RosieBell

The Youth Who Could Not Shiver

Grimm's Fairy Tales were first published on December 20th 1812. To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication the BBC ran a series on the tales which examined them from various angles - as expressions of nationalism and psychological states, feminist interpretations and so on.  The tales have mutated in all sorts of ways - bowdlerised for children's editions, cutified by Walt Disney, rewritten by Angela Carter.

When I was child I had a big format picture book of them which had been published in 1966.  The tales still contained cruelty which would be thought unsuitable for children today e.g  the wicked queen in Snow White being forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she was dead, Cinderella's sisters cutting off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper and the wood-cutter opening up the wolf's belly to rescue Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, then sowing it up again with stones.  Also Rapunzel had twins before she was married.

My favourite story was, and is, The Youth Who could Not Shiver.  The Youth in it has heard of people shivering with fear in graveyards and other creepy places, but has never felt it for himself.  So he goes about the world saying continually "Oh, if I could but shiver".  People get him to sit under a gallows where seven hanged men are swinging, or to watch three nights in a heavily haunted castle.  .

"When midnight came, a ringing and a rattling noise was heard, gentle at first and louder and louder by degrees; then there was a pause, and presently with a loud outcry half a man's body came down the chimney and fell at his feet. "Holloa," he exclaimed; "only half a man answered that ringing; that is too little." Then the ringing began afresh, and a roaring and howling was heard, and the other half fell down. "Wait a bit," said he; "I will poke up the fire first."

When he had done so and looked round again, the two pieces had joined themselves together, and an ugly man was sitting in his place. "I did not bargain for that," said the youth; "the bench is mine." The man tried to push him away, but the youth would not let him, and giving him a violent push sat himself down in his old place. Presently more men fell down the chimney, one after the other, who brought nine thigh-bones and two skulls, which they set up, and then they began to play at ninepins.

At this the youth wished also to play, so he asked whether he might join them. "Yes, if you have money!" "Money enough," he replied, "but your balls are not quite round"; so saying he took up the skulls, and, placing them on his lathe, turned them round.

"Ah, now you will roll well," said he. "Holloa! now we will go at it merrily." So he played with them and lost some of his money, but as it struck twelve everything disappeared. Then he lay down and went to sleep quietly.

On the morrow the King came for news, and asked him how he had fared this time. "I have been playing ninepins," he replied, "and lost a couple of dollars." "Have you not shivered?" "No! I have enjoyed myself very much; but I wish some one would teach me that!"'

This tale is comic, and I do wish some film company would turn it into a spoof horror movie.  The Youth is a really attractive figure, being so fearless and matter of fact when confronted by supernatural terrors.  The ending is good too.  The Youth wins the Princess, of course, but she and her chambermaid finally get him to shiver by natural instead of supernatural means. 

However, I was put out to find out in the series that that the Nazis picked up Grimm's tales for propaganda purposes e.g.  by giving the wood-cutter in Red Riding Hood a Nazi armband.  The Youth Who Could not Shiver was a Nazi favourite.  Of course they missed the point of the story, which they turned into Nazi uplift.

"Paul Diehl's 1935 adaptation of this story . . . was one of a range of silent short films made for the Reichstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (State Office for Educational Films) and widely shown in German schools. The scene of the night in the castle, though it follows Grimm closely in parts, shows clearly this altered ideological orientation. The youth, now given the name Hans, is swift and violent in his dispatch of a variety of grotesque creatures. He skewers one on a fork and holds it over a flame. He fastens a cat in a vice, cuts its head off, and tosses it into the moat. Unlike the written text, in which the youth feels sorry for a dead body and tries to warm it up, Diehl presents him as pitiless. Since the film has no sound-track, teachers could talk over it and impose an interpretation: children were taught that the action in the film symbolized the necessity for German fearlessness in stamping out enemies of the state (Jews, gays, Gypsies, non-Aryans). In 1937 the film was given a gold medal by the government department for which it was made. Nine years later, however, a Unesco commission, charged with the task of de-Nazifying the teachers and materials that were to be employed in post-war German schools, came to a different verdict: ‘Though there is nothing that is specifically subversive in this film, there is much that is typically Nazi in outlook, with its approbation of killing and force, coupled with callousness.’ The film was therefore suppressed, and is today little known, despite the technical proficiency of its animation."

