RosieBell

Vivat Rex

I've been listening to Vivat Rex, which they have repeated in honour of the Queen's diamond Jubilee.  It was created in 1977 for the silver one.  I've only heard snippets before.  Now, thanks to  Iplayer, I can listen for an hour a day to fine actors repeating great lines dramatising 200 years of English nobles fighting for the crown.  (What a lot of ruthless cut-throats the Queen's ancestors were).

It kicked off with Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. John Hurt played Edward, managing a note of affronted whingeing that made me sympathise with Mortimer and Queen Isabella for deposing him, then his simple and dignified suffering at the end had me pitying him.  I saw this play many years ago done by the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and it has stuck with me - they had an excellent arrogant Mortimer and a creepy Lightborn, the assassin, with big clumsy red hands, quite horrible when he lay them on the broken Edward.  The Lightborn in Vivat Rex was equally cold and sinister.

Edward II was Marlowe's only play set in England.  What a loss it was, his death in Deptford at the age of 29.

23 April 1564 to 23 April 1616

Shakespeare's birthday and death day so here's a bit from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.  This is the speech of parlay at the siege of Harfleur.  I think it was left out of the Olivier version, which was made in World War II, and was colourful and patriotic..  Branagh's take on Henry V was to make it far greyer, muddier and bloodier than Olivier's, emphasising the horrors of war.

   

Henry V. How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?

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. 

Dark Days in Winter

After the death of Hitchens on 15 December some people flippantly remarked that he had spoiled yet another Christmas.  However, he did get a dig in at his least favourite time of the year.  In one of his, as usual, fine pieces of literary criticism,  he says of Dickens:-

Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

CH - I am sorry you are dead, if only so you will not have someone point out to you that in your prose you overworked two adjectives - "moist" (here an adverb).  The other one is "fetid."    But also, my December and other people's Decembers are not darkened by "protracted obligatory celebration".  Dickens, it seems, loved walking through London on Christmas Day to see that in every house every person was involved in preparing for Christmas, and Christmas makes most sense as a collective celebration.  It is not like the kind of enforced show that you get in North Korea, but the taking part of something that is both publicly celebrated and to which each family will bring its own little bit of tradition - what time they open the presents or including a dish that a foreign family member once introduced.  

Now your December days were not dark - you earned money doing work you loved and were popular and successful.  For the rest of us dull drones though there is a lightening to the heart at the decorated trees, the Nativity scenes, the carollers in the supermarket and on the streets, the beautiful music being played, the sweet story itself - that of birth and hope for the humble.   You had a grand life, but those of us whose lives are more meagre find some passing delight in these things.   Christmas has been taken on by people of other faiths or none.

So though I shall miss you greatly I shan't miss your constant groans against Christmas.  To bring some brightness of tinsel and decoration in those dark short days - when some of us barely see the natural light -is an act of collective creativity.  Remember, a tradition is the democracy of the dead  as Chesterton, a great Christmas and Dickens lover, once said. 

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. 

Good and bad hoaxes

I love a good hoax.  A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners.  Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look stupid, to expose the vanity of those in high places.   The Emperor's New Clothes is a satisfying story, but there would be little point to The Peasant's New Clothes. Hoaxees are gulled for believing what they want to believe, usually something flattering.   A hoax is cruel but its victims are not pathetic innocents.  You see them as being humiliated as they deserve.   Also, a good hoax confirms the prejudices of the on-lookers.  They have always known that the hoaxee had it coming to them for their superior airs and crackpot ideas. 

Some hoaxes:-

The Sokal Affair.  Alan Sokal submitted a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", to the cultural studies journal Social Text.  The journal in all seriousness published this paper which among other things stated that "quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct".  The dupes were a bunch of post-modernist pseuds and academics.  They looked like posturing idiots and those who had suspected post-modernism was a shack of jargon were full of glee to see this eyesore get trashed.

