Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

“LIVE” IS NOT LIVE

            Let’s imagine you are one of those people who attend rock concerts.

Let’s imagine that you are a typical rock-concert attender – not one of the very tiny minority close to the stage, who can see the performers sweat and watch their disdainful faces, de rigueur when rockers want to look hip. No. You’re one of the vast majority so far from the stage that, with your unaided eyes, all you can see are tiny figures in the distance, hopping around and mainly obscured by the people in front of you. Face it. They could be anyone.

But you’re really at the rock concert, aren’t you?

Except that all you can hear of the performance is what is artificially amplified (and distorted) by the sound system.

The promoters might help you out, however. They might put up huge television screens so that you can see the performers in close-up.

Except that now you are both hearing the music through an artificial medium and seeing the performance through an artificial medium.

So are you really at a live event at all?

Be honest now. How authentic, how “live”, is your experience when you are not hearing with your own ears and not seeing with your own eyes?

In reality, if you want to enjoy your favourite band under such conditions, you might as well be at home watching a rock-video or listening to some download of their music. That would be no less “live” than you arena experience.

I know I could, at this point, wander off into considerations of the psychopathology of rock-concert-attending crowds, who are there as much for the ritualistic experience of being there, and being part of a like-minded crowd, as they are there for the sake of listening to music. But that would take me off my subject somewhat. What really interests me is the fact that, as soon as television cameras and sound-systems are introduced into a “live” event, they compromise and alter its “live” status.

Let me walk away from rock concerts to another sort of event.

On Good Friday this year, my wife and I were in the north of England being hosted by our son and his family. Two of his daughters – our grand-daughters – were singing in a large choir that was part of the Great North Passion, a kind of populist version of the Passion of Christ being acted out in South Shields, for live BBC television transmission. For the event, shipping containers had been arranged in a field roughly in the form of a cross, to hold the crowd that would attend the event.

The Great North Passion is of course related to the Christian festival, but it strives to be as inclusive as possible. Different communities around the north of England contribute different reflections for each station, the official commentary goes out of its way to note that the value of compassion is honoured in all the world’s great religions, and while the performances contained some traditional hymns and choral work, they were outnumbered by the pop, rock and blues performances. This was for prime-time, populist TV, after all.

So how did I react to this event?

I couldn’t stifle some incidental reflections on how the very idea of the Stations of the Cross – traditionally a very Catholic devotion – would once have been scorned in non-Catholic England; but in an age when public expressions of Christianity are hard to come by, it is grabbed at enthusiastically for community performance.

Of course I found myself in the middle of a big crowd, not able to go up to each station, when bits of the action and business were being acted out. So I spent much time milling about, seeing only other people doing exactly the same thing. I managed to take a couple of blurred, long-distance shots of my grand-daughters performing in the choir with its distinctive purple garb. I was impressed by the capable performance poet Katie Fox – a blonde-headed, buxom woman – who had trained a large group of teenagers to perform a vigorous poem about the value of kindness. For me this was the highlight of the whole event, and I rushed up to snap the group once their performance was over and while they were being congratulated by His Worship the Mayor.

But all the time I was aware that this “live” performance, the performance for which a couple of thousand of us had come to stand among the cruciform shipping containers, was essentially a performance for the television-watching audience at home, who would be getting a better view of each episode in the unfolding action, and of each musical group, than we in the live crowd were getting.

And indeed there were big monitors set up so that we could see the blues-singer and the hymn-singer and the performance poet’s troupe and the clog–dancing lads from the mill (yes, they were part of it) all in close-up. And we wouldn’t have to be bothered looking at the real people with our own eyes, in the distance, tiny and obscured over the heads of the crowd.

So put television cameras at a live event and it ceases to be a live event. It becomes the adjunct to a broadcast.

In this media age, to be really there means to be looking at a TV screen.

Something New

 We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“THE FAMILIES” by Vincent O’Sullivan  (Victoria University Press, $NZ35)

            After I had finished reading Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest collection of short stories, I tried the game of finding one apt epithet to sum up their tone and mood. I know this is a very foolish game. These fourteen short stories, many of which have had previous magazine publication, deal with a variety of different characters and situations. They were not produced by cookie-cutter. Yet there was a dominant mood I felt when I came to the end of them. What was it?

            Regretful? Rueful? Knowing?

No. None of these words quite captures the tone of the volume, but they do come close to it. There is a sadness, a dull heartache to much of what O’Sullivan writes about – perhaps a sense of missed opportunities, absences and lack of fulfillment in characters who have heard the chimes at midnight. After all, most of the characters in The Families are well into middle age, or past it - elderly people who vaguely understand that mortality looms. These are Songs of Experience, not Songs of Innocence. Only the very last story in the collection, “Luce”, is seen from a child’s perspective; and only one story, “On Another Note”, deals exclusively with younger adults.

The book’s title (also the title of a key story) is apt. Most of these tales are about intimate family or marriage relationships. Widow- or widower-hood (“Josie”). Adult children losing a parent and contesting their siblings’ memories of that parent (“Daddy Drops a Line”, “Getting it Right”). The mail-order marriage of an older Kiwi man to a younger Filipino wife (“Frame”). Divorce (“Holding On”). The spectacular crack-up of a marriage in events close to insanity (“Pieces”). A man pouring out his unease about his wife in a long conversation with a counsellor (“On a Clear Day”). A man’s inability to convey his experiences to his wife in any meaningful way (“Mrs Bennett and the Bears”). And then there are the funerals or the threat of funerals; and adjustments to having a diminished sex life; and the indignities of old age. The wealthy middle-class woman stressing over a young man who disrespectfully calls her an “old trout”(“Posting”). The guy who refuses to accept that his body is ageing, but who keeps getting confronted by the evidence (“Fainting and the Fat Man”). The old man in trouble in the nursing home (“Keeping an Eye”).