Among all their other barbarities, the Nazis had no sense of humour and no idea how to read. 

The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex by Mark Kermode

Mark Kermode has seen about a hundred films to my one, but as his opinion of the one we've both seen coincides with mine, I naturally find him an intelligent film critic.  The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex is a collection of  essays - on the economic facts behind block blusters; the baseness of the selection process for the Oscars; the awfulness of going to the flicks today where 90% of the commercial thinking goes into flogging popcorn; the hideousness of 3D, and diatribes about very bad films, especially Sex and the City 2.  He's broadcasting his opinion of this "ghastly and putrid and vomit-inducing" film in this YouTube clip:-  

 

When I first heard this I had imagined Mark Kermode was a small "l" liberal provoked into a tumbrel moment but he says he's an old Trot, so seeing the Sex and the City 2 as the nadir of American capitalism and imperialism comes naturally to him.

There are also engaging anecdotes of how he started life as a film critic when a boy scribbling pages about Dougal and the Blue Cat (the film spin off of The Magic Roundabout) then maturing to Blazing Saddles - in order to relive the experience.  One bout of entertainment went a long way in those pre-internet, DVD and even video days.

On block busters - he sees them, in corporate speak, as an Opportunity not a Threat to good film-making. To make money - and they almost always do - they have to include a big star, great special effects and a newsworthy budget (he makes the point that the 100 million plus dollars spent in themselves are an audience draw - if it's that expensive people go to see what the pricey buzz is about).

"If you spend enough money, bag an A-list star and pile on the spectacle, the chances are your movie will not lose money (unless it's a comedy), regardless of how smart of dumb it may be.  . . an intelligent script will not (as it is widely claimed) make your movie tank or alienate your core audience.  Even if they don't understand the film, they'll show up and pay to see it anyway - in just the same way they'll flock to see films that are rubbish, and which they don't actually enjoy.  Like Pearl Harbour."

(Pearl Harbour, the movie, has the weakest, wettest, love story ever devised to insult you, the audience member.)

"The idea that creative risk must be limited to low or mid-priced movie-making (where you can in fact lose loads of money) while thick-headed reductionism rules the big-budget roost is the opposite of the truth."

Mark Kermode does love movies and does love his job as film critic even if it means seeing everything including all the Saw series.  He talks of the annoyance critics cause film makers who denounce them as elitist snobs, when they are not quoting them out of context to ramp up their movies.

"the difference between film criticism and pub talk.  Pub talk can be all opinion and nothing else; film criticism, if it is done properly , should involve opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and . . entertainment. . .

To illustrate these essential elements, here are five short reviews of Saw 3D, each adding another key ingredient:

1) Opinion
Saw 3D is rubbish.

2) Opinion and description:
Saw 3D is a horror film that is rubbish.

3) Opinion, description and contextualisation:
Saw 3D is the seventh episode and the first stereoscopic instalment in a long running horror series, and it is rubbish.

4) Opinion, description, contextualisation and analysis:
Saw 3D is the first stereoscopic instalment in a series that began life as a tortuously inventive low-budget chiller but which as descended over the course of six sequels into gory, boring torture porn which is rubbish.

5) Opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and entertainment.
It took the once-inventive but increasingly depressing Saw series seven movies to resort to the hackneyed headache of 3-D, but despite the promise that this is "The Final Chapter" (just wait until the sums say otherwise) you keep wishing those protruding spikes would leap a little further out of the screen and puncture your eyeballs to ensure that you never have to watch rubbish like this ever again."

(The movies marketeers extract "inventive" from that paragraph and mount it on the marquees.)

Kermode is a total cineaste, a lover not just of movies but of movie theatres; of the smell of celluloid and the look of reels from the pre-digital age, which always jumped at the same point; the actual physical appearance of a strip of film with frames missing because the projectionist had snipped a piece showing a female naked bottom for a souvenir.  He's the vinyl lover - even the shellac lover - groaning at the CD and I-Pod and lamenting that the skilled projectionist has been replaced by a button pusher.

