Zoo in the head

Phrases from Gray's Elegy still available as book titles

Suitable for all genres, but especially crime, science-fiction and erotica; and I can see at least three plausible studies of the Sixties folk movement.

The World to Darkness

The Distant Folds

The Moping Owl

To the Moon Complain

Heaves the Turf

A Mouldering Heap

The Rude Forefathers

Destiny Obscure

Storied Urns*

Animated Busts

The Silent Dust

Cold Ear of Death

Pregnant with Celestial Fire

The Rod of Empire

Waked to Ecstasy

Her Ample Page

The Genial Current of the Soul

His Country's Blood

Wade Through Slaughter

The Gates of Mercy

Struggling Pangs

The Noiseless Tenor

Bones from Insult

Shapeless Sculpture

Unlettered Muse

This Pleasing, Anxious Being

The Warm Precincts

The Cheerful Day

Some Pious Drops

Meet the Sun

Old Fantastic Roots

Hard by Yon Wood

Dirges Due

Large Was His Bounty

The Bosom of his Father

Spelling regularized but otherwise sic. I did consider Short and Simple Anals as a possibility but decided it would be cheating.

*Actually used by Michael Innes, in an Appleby short story, as the title of a novel by a Hardyesque writer of rustic tragedies.

"The insight of long habit, so much more reliable than love"

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (1995), Ch. 7

A quick note

Blogs have gone out of fashion lately, but I'm reviving this one after a few moribund years because I need some practice at writing for myself, not for editors, and don't know another form that allows such freedom. Well, jotting in notebooks, I guess, but it's unlikely the Ransom Centre will be bidding for my literary estate any time soon, and there's little point in producing something that nobody will see. Also, the indispensable thing that editors give is feedback: please feel not just free but obliged to comment.

Window dressing

An interesting thing about T.S. Eliot's work is how quickly it escaped the preserves of poetry into the wider world of culture, to be quoted and recycled by other writers. The best known instance is Evelyn Waugh snatching a phrase from The Waste Land' for the title of A Handful of Dust: the novel was published in 1934, 12 years after the poem appeared. But there are other examples.

At the start of A Window in London (Herbert Mason, 1940 — also titled Lady in Distress), Pat (Patricia Roc) and her colleague Peggy are finishing the overnight shift on the switchboard at a swish London hotel as Lou and an unnamed girl arrive to take over.

Lou: Thanks for waiting. And if it is or if it isn’t, there it is and it’s up to you. I ask you, did you ever?
Other girl: I never.
Lou: Good morning, Pat. Morning, Peggy.
Other girl: Morning, Peggy. Good morning, Pat.
Pat: At last.
Peggy: You’re five minutes late.
Lou: Late, I ain’t never.
Peggy: You are late.
Lou: Well if I am it’s this way. Last night when I went off duty I —
Enter the porter, bringing a tray of tea
Porter: Here we are. Lovely. Cooled it with me own breath.
Lou: Hi, just what the doctor ordered.
The other girl takes a cup
Porter: 'Ere. 'Ere, that’s mine. Blimey, what a sauce.

Lou: Well, as I was saying, last night when I went off duty I meets my gentleman friend, and when I meets my gentleman friend, he says to me, Listen, Lou, what you say is, is. If you want to go your own way, he says, you can go your own way, he says. But, he says, it’s a bit of a change if for a change you went my way, he says. So I said if he felt that way we’d go his way, and of course if we’d gone my way we wouldn’t have been out half the night trying to find the way home.
Peggy: I’m very surprised you ever found your way home at all.

Remind you of anything? Reminds me of the monologue that closes 'A Game of Chess', the second part of The Waste Land.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself

…

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look…

…and so on. The torrential egoism, the jumbling of tenses (past and historic present), the tumble of he saids/I saids, as well as more specific echoes: the opening exchange of greetings ("Good morning, Pat. Morning, Peggy" / "Morning, Peggy. Good morning, Pat") mirrors the valedictions that close this section of the poem ("Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. / Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.") — the name Lou might be a clue, too; and "And if it is or if it isn’t, there it is and it’s up to you" is as ostentatiously commonsensical and as unhelpful as Eliot's "If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said." (Rhythmically, as well, it looks to have something in common with the first part of Sweeney Agonistes, 'Fragment of a Prologue', published in the Criterion in October 1926: "Well some men don't and some men do / Some men don't and you know who". But that's not how it's spoken on screen.)