There now – I have name-checked all the stories, pointed to their subject-matter and in the process I have probably gravely misrepresented them by suggesting that they are all grim. This misses the variety of fictional voices telling the stories, and the frequently humorous (or resigned) acceptance of things as unavoidable realities. The woman in “Josie”, adjusting to widowhood, is remembering a husband who was a curmudgeonly Kiwi joker of the old school, her memories attached to a specifically Catholic milieu in the Auckland of earlier generations. It is not just a story of grief, but of commitment to a marriage in spite of a spouse’s obvious shortcomings. In a roundabout way, it is a story about love. Reading it, I was reminded of Randall Jarrell’s classic introduction to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children in which Jarrell said that Stead’s story of a dysfunctional family would nevertheless remind people of the absolute necessity of families. O’Sullivan’s widowed and aged and wounded people have the same effect on me. We are not invited to look down on these people, or to see their characters as defective, but to see their experiences as an inevitable part of being human, loving, and taking the gamble on love for somebody else.

Reviewing a collection of short stories presents the same temptation as reviewing a collection of poetry. That is the temptation to pick out favourites. As a purely subjective reaction, and even though (as an author’s note tells us) it began as part of a literary game referencing Katherine Mansfield, I found “On Another Note” the most upsetting story, perhaps for the very fact that it is about younger people. She is 32 and stuck in Paris while her 26-year-old man is on business in Cologne. She misses him. Without him, she is not enjoying Paris as much as she thought she would. And hovering over it all, there is a sense of the uncertainty and instability of their union, as if it could evaporate, as if they are not fully committed. This is what makes it poignant – the callowness of her feelings, even though she is apparently sophisticated. Is it pity I’m feeling for the younger people here, innocent enough to think that six years’ age difference is a huge barrier between adults, unhappy enough not yet to know what a committed union really is? They are vulnerable children who think they are grown-up. And throughout it all there is the spot-on detail of how she and he are culturally different.

At the same time, my critical sense tells me that the title story “The Families” is the most complex and challenging in the collection, and the most penetrating as far as the family situation is concerned. An adult daughter comes back to her parents’ home in Hamilton after breaking off an engagement in Australia. Half-dependent once again, and living in what is now other people’s space, she faces up to a contrast in parents – a shoulder-to-cry-on father and a sharp, practical mother - and sibling rivalries with her sister. In some ways, these are typical family tensions, but presented in precise detail. The family of “The Families” is the most disconnected in the book and the story’s situation is the most unresolved. But a twist and a shift of focus once again suggest the absolutely necessity of coupling in spite of difficulties. Human beings are social animals and families are their natural unit, whatever pain this may entail.

Apart from the thematic connections I’ve already noted, what these stories have in common is the closeness and precision of O’Sullivan’s observation and his eye for the apt detail. Take this spot-on account of a modern funeral, as seen by a somewhat disgruntled older man, from the story “Fainting and the Fat Man”:

“The funeral was three days later. Most of those in the church were from the same age group as the dead man and his wife. Friends spoke sincerely and some found it difficult to end what they wanted to say. There were also stories one was meant to laugh at, which these days seemed de rigueur for funerals. It brought home to Robin how out of touch he was with how fashions changed. He disliked it too when the woman minister thought it obligatory to smile as if to jolly things along, and mentioned God as little as possible, out of deference, was it, for the dead?” (Pg.108)

I almost rolled my eyes and groaned at the familiarity of this, which may indicate how much I myself now identify with the generation of the disgruntled older man.

On a different level, but still showing the author’s closeness of observation, take this longer passage from the story “Pieces”. The woman who is doing the observing is noting how much of social and family interaction – in this case at an awkward restaurant meal – takes the form of play-acting. People act out public roles. This is seen in the gestures and inept words of both father and son, and of the young woman being introduced into the family. Yet we are aware as we read that the woman whose consciousness we are sharing is detaching herself from her family, and her disengagement will eventually lead to extreme actions. The consciousness is as unreliable as any narrator ever is, and we are not invited to condescend to the people she is observing, or to see them as puppets. Her viewpoint is dramatized without necessarily being endorsed:

“She has watched them, the two young men joshing, wasn’t that the word she had read for what they were doing? Not being father and son together so much as playing at it, acting out the bond she supposed they had seen in the movies and on TV, even the physical moves that went with it, Tom’s fist lightly punching on Gareth’s shoulder, Gareth’s exaggerated feinting, as though a boxer facing the real thing. And now, while they waited for the wine to arrive that would accompany the cheese, the boy covered his face with his open-fingered hand, his muttered ‘Oh God, you don’t really1’ when his father began on his sincere and slightly drunken praise of the young woman he, he and Mandy, would be proud to welcome into the family, he knew he spoke for Mandy as well, as if that needed to be spelled out, how proud they were of both of them. As he spoke, she watched the girl’s own mannered pose, her elbows on the cloth, her chin on her folded knuckles, a forefinger along one cheek, her eyebrows arched, appreciative. ‘I am not greatly surprised,’ her posture said, ‘but I am touched, believe me, I really and truly am.’ It was what the moment demanded, what the occasion called for. That hollow phrase, Mandy had thought, that perfect phrase. She raised her hand and pinched the bridge of her nose, so that Tom asked her was she feeling all right, not one of her migraines coming on? He and April and Gareth, each remembered that, their asking her that. How intense and remote it was, she remembered that, the moment they sat in, like figures in one of those souvenir glass domes, small and distant figures, where descending flakes so easily were stirred. The image coming back to her as she watched, as though from a similar distance, the little drama of the court proceed around her, the figures both close enough to touch, as distanced as the moon.” (pp.184-185)

