Seasonal blog, sort of.

Five descriptions the Prophet Muhammad:

"Muhammad was middle-sized, did not have lank or crisp hair, was not fat, had a white circular face, wide black eyes, and long eye-lashes. When he walked, he walked as though he went down a declivity. He had the "seal of prophecy" between his shoulder blades . . ."

"He was bulky. His face shone like the moon. He was taller than middling stature but shorter than conspicuous tallness. He had thick, curly hair. The plaits of his hair were parted. His hair reached beyond the lobe of his ear. His complexion was azhar [bright, luminous]."

"Muhammad had a wide forehead, and fine, long, arched eyebrows which did not meet. Between his eyebrows there was a vein which distended when he was angry. The upper part of his nose was hooked; he was thick bearded, had smooth cheeks, a strong mouth, and his teeth were set apart. He had thin hair on his chest."

"His neck was like the neck of an ivory statue, with the purity of silver."

"Muhammad was proportionate, stout, firm-gripped, even of belly and chest, broad-chested and broad-shouldered."

These are all taken from reputable online sources. Does a coherent picture emerge? Islam, as we all know, prohibits the pictorial representation of Muhammad so I was interested to find these and many other verbal descriptions are in circulation, all of them suggestive without being particularly vivid (apart from "he walked as though he went down a declivity" and that throbbing vein). Christ is never described physically in the New Testament although we all know what artists think the Son of God looked like thanks to countless painted depictions showing scenes in the Nativity to the Crucifixion. No taboo surrounds such representations, although apart from kitsch illustrators of religious tracts it's hard to image a serious artist today producing a painting of Christ unironically or without some subversive conceptual agenda. If you take a look at Google images for "Prophet Muhammad" you'll see some examples that clearly have no satirical intent and are, one assumes, acceptable to most Muslims.

There have of course been other, more provocative, representations of Mohammed with catastrophic results. Before we rush to condemn those who take offence (and after rushing to condemn the radicalised little shits who perpetrated the murderous attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo)  it's worth recalling that there was an enormous public row in Britain in late 1941 when the BBC broadcast a series of plays by Dorothy L. Sayers entitled The Man Born to be King. The very idea of an actor taking the role provoked outrage - there were accusations of blasphemy and (allegedly) one conservative Christian group claimed the fall of Singapore the following year was a sign of God's wrath. The Man Born to be King has since been re-made four times for the radio, and I was surprised and delighted to discover that the 1951 version featured none other than the comic actor Deryck Guyler as the Messiah.

Guyler (1914-1999) is fondly remembered by members of my generation for his portrayal of officious, short-tempered middle-aged men in sitcoms such as Please Sir! and Sykes and (on BBC radio) as Lennox-Brown in The Men from the Ministry (and I can hear the theme music, note for note, as I type this) So here's a seasonal treat for all my readers: a Christmas edition of Sykes featuring Guyler as the eccentric neighbourhood copper, Corky. This is rather marvellous - part of my childhood, in fact, when telly (and Christmas) was like this. Click on the link and do watch at some point over the next few days - but you'll have to skip the ads before you get to Eric and Hattie Jacques (who, despite what we all thought) wasn't really his sister. Imagine Guyler as Corky as Jesus.

Anatomy of a Soldier

I first became aware of the author Harry Parker when he featured in an evening of readings by Faber authors earlier this year. The star turn that night was Edna O'Brien (the only human being I've ever seen who is literally dazzling), supported by Eimear McBride (reading from her forthcoming second novel The Lesser Bohemians, clearly delighted to be sharing the stage with her literary mentor). The line-up  also included Viv Albertine (late of The Slits and reading from her iPad) and a chap (whose name escaped me), a nephew of the critic I. A. Richards who had written a book about mountaineering. Harry Parker, first up, read from his unpublished novel Anatomy of a Soldier.