 

The resemblance between the women in the poem and the women in the film could be generic — perhaps there are lots of examples of writers of the same period pulling the same kinds of trick to give an impression of the speech of the lower orders — but a connection to Eliot is plausible. The screenplay for A Window in London is credited to Ian Dalrymple: he was born in 1903 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, editing the university literary magazine Granta in 1924-25 — exactly the type of smart young literary man you'd expect would be acquainted with The Waste Land. Dalrymple's lasting importance in cinema history comes from his time at the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, where among many other things he produced Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943) and Pat Jackson's Western Approaches (1944). Before that he'd worked as an editor and scriptwriter, sharing a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Citadel at the 1939 Oscars; he'd also worked, uncredited, on the film that won the category, Anthony Asquith's version of Pygmalion. That's interesting because it implies that Dalrymple must have had a sense of accent and class that the film doesn't show: Pat's husband Peter, a crane operator, is played by the unproletarian Michael Redgrave — his nickname at work, "the Duke", seems to acknowledge that he's got the wrong accent for the job. Lou the switchboard girl also leans a bit too far to the RP side of things. (I think the actress playing her, on the right-hand side of the photograph at the top, is Gertrude Musgrove — the credits have her down as "Telephonist", which is unhelpfully vague. Musgrove had a brief career in British film, never progressing beyond smallish parts, and was married to Vincent Korda, Alexander and Zoltán's younger brother, an art director whose credits included The Thief of Baghdad (1940) and The Third Man (1949); their son was Michael Korda, publisher and writer.)

 

Accents apart, the film has an acute sense of London. A large part of the pleasure in watching it is seeing the location footage of the city before the Second World War: Peter is working on the construction of Waterloo Bridge; Pat's hotel is Dolphin Square; the film opens with a bewitching montage of the river, the gates being opened at Westminster tube station, a pint of milk being left on a doorstep, a newspaper pushed through a letter box, a cat padding down area steps, empty streets. Earth has not anything, etc. Pat arrives at their tiny flat as Peter sleeps through a loud alarm clock; they complain about how little they see of one another; she wishes she could get a day job, and then drops off before he has left for work. Though the flat is perhaps a little too nice, her clothes a little too smart to give a real sense of poverty in the financial sense, you do feel how they are afflicted by a poverty of opportunity (it made me think a little of the desperate characters in Julian Maclaren-Ross's wonderful novel Of Love and Hunger, published in 1947 but set at precisely this moment, just before the war). The plot is simple enough: travelling to work by tube, Peter sees at a window a woman being stabbed to death. He rushes to the police, but it turns out that what he saw was a down-on-his-luck stage magician and his assistant/wife (Paul Lukas and Sally Gray) practising their act. Peter flirts with the wife, and a little bit more than that, the magician follows him and starts a fight, and Peter apparently kills him. The dénouement feels fudged but before that it maintains an unusual balance of suspense, comedy and romantic intrigue — the casual way the hero is allowed to drift into romance with a married woman is surprisingly unBritish: the source of the plot was a French film of 1939, Métropolitain (French — well, there you are). Lukas puts more feeling into his role than the script deserves, and Gray is very good, as always, despite an emotionally incoherent role. I tend to assume that a short film career represents some kind of failure, but she seems to have married happily, an Irish peer, and been content to leave the film business behind; try to see her in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), the best example of the small sub-genre of spiv noir.

 

 

 

 

Monday morning Penguin: Smiley culture

A

1972 reprint. No designer credited.

Le Carré's first novel establishes the Smiley legend — the anonymous, scholarly little man who is somehow a brilliant spy, and who somehow won the beautiful Lady Ann Sercomb, only to be repeatedly betrayed by her. The Lady Ann stuff is back-story in the novel, but Paul Dehn's screenplay, filmed as The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet, 1966 — I wrote briefly about it in the March 2018 issue of Sight & Sound), makes it central to the plot: the traitor Smiley unmasks is his friend and his his wife's lover. My entirely unevidenced theory is that the film helped Le Carré formulate the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

When the book was first published, in 1961, spying still looked like a rather shabby, small-scale thing: the Portland spy ring, notable for the crudity of both their methods and their motives (avarice, lust, resentment), were in the news; Call for the Dead reflects that reality. Kim Philby's defection came a couple of years later, at which point the game started to look rather bigger, and the entanglement of the Establishment with treachery became clear.