            And as one last example, from the story “Posting”, there is this piece of acute self-analysis by an older woman, who feels she has been insulted by a younger person. It is the startling moment when age is at last acknowledged:

“Angela liked to hang on to outrage. She’d have thought her favourite store would have had more class. Shown more respect. Not employed upstarts and smartarses. She would make that eminently clear! Angela was one for the enforcing word. Carol was laughing by the time their conversation ran out. Yet it came back to her over the next few days – the young man’s low-spoken, dismissive tone, the plunge of raw panic his words had given her. She accepted it now for what it was – not insult, not malice, but simply her having to accept that something had been said which was true, something that had never quite occurred to her. That when people looked at her, they looked at old age. All it meant, as she now accepted, was that she was in another place from where she had believed herself to be. Like anyone who finds herself in another country, she would have to behave a little differently. That was what it came down to. There was even something nice about that, about having to learn something new.” (“Posting”Pg.201)

In passages such as these, we are drawn into the characters’ thoughts without totally identifying with them. O’Sullivan’s frequent use of the third-person limited narrative voice is an indication of this technique. Nevertheless, we do share the characters’ feelings and see them as our brothers and sisters, no matter how battered their condition might be.

At the beginning of this review, I was fumbling around looking for one appropriate epithet to characterise this collection. I think I may now have come up it. In their ability to make us “feel with” characters, and without any overlay of sentimentality, the appropriate and exact word is compassionate.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.  

“THE MALCONTENT” by John Marston (written and first performed 1603; first printed 1604)

 

            Sometimes old books sit on your shelves, unread for years, before you get around to justifying the shelf-pace you give them by actually re-reading them.

Consider my battered old pink-covered “Regents Renaissance Drama Series” paperback copy of John Marston’s early Jacobean play The Malcontent. I kept it for forty years, since student days, before I found an excuse to re-read it. In fact way back in student days, I never formally “studied” this play or churned out student essays on it, though I did do papers on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. But I remember one evening joining a play-reading tutorial group run by Mac Jackson at the University of Auckland, and putting my copy of the play to use by reading the role of the usurping Duke Pietro. This allowed me to show off, because Duke Pietro is at one point disguised as a hermit, so I could prove how good I was among the student-readers by putting on two separate voices: the courtly duke and the rustic, mummerset hermit.

And that was the one and only time I had read The Malcontent, nearly all of which had long since drifted out of my mind.

Then, this year, I found the excuse to read it again.

Allow me first to talk about the play and the playwright. Oxford-educated John Marston (1576-1634) flourished as playwright for just ten years from c.1599 until he took holy orders in 1609 and gave the theatre up. He’s certainly not one of the front-rankers among playwrights of his age (Bill Shakespeare, Chris Marlowe, Ben Jonson) and he’s not even one of the second-tier lot who have always had some sort of following (John Webster; Beaumont and Fletcher). Rather, he was the type of chap who wrote one or two plays that still intrigue people – like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (if Kyd actually wrote it); like Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (if Tourneur actually wrote it); like Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (if Middleton and Rowley actually wrote it). But at least this puts him ahead of the likes of Philip Massinger who still clutter up anthologies of Jacobean drama but whose plays are hardly ever performed – or read.

Marston made his mark first as a bitterly satirical poet in university circles. When he took up writing plays he continued in the same bitter vein, and managed to get offside with Ben Jonson, whom he accused of pomposity and pedantry. The two of them ridiculed each other as characters in their respective plays. But then Marston made it up with Jonson, became his devoted disciple and even dedicated some work to him and occasionally collaborated with him. Like Jonson’s, Marston’s plays are “humorous” in the sense of being filled with characters who act out their “humours” or temperaments in obvious ways. Quite rightly, some compare them with late medieval morality plays, where virtues and vices are personified and put on display. Why Marston gave up writing plays and became a clergyman is unclear, but it has been suggested that he might have got into real trouble with a piece of satire that overstepped the mark and brought the government’s wrath down upon him.

The one play of Marston’s, which is still performed with reasonable frequency, is The Malcontent, although another called The Dutch Courtesan is still in print. (And, in a complimentary essay on Marston, T.S.Eliot chose to praise most highly a third, and frankly more obscure, play by Marston – one wonders if Old Possum wasn’t in one of his perverse moods at the time.)

First performed in 1603 and first published in 1604, The Malcontent is part revenge melodrama and part savage, satirical farce.

At the court of Genoa, Malevole is a kind of licensed fool, entitled to say the most scurrilous and nasty things about courtiers because it amuses the Duke of Genoa, Pietro Jacomo. But little does Duke Pietro know that the bitterly satirical Malevole, the “malcontent”, is really Giovanni Altofronto, the rightful Duke of Genoa, in disguise. Only Malevole’s faithful friend Celso knows this, and it is to Celso that Malevole reveals himself and speaks as himself, conveniently filling us in on the background politics to the play and how he got to be banished in the first place.

In Act One Malevole makes it clear to Duke Pietro that the duke’s wife Aurelia is having an affair with the duke’s chief minister Mendoza, and that she is also being courted by the callow young courtier Ferneze. This might seem mere trouble-making from a rumour-monger and malcontent, except that we soon discover it is true. For all his snarling the “malcontent” is really revealing the truth about a morally corrupt court. This is the method of the whole play. What appears to be angry rant is in fact truthful satire on immoral people.