The Critics' Samurai Code is  unambiguous: books should never be reviewed before they are published, and reviews never circulated before they appear in print or online. Our leading literary organs generally abide by that and so do I, so what follows is not a review but a sort of drum-beating pre-view, and certainly not the first to appear. (I cleared permission with the author's agent before writing this blog). There's been a discernible buzz surrounding this book for some months now and for once the hyperbole is entirely justified because Anatomy of a Soldier is one of the most brilliant debut novels you're ever likely to read.

It's an unapologetically experimental work and a far cry from the Andy McNab school. The first-person narration (although the term itself is hardly the right description of what the author has achieved) comes from a series of inanimate objects: a rifle, some medical gauze, an army boot, a bag of fertilzer, a prosthetic limb and so on. Each object is imbued with a degree of consciousness and insight (although never quite amounting to self-consciousness) and each object delivers an eloquent, necessarily partial (in both senses) account of its role in an emerging catastrophe. I can't begin to tell you how incredibly impressive this is - the cumulative effect is harrowing, convincing and profoundly satisfying. Parker served in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009 and clearly knows what he's talking about and he understands the vital importance of a soldier's kit and of bantering camaraderie. He doesn't aestheticise the experience of war but renders it directly and with complete conviction in an arrestingly original way. It's hardly a just comparison but the last time I read an avant-garde account of conflict this powerful and persuasive it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

The central character, Captain Tom Barnes, is horribly injured by an explosive device in an unspecified country and Parker's novel explores in penetrating, clear-eyed detail this traumatic event and Barnes's subsequent treatment and rehabilitation. The fragments build up a lucid and coherent account while the narrative perspective shifts between Barnes, his fellow soldiers and the local insurgents. This is gripping and rewarding. It extends the range of the novel.

When I heard the author read a few pages that evening my immediate reaction (since amended) was that such ingenuity, however well executed, would be unlikely to sustain the reader's interest at novel length. The danger, I thought, was that the approach would sooner or later degenerate into a simple guessing game in which the reader, having identified (as it were) 'the mystery object', would be tempted to skip to the next section, and that while that might offer some ludic satisfaction it would not amount to a coherent fiction. I'm happy to admit I was quite wrong.

I received an advance copy a week later and having read it in (as they say) a single mesmerised sitting realised that what I'd heard at the Faber reading was representative but not typical (if you see what I mean). Anatomy of a Soldier is  potent, compassionate, visceral and necessary. It knocked the stuffing out of this reader and will certainly be one of the great works of fiction published in 2016. 

Anatomy of a Soldier will be published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2016.

Susan Sontag and Scopitone

In her influential, indeed seminal 1964 essay Notes on "Camp", the late Susan Sontag initiated a line of discourse that is still going strong. In it she lists the following 'random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp':  

    Zuleika Dobson

    Tiffany lamps

    Scopitone films

    The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA

    The Enquirer, headlines and stories

    Aubrey Beardsley drawings

    Swan Lake

    Bellini's operas

    Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

    Certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards

    Schoedsack's King Kong

    The Cuban pop singer La Lupe

    Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man

    The old Flash Gordon comics

    Women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)

    The novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett

    Stag movies seen without lust

Several things strike me - one is the predominant belle époque Yellow Book resonance of Salome and Beardsley, and of the 1920s (Tiffany lamps, flapper clothes). Camp for Sontag was, at least in part, about the confident cultural appropriation of the past, and about ironic detachment. It was also more or less about foreignness because, with the exception of the Enquirer, the Brown Derby and Flash Gordon (and perhaps the Lynn Ward pictorial novel, which strikes me as the opposite of camp)., almost everything she lists comes from remote Europe, and the even remoter nineteenth century.

That a list is so accommodating as to find space for the Brown Derby (one of a string of hat-shaped restaurants), Bellini and King Kong begs the question: what isn't camp? A camp sensibility will manage to locate and elaborate potential campness in anything - it's the sensibility that counts rather than its correlative.