Smallness and shabbiness help to make this a terrific novel. It has all the Le Carré virtues in embryo: the vivid characterisations, of Smiley himself and Mendel the policeman and a host of minor characters; a tangled but perfectly intelligible plot; a sharp sense of the minute gradations of the English class system and the soul-draining dreariness it insists on (it's fascinating how well Lumet, a visiting American, reproduced this in the film); the plausible reduction of human activity to different varieties of betrayal; an atmosphere of doubt and disillusion, of a war that continues after all moral clarity has been lost — maybe that's the real fog of war we should worry about. The book does, it's true, show early signs of some of Le Carré's limitations — notably, his ear for dialogue has a very narrow range; he can't do much beyond a certain kind of upper-middle-class masculine chit-chat; not to mention all those virtues noted above, which become vices at excessive length. Still, for the moment he was keeping it short and snappy.

A group of Dresden figures, a wedding present to George and Ann, is a recurring image. I imagine whoever designed this cover must have been fantastically proud of the way he incorporated it, and fantastically frustrated by having to incorporate the big red label to remind prospective readers what they were looking at.

Monday morning Penguins: Malone, and Malone again (naturally)

1965 reprint, cover drawing by Virgil Burnett — American artist who moved to Paris in the Sixties and lived off Penguin covers. Later they moved him on to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fr. Rolfe, François Mauriac and a lot of Daphne du Maurier (The Birds is good); this seems to have been his first, though. He seems a neat choice for Beckett: the Parisian connection, the assonance of the surnames, and the first name taken from Dante's guide to the underworld.

Next iteration:

1974 reprint: "The cover shows 'Skull 1923' by Alberto Giacometti by kind permission of Sir Robert Sainsbury (photo Rodney Todd-White)."

With Penguin Modern Classics the connection between cover art and text can sometimes seem obscure to the point of arbitrariness, but Giacometti is almost blindingly obvious: he and Beckett were friends from the 1930s until the artist's death in 1966, and collaborated on a revival of Waiting for Godot in 1961.

I do admire the modern Faber Becketts, in their specially commissioned typeface.

 

Monday morning Penguin: Coffin, Scarcely Used

Coffin, Scarcely Used by Colin Watson, first Penguin edition, 1962. Cover design by Germano Facetti.

This is the first of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles, a series of detective stories set in a small Lincolnshire port, generally identified with Boston. The books are gently funny; the crimes tend to the whimsical, even grotesque — the main death in Coffin, Scarcely Used is of a local newspaper editor, found up a pylon, electrocuted, with a mouth full of marshmallows — and Watson's dogged detective, Inspector Purbright, approaches them with an answering eccentricity, taking pleasure in spoofing or unnerving local dignitaries, hinting at a contempt for the established order under a mask of deference.

The appeal lies in Watson's sceptical view of English provincial life, with its cliques and rivalries, respectability and vice, all lubricated by hypocrisy; he's a forerunner of Reginald Hill. But Flaxborough seems smaller than Hill's Wetherton, though it's hard to be sure: neither is to scale, at times seeming quite metropolitan, encompassing a variety of locales and supporting a range of classes and many enterprises, criminal and legitimate, at other times villagey enough for everyone to know each other.

Several of the Flaxborough novels were dramatised on BBC television in the 1970s under the title Murder Most English, with Anton Rodgers as Purbright and Christopher Timothy as his naive sidekick Sergeant Love. The theme tune was an earworm; it's probably for the best that I can't find it online.

Apart from the Flaxborough Chronicles, Watson was best known as the author of Snobbery with Violence (1971), a study of English crime novels and class between the wars, in which he coined the term "Mayhem Parva" for the villages whose homicide-rich environments have supported so much fiction. The continued popularity of The Midsomer Murders suggests that criticism makes nothing happen. Honestly, sometimes I think I might as well be a poet.

Facetti's cover design for this is brilliant, if a little too dramatic for an essentially comic story. This copy cost £1.99 at the Amnesty Bookshop in Cambridge: it's tattier than I'd like, but it doesn't crop up often and usually costs a lot more.

Nostalgia ain't, etc.

This is the first thing that came up when I typed "nostalgia" into Google's image search.

You might have expected that we'd be cured of purely nostalgic pleasures by now. Digital technology gives us unprecedented access to every the cultural artefacts of the recent past, which means that we no longer have to struggle, as we used to, to remember that song, that film, that book; if we can't hear it/see it/read it instantly, we can order a physical copy which will show up in a few days. The pleasure of unfulfilled yearning is hard to come by, the tickle of returning to the past is had almost too easily.

