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language! He took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.

Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.

Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.

When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.

Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.

Copyright Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203 (The Paris Review) 

On Roger Hilton's 'Oi Yoi Yoi'.

In 2008 I remarked to a friend, the art historian and critic Andrew Lambirth, that the logo for the Beijing Olympic Games seemed to owe something to Hilton's painting Oi Yoi Yoi. I was less than half-serious, and therefore surprised to read, in Andrew's excellent catalogue essay for a 2009 Hilton show at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, that there may have been more to my off-hand comment than I thought.

Roger Hilton Oi Yoi Yoi (1963)

Beijing Olympics logo (2008)

The Beijing logo of a running figure (above) was designed by Guo Chunning, and is a stylised calligraphic rendition of the Chinese character 京 (pronounced jīng, meaning 'capital', from the name of the host city). The logo represents both a dancing figure and a runner crossing the finishing line. It's not just the shape, and the way the limbs seem to extend beyond the frame, but the abstract blocks of red that serve to outline the figure which reminded me of Hilton's painting. Andrew suggested in his essay that Hilton may indeed have had a Chinese ideogram in mind when he created the original painting - his wide-ranging interest in other cultures would support such a view.

Oi Yoi Yoi is a really great picture, and makes me happy whenever I look at it or think about it. It's all about life. Hilton said the subject was 'my wife dancing on a verandah, we were having a quarrel. She was nude and angry at the time and she was dancing up and down shouting 'oi yoi yoi''.  This was on the balcony of their remote French home, and the pair had been guzzling rum. What Hilton didn't include in the picture, apparently because he didn't notice it at the time, was that the local fire brigade were tackling a blaze in a field nearby.

Hilton made a second version that year (below) which is every bit as good. I'm not sure which one I like best. The title of the first is better. The second image is more bouncy, and especially the breast.

Dancing Woman (1963)

Hilton, à propos, pioneered the admirable practice of drawing nudes in motion by encouraging Rose, his wife, to walk around as he sketched her. Good work!

Images © The Estate of Roger Hilton; Tate Gallery

A Leap in the Dark 32

A Leap in the Dark 32   8pm  Saturday 18th July 2020

          Empathy, poetry, and pottery

Tonight’s Leap features (and surely this is a world first) live conceptual ceramics with the artist Laura Hopkins, followed by three occasional poems by The Pale Usher, and Roland Bates on the German novelist Uwe Johnsson’s links to a Kent seaside town. There follows a zoomversation about formative reading with contributions from the audience. We welcome back the Settee Salon with poet Amy McCauley and author Rónán Hession who will together be looking at empathy in literature. Then we’ll have a new and no doubt short-lived feature we call ”What’s That On Your Walls?”, which doesn’t need much by way of explanation.

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, but please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

1 The Pale Usher welcomes you

2 Feat of Clay: live conceptual ceramics with the artist Laura Hopkins

3 Three occasional poems by The Pale Usher

4 Roland Bates on Uwe Johnsson

5 Formative books - a zoomversation in which members of the audience 

  nominate the fiction/non-fiction that had an impact on them as young 

  readers

Interval  The Potter’s Wheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUzGF401vLc

7 The Settee Salon: On empathy in fiction, with Amy McCauley, Rónán 

  Hession and (perhaps) Susanna Crossman 

8 What’s That On Your Walls? Our new short-lived regular feature

9 Live conceptual ceramics - an update

9 The Pale Usher signs off

The Company

Roland Bates has been a bookseller in more or less salubrious locations since about 2000. He can be found in Kirkdale Books in South London: https://kirkdalebookshop.com

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist. She has recent/upcoming work in Trauma (Dodo Ink, 2020), Neue Rundschau, (S. Fischer, 2019), (translated into German), We’ll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019), The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Berfrois and more. Co-author of the French book, L'Hôpital Le Dessous des Cartes (LEH, 2015), she regularly collaborates on international hybrid arts projects. Her debut novel Dark Island will be published in 2021. For more: @crossmansusanna http://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/ 

Rónán Hession is a writer musician and civil servant from Dublin. His debut novel Leonard and Hungry Paul (published by Bluemoose Books) has been nominated for the Irish Book Awards, British Book Awards, the BAMB awards, and long listed for the Republic of Consciousness prize. His third album Dictionary Crimes was nominated for the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year. He is currently completing work on his second novel Panenka, which will be published by Bluemoose in 2021.A third novel, Ghost Mountain, will appear in 2023.

Laura Hopkins is an award-winning stage designer and ceramicist-in-training. Her website: www.laurahopkins.co.uk

Amy McCauley is a poet and freelance writer. She is the author of OEDIPA (Guillemot Press, 2018) and 24/7 Brexitland (No Matter Press, 2020). Amy’s first full-length collection of poetry will be published by Henningham Family Press in 2021.

The next Leap in the Dark on Friday 24th July will feature:

- music by our composer-in-residence Helen Ottaway

- Spring Journal canto XVIII by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

- The return of Guru Dave, the sultan of suntan, who will also deliver a

  Letter from Deià 

- The Fall (and Fall) of Mark E Smith

- Live Bingo with The Pale Usher 

Stay well!

