Zoo in the head

Midweek Penguin: Auks and a death-wish

What a lot of readers find hard to take in Michael Innes's detective stories is the superficial snobbery — the excessive attention to people with titles, to grand houses and social forms. Which can get wearing, I admit.

What I like about him is the way that, under the formal surface, nightmares seethe. The apparatus of nightmare infests his books: doubles, chases through endless dark spaces, messages that evade sense, vanishings, substitutions, betrayals. Often, the stories seem to be elaborate constructions designed solely to contain scenes snatched from dreams (an early book, Appleby's End, is set at a country house called Long Dream). Pigs, women and simple-minded yokels are turned to statues. A boy in a cinema realizes that the boy sitting next to him in the cinema is himself, and that he is committing a murder; on a night train, a middle-aged man encounters an elderly midget, an eight-foot schoolboy, a Chinese lady holding a white monkey on a chain, and a living mummy. A young man on a beach by night falls under the spell of an older, naked man who emerges from the sea. Lions cringe like lapdogs; a man is addressed by a child dressed as a cat; a girl seeking her vanished lover thrusts herself down a darkened crevice into the Library of Babel...

In the Forties and Fifties, Innes was mildly obsessed by the nightmare of mass destruction, of atom bombs and uncontrollable viruses — but hey, wasn't everybody? This is the nightmare of Hare Sitting Up (1959), offered at the very beginning. The title page carries as epigram a quotation from Women in Love:

You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

The story revolves around a vanished scientist, his twin — so nearly identical that nobody can tell the difference — and a mad, bird-loving lord who wants to leave the world free of the burden of us. Along the way, Sir John Appleby, our hero, is distracted by a big red herring in the shape of the great auk, or garefowl, close relative of the penguin: a rumour surfaces that it has been spotted on a Scottish island, a century after it was hunted to extinction.

As always with Innes, there's a lot of hyper-literary chitchat, some Latin tags ("But there just have to be limits, it seems to me, to the fiat justititia ruat coelum attitude" ...  "Ne sutor ultra crepidam is my motto.") and some dreary whimsical banter. But he chills the whimsy with some lines from Measure for Measure: "Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die."

This is the first Penguin edition, 1964. The cover has one of Alan Aldridge's simpler, more striking designs on a Marber grid. Abundant and cheap, so hold out for a copy in good nick.

 

Some Batman resources

You may or may not be aware that a new Batman film is about to appear in cinemas [SPOILER ALERT: It's called The Dark Knight Rises].

Perhaps you feel that you don't understand enough about this "Batman" thing. Here is some help:

1) In a paper entitled "Trajectory of a falling Batman" graduate physicists at the University of Leicester ask whether the Batman's cape would, as depicted in Batman Begins, enable him to glide. [SPOILER ALERT: It wouldn't.]

2) The Finnish loss-making mobile-phone company Nokia has published a series of three-dimensional maps of Gotham City. [SPOILER ALERT: It's a bit like New York.] More Gotham topographical resources here.

3) Nice Catherine Shoard, of the Guardian, considers the politics of Batman [SPOILER ALERT: They're a bit right-wing.]

4) LogoDesignLove links to a video and some well-researched writing on the Batman logo. [SPOILER ALERT: Pointy ears.]

5) Batman is kind of gay, or at least fairly bi-curious. (One commenter points out: "... just because hew has no permanent relationship with a woman does not mean he's a homosexual,he can not put a woman in his life due to his oath in fighting crime" [sic, passim]. That's what they used to say about Edward Heath, too.)

Hope that all helps.

UPDATE: At the Telegraph, Robert Colvile agrees with Catherine Shoard but thinks Batman's right-wing views should be celebrated. (I thought conservatism was all about respecting social institutions: Batman uses his wealth to ignore them. Puzzling.)

Minds watching themselves

From a Guardian profile of the naturalist and television presenter Chris Packham, written by Patrick Barkham:

In a nation traditionally distrustful of public intellectuals, Packham may be too clever by half for some tastes. Every year he slips song titles into Springwatch, beginning with his beloved Smiths and continuing this year with David Bowie.

Where to begin? What does he think — oh, never mind. Just pass the hemlock, will you?

1973: A pretty good year for Peter Boyle

When Peter Boyle died in 2006, all the headlines could think to say about him was that he'd been the grumpy dad in Everybody Loves Raymond and the monster in Young Frankenstein. But at the start of his career he was a tough, charismatic character actor who added individuality and intelligence to a number of films.