The Hitler Diaries. This was more of a forgery for gain than pure mischief, but the egg faced and out of pocket were Rupert Murdoch, the editors of The Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and the German magazine Stern, and the journalist who "discovered" the diaries, the Nazi-obsessive Gerd Heidemann.  The Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times said later: " When such a scoop is offered, you don't really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity."   Those of us who regard Rupert Murdoch as being a disgrace to truth and decency were justified by the greedy old despot saying about the affair "After all, we are in the entertainment business.” As a bonus, potential readers, the sort who are creepily fascinated about anything to do with Nazism, were cock-teased as well. 

The poems of Ern Malley. A hoax by a couple of Australian litterateurs on the editors of an avant-garde poetry magazine.  They concocted an unknown poet called Ern Malley and sent in his poems, which they had written deliberately badly.   The poetry magazine ran a special issue celebrating this new important voice in poetry.  The victims in this case were those who are overly impressed by literature that is obscure and difficult.

(Kingsley Amis wrote a story on a similar theme called Dear Illusion, about a poet who knowingly writes inept poetry that is lauded by the critics.)  

The Dreadnought Hoax.   Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury mates pretended to be Abyssinian royalty and were entertained by the Royal Navy on HMS Dreadnought.  I don't think it was that amusing, because I suppose the Navy officers had no choice but to be civil to foreign guests, but the fact that Virginia Woolf did this blacked up, bearded and in drag makes it stand out among hoaxes.  The Navy chaps gave the instigator, a poet and constant prankster called Horace de Vere Cole,  a token smack with a cane afterwards to satisfy their honour.

Virginia Woolf is at the far left

These days our armed forces have dwindled in size and power so a hoax on them would be silly childishness, whereas a successful hoax on, say, the Daily Mail or Simon Cowell, would delight a chunk of the British public.

The Conquest Letter.  I can't find a link for this but Kingsley Amis recounts it in his Memoirs. 

Robert Conquest, another poet and prankster and a distinguished Sovietologist, sent a letter to Philip Larkin marked HMG and stating that Larkin's collection of  pornography was to be investigated by officialdom.  Larkin dashed off to his solicitor's office and spent the whole day hiding there.  He later billed Conquest for the solicitor's time.   This event didn't spoil their friendship.   Conquest is a prolific writer and has been married four times.  He must have a lot of excess energy.

Philip Larkin wrote (bad) pornography himself, so there seems to be some justice in this hoax. 

My sister L. This was not a pure hoax, more of a wind up but L took a snapshot to school of a heart-throb pop-star, sitting right up close and smiling at her.  In fact, she had got a picture from a magazine, pinned it up on the garage wall and photographed that.  It did look very convincing for those who hadn't seen her other snaps, where she was inclined to cut off people's heads, or catch them as blurs in the corner.  This was funny and harmless.  If she had gone to school and said, for instance, that our mother had cancer, that would have been more in line with the Muchausen syndrome school of hoaxing, that is, unhealthily seeking attention.

Myself.  Once as art critic for a kind of Time Out magazine I did a piece of deliberate pretentious nonsense about an exhibition I'd seen - no-one spotted it but then I think no-one read it.   The magazine's editors thought they should cover exhibitions and as everyone else had snaffled the music side they gave that spot to me.  I should say I was, and am, fairly indifferent to painting and sculpture.  Those who like them should enjoy the Van Meergen hoax.  He faked a Vermeer which met an art critic's theory that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting.  Van Meegeren was happy with this result which confirmed what he had come to think about the Dutch art establishment and then found he could sell a phony Vermeer for a fortune so carried on faking.

The televisual hoaxer Ali G.  I can't stand the unfunny little arse and when he interviewed people who were very polite to him no matter how stupid and crass his questions, I was on their side.  I think the real dupes of his hoax were the idiots who found him entertaining.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - all right, drop the jokey tone.  The fact that this fraud is taken seriously still as a view of how the world works makes me howl.

So - a good hoax fulfils a victim's wishful thinking.  It's easy to see why Hamas loves the Protocols, why the Sokal hoaxees believed a real proper physicist endorsed their views about science and why the Australian avant-garde grabbed hold of their very own Dylan Thomas.  