He's good fun and good company. If you want to spend an easy 10 minutes look him up on YouTube on any film and he'll come out with something worth listening to.

The First Blog - Blog Principles from 1927

I wonder if this was the first Blog.

I found the following in a novel called The Way Things Are  (published 1927).  The heroine, Laura Temple, is visiting her neighbour, Lady Kingsley-Browne, who has been badly upset by the behaviour of her wayward daughter Bebee.  Bebee has caused a huge scandal by moving in with a married man and his wife.

"I must tell you that Bebee, poor darling child, has taken up quite a new line." [said Lady Kingsley-Browne.]

"Oh, what?" exclaimed Laura, her tone of dismay betraying her conviction that any new line followed by Bebee must necessarily be a disastrous one.

"She is leaving him - in fact, she already has left him.  She has - it seems a most extraordinary thing, I know - but she has taken up religion. At least,  I suppose you might call it religion.  Do come nearer the fire, Laura.  I wonder if there any scones, or anything hot? . . .

"Thank you.  But do please go on-"

"It seems as though Bebee has so much personality, poor darling, that she has to express herself in ways that might, in anybody else, seem almost odd."

"Yes."

"It seems she has met a man - I'm sure things would have been just the same had it been another woman-"

Lady Kingsley-Browne paused, but as Laura felt equally sure that whatever "it" might be, things would not have been the same had it been another woman, she made no reply.

"It just happens to have been a man - Ernest Blog is his name, but Americans so often have names that we think odd - well, he has discovered, or invented, a tremendous new creed, and he has quite converted Bebee to it.  And the really bright spot is, that they are on their way to England, to - to try and spread it. . .  I can't tell you how ardently she has taken up this new creed."

"What, exactly, is it?"

". . Mr Blog lays down just one or two broad principles.  Nothing sectarian, you know - it rather reminded me of the Women's Institute movement . . . sort of guiding lines, that makes life simpler for all of us. . .  "

"I should like to hear some of the - the Blog principles, if you can remember them.  I am not laughing, really and truly.  It's only the name that - just for the moment - "

"I know," said Lady Kingsley-Browne forbearingly.  "It has a quaint sound, I am bound to admit.  But the principles seem very simple and beautiful.  She enclosed a sheet, with some Rules of Life written on it, put together by Mr. Blog.  Nothing dogmatic, you know.  Just: It is Better to Speak the Truth than to tell Lies, and Kindness is Right, but Cruelty is Wrong.  Things of that sort.  I liked all that part of it."

"Was there another part, as well?"

"Two other parts.  One was about diet, which always seems to enter tremendously into any new kind of religion. .  . His - Ernest Blog's - idea is nothing cooked.  Only things that have ripened in the sun - and, of course, in this country, that would limit one a good deal.  But anything in the way of drink, and as much of it as one likes.  Prohibition, you see."

"Not in England."

"I know.  Perhaps he'll modify that part of it over here."

"And what else?" said Laura.

"Free Love," said Lady Kingsley-Browne, as one accepting the inevitable.

Later on when Dr Ernest Blog appears he is described as being "exactly two foot high".

So that's the proto-Blog or the  Ur-Blog.  Short, American, cranky, and advancing platitudes as daring originality.  However, you can't really object to the principles of Truth being better than Lies and Kindness than Cruelty - though you can find plenty of writers, on and off blogs,  ready to do so.

The first Blog follower was an egocentric air-head and flake.

(Extract from Chapter XVI of The Way Things Are by E M Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady has never been out of print.  The Way Things Are is republished by Virago Modern Classics.)


E M Delafield on the cover of Life.

Peter Rabbit the Musical

I'm remembering a musical version of Peter Rabbit that used to be played on the children's story time on the radio.

Mrs Rabbit's song went:-

My name is Mrs Rabbit,
And happy is my lot,
See what beautiful,
Children I have got,
I work for them,
And pray for them,
And teach them how to be,
Most respected members,
Of the bunny family.

Chorus:

We're a happy family,
We're a happy family,
And we live in the roots,
Of a big oak tree,
Flopsy! Mopsy!
How could they be sweeter.
And funny little Cottontail
And Peter.