A couple of items in Sontag's list were completely off my radar: Scopitone films? La Lupe? Stag movies seen without lust? Other items seem to me to be a lapsed currency (Tiffany lamps) while others are tantalisingly vague: 'certain turn-of-the century postcards' - what on earth can she mean? And (this seems to me important) where does camp end and kitsch begin? It's a contested border. A theory of mine, and one that may not withstand close or even momentary scrutiny, is that camp degrades sooner or later into kitsch, but that kitsch can sometimes be rehabilitated, given fresh value and purchase on the culture, by camp. It's a temporal thing - tastes change.

But let's go back to Scopitone. I looked it up and discovered that the this was a kind of video-jukebox, showing 16mm films of mid-century performers, precursor to the pop video. Happily many of these survive and are available to view in a wonderful online archive here.  (You'll be immediately hooked, so beware). With the exceptions of Nancy Sinatra (inevitably performing These Boots are Made for Walking) and the French chanteuse Sylvie Vartan (twisting away conscientiously to Ray Charles's What I Say and raising the bar for cute), none of the singers in the Scopitone archive meant a thing to me. Which only adds, of course, to their charm and poignancy - all these lost young hopefuls from the middle of the last century. But none of the Scopitone films I've watched so far - perhaps a dozen, and with varying degrees of delight - strikes me as particularly camp in Sontagian terms. They share a retro appeal, are agreeably unhip and (as we now know) are mostly poignant records of incipient commercial failure, of cultural also-rans.

Camp today - and it's a long time since it needed Sontag's tentative inverted commas, having moved into the mainstream - is more raucous, more ubiquitous than it was half a century ago. I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing, but it's undeniably a thing. I don't own a television but such is the cultural ubiquity of the television presenter Graham Norton that even I am aware of his overpowering register. Camp has become a default setting. It's worrying.

Plum to Zadie

Change and decay in all around I see.

Well decay, certainly. The latter outweighs the former in Cameron's Britain, not least if one considers change should always be for the better. As the country sinks into a state in which vile oligarchs and sad paupers are united only in their enthralment to celebrity culture (which is the opposite of life), as our children are denied any purchase on the future economy (whatever form that takes), as freedoms are eroded and the public discourse around political issues becomes ever more rancorous and infantile, as the homeless and hopeless proliferate, as private companies wait to pounce on what remains of our public health service . . .

What prompts such glum reflections?

It is, as I'm sure you'll already have guessed, the recent publication in two volumes of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, edited by Philip Hensher. They cost twenty five pounds each, and it's fifty quid well spent if you're in the market for two inconveniently heavy slabs of (mostly) light fiction.

I admire Hensher very much, and for many reasons, and I'm pleased to see that our tastes overlap (not least in his perfectly reasonable claim that V. S. Pritchett is the greatest of short story practitioners, although I'd quibble at his selection of The Camberwell Beauty). 

What prompts my gloom, and what may prompt a corresponding gloom in you, my valued reader, is the sub-title of the second volume: 'From P. G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith'.

There's quite a distance between those two writers, and I can't persuade myself that there's much in the way of progress. I can see the point of Zadie Smith and am pleased that she seems to have overcome the early success of White Teeth, a fiction that (as they say) ticked all the boxes but (as I say) left me cold. This was partly for personal reasons, as her upbeat depiction of a Jehovah's Witness family managed to be as ignorant and condescending as anything I've ever read about this nasty cult (and I know what I'm talking about, believe me). It was also because I never bought into her portrayal of urban multiculturalism, which is a far more nuanced and tricky and unstable a subject than she allows. 

Now 40, she's so much part of the literary establishment (whatever that is) that I feel Hensher should be looking at other, more recent (and inevitably younger) writers for a sense of where the form is heading, what it is capable of doing. Recent virtuosic short story collections include volumes by May-Lan Tan (Things to Make and Break), Thomas Morris (We Don't Know What We're Doing), Claire-Louise Bennet (Pond) and many, many others. That Zadie Smith (and, come to that, Ali Smith) are included as (by implication) the culmination of a literary form dating back to Defoe is something I'm sure both of them would find  amusing and embarrassing. But mostly embarrassing.