Thus in Act Two we see lust acting itself out, helped by the disgusting old bawd and pander Maquerelle. Mendoza is able to persuade the duke that it is young Ferneze alone who is cuckolding him. Mendoza in effect gets Duke Pietro’s permission to kill Ferneze on the very night Ferneze is first sleeping with the duchess. Mendoza commits the murder – and at once begins to conspire with Aurelia on how to dispose of the duke and make himself ruler of Genoa.

How this over-the-top tale of bad faith resolves itself needn’t be recounted in detail. Suffice it to say that the supposedly murdered Ferneze isn’t really dead and now becomes an ally of Malevole in bringing about the downfall of the evil Mendoza. So does Duke Pietro once Malevole opens his eyes to Mendoza’s double-crossing. The upshot involves a masque, which the over-confident Mendoza thinks is in honour of his taking over the dukedom – but the figures in the masque one by one reveal themselves to be Altofronto, Pietro, Ferneze and Celso. The defeated Mendoza is harried out and (rather hastily) Altofronto, the supposed “malcontent”, retakes his dukedom.

More than one critic has called this a male revenge fantasy, and so indeed it is. The apparent outsider Malevole is vindicated; the good - or at least repentant - characters (like Pietro and his wilful duchess) are rewarded; and the wicked are duly punished. There are amusing things en route, such as Mendoza’s misguided attempt to use Malevole as one of his assassins, which leads Malevole to undercut him in an elaborate way when Duke Pietro disguises himself as a hermit to report to Mendoza on his own death. There is also the sentimental scene in which Altofronto’s imprisoned wife – the true duchess of Genoa – proves her moral mettle by swearing her undying love to him.

In all this, though, what most engages are the outbursts of venom and excess in the language. In Act One, Scene Two, Duke Pietro calls forth his pet Malevole thus: “Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here. I give thy dogged sullenness free liberty; trot about and bespurtle whom thou pleasest.”

Later in the same scene the duke describes Malevole to others in this way: “This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever convers’d with nature; a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer when he was thrust out of the presence. His appetite is as insatiable as the grave, as far from any content as from heaven. His highest delight is to procure others’ vexation, and therein he thinks he truly serves heaven; for ‘tis his position, whosoever on this earth can be contented is a slave and damn’d…..”

Malevole does know the way his words unsettle others. Having robbed the duke of his peace of mind by telling him about his wife’s adultery, he soliloquizes: “Distemperance rob thy sleep! / The heart’s disquiet is revenge most deep: / He that gets blood, the life of flesh but spills, / But he that breaks heart’s peace, the dear soul kills…” (I, iii)

Malevole’s anger at others sometimes swells into an anger at the universe in general. In Act Four, Scene Five he speaks to Pietro, when consoling him for losing his wife and dukedom, with a particularly savage contemptus mundi: “This earth is only the grave and Golgotha wherein all things that live must rot; ‘tis but the draught wherein the heavenly bodies discharge their corruption; the very muck hill on which the sublunary orbs cast their excrements. Man is the slime of this dung pit, and princes are the governors of these men; for, for our souls, they are as free as emperors, all of one piece; there goes but a pair of shears betwixt an emperor and the son of a bagpiper – only the dyeing, dressing, pressing, glossing makes the difference…”

The world, in short, is a shit-heap, earthly rank is mere veneer and only the immortality of our souls redeems us.

And yet is this all rather forced? For within a page of having said this, his own fortune having changed for the better, Malevole asks “Who doubts of Providence that sees this change?” Given that Malevole is in disguise, much of Malevole’s snarling is pure play-acting and some of it becomes pure bombast.

Re-reading this play after so many years, I thought I could detect echoes of Bill Shakespeare in it – or perhaps I am simply saying that Shakespeare and Marston shared some popular Jacobean theatrical situations. At a stretch, a discontented man adopting an antic disposition, and hanging around a court plotting revenge on a usurper, could be seen as echoing the premise of Hamlet. There are moments when the duke’s troubled mind over his wife’s adultery is reminiscent of Othello – especially the duke’s wish that he had never heard of his wife’s sins. In Othello, however, Iago really is a trouble-maker weaving scandal out of fictions, whereas in The Malcontent, Malevole, for all his snarling, is telling the truth. In III, i Duke Pietro wails, Othello-like, “O, would I ne’er had known / My own dishonour! Good God, that men should / Desire to search out that which, being found, kills all / Their joy of life! To taste the tree of knowledge, / And then be driven from out paradise.” In The Malcontent, the pretended story of the duke committing suicide by jumping to his death off a cliff reminds one of the episode in King Lear where Edgar fools his father Gloucester into imagining he has attempted suicide by jumping off a cliff.

But having made these comparisons, I don’t want to “talk up” The Malcontent too much, as it has some glaring and obvious defects. There is evidence of much padding to fill out the plot. In Act 3, there is a long scene where one Lady Biancha and the foolish gentleman Bilioso discuss the costumes of the fashionable and, with the fool Passarello, make wisecracks about the follies of various nations. There is an overlong scene where the pages of Duke Pietro fool with him before a song is sung. In Act 4, it is only after a long time-wasting scene between the pander Maquerelle and various clowns, that we see Malevole’s plot worked out. There is yet another time-filling scene between Maquerelle and fashionable people in Act Five. As the text stands, it doesn’t integrate well the thrust of the plot with the painfully unfunny comic interludes. In sum, I see it as a good, entertaining, savage farce, with moments of memorable phrasing and some redundant longueurs.

Which, at long last, brings me to my reason for taking the text off the shelf and re-reading it after all these years.

The Malcontent was not originally performed with an adult cast. In 1603 it was first performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the private Blackfriars Theatre, in which Marston had shares. In other words, this play on distinctly adult themes was acted out by a troupe of boys between the ages of 12 and 16. There was, at the beginning of the 17^th century, a short-lived fashion for casts of boy actors who could also sing. It was noted with some annoyance by Shakespeare in Hamlet, when he had Rosencrantz inform Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) “there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills and dare scarce home thither.”