Peter's aria was on his own naughtiness and how he wished he was good:-

Why do I do it?
(can't remember most of it)

I think a halo,
Would suit me,
Dangling over my head,
When they behold me,
They wouldn't scold me,
They'd say, well done instead.

Peter sneaks into Mr MacGregor's garden and then is spotted by Mr McGregor:-


Stop thief! stop thief!
Not another lettuce leaf,
Will you have

Radishes, parsley,
Carrots, baby peas,
Each of these are not for you,
But for me.

If I catch you, you will die,
And you'll be rabbit pie,
Supper for my wife and I!

Stop thief!

Peter gets away and returns home, traumatised by the experience and has to be put to bed by his mother.

The whole story comes back to me.  I went to a small primary school where the older children often taught the younger children.  I can hear someone's voice - was it Alan Blythe's - asking us, "Now why did Mrs Rabbit buy five currant buns when she went to the shops?  Why not 4 or 6?"

We did the calculations - Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, Peter - and the mother of course!

(I wrote this to have the pleasure of pasting the exquisite illustrations.  I can't find the lyrics for Peter Rabbit the Musical on Google. )

Last Words

I got a copy of Christopher Hitchens's Arguably from the library, who now want it back after a 3 week loan. It's a fat book, made fatter by large, wide spaced print. I don't think it's as good as Unacknowledged Legislators.  The sense I had was that of Hitchens not at the very top of his game - however I'd rather read him in that mode than others at their best, so I'll buy a copy when I'm less skint.

He most reveals his political self in the essay on Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. There are some passages where you can guess he is seeing with a small jolt of recognition his own stance post September 2001 

He says of Rebecca West's guide and friend "Constantine" who is "supposed to speak for all those who have resisted the long, rival tyrannies of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and who are now trying to teach the discordant peoples of Yugoslavia to speak with one voice. . .When dealing with an incensed young Bosnian who accused him of being a government stooge, he responds with some gravity by saying: "Yes.  For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition."  This is one of the more profoundly mature, and also among the most tragic, of the signals that West's ear was attuned to pick up."

So Hitchens preferred to speak to Paul Wolfowitz than to the readers of The Nation, since Wolfowitz had some power of action. 

Hitchens has often been accused of trying to re-live the 1930s, seeing in the excuse making for political Islam from the left a re-run of the Nazi-Soviet pact. You can guess he hears a familiar chime in these words of Rebecca West, about her own disillusionment with ineffective progressive and pacifistic circles:-

"She reflects on the "anti-war" meetings that she has attended back home. . .

"The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue, but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. . .They want to be right, not do right. ."

He also says that George Orwell was "a great admirer of Rebecca West".  Is that wishful thinking?  I can remember one passing reference to her in his work and she's not in the index of the four volume Collected Essays.  However,  I don't have the complete works, so I may have missed something.

7 February 1812-2012 and beyond

I am not a huge Dickens fan. Of the great Victorian novelists I prefer Eliot, Thackeray, the Brontes and Trollope over Dickens. Philip Larkin said it for me:-

I should like to say something about this 'irrepressible vitality', this 'throwing a fresh handful of characters on the fire when it burns low', in fact the whole Dickens method - it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say 'You don't have to entertain me, you know. I'm quite happy just sitting here". This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives -seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. (1)

That crammed, teeming quality of Dickens - the never letting up - along with the melodrama, sentimentality and the coy saint heroines - puts me off reading him. I am happy though that there are so many adaptations. Dickens was a great creator of character and scenes, and his wardrobe of carnival masks makes for a fine Victorian resource, like the converted warehouses and rescued railway stations in British cities.(2)

Like most people I was really taken with the Great Expectations adaptation, especially the first two episodes, which were atmospheric and intense. The third episode was a bit rushed. There were so many plot pieces to bang into place and some, eg that Mr Jaggers' housekeeper was Estella's mother, were skimped. All in all though, I found it engrossing, but then I don't have strong feelings about the book, unlike Howard Jacobson, who complains that they missed out the comedy (which is half of Dickens) and that the whole thing was a travesty of Jacobson's own interpretation. 