And what about P. G. Wodehouse? For some (including me) he's simply unmatched as a comic writer, and is one of the great literary stylists, instantly recognisable yet virtually inimitable. Gabriel Josipovici makes a strong case for regarding Wodehouse as an important modernist, and I can't help but agree, because Wodehouse is as much a language virtuoso as, say James Joyce. "Some girls are the sand in civilisation's spinach'. How about that?

The French take on English Lit.

What connects these five novels and their writers?

The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos

Martin Eden by Jack London

Sophie's Choice by William Styron

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

The answer may come as a surprise. They all featured in Les cent livres du siècle, a list of the one hundred best books of the 20th century, according to a poll conducted in the spring of 1999 (and I know this isn't topical, except retrospectively) by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde. 

Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists (and I already smell a rat), 17,000 French voters responded to the question "Which books have remained in your memory?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?)

Now there were other books written in English in the list - Steinbecks's The Grapes of Wrath was the highest-placed Anglophone novel (in 7th place) and Ulysses came in 28th, below Lolita and above The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati. There was The Hound of the Baskervilles and The War of the Worlds and (for some reason) Gone with the Wind.

What struck me about the five novels listed at the start of this blog is that not only had I never read any of them (and of course one can't read everything), but that, in the case of Martin Eden I'm ashamed to admit I'd never even heard of the book. At least I thought I'd never heard of it but it turns out I must have. In Nabokov's Pnin (1957), the title character asks for a copy of Martin Eden in a bookshop, describing it as "a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London". The assistant (like me) has never heard of it, and tries to palm him off with The Son of the Wolf prompting Pnin's gloomy reflection: "Strange! The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody—little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates—everybody read and re-read him."

It's odd, isn't it, that some writers appear to enjoy a greater reputation in other languages. I seem to recall that everyone in Paris in the late 1980s was reading John Irving. Why? It's not that he's a negligible writer but what was it that triggered an eager response in France?

Perhaps the most popular 19th century anglophone writer in France is Edgar Allen Poe (or 'Edgar Poe' as the French prefer to call him). It's not so hard to find a likely reason in the identity of Poe's best interpreter. Charles Baudelaire spent nearly ten years translating Poe's works into French, and his translations were and are very highly regarded. He certainly wasn't the first Frnech writer to tackle Poe, but his "scrupulous translations" were and are considered the best. These were published, in case you want to read them (I haven't) as Histoires extraordinaires (1852), Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) (1857). There are, I expect others. Certainly Baudelaire is an added lure (which sounds like an anagram), and I can't help wondering which foreign writers  were or are popular in English in part at least because of the fame of their translators. I don't mean Dante (for instance), but Poe-like authors . . . any thoughts?

World's funniest sentence

Not aphorisms, or witticisms, and certainly not jokes and smart-arse one liners. What I'm after are sentences (and sometimes a series of sentences) that are funny in themselves, but which rely on a context for their effect.

This was prompted by my off-the-cuff remark recently that the author Anthony Buckeridge - creator of the immortal schoolboy Jennings and his pal Darbishire - would be hard to beat, on the strength of Darby's flailing attempts to say, following a bicycle crash: "My black back brake block's broken!" (from Jennings's Diary). At the age of eight or nine I could think of nothing funnier, apart from his regular cry of "Fossilised fishhooks!"


I haven't given much thought to what follows but here, in no particular order, are some favourites:

1. 'Perhaps this will refresh your memory'. It's the caption to a cartoon by James Thurber. You'll need to look up the image of course, if you don't know it already.  Brace yourself.

2. 'I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, 'till tomorrow - ' At this moment the door of the house opened, ... 'I shall sit here,' he said, 'on and off, for days and days. 

The great Peter Cook found these lines from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  particularly hilarious. He 'did' the voice of the frog Footman as a dimwit yokel. 

3. From Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet. I can' find a copy but I recall the end of a lengthy episode in which the titular heroes decide to become farmers and after a scrupulous study of all the literature and heavy investment in infrastructure and feed, attempt to raise pigs, This culminates in the simple and deadpan line:

                             The pigs escaped and bit people. 