However, a year after The Malcontent debuted with an adolescent cast at the Blackfriars Theatre, Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, cheekily took the play and performed it at the Globe with an adult cast. Some alterations were made to the text, including additional “comedy” and a grimly unfunny “Induction” by John Webster to rub in the point that grown men were better actors than beardless boys. The play is usually printed now with Webster’s Induction and the additions. This is the way it appears in the battered old “Regents Renaissance Drama Series” copy from my student days. It seems that Marston himself had a hand in the re-write.

Recently, the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London has had an addition to it. It is a reconstruction of a “private” closed theatre like the original Blackfriars, called the Sam Wanamaker Theatre. My wife and I were in London last month (April 2014) and, thanks to the generosity of our hosts, we were able to see at the Sam Wanamaker an attempt to show how The Malcontent would have appeared to its first viewers. It was a performance of the play by a cast of young teenagers, the “Globe Young Players”, more or less the ages of the boys who would have first performed the play at the Blackfriars 400 years ago. The cast was not exactly as it would have been in 1603. It included girls as well as boys – and the female sex did not appear on stage in Marston’s day. It was in preparation for seeing this performance that I re-read the text.

So how did a story of adultery, revenge and attempted murder fare when played by young teenagers? In the interval, we turned to two English chaps sitting next to us and asked them what they thought of the show. After first cannily ensuring that we weren’t related to anyone on stage (doubtless there were some proud parents in the audience), they said freely that they thought it was “interesting, but a failed experiment” and “a bit of a school play”. Reluctantly, I would have to agree with them. While it was fun to sit in a space something like the play’s original venue – complete with lousy site-lines and chandeliers with real candles in them – it was clear that some of the young cast didn’t entirely understand the Jacobean words they were saying. The dreaded sing-song took over a few voices, and emphases were often wrong. Worse, the boy cast as the “Malcontent” was simply too young a teenager for the role. He was not old enough to snarl convincingly. When he should have dominated the stage, he was easily out-acted by the older teenage boys who played Duke Pietro and Mendoza. Most imbalancing of all was the tall chap who played, in drag, the pander Maquerelle in such a high camp style that he stole all the scenes in which he appeared.

The production wisely ditched the added “Induction” and much of the added “comedy”, paring the text back to what it would probably have been at the Blackfriars. The customary jig at the end was vigorous and an enjoyable reminder of the way plays usually did end in London playhouses when Marston was around. But as the recited lines rolled past my ears, I most often found myself asking “How much more fun would this be if it were performed by adults?”

Perhaps there is simply no way of recapturing the particular skills and appeal that boy actors had four centuries ago.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

WHAT PASSING BELLS?

            A recent trip to Europe means that for the next four or five weeks, these “Something Thoughtfuls” will probably be awash with reflections and comments drawn from things done and sights seen there – and as Anzac Day is still only a few weeks ago as I write; and as this is the year in which everybody is remembering the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War; I thought I would begin with two experiences related to war, a human condition which I have been spared.

            FIRST EXPERIENCE: Spending time in Paris, my wife and I proved to be the type of tourists who are most interested in chasing up art, classical music, churches and literary shrines. But one morning, having walked from our hotel in St-Germain-des-Pres to the suburb of Passy, and having enjoyed a long visit at the home of Honore de Balzac, we decided to continue our trek down to the Arc de Triomphe, accessed by a subterranean walkway under the (typically-French) hectic and uncontrolled roundabout that is the Place de l’Etoile.

            Of course we took the elevator to the roof. Of course we pointed our phone-cameras in all directions and took panoramic shots of Paris, especially that view straight down the Champs Elysees where the military forces parade whenever there is some big national day like the 14^th of July. Of course we paused in the small military museum on the top floor, and I thought it right and just that there was a huge statue of a First World War poilu representing the Unknown Soldier. The historian in me knows that the French Army took most of the strain in defending the Western Front in 1914-18, with the British and (later) American forces in a supporting role. Look at some Anglophone books on that war, and you’d imagine that the whole thing was a slugging match between Tommy and Fritz.

            But it was when we returned to the open air at the foot of the arch, near where the eternal flame to the unknown warrior is tended, that my thoughts turned really melancholic. I looked at the inscribed lists on the inward side of the arch of all the victorious French battles from the Napoleonic era and later in the nineteenth century, and of their heroes and commanding officers. And I began to think of the vainglory of so many war memorials. How many of these battles solved any pressing problem? How many of them were fought for reasons that would now be regarded as shameful? And where, Mr Buonaparte, did all your world-conquering get you anyway? I kept hearing in my head Byron’s mighty, sarcastic Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, which reflects that all the man taught was the pointlessness of war-mongering (“….thanks for that lesson!”).

Please don’t misinterpret me on this one. As a bit of a Francophile, I don’t single out French war memorials for this sort of reflection. The same thoughts would bubble up in my mind were I standing in front of some memorials and monuments in London, Washington or Moscow. I remember a very sad visit I made, ten years ago, to the Victor Emmanuel Monument in Rome, Italy’s biggest national war memorial. Quite rightly, the museum inside the monument celebrated the Italian heroes of the Risorgimento and of the First World War. But there was a great big aching gap after the early 1920s, for there could not be a word or image in praise of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and its military adventuring. For Italians, this very absence from their national shrine probably rubs in the fact that there is something shameful in their history that is better forgotten. And maybe some of Napoleon’s ventures would be better forgotten too.