The Gay Girl in Damascus is not a classic hoax since it was not created to show up the main dupes, the well-meaning progressives who sympathise with Syrian protesters.  The hoaxer Tom MacMaster is pleased with himself for adopting a persona that was so convincing it fooled his readers, but there's no sense that he's laughing at them for setting up and signing petitions demanding Amina's release from a Syrian jail.   MacMaster's  idea of wit is sarcastic jeering (common among activists).  One thing he does say is that his false blog exposed the "liberal Orientalism" of the west. 

Heresy Corner interprets :-

The clue to what he was playing at lies in the phrase "liberal Orientalism". It's not clear what liberal orientalism he thought he was exposing - perhaps it was the concern some (but not all) western liberals display for the plight of gay people and women in repressive Islamic societies. A perception which, of course, made "Amina" such a brave and representative heroine. It's even possible that he was deliberately creating a character who would prove irresistible to Western liberals, someone around whom they could unite - as indeed, for a time, they did.

MacMaster's own brand of liberal Orientalism, however, seems to have been of a different order - the celebration of an idealised Islamic society characterised above all by tolerance, pluralism and freedom. A picture entirely at odds with the burkhas and beheadings image perpetuated by that other sort of "orientalism" that sees Islam as irredeemably backward and savage. [The whole article is worth reading].

The "liberal orientalism" motive looks like an afterthought.  What the Gay Girl resembles is another literary counterfeit, the poems of Ossian.   A writer who cannot advance his works by their own merits passes them off as having been written by a more romantic figure.  MacMaster used the  beautiful lesbian rebel Amina, James MacPherson a druidlike bard called Ossian.  Both met the taste of their times. Amina's protest, authenticity and identity politics are much admired in modern culture. Macpherson's eighteenth century had developed a new interest in an ancient and native literature.  In Scotland this was "heightened by post-1745 nostalgic romanticisation of all things relating to the Highlands," (the progenitor of today's tourist industry).  Many contemporary Scots passionately wanted to believe in Scotland's antique literary heritage.   

Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes

The Gay Girl is a writer's hoax - of wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, because MacMaster does believe that his own work is of high quality that just needs a publishing break.  He also has strong sympathies with the Syrian uprising and so he coupled a writer's vanity with the unscrupulousness of a politico who feels justified in lying and forgery for a good cause.   

Samuel Johnson was famously sceptical about the Ossian poems which he called "an imposture" and what he said about  MacPherson goes for MacMaster, going by this interview:-

stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

Slipshods and pedants

Lovely piece by Martin Amis about his father, Kingsley Amis’s, posthumous book, The King’s English.  When he writes about language or about people close to him, Martin Amis is at his best.

The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

I don’t think that was an inspired coinage from K Amis.  M Amis comes up with a better one, “punks” and “fogeys”, as the identifiers of the slipshod and pedantic.  As for me, I’d just stick to “slipshods" and "pedants" - especially as both words are onomatopoeic in this context - you can slide and elide “slipshod” ("slusha") and “pedant” is a word you can really enunciate precisely.

I read The King’s English as I would a novel, just as when I was young I read Current English Usage, .and can happily browse through Fowler’s Modern English Usage.  They were just phasing out grammar when I went to school but they hadn’t got quite rid of Latin, so I picked up the idea that what we speak and write has a history and structure and that the words had particular names and functions.  I taught English at University level for a couple of terms to people a few years younger than I, and it was difficult to explain some of Chaucer’s use of words to students who didn’t know what a noun or verb was. 

I’m a wanker/fogey/pedant of course, unless I’m with those pseudo-pedants who go on about split infinitives and so on, when I turn into a super-pedant who has learned about the evolution of language.  I like understanding the difference between “masterful” and “masterly”.   I roll my eyes when I read my well educated colleagues’ emails about setting up a meeting for Mark and I, or Ruth and myself will be on this conference call.   The words “me” and “I” turning up with a partner throws them.