4. When Lauren Bacall first met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not she reportedly told him: 'Without my glasses you're a good-looking guy.'

5. P. G. Wodehouse of course - but where to begin? I'd plump for 'Some girls are the sand in civilisation's spinach'. That will have to do for now. Or Jeeves, in his 'stately procession of one'.

6. "Advanced, forthright, signifficant".  It's Nigel Molesworth, nailing the modish young philosopher Colin Wilson. That double f makes me happy. Geoffrey Willans!

7. George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody. Too many bone-dry lines to savour. But I'll go of the moment when Mr Pooter lowers himself into a very hot bathtub (which he has recently decorated in Pinkford's red enamel paint). Here's the passage, and I'll reveal the particular sentence that melts my butter afterwards:

    On moving my hand above the surface of the water, I experienced the greatest fright I ever received in the whole course of my life; for imagine my horror on discovering my hand, as I thought, full of blood. My first thought was that I had ruptured an artery, and was bleeding to death, and should be discovered, later on, looking like a second Marat, as I remember seeing him in Madame Tussaud’s. My second thought was to ring the bell, but remembered there was no bell to ring. My third was, that there was nothing but the enamel paint, which had dissolved with boiling water. I stepped out of the bath, perfectly red all over, resembling the Red Indians I have seen depicted at an East–End theatre. I determined not to say a word to Carrie, but to tell Farmerson to come on Monday and paint the bath white.

What reliably makes me shake with laughter is "My second thought was to ring the bell, but remembered there was no bell to ring." We all have moments like that. Or days.

8. "The fleet's lit up" Lieutenant-Commander Thomas 'Tommy' Woodroffe (1899–1978) was a British naval officer, broadcaster and writer. After his retirement he became a commentator for BBC Radio. 

From the fairly-reliable Wikipedia entry on the great man:

   In 1937 he was to describe the Spithead Review from his old ship the battleship HMS Nelson. Apparently he met some of his former colleagues before the broadcast and drank to the extent that his broadcast, still known today by his repeated use of the phrase "the fleet's lit up", was so incoherent he was taken off air after a few minutes and suspended for a week by the BBC Director-General John Reith.

9. 'I'm picky'  Isabelle Huppert. when asked how she can be both a nymphomaniac and a virgin, in Hal Hartley's wonderful indie movie Amateur.

10. 'Nobody's perfect' Over-exposed perhaps, but still a hell of a line, from Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot. And it's also true, which is a bonus.

11. 'He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy'. 

12. 'Hard boiled eggs and nuts' says Ollie straight to the camera, understandably disgusted by Stan's 'gift' in County Hospital.

13.  'Swipe me how glittering' (or any number of glum ejaculations from the lad himself, Tony Hancock).

14.  Hardly a joke, more an expression of a world view, and therefore admissible: an opening line from Ken Dodd, at the start of an epic one-man show exploring the limits of language and human endurance: "What a beautiful day! What a beautiful day for sticking a cucumber through the vicar's letterbox and shouting "THE MARTIANS HAVE LANDED!"

15. O could hardly overlook this one: Collapse of stout party It's not so much the mildly salacious sentence that triggers the moment, but the inexorable descent into inarticulate sobs and gurgles that's so compelling. A worthy conclusion - and companion piece to number 8 (above).

More to follow, perhaps.

On Julian Maclaren-Ross

Last week - Tuesday November 3rd to be precise - marked the anniversary of the death, in 1964, of the wonderful writer Julian Maclaren-Ross.

So this is a belated blog, prompted by the great Soho chronicler's passing, just over half a century ago. He died broke and it was only a few years ago that, thanks to the heroic efforts of the  journalist Virginia Ironside and members of the Sohemian Society, a gravestone was belatedly commissioned and put in place. I was present at the ceremony and delivered the following heartfelt doggerel, as whiskey was poured over the elegant headstone and cigarettes left, for what use is an afterlife without booze and baccy?