Yet, at the Arc de Triomphe, this wasn’t the thing that really troubled me.

We were about to end our visit when uniformed squads of soldiers and sailors began forming around us. We wondered if this was some special day of military remembrance that we didn’t know about, but when we asked a French photographer near us, he said it was simply the daily salute to the unknown warrior – like the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, as much a performance for tourists’ cameras as anything. Still, these were real young soldiers and sailors. And that is the operative word. Young. Their commanding officers were middle-aged men, but the squaddies were kids. The ranks of sailors were arranged in order of height, tallest to shortest, which meant that the women sailors were in the back row. It was almost comic to see one officer gently rebuking a short kid – who would probably have been 18 or 19 years old but who looked much younger – for holding her automatic rifle in the wrong position.

And that was the moment when my thoughts turned really wretched. In most of the wars that have ever been fought, the great majority of soldiers have been little more than kids – teenagers or men in their early twenties, with the hardened, grizzled veterans a distinct and small minority. “Old soldiers never die”? Quite right, because most soldiers who die in wars are youngsters.

As far as I know, France isn’t involved in a major military conflict at the moment, and these young men and women at the Arc de Triomphe were in no immediate danger of losing their lives. But the sight of this little kid carrying a big lethal weapon hit me hard.

We left the Arc de Triomphe and made our way down the Champs Elysees, battered by the dense crowds and eventually reaching the Place de la Concorde, an even more manic and disorderly roundabout than the Place de l’Etoile. But all the time I was thinking that wars are fought by children holding weapons, while old men give them orders.

SECOND EXPERIENCE: Some weeks later, in late April, we were in Amsterdam visiting one of our sons, a generous host, who is currently sojourning there. He had formed the plan of driving us and his young family down to Messines, to join in a dawn service for Anzac Day. So off we went, taking five or so hours to make the motorway trip, watching the flat Dutch landscape turning into the gently rolling Flemish landscape and getting caught up in the horrible traffic jams that afflict the ring road around the port of Antwerp. After a night’s sleep in Flanders, and after some misadventures in the pre-dawn darkness, we found our way to the Anzac ceremony held at the Buttes British Cemetery near Polygon Wood. Appropriately for the occasion, there was a gentle drizzle. We heard a choir of Australian schoolkids sing Advance Australia Fair and a lone New Zealand singer lead God Defend New Zealand, and the bugles were blown and the chaplain declaimed and we were told that we would remember them at the going down of the sun.

No, I am not being a cynic. Despite having some military brothers, I’m not a part of military culture and have always had very mixed feelings about the celebration of Anzac Day. Why should we make such a foolish and failed campaign our remembrance day anyway? Why pretend that it was somehow the start of New Zealand nationhood when in fact, at the time, it was something that bound us more closely to an imperial Britain? And yet, among the long lines of gravestones, I was a little overwhelmed at the thought of all the dead here, and found myself, after the ceremony was over, wandering up and down the lines, under the drizzle, photographing the graves of New Zealand soldiers “known unto God” – in other words, poor, anonymous fellows who lost both their life and their identity. (I thought one of my Reid great-uncles, who died at Passchendaele in 1917, might be among the anonymous ones; but my sister has subsequently informed me that he has a marked grave some distance from the cemetery we were visiting.)

After the dawn ceremony it was a provided breakfast (croissants and coffee) and after that we went to another, specifically New Zealand, ceremony at the New Zealand monument that stands on the ridge overlooking the battlefield. I found it impossible to connect the well-wooded, rolling, peaceful farmland not too far below us (the Messines Ridge is just a gentle rise, not a tall eminence) with all those familiar black-and-white photographs of the same area as a sea of artillery-blasted mud with soldiers working among the broken bits of a few denuded trees.

But what is the point of this rambling anecdote?

Well, after our second breakfast this morning – this time provided by the burgomaster and councillors of Messines, who have a strong remembrance of the New Zealand Division which finally drove the imperial German forces out of their town in 1917 – and after we had photographed the statue of the New Zealand soldier which now stands in Messines, my son and I were latched onto by two Walloon (French-speaking) Belgian radio journalists, who, having chatted with me in French, wanted to interview us for a programme about how New Zealanders now remember the First World War.

To get us to an appropriate spot for the interview, they took us to the rebuilt old church of Messines. Everything old in this part of Flanders was rebuilt in the 1920s and 1930s, having been reduced to rubble in the Great War. That is one reason why so many Flemish villages look so neat and tidy. As we walked to the church, one of the interviewers told us wryly that its shell-blasted crypt was where a certain Corporal Hitler had been treated successfully for wounds early in 1915. We agreed that it was a pity some doctors were so good at their jobs. Only when we reached the church did we understand why they thought it was an appropriate venue for an interview with two Kiwis. Worked into the pavement in front of the church, there is a large mosaic map of New Zealand, another reminder of the New Zealand Division’s role here in 1917.

So to the questions; and this is where Muggins said something foolish.

So what was New Zealand’s role in the First World War? they asked

I said it was huge – 100,000 men under arms out of a total population of one million in 1914-18 meant perhaps a greater per capita contribution to the war than in most other combatant countries.

And how was that war remembered by New Zealanders? they asked.

I said in some way, remembrance of it was unavoidable. There are war memorials with names of the dead in every city and substantial town in New Zealand, and usually the list of New Zealanders dead in the First World War is longer than the list of New Zealanders dead in the Second World War, because more New Zealanders fought in the First World War.

And did New Zealanders remember New Zealand’s role in Belgium? they asked.

I said that, despite having a remembrance day dated from the Gallipoli campaign, most New Zealanders understood that far more of their soldiers had died on the Western Front, in France and Belgium, and especially at Passchendaele and Messines, than had died in Turkey.