It is always risky to watch the potential pig's ear that someone is going to make out of your silkiest purse.  I remember being furious at a scrappy Daniel Deronda a few years back. If you are not so engaged, though, arguing about how characters and scenes are presented is part of the fun. So I enjoyed Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham (3) and her appearance with the props of an emo video - bridal veil and the wicked fairy quality - a version of Kate Bush jilted. That made her house a place of bad magic, and Pip's love for Estella an enchantment like that of the palely loitering knight in the thrall of the Belle Dame Sans Merci.  I agree with those who said Estella wasn't beautiful enough.  You can get away with a moderately nice-looking Elizabeth Bennet, say, or Esther Summerson in Bleak House, as they are women of character and their words and actions make them attractive, but Estella has nothing to say except what a cold-hearted screwed up bitch she is, the kind of a woman a smart guy would not touch with a bargepole. She should be as lovely as a star, able to stagger men, and she wasn't.

Ray Winstone as Magwitch the convict. - no, I don't think he was a ham. If you were going to have anyone menace you in lonely marshes, he'd be the man, and in his later scenes he was given some humour and dignity, which he did well with his little eyes and ugly face. In a work though where the theme is snobbery, they missed the chance that he was in his own way a snob. It's in this speech in the book:-

And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to know in secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor ever you'll be!' When one of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such.

Also, they didn't get round the howler that Magwitch could swim from the prison ship to shore with a hefty piece of iron chain around his ankle. Dickens' contemporaries bathed rather than swam, so they overlooked the impossibility at the time, but there's no excuse now.(4)

My favourite performance was that of Harry Lloyd as Herbert Pocket, with his sweet, light-hearted decency.

Another BBC shot at Dickens is Radio 4's Classic Serial production of Martin Chuzzlewit. It's called The Mumbai Chuzzlewits and set in modern day Mumbai amongst a Catholic community. It works well. The extended family plottiing against each other makes sense in that setting, as does the theme of hypocrisy versus true virtue among church going Christians. The Pecksniff figure (called "Pinto") (Rajit Kapur) hits the right note, with his little deprecatory laugh, that makes you want to strangle him. The old patriarch, Martin Chuzzlewit (Roshan Seth) is a delight, complaining about being served peasant food (dahl instead of gruel or slops), and angry at his own unjust autocracy which has brought him such sadness. Young Martin (called "Mickey") goes to Dubai rather than America as in the original and there meets misery among the immigrant workers.

One slight problem - in Victorian novels plots depended on miscommunicating (suppressed letters) and lack of information (missing heirs), so in this version they had to cobble up a bit of unlikelihood about why Mickey and his sweetheart Mary cannot email or text each other.

The first episode was preceded by an essay on the place of Dickens in India.  In order to make an Anglophonic and Anglophiliac civil servant class, education policy under the Raj included much English literature. It was taught in Indian universities before it got onto the Oxbridge syllabus. Dickens is still taught, still well known there, and his hypocrites, arrogant rich merchants and half-starved underclass in crowded cities are recognisable as part of India.

Another piece of Dickens was Amando Ianucci's Tale of Charles Dickens. Whatever the thesis - damning the literary critics (why? - there have been brilliant ones) - it did the trick for me by having various people read out chunks of Dickens, and enjoying his inventive imagery. I really was persuaded that I would re-read him some time.

(1) Letters to Monica

(2) The late Christopher Hitchens had evidently not read Dickens recently and slyly makes a virtue out of being a little uninformed about his subject. "You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time."

(3) Gillian Anderson in very good at embittered Victorian women, whether it's Lady Dedlock in Bleak House or Mrs Castaway in The Crimson Petal and the Rose. She suggests secret or semi-secret suffering that is deep and unalterable. 

(4) I filched this from John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre be Happy: More Puzzles from Classic Fiction. Sutherland also points out that although Magwitch as a Lifer returning from the Australian penal colony was supposed to have commited a capital offence, Pip and his friends aren't prosecuted for aiding and abetting the offender.

Update:- the last episode of The Mumbai Chuzzlewits was disappointing, full of Hollywood cliches.  "You must fight for her."  "You're coming if I have to make you."  "Why don't you get out of our lives?"  The best bit was old Martin Chuzzlewit snarling at his sardonic doctor, and even that is an old trope, the crusty elderly gentleman. 