Martin Amis ends his piece with tenderness:-

Two months before he died, Kingsley had a heavy fall after a good lunch ("At my age," as he used to say, "lunch is dinner") and banged his head on a stone step. Thereafter, by degrees, he became a pitiable and painfully disconcerting madcap. He kept trying, he tried and he tried, but he couldn't write; he couldn't read, or be read to; and his speech was like a mixture of The Cat in the Hat and Finnegans Wake. Aged 73, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Plans for Kingsley's memorial service were quite far advanced when the typescript of the present book (then hardly more than a family rumour) was delivered to my door. I picked it up with a trepidation that the first few pages briskly dispersed. Here it was again, my father's voice – funny, resilient, erudite, with touches of very delicate feeling (see the entries under Brave and Gender), and, throughout, sublimely articulate. In truth, The King's English contains more concentrated artistic thrust than any of the five novels that followed his masterpiece of 1986, The Old Devils. The reason for this is, I think, clear enough. Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

Women in Love, Lust or who cares?

The BBC’s adaptation of D H Lawrence’s Women in Love looked lovely. There was a lot of white, from the white horses at the beginning to the sheets hanging in the garden, the tiles in the kitchen and the women‘s blouses and petticoats. There were muted soft colours as well -  greys, or greens of tweed and the woods. So when Gudrun Brangwen, (Rosamund Pike) who is cream and gold,  put on her colourful arty clothes she looked splendid and different. Care had gone to approach scenes from unexpected angles. Its looks, however, were the best thing going for it. The script was terrible.

It was first of all disjointed. You went from one character to another not knowing how they connected to each other and why they were there. Then there were the characters themselves. There are two Brangwen sisters, Ursula  (Rachael Stirling) and Gudrun. At the beginning Ursula gives a little lecture to her sister Gudrun not to see her life in relation to some man. But Ursula in fact is only portrayed in that way, as something female that miscarries, bleeds, yearns, is raped, and has sex. She talks - about love, lust, and sex - but there’s nothing of her there. I don’t mean she should have been given the job of a nuclear physicist, but that she should have been given an outline - meek or fierce, sweet or bitter.  But she was a blur who said things like:- “You do not accompany me into the unknown.  You do not set off with me.”  

Lawrence said of his novel The Rainbow where Ursula first features that “You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of character.”   I’m suspicious of artists who say you mustn’t expect something in their art which in fact is an important aspect of it. I think they are making excuses for being unable to bring something off.  He couldn’t do it with Ursula and nor could the script writer.

As her doings took up a large part of the screen time, it was a relief to get off with Gudrun, the ball-breaker, cock-teaser, home-wrecker and life-grabber. She at least was very much there, and she had a gang of Bohemian friends with cigarettes holders to set her off.  So her scaring her older married lover into flight had some drama to it.  Rosamund Pike was fine playing her. I very much liked Rosamund Pike as the beautiful ninny Helen in An Education and would love to see her in more comedy.  With her round flat face and tiny nose she reminds me of a sunfish. 

Gerald Crich (Joseph Mawle)  the alpha male, was the supposed force of modernity  - and we know that because his friend Rupert Birkin keeps telling him so.   Being told what people represent - being explicit instead of implicit - was one way the script had of being bad.  Mawle has the right kind of devilish attractiveness for the role.  But Rory Kinnear as Rupert Birkin came on to the Crich estate like Hugh Grant at Four Weddings and a Funeral, in self-conscious diffidence, so that his terrifying ex-girlfriend Hermione Roddice (Olivia Grant) looked like Duckface pursuing him.  He played the priest losing his faith who then believes instead in love, love, love.  He is a bit too cherubic to appear as the anguished intellectual.

The theme of Women in Love is passion; lust; love; fulfilment.   In this series that was expressed by shagging. So it was a shagathon, much of it al fresco - beaches, woods, against trees. Good shag, bad shag, female with clenched hands enduring it, female moaning enjoying it. Then some talking in between about sex and love.  I found it a terrible plod.  I left the two couples when they went off to Africa. 