Maclaren Ross is the subject of one of the very best literary biographies you'll ever read:  Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts.

The poem was, and is, dedicated to Julian's son Alex.


Lines to Mark the Unveiling of a Headstone

For Alex Maclaren-Ross

Dear Julian Maclaren-Ross,

     You wouldn’t give a tinker’s toss

     For all this fuss. This is for us – the living.

We’re here to perpetrate an act of giving.

It’s true our congregation’s small in number -

     Not sure what quorum constitutes a wake.

     We’ve interrupted your eternal slumber

To celebrate a dandy and a rake,

Who loved the rough sodality of pubs,

     Cocoon’d by fugs of gossip, banter, quips,

     Spoofing the hours away in coppers, tanners, bobs;

And pints of  bitter, scotch and filter tips.

You have a headstone now. It’s kindly meant -

     Confirming you as WRITER AND BOHEMIAN,

     And elected unopposed as president

Of a club that we - don’t snigger! - call Sohemian.

We’ve gathered here today for this unveiling -

     Your unmarked grave now marked for all to see.

      I’m pleased to say the atmosphere prevailing

Is one of simple camaraderie.

Alex is here, your son - a grown man; 

     (There wasn’t time for you to get acquainted);

     He knows you now as well as a son can,

Aware you’re never likely to be sainted.

We love your tales of squaddies, spivs and chancers;

     Of clots and colonels, pukka sahibs, drunks;

     Of chaps in digs, of salesmen, tarts and dancers,

How some are decent types and others skunks.

Your style, M-R, is simple, tough and supple -

     You buttonhole your reader with each word;

     You’re free of bullshit, cliché, cant and waffle,  

And have a master’s sense of the absurd.

Are you surprised you’re more read now than ever?

     That most of what you wrote is back in print? 

     Your critics and your public think you’re clever,

(Of Love and Hunger must have made a mint).

You have an active afterlife as Trapnel,

     It can’t be long before you get a plaque

     Or some such reputation-forging shrapnel.

It’s fair to say at last you’ve made your mark.

But where are they, those other Forties spirits?

     Where’s Sister Anne and Tambi, Nina, Ruthven?

     Well thanks to your biographer Paul Willetts

They’re here, and still by fear and loathing driven,

As though they’ve just nipped out to bounce a cheque,

     To lunch with Rotha, hoping for a break;

     At work to salvage something from time’s wreck -

A paragraph that isn’t glib or fake.

Their fading Wheatsheaf shades prop up the bar,

     A pissed-up mist of spite and spleen and ink;

     They’ve settled in, they won’t be going far;

A miasma of pills and fags and drink.

But let me at this point bring in and honour

     A quondam Chelsea Bird with whim of iron

     Who got Tom Waugh to carve your name upon a 

Granite block (with words that suit Lord Byron).

You’d really like Virginia, I think:

      A writer too – commanding large advances.

      She’d match you yarn for yarn and drink for drink

And show you how to cope at beat club dances.

Now let’s agree, before we get the rounds in -

     What‘s great about your stuff? Why does it last?

     What is it that your writing most abounds in?

What keeps it fresh, unfettered by the past?

Good questions all, but I don’t have a clue.

     Can’t do lit. crit., and think it would be mad to.

     But here’s a wonky insight, partly true:

You wrote the way you did because you had to.

Hounded by creditors, landlords and editors

     Clobbered by taxes and exes and sex, 

          Fizzing with benzedrine, twitchy with dexies 

               Years of bad eating and mountainous debts.

You fabulous, bibulous arch self-inventor -

     With cane and dark glasses and camel-hair coat.

          Seductive, productive, intransigent mentor

               To thinkers and drinkers and this pisspoor poet.

Enough! It's nearly time for us to go.

     So from us all and all your readers too,

     It's “Toodle pip old man” and “Cheerio”,

We're off to raise a glass or three to you,

     

Dear Julian Maclaren-Ross,

     Who wouldn’t give a tinker’s toss

     For all this fuss. Please join us – the living.