Irreplaceable

Well, there's nothing much I can say.  Everyone, from close friends to fans to enemies are talking about this event which we knew was imminent.  I came home Thursday evening after a works night out full of red wine and good food , turned on the radio and there it was, the news that the writer Christopher Hitchens had died.  The tributes are pouring in, the reminiscences, the summings ups, the paying off of old scores. The famous, the obscure, the mandarin and the meanest of spirits are all having their say. I've read a few of their pieces and liked David Frum's best of all for its warmth and this final paragraph from Jacob Weisberg. 

Here's what I learned from Christopher Hitchens in the 25 years I knew him. Don't let anyone else do your thinking for you. Follow your principles to the end. Don't flinch from the truth. Repeat until the last ounce of strength drains from your body.

Though cut short by today's standards, Hitchens had a full life - full of combativeness, friends, drink, cigarettes, reading, politicking, travel, lecturing and most of all writing.  However hangovered he was Hitchens would write.  Even in his last days with his veins running morphine and tubes stuck in him at every point, he would be carried from his bed to a chair to continue writing.  

The world does seem drabber and emptier. This is a definite diminishment. The brilliance, the wit, the love of language are gone.  Even those who loathed him for political reasons would have liked to have had him on their side. 

I've tried to find some fitting words from the poets eg W H Auden's lament for the death of Yeats. 

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day . .

 . ..  .

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

There's another tribute to an English writer, as untidy and as argumentative and as loved by his friends as Hitchens was.  

"He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. -Johnson is dead.- Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; -no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."

If there is a next best, please send me his or her name. 

Coda to a death fugue

Further to a post on Shiraz Socialist re Primo Levi:-

Primo Levi always said his experience was utterly untypical.   He survived whereas millions of others didn’t.  It was also untypical in that he was in the concentration camp part of Auschwitz and was starving and labouring under brutal supervision instead of being shot or gassed immediately. 

The first images I saw of the Holocaust were still photos of the piled bodies but what we see mostly in  films, or read in books like Levi’s are narratives, where you follow the journey of those who got through, and leave the bones and ash behind.  It’s the view of Noah’s Ark.  You forget the many drowned and concentrate on the few saved. 

I’ve been reading Bloodlands:-

The Germans began the mass killings of Jews in summer 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union, by gunfire over pits, far from a concentration camp system that had already being in operation for eight years.  In a matter of a given few days in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all of their concentration camps.  The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps but for the medical killing facilities of the “euthanasia” program.  Then came the mobile gas vans used to kill Jews in the Soviet east, then the parked gas van at Chelmno used to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany, then the permanent gassing facilities at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the General Government.  The gas chambers allowed the policy pursed in the occupied Soviet Union, the mass killing of Jews, to be continued west of the Molotov-Rippentrop line.  The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

The image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over the unknown desert.  In the early months of 1945, the chiefly non-Jewish prisoners in the SS concentration camp system were dying in large numbers. . . Some of the starving victims were captured on film by the British and the Americans.  These images led west Europeans and Americans towards erroneous conclusions about the German system.  The concentration camps did kill hundred of thousands of people at the end of the war, but they were not (in contrast to the death facilities) designed for mass killing./ Although some Jews were sentenced to concentration camps as political prisoners and others were dispatched to them as laborers, the concentration camps were not chiefly for Jews.  Jews who were sent to concentration camps were among the Jews who survived.  This is another reason the concentration camps are familiar; they were described by survivors, people who would have been worked to death eventually, but who were liberated at war’s end.  The German policy to kill all the Jews of Europe was implemented not in the concentration camps but over pits, in gas vans, and at the death facilities at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.

. . Auschwitz was an unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility.  It stands as a symbol of both concentration and extermination, which creates a certain confusion.. . The literature of Auschwitz [was] written by its survivors, Tadeussz Borowski, or Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel.  But this sequence is exceptional.  It does not capture the usual course of the Holocaust, event at Auschwitz.  Most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz were gassed upon arrival, never having spent time inside a camp.  The journey of Jews from the camp to the gas-chambers was a minor part of the history of  the Auschwitz complex, and is misleading as a guide to the Holocaust or to mass killing generally.