This ought to put the squeeze on nostalgia.When we can check our memories and assess our youthful tastes, shuddering at how bad they were (and, occasionally, feeling a glow of satisfaction at our shrewdness), it should be easy to stick with the good stuff. I can't see any evidence that this is what happens, though. We still wallow in the mud, over and over again: we watch old editions of Top of the Pops on a Friday night on BBC4 and lap up Tony Orlando and Dawn as eagerly as we do Bowie or the better bits of Roxy Music.

It seems fair to call the pleasure we get from rubbish like Tony Orlando (and from old Carry On films or the Roger Moore Bonds, or — in my case — Marvel comics of the 1970s) "nostalgic", as opposed to aesthetic, since it is tied to memory and divorced from any of the qualities I usually look for in art. But the word hides the problem: in what does this nostalgic pleasure lie? Is it a Proustian thing — does the chorus of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" act as an aide-memoire, calling up by association other memories of the long-ago? Or is it deeper than that: hearing Tony's pleas for his old love to be confirmed, do we slough off our adult carapace of learned tastes and inhibitions, to resemble younger, softer, more instinctive version of ourselves? Neither idea convinces me.

Monday evening Penguin: The Cone-Gatherers

The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins — first published 1955; published by Penguin 1983. Cover illustration by Grizelda Holderness.

The book is set during the Second World War on the highland estate of the Runcie-Campbells. The pine woods are to be cut down, to aid the war effort; the brothers Neil and Calum have been employed to climb the trees and collect cones, so that the pines can be regrown. Calum is a holy fool, simple-minded, devoted to trees and animals, happy, the beauty of his nature and his face in contrast to his  dwarfish, hunchbacked body. Duror, the estate gamekeeper, who has a loathing of deformity, nurses a fanatical hatred of Calum, his rage fuelled by a miserable domestic situation — his once pretty wife, paralysed for years, has grown grotesquely fat. Duror also has to contend with her magnificently passive-aggressive mother, constantly trying to nag him back into the marital bedroom:

"Later," he said. "I want to have a look at Prince's paw. He got a thorn in it yesterday."

"I ken a heart with thorns in it."

For a moment he almost gave way and shouted, with fists outstretched towards those stars, that in his heart and brain were thorns bitterer than those that bled the brow of Christ. Instead, he merely nodded.

"I'll not be long," he murmured. "I'm frightened the paw might fester."

Quick though he had been in his restraint, she had caught another glimpse of his torment. It shocked her and yet it satisfied her too: she saw it, clear as the sun in the sky, as divine retribution.

"A heart can fester too, John," she said, as he opened the door and went up.

Mothers-in-law, eh? That passage (like quite a few others in the book) reads to me like the kind of overwrought rural melodramatics that Stella Gibbons was trying to put a stop to in Cold Comfort Farm. But at the same time the story is schematic almost to the point of allegory; it reminds me of Nigel Dennis's A House in Order (1966), another almost-fable, in which closeness to nature provides a very equivocal shelter from war. Both are, I guess, examples of mid-century British modernism in literature, rather as Ravilious's drawings were in art: touched by the Continental currents of abstraction, pessimism, mistrust of realism, but unwilling to let go of realism altogether, possessing native affinities with landscape and nature, and moved by gentleness. Though The Cone-Gatherers is headed somewhere brutal, the conviction of Calum's gentleness underlies everything.

I always seem to finish up quoting Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited: "Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches." I don't think that last sentence is true — art can survive charm, and be enriched by it; but charm is dangerous. It is a moot point, how far Blanche's remarks about the English can be applied to the Scots. I'm not reducing Scottish literature to a branch of English; but the two have co-existed, interbred, and been adrift on the same waters for ever; they have things in common.

I like Holderness's drawing, which gets both the abstract nature of the story and its bloody tinges. There is a King Penguin version which I prefer, the picture framed by a white border rather than bleeding to the edges; but this copy was a bargain in the £1 bin at Pages of Hackney.

The Devil and Fritz Lang

Photographs of Fritz Lang always make me do a small mental vif. The films, with their guns and machinery, seem to stink of modernity and, even before he went there, America — or maybe Amerika, Kafka's dream version. Yet he looks so Alte Welt. (The monocle!)

Last Friday, at the British Museum, I heard Michael Wood lecture on "Fritz Lang and the Life of Crime"; I shan't say much about that — I'd probably get it wrong, and the text will be published in the London Review of Books a week or two from now. But it helped me to shape some recent thoughts — specifically, about the possible theological, eschatological dimensions of Lang.