The Pale Usher

A Leap in the Dark 31

A Leap in the Dark 31   8pm  Friday 17th July 2020

New writing: Fragments of My Father, Seen From Here and A Liar’s Dictionary 

Joining our Friday regulars Jonathan Gibbs, Michael Hughes and Yoga Dave are author Sam Mills in conversation with Susanna Crossman; Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells reading their own work as featured in the anthology Seen From Here; a first Letter from Paris by Gerry Feehily, and Eley Williams on her new novel A Liar’s Dictionary. Plus the second round of Ping Henningham’s Tyrannosaurus rex, the online game that’s taking the world by storm!

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, but please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

1 The Pale Usher welcomes you

2 Spring Journal canto XVIII by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

3 Yoga with David ’Guru Dave’ Holzer

4 Sam Mills, author of The Fragments of my Father in conversation with 

  Susanna Crossman

5 Seen From Here: Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells read from this 

  anthology

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists.

Published in a PDF format by Unstable Object, an imprint launched by Tim and Vlatka, the book is available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust. Here’s the link:

            www.thisisunbound.co.uk/products/seen-from-here 

Interval 

6 A Letter from Paris by Gerry Feehily

7 Ping Henningham’s Tyranosaurus rex (2nd round)

8 Eley Williams on her new novel A Liar’s Dictionary

9 The Pale Usher signs off 

The Company

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist. She has recent/upcoming work in Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German), We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Berfrois and more… Co-author of the French book, L'Hôpital Le Dessous des Cartes (LEH 2015), she regularly collaborates on international hybrid arts projects. Her debut novel Dark Island will be published in 2021. For more: @crossmansusanna http://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com 

Tim Etchells is an artist, writer and performance maker, author of Endland (published by And Other Stories) and a founder member and artistic director of the performance ensemble Forced Entertainment.

Gerry Feehily is a London-born, Ireland-raised author and journalist based in Paris. An arts critic on national French radio station France Culture, he is also the English site editor at presseurop.eu and looks after the Ireland desk at Paris weekly Courrier International. He frequently appears on French television and radio to talk of Irish and European issues. His first novel, Fever, was published in 2007.

Jonathan Gibbs is a writer and critic. His first novel, Randall, was published in 2014 by Galley Beggar, and his second, The Large Door, by Boiler House Press last year. He has written on books for various places including the TLS, Brixton Review of Booksand The Guardian. He curates the online short story project A Personal Anthology, in which writers, critics and others are invited to 'dream-edit' an anthology of their favourite short fiction. Spring Journal is a response to the current coronavirus pandemic taking its cue very directly from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

Ping Henningham is an artist, performer and co-founder of Henningham Family Press.

David Holzer is a dedicated yogi, author, blogger and journalist. He founded YogaWriters and has taught workshops in yoga for writers in Mallorca, where he lives. Hundreds of people have taken his Yoga for Writers course on the DailyOm platform (www.yogawriters.org). His writing appears regularly in Om yoga and lifestyle magazine. David will be explaining why yoga is so beneficial for writers and taking us through a simple yoga sequence that can be done by anyone of any age in the comfort of a favourite chair.

Disclaimer

Please take care when practicing yoga. Should a pose feel that it could be harmful to you, do not attempt it or come gently out of the pose.

Breathing is a key part of yoga. Please breathe comfortably and naturally through your nose at all times. If your breath becomes forced, slow down the speed of your practice.

If you feel any kind of sharp, sudden pain anywhere in your body stop practicing right away. Be especially aware of your joints, particularly your knees.

Vlatka Horvat is an artist working across a range of forms, including sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography and writing. She teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. 

Michael Hughes is the author of two acclaimed novels: Countenance Divine (2016) and Country (2018) both published by John Murray, the latter winning the 2018 Hellenic Prize. Under his stage name Michael Colgan he recently appeared in the acclaimed HBO television drama Chernobyl. 

Sam Mills studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University, then worked as a journalist and publicist before giving it all up to write full time.

She is the author of two young adult novels, A Nicer Way to Die and The Boys Who Saved the World. Her adult fiction debut was The Quiddity of Will Self (2012). The Fragments of My Father is published this week by Faber and Faber.

Eley Williams is a poet and author of the prize-winning short story collection Attrib. (Influx Press). Her forthcoming novel A Liar’s Dictionary is published this week by William Heinemann. She lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Pale Usher is David Collard, who organises these gatherings.

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

On tomorrow night's Leap we’ll have (surely a world first) live conceptual ceramics with the artist Laura Hopkins, three occasional poems by The Pale Usher, and Roland Bates on the German novelist Uwe Johnsson’s links to a Kentish seaside town. We welcome back the Settee Salon with Amy McCauley, Rónán Hession and (subject to her availability) Susanna Crossman, who will together be looking at empathy in literature. Followed by a new and no doubt short-lived feature we call ”What’s That On Your Walls?”, which doesn’t need much by way of explanation.