He got attention in 1970, in the title role of Joe — in effect, Archie Bunker with a gun. In 1971 he turned down Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, leaving it to Gene Hackman to collect the Oscar. That may have been his big career mistake: Hackman became Hollywood's bald character actor of choice. But Boyle was more interestingly and aggressively bald than Hackman, with an ugly fringe of black hair around the edge of his scalp: perhaps that was too much of a fuck-you to Hollywood standards of beauty and grooming for him ever to make it really big. Still, he kept getting work, and he was on an upward curve in 1973, when Slither and The Friends of Eddie Coyle were released.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an adaptation of one of George V. Higgins's crime novels, about a small-time Boston hood who makes money by selling guns to bank robbers and stays out of jail by snitching. Robert Mitchum played Eddie: he looks worn out and ripe for a fall, and it's a shame that he gets stuck with some lengthy speeches about the hardships of the criminal life — they feel like a clumsy lunge at significance by a director who doesn't have enough faith in plot, action and actors. (That's Peter Yates, by the way: if you ask me, it's the same problem that afflicts Bullitt, where poor old Jacqueline Bisset gets stuck with some very dreary stuff about the brutalizing effect of Steve McQueen's police work.) Boyle has better luck with his part: he's Dillon, a barman in the bar Coyle likes to visit — ordinary looking, but quite early on we learn that he's snitching to the same Treasury agent as Coyle, whining about his money problems and how much he needs the puny twenty bucks the Treasury guy pays him every week. Turns out he's a hitman, though, at five grand a pop (the still above shows him negotiating his terms of payment). Like Coyle, Dillon's trying to play off both sides; but he's a lot better at it.

Boyle plays Dillon as a man without much of a personality, just a series of masks and ploys. There's nothing remotely romantic about his hitman — no samurai professionalism, no existential relationship with death, not even a particularly impressive fee structure. It could easily have been a turn — it could have been his Popeye Doyle; instead, he tries hard to make him real.

Slither was a change of pace, though it's still about crime and still about losers. James Caan, fresh out of jail, is given the secret of "unimaginable" wealth by a friend who's just been gut-shot and is about to blow himself up with some sticks of dynamite. To get the money, he has to find a man called Barry Fenaka, who turns out to be a danceband leader with a strong line in tacky comic patter and an enthusiasm for "recvees" (recreational vehicles). There are echoes of North by Northwest, but with the glamour and suspense all sanded away — Cary Grant gets trapped by the bad guys at an art auction; the same thing happens to James Caan at a trailer-park bingo game. And the language, with its calculated banalities and characters becoming obsessed with certain words, put me in mind of Charles Portis (The Dog of the South, not True Grit). It's a slow film, amusing rather than funny, aiming for puzzlement more than suspense. Caan has to carry it, but Boyle supplies most of the comic energy; and he wears what must be one of the most heroically self-sacrificing combovers in film history:

Great love hath no man than this: that he has really shitty hair for the sake of the movie. But shitty hair will never make you a star.

 Author's note: Just re-read this; it doesn't work. Will re-write later. Come back and have another look in a few days.

Potential T-shirt of the Day

Sticking with Shaw:

Homelife is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

(from the preface to Getting Married, 1908)

Monday morning Penguin: Squiggly

In his will, George Bernard Shaw imposed on the Public Trustee the duty of finding and publishing a new, more rational alphabet. He had been railing for years against the idiocy of using an ancient Latin alphabet for a modern, largely Germanic language; and argued that the stupidity was compounded by spellings that reflected a word's history rather than its sound and meaning. It had taken the First World War to bring us British Summer Time; perhaps it would take another war to force us to rationalize our spelling: "...I shall not grudge it. The waste of war is negligible in comparison to the daily waste of trying to communicate with one another in English through an alphabet with sixteen letters missing." Sense of proportion, much?

Shaw wanted an alphabet of at least 40 letters, the extra ones replacing compounds such as SH or OW, and to eliminate diacritical marks (this is, I guess, a development of his disdain for apostrophes — youll see that he didnt use them in his plays). Once the alphabet had been established, a phonetic expert would be employed to transliterate Shaw's 1913 play Androcles and the Lion into it, working on the assumption that the pronunciation would be approximately "that recorded of His Majesty our late King George V".

There was some legal trouble about the will: in the end, the British Museum, RADA and the National Gallery of Ireland — who between them stood to get whatever wasn't spent on the new alphabet — stumped up for a competition to find the best design. 450 entries were received; the judges decided that, rather than pick an outright winner, they would split the £500 prize four ways. One of the four winning entries, by Kingsley Read, was used for Androcles; Penguin published the result in 1962, 12 years after Shaw died. It includes a parallel English text, which is a relief.

Copies are surprisingly common, and shouldn't cost much: mine was a measly quid, though years ago. Cover by Germano Facetti, by the way. If you are buying, do make sure the copy comes with the detachable reading key:

Read's squiggling alphabet looks something like Pitman shorthand. The sounds and signs follow patterns: for example, "tall" letters are mostly unvoiced consonants (T, P, F); "deep" letters, got by turning tall letters upside down, are the voiced versions (D, B,V). 