And did young people know this? they asked – which made me say some rude things about how little young people know about anything anyway.

But finally to Muggins’ gaffe.

How did I, as a New Zealander, regard the First World War and its significance? they asked.

And confidently I went off into one of my favourite dithyrambs. We all understand the purpose of the Second World War, I said, because a very real evil was being fought against. But, I said, I find it much harder to understand the real purpose of the First World War. Yes, Germany had a militaristic culture. Yes, it was aggressive. But then all combatant powers – British, French, German, Austrian, Turkish, Russian, Italian – had their own nationalist agendas in the war and from this distance it is hard to see any of them as particularly creditable. Despite the support for democracy that was defined as the Allied cause late in the war (Wilson’s 14 points and all that), from this distance, I said, the First World War looks like little more than the clash of rival empires and the flexing of military muscles. It had no clear cause or purpose.

The two Walloons listened patiently to all this, before the interviewer politely intervened.

But there was a real cause to fight for in 1914, he said. We had no hand in starting the war, but our country was invaded and civilians were shot by the invaders and that is why we were grateful to your people for coming to help us.

And as he, with the utmost politeness, said more in the same vein, I pulled my horns in and knew I’d stumbled into a basic and obvious fact about historical interpretation. It all depends on where you are standing. Okay for me or you, far away on the other side of the world, to see the First World War as a pointless hecatomb. But for some people it was about real and vivid issues – such as why strangers whom you had never provoked were lobbing artillery shells into your fields and houses and shooting your people because the strangers had some master plan for reaching Paris in a hurry.

So here endeth my second lesson on war for the day – for non-combatants like me, removed in time, place and history, it is easy to see many wars in the abstract. But they are fought in the concrete.

Amen and a compassionate prayer for the dead – whatever they thought they were fighting about.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

 “MOTHER OF GOD” by Paul Rosolie  (Bantam Press / Random House, $NZ37:99) ; “AFTERNOONS IN ITHAKA” by Spiri Tsintziras (ABC Books / Harper-Collins, $NZ 29:99)

            As I have remarked on this blog before, travel books come in many types and yet there is one iron-cast rule. It is no longer adequate for real travel writers (i.e. those outside the tourist industry-sponsored “Travel” sections of newspapers) to simply give an account of where they have been and what they have seen. Real travel writers have to have a personal angle and perspective, and some literary skill. Worthwhile travel writing is, in effect, a series of experiences and reflections fired by the foreign place – not just descriptions of that foreign place. (Look up my essay “On the Beaten Track” via the index at right).

As if to illustrate my thesis I have before me this week two books of travel as different from each other as chalk and cheese – or rather as different as raw survival and fine peasant cuisine. Each has a very personal perspective.

The rough, tough one first.

The title of Paul Rosolie’s Mother of God does not signify that his is a religious book.

Rather it is a book about the western-most area of the Amazon rain forest which early Spanish explorers called “Madre de Dios” – Mother of God. Straddling the borders of Peru and Brazil, and with the Andes in sight, the Madre de Dios is an area of incredible biodiversity. As Rosolie reckons it up early in the piece:

“The rough tallies for the entire Andes/Amazon region: 1,666 birds, 414 mammals, 479 reptiles, 834 amphibians and a large portion of the Amazon’s 9,000 fish species. In the Madre de Dios alone there are more than 1,400 butterfly species.” (pp.12-13)

And this does not account for the even more incredible variety of plants and trees. Speaking of being lost in the jungle in a storm, Rosolie writes:

“If the storm intensified, there was little chance I’d survive the resulting carpet bombing of shed tree limbs. Some of the great explorers have claimed that snake or piranhas or jaguars present the gravest threat in the Amazon, but these declarations betray inexperience. The trees themselves, in their dizzying innumerability, isolate and disorient you, and in a storm prove the most deadly. Some of the true giants are so interlaced with vines and strangler tentacles that when they fall, their weight tears down almost an acre of jungle. There is no way to escape.” (p.6)

Rosolie is cautious about using such terms as “pristine” or “unspoiled”, as he is aware that human beings are already having a major impact on the Madre de Dios and it is gravely threatened. Even so, he cannot resist telling us every so often that he has witnessed what is in effect raw nature acting out the same dramas that have been acted out for tens of thousands of years.

The first half of the book is entitled “The Age of Innocence” and chronicles Rosolie’s earlier travels in the region, very much in the form of a series of encounters with wild animal species. The second half has the title “The Battle of the Amazon”, and concentrates more on the ecological concerns his experiences aroused in him.

As he tells it, he was an 18-year-old student in New Jersey, bored with his studies, longing for an outdoor life and already concerned about saving animals, when he wangled his first trip to the Madre de Dios. While there he heard stories of the region’s unexplored areas of rain forest from an English conservationist whom he calls Emma and her Peruvian boyfriend Juan Julio. He was fired with the idea of doing some lone trekking; and on return visits, in his early twenties, he proceeded to do just that.

By his own account, he had mixed qualities of naivete and complete fearlessness, always being more intrigued and delighted by wild animals than he was scared of them.

He climbed up into the rain forest’s canopy to discover the high-living wildlife there, and was delighted to observe ants that had the capacity to “hang-glide” onto other branches if the wind knocked them off their perches. He gloried in the sight of macaws with their brilliant plumage. The first time he and some comrades encountered a caiman (large black Amazonian crocodile) he tried to restrain it by grabbing its tail and just missed having his face ripped off as the beast swiftly swung around to snap at him with its great jaws (p.44). He avoided rampaging peccaries (wild pigs) when they were quarrelling with howler monkeys over a waterhole, but he did stay around to see how the two species interacted. He was awe-struck by the “strangler fig”, which parasitically envelops trees and gradually sucks the life out of them, almost the same way the region’s anacondas crush the life out of animals.