Auschwitz was indeed a a major site of the Holocaust: about one in six murdered Jews perished there.  But though the death factory was Auschwitz was the last killing facility to function, it was not the height of the technology of death: the most efficient shooting squads killed faster, the starvation sites killed faster, and Treblinka killed faster. . . By the time the gas chamber and crematoria completed at Birkenau came on line in spring 1943, more than three quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead.  For that matter, the tremendous majority of all the people who would be deliberately killed by the Soviet and the Nazi regimes, well over ninety percent, had already been killed by the time those gas chambers at Birkenau began their deadly work.  Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue.

Bloodlands p 382-383.

I haven’t got If This is a Man to hand, but I remember when they arrive at Auschwitz he says of most of the people with him - men, women and children - that “they were swallowed up by the night”.  Those must have been the great majority who were killed immediately.

The Indispensable Thing

I’d put my name on the waiting list at the library for The Finkler Question and the librarian told me that thirty other people were after it.   I read it and thought it was a bit of a dog’s breakfast.  The other night I bought The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid from a charity shop as I needed something to read on the bus.  This did what a novel should do, that is, made me want go on reading it.  If anyone thinks that means I must mostly read thrillers, no, I want to go on reading Trollope, Tolstoy, Thackeray, George Eliot, Orwell.  The seductive ability of a novel to make me want to stick around with it is ultimately inexplicable, but as in a love affair, it is the indispensable thing.  The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a shapely, economical novel about someone who fails to be a rootless cosmopolitan or a happy immigrant to the USA.  He is rooted, he finds, in his home (Lahore), his family, his Pakistani patriotism, his religion, even, though that’s not dwelt on. 

When I first picked it up it reminded me a bit of a translation of a French novel eg Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By or something by Camus (can’t remember which) when the protagonist sits at a table and speaks to someone else who is never quite identified and never speaks himself.  So it’s done in the first person but with the street life and food of Lahore brought in, a little, I suppose, like the novel in letters.  The feeling of a translation was given by the rather formal English with the occasional Raj leftovers of expressions - “ruffians” for instance.   It’s a novel of disenchantment with the USA and globalisation.  I found the love affair a bit too romantic to be true - I‘m told it‘s allegorical, the woman Erica is “America“ - but it was far too detailed and her being in a loony bin was reminiscent of 70s novels that dealt with mad girls.  But I did like its cleverness and elegance, and the emotion that ran through the book - of a confused anger and resentment, those great bases of fascism - was beautifully conveyed and scary as well because there aren’t practical politics to combat it except of a grand monstrous kind.  Give ‘em Kashmir.  Let them defeat India in a war.  That will make them feel better.

Get a move on

Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along.  I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:-

I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could  have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes of 1950s Manchester.  And yet, had any authentic gentile rambler peered late through our particular windows, he would have beheld scenes of such primitive industry that he must have supposed to be tinkers from some part of Turkey not mentioned in any atlas.  For, like many Jewish families of that time, ours was a market family . . - and when we were not sitting in a circle on the floor, straightening out and putting into bundles the banknotes which my father shook like confetti from his market apron, we were making up bags of discoloured chocolate to be thrown free, as crowd-pullers, from my father’s stall; or counting out plastic poppet beads from a hessian sack and popping them together to make necklaces; or stylishly arranging a sponge, a facecloth, a toothbrush and  a shoe brush in a see-though bag on which we then stapled a label saying HOLIDAY KIT, to be sold the next day to gentile cyclists who were looking for that very thing to fit inside their saddle-bags.

The observation, the detail, the feeling of family solidarity and industry conveyed, the engaging warmth - yes, Howard Jacobson is an excellent writer.    I’ll enjoy reading Roots Schmoots as I know it will be full of insight, critical intelligence and wit. I read his columns in The Independent and when he and Caryl Churchill were fighting over that nasty piece of work, Seven Jewish Children, I was on his side.

I do wish though he wouldn’t write novels.  I have read a couple of them - Kalooki Nights (all over the place) and The Act of Love (absurd) and now I have pushed myself through The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker prize, to the delight of those who share Jacobson’s fears of rising anti-Semitism.