On the obverse of the reading key is a guide to help anybody who wants to write the damn thing:

Androcles is a silly little slip of a play, which is likely why Shaw thought it was worth transliterating: imagine trying to transcribe the squeals of Eliza Doolittle into the tones of George V, or to hack your way through the thickets of Man and Superman.

Speaking of which: underneath a comic surface the play has a Nietzschean subtext. Androcles (the one who pulls a thorn out of a lion's paw) is a Christian slave — Christianity being to Nietzsche the religion of slave-morality. The characters include Ferrovius, a superman who continually suppresses his terrific strength and will to power to serve Christ. Ferrovius believes he has converted many pagans, when really all he has done is terrify them into paying lip-service to Christianity — his version of Christ's message being oddly hard to distinguish from a threat of violence. Androcles, on the other hand, is genuinely peaceable and submissive but such an animal lover that he is almost goaded to violence by the sight of a gladiator armed with a whip: 

ANDROCLES ...I cant bear the sight of a whip. The only time I ever hit a man was when he lashed an old horse with a whip. It was terrible: I danced on his face when he was on the ground.

Cf. Nietzsche, supposedly driven mad by the sight of a horse being beaten on the street in Turin. Presumably not a coincidence: in the preface to Androcles and the Lion Shaw name-checks Nietzsche twice, and mentions his madness (though not the horse).

Alphabets, whips, wild animals, madness: I can't help muddling it up with Saki's "Tobermory", in which a man called Cornelius Appin teaches a cat to speak:

Tobermory had been Appin's one successful pupil, and he was destined to have no successor. A few weeks later an elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which had shown no previous signs of irritability, broke loose and killed an Englishman who had apparently been teasing it. The victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin and Eppelin, but his front name was faithfully rendered Cornelius.

"If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got."

Film notes: Gilda

Charles Vidor, 1946.

1. Rita. Ree-ta. The tip of the tongue stumbling down the palate, two steps at a time, struggling to get its trousers off. Her first scene: what people talk about is the entrance, her head rearing into the shot, face framed by that hair. Notice the moment after that: Ballin, her husband, has called "Are you decent?" Gilda spots Johnny Farrell, and half pouts, showing her lower teeth. You hear her say: "I'm decent." You see her saying: "I'm filthy."

2. Noir. This film ticks most of the boxes - femme fatale, cynical/romantic hero, infidelity, amour fou, crime, bad luck, bad Freudianism. But noir is a look as well as a mood: the shadows need to crowd the actors. It's too well lit.

3. Ever noticed how monogamous noir is? Even if there's more than one woman available, the hero never has any choice.

4. The McGuffin. Tungsten! Corner the market in tungsten and you can rule the world! What's that about?

5. The real plot: Glenn Ford is offered Rita Hayworth on a plate and he says no. What's that about? Maybe if Rita was a little less ludicrously desirable the film would make sense. The sexiest scene isn't her strip-tease to "Put the Blame on Mame" – how can something so public be sexy? – but her intimate dance with Ford. She breathes at him: "I could help you get in practice again. Dancing, I mean." You can feel her breath on your own ear.

Monday morning Penguin: When life gives you lemons...

First Penguin edition, 1963.

From the back cover:

Anything could happen on a frontier planet, and Pyrrus was a shining example. Every form of non-human life, flora and fauna, mutation upon mutation, had combined with the impossible weather, the earthquakes, and the volcanoes to become a deadly weapon ... for the extermination of man. The Pyrran settlers had developed superhuman strength and reactions and had imported the most modern aids to warfare, but the odds were too heavy against them. Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, had allowed and even helped himself to get sucked into the fray without realizing that to relax your guard for a split second was one split second too many. Appalled by the conditions, he fought a single-handed war, not only with the planet but against its murder-minded people, to stop the carnage and bring peace to the war-torn outpost. To say it was hard would be a galactic understatement.

What Jason discovers is that the planet's life-forms have all evolved psi powers: their hostility and aggression only reflect the feelings of the humans they meet.

Q tip

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's last word on literary style:

For — believe me, Gentlemen — so far as Handel stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine objective writers above all who appeal to you by parade of personality or private sentiment.

Mention of these great masculine "objective" writers brings me to my last word: which is, "Steep yourselves in them: habitually bring all to the test of them: for while you cannot escape the fate of all style, which is to be personal, the more of catholic manhood you inherit from thsoe great loins the more you will assuredly beget.

Mmm. Steep me in those manly catholic loins.

Notes: 1) It's pronounced "Cooch". 2) Q was his nom de plume. 3) From "On Style", the last in a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University, 1913-14, and collected as On the Art of Writing (1916).

Potential T-shirt of the Day

When children appear, we justify all our weaknesses, compromises, snobberies, by saying: "It's for the children's sake."

— Anton Chekhov