Love, passion, marriage - there are other ways of portraying them on screen besides bonking.  Ages ago there was a television version of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.  The Morels in that story are a miner who has married a genteel lady, and they are always at odds. One scene still stays with me.  The husband and wife are sitting by the fire, he reading the paper, she sewing.

Mrs Morel:- Walter, I think I’m with child again.
Mr Morel:- (Slyly, looking at his newspaper) Oh!  I wonder how that happened?
Mrs Morel (looks up at him and smiles slightly.)

That gave far more of a sense that a sexual spark can keep an unhappy marriage smouldering than any amount of shagging and talking about “you are my soul”.

South Riding

Sunday evening, you’ve gloomily ironed your shirts for the week and now it’s time to settle on the sofa with a dram and see what the BBC has to offer you.  A train appearing through steam, a man on a horse galloping along the beach, cars with running boards and a woman in a bright red calf-length dress and round hat, who shines out among the grey of a town and the faces of the unemployed. You are warned that there will be scenes of a sexual nature.  Of course, it’s an adaptation by Andrew Davies , the man who loves a good corset-undoing scene for the Victorians, wet breeches for the Regency period and this one, South Riding, being modern, we can expect stocking tops and suspenders. 

Andrew Davies’s adaptations vary  in quality.  Vanity Fair was excellent, while the last Emma was a downer, as was Daniel Deronda, partly because the actress in them, Romola Garai, is a lightweight and spent most of her time smiling like crazy, as if advertising toothpaste. 

You can expect in a BBC period drama that the researchers will get the cut of the clothes and the shape of the vehicles right, but Davies is responsible for the dialogue.  I haven’t got a copy of South Riding to hand, but I’m pretty sure this was not 1930s speak:-

“it sends a message that the girls are valued”

A school is “affordable”

About a Council decision “What is needed is transparency”

Those phrases are from more recent times, that of the Today programme interviewing a politician post about 1980.  Are we going to have “robust” by-laws next?

Despite those niggles the story has got going nicely.  Sarah Burton, a progressive and socialist, has been appointed headmistress to the girls’ high school in a Yorkshire town.  Her appointment is opposed by the Conservative councillor and landowner, Robert Carne, who is struggling financially and has a neurotic daughter and a wife in an asylum.  Sarah Burton is played by Anna Maxwell Martin, and looks and feels right, not celebrity pretty but attractive, a red-haired powerhouse full of reforming zeal, a Jennie Lee of her time and place. David Morrissey as Robert Carne is heavy and brooding, which is all you need for the part.  Robert Carne has a grand house, a  tragic life and a masculine presence, which is enough for romantic appeal.  After the initial antagonism the two have been thrown into each other’s company in a calf birthing scene in a barn, and that was mellow and warm with the colours of the Jersey cows and the hay.  The scenery of wide skies and flat countryside, the shabby school, the grey town and the general period feel are well done.

South Riding was made into a series  in 1974 with Dorothy Tutin playing Sarah Burton.  It was thirteen episodes long, while this series is three only.  The earlier series was panoramic like Winifred Holtby’s novel, the structure of which was held together by the decisions of the town councillors, and how they affected the different characters, from high to low.  That big cast of characters are mostly going to have to be dropped or reduced and we’ll lose the wide view for a more focused drama but that has plenty going for it. Lydia Holly, for instance, (Charlie-May Clark), a clever, talented girl with uncontrollable hair has a short scene with her impoverished family, when her ebullient labourer father and she quote How Horatio Kept the Bridge at each other.  The family’s life is very poor - they live in a railway carriage - but not loveless and miserable and that gives Lydia a real spark.  Andrew Davies has kept Councillor Huggins (John Henshaw) the lay preacher and adulterer, who I would guess has been left in as he’ll grope around a few stocking tops and he has a great good-time girl (Janine Mellor) to fondle. 

So plenty of dramatic interest, competent acting, a fine appearance, an okay script.  Not up there with Cranford but of a reasonable standard, and like the Shipping Forecast, shows that the BBC is ticking along and all is right with the world.