My first objection was to the main character, Julian Treslove.  He’s the same mournful romantic guy, doomed to be humiliated that starred  in The Act of Love and Kalooki Nights.  As Maxie in Kalooki Nights got together with women with a diaeresis in their names - Zoe and Chloe - so does Julian fall for women whose names begin with “J” so there’s a June, a Josephine, a Janice culminating with a Juno.  This, you understand, puns with Ju/Jew - the only purpose being to annoy me like fuck with its pointless pattern making.  Julian’s romanticism includes fantasies of having women literally die in his arms and so he names his sons Rodolfo and Alfredo from La Boheme and La Traviata.  The problem with doing that is that when one of them gets involved in some serious novelistic action, it’s incongruous, as if one of Donald Duck’s nephews, Hughie, Dewey and Louis, was  required to be Elizabeth Bennet’s suitor in Pride and Prejudice.  

After about a hundred pages of Julian and his friendship with the popular philosopher Finkler and the  tragic bereaved Czech Libor which I wasn‘t faintly interested in,  Finkler goes on Desert Island Discs and says vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine matters, that he is ashamed to be a Jew, and at that point the novel starts to get going.  Finkler sets up an ASHamed Jews movement, and there is scope for a story with satirical bite, that of a progressive who is brought down by the forces that he unwisely consorts with.  That is the story of Kingsley Amis‘s Girl, 20 (which I thoroughly recommend) when the trendy 50 something violinist tries to get  down with the yoof, and the yoof basically do him over.  But this does not last long enough though there are a few pages featuring the anti-Jewish Jew who is trying to make his foreskin re-grow, and recording the process on a blog, which are a good dig against both obsessively anti-Jewish Jews and blog performances generally, showy off buggers that we are.  

The Finkler Question is a roman a clef e.g.  when one character says of a film director “He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson” (in an anti-Semitic attack) she is referring to Ken Loach and the play that is a great hit among the progressives, The Sons of Abraham, is of course Seven Jewish Children.  I daresay some of the activists in Finkler’s ASHamed movement are identifiable as real people as well. 

The novel deals with various themes:- resurgent anti-Semitism against the diaspora arising from the obsession of the Western left with Israel; the difference between Jewish and gentile culture; the nature of philo-Semitism.  These are presented as the thoughts of a character (e.g. one searches the internet and sees a frightening list of anti-Semitic incidents) or in unlikely dialogue.  They are interesting and important ideas and Howard Jacobson could write any amount of articles on them.   I’d love to read a non-fiction book on his on philo-Semitism for instance. But they didn’t work in the novel as they are not incorporated into its fabric but are pinned on it like badges.  

What could have shaped the novel, of how Finkler goes from being an anti-Israel secularist to saying Khaddish over and over for the dead Libor, doesn‘t take up enough space, which is filled with the limp character Julian and his dull inability to get on with women and his life.  Like Kalooki Nights, the novel is all over the place.

Jacobson says of stories:-

Just as it is impossible to write a novel that is without melancholy, so is it impossible to write a novel without a story.

A story, mind, not a plot: it is a mistake to confuse the one with another. For it is a story for a person of a particular appearance to walk into a particular room wearing a particular expression. No more need ever happen, for my money, always provided that something or other is made vivid – maybe the person, maybe the room, maybe the expression, or maybe nothing other than the way the author feels or doesn't feel – absence of feeling being as good a story as any – about one or all of them.

. . .

Though Dickens plotted like a dervish, I would swap every coincidence and denouement he contrived for a single passage of description of the torpor of a Victorian Sunday in London, or the rains coming out again in Lincolnshire.

Well, you could say he’s making a virtue out of necessity as Jacobson could describe the rains beautifully, but not in a novel that makes me want to read to the end.  His novels have no momentum, whether of character or incident. 

Novels were frivolous once.  You didn’t read them before lunch or on a Sunday and they weren’t regarded as literature.  Writers who wanted to be treated as serious wrote verse tragedies, which were mostly dreadful.   Now a writer who wants to be treated as serious writes a novel, when he or she could be writing biography, criticism or travel.  Howard Jacobson has done criticism and travel, with sensitivity and observation, and could do biography.  He’s a highly intelligent guy and a good writer.  If only he didn’t write novels.