He was happy to have some of his preconceptions modified. Expecting the water of the Amazon’s tributaries to be always filled with piranhas or caiman and to be undrinkable, he was surprised to find his conservationist companions happily drinking it and bathing in it.

He nursed an orphaned baby anteater he called Lulu, which got used to riding around on his back the way baby anteaters ride on their mothers. But he warns that full-grown anteaters are not as cute as they might look and are perfectly capable of standing their ground against bigger beasts with the help of their formidable claws. Of Lulu he writes:

“If you bred a hyper baby black bear with Edward Scissorhands, the result would be something similar to what we were dealing with. Though she was small, her claws were already three-inch long black sickles that could tear through denim and skin with ease…” (p.67)

At a certain point in his travels, he contracted a horrible infection, his face swelled up with dozens of pus-filled spots (there’s a particularly grisly shot of him in this condition in the selection of colour photographs) and he had to be taken back to New York for hospitalization. Ironically, he was carried out of the jungle by his enemies, the poachers who shoot and kill all Amazon species regardless of their endangered status.

I admit that I was at first a little suspicious of some of his animal stories and wondered if he wasn’t fantasising. When he first encountered a 12-foot anaconda, for example, he tells us that he was so eager to observe it that he wrestled with it to keep it in sight (pp.133-36). Yet he is insistent that he did such things, and later when he meets an even larger specimen of the species, he tells us:

“My brain fired a hundred thoughts all at once as her coils exploded into action, rapidly entering the water and disappearing. Propelled by an irrational urge to restrain the snake and get photographic evidence of her size, I dived onto her back like a shortstop catching a line drive. My presence did nothing to impede her progress, and my arms could not close around her, such was her circumference. I was carried more than seven feet on the anaconda, my arms clinging to her trunk, legs dragging along beside.” (p.151)

I will just have to accept the veracity of these tales, as I accept this charming tale involving a giant snake:

“Climbing down to get a photo, I was beside the stream when I heard a muffled pop. Just three feet to my left, in the stream, a female anaconda more than fourteen feet long lay coiled around the body of a peccary. The herd had come through here, and the anaconda had grabbed one by the cheek as it passed and wrestled it into the water. The pop I heard was the pig’s spine breaking in half. Gowri [the author’s Indian fiancée] almost lost her mind at the sight of such a massive snake, but was still able to snap a stunning photo of the scene.” (p.223)

The snap is reproduced in the book. The amazing thing is that this ferocious reptile was scared away by the human attention, leaving her kill behind her. The human beings took the crushed peccary back to their camp and roasted and ate it.

To strip away the last shreds of my scepticism, I find that you can go on Youtube, look up “Paul Rosalie”, and find ample film of him interacting with ferocious snakes in a fearless way.

By now you have rumbled that all I am doing in this book review is presenting you with a summary of the book’s highlights. That is because I am holding back on making a few negative comments on the book’s style. It is fully understandable, and commendable of him, that Rosolie adopts a rather impassioned tone in the book’s second half as he deals with the poachers, the loggers who chop down centuries-old mahogany groves to service wealthy markets, the developers who want to rip up virgin rainforest to mine, and the Trans-Amazonian highway pushing through the region, which he describes as “the most environmentally devastating single project in the history of the world.” (p.185). This, I guess, is anger in a good cause.

But as a whole, the book’s style can be cliché–ridden journalese. Yes, there is the occasional felicitous phrase, as when Rosolie declares “To walk the Amazon by night is to enter a world where you are gravely disadvantaged compared to millions of sensory savants.”(p.84) I love that “sensory savants” bit, as he thinks of all the acutely seeing and hearing and smelling animals surrounding him in the darkness. But this is an exception to the book’s undistinguished reportage.

In an autobiographical chapter (Chapter 2), Rosolie tells us that he is dyslexic and got low grades at school in New Jersey and was regarded as a simpleton. Clearly he is no simpleton, but this does lead me to wonder if Mother of God was ghost-written, or perhaps very heavily edited and re-written for him before publication. In this, I could be quite wrong, and I am sorry to be churlish in my suggestion, as the book tells such a good story. There are, however, times when Rosolie overdoes his sympathetic tears at the destruction of animals. There is one episode (p.286) where he pictures himself, as poachers close in, communing with a wounded jaguar and saying “Please live!” like the hero of a staged Hollywood eco-drama.

Oh dear. Rotten–hearted old cynic me. Maybe I’m just saying that Rosolie’s style can be rather melodramatic. But I enjoyed the things this book told me about so much, that perhaps I should just stop quibbling about the way it is written.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

“Spiri” (Spirithoula) Tsintziras’ Afternoons in Ithaka is, as a travel book, the most

extreme contrast with Paul Rosalie’s adventures in the wild places of the earth.

This is a story contrasting one relatively-newly settled country with one country of very ancient civilization. Spiri is a Greek Australian, an experienced journalist and co-author of a popular children’s book. Her story is as much autobiography and confession as it is travel book. Its 350-odd pages divide into three parts, ”The Seed”, “The Sapling” and “The Fruit”, as she charts her own growth and growing confidence in her cultural identity.

As a working class kid growing up in Melbourne, Spiri was partly intrigued and partly embarrassed by her parents’ Greek culture. The district was fairly rough-house. Dad was sometimes on the unemployment benefit when he couldn’t get factory work, sometimes drank too much and sometimes got nasty when drunk. His most stable period appears to have been when he ran a fish ‘n chips shop. Mum struggled to earn something as a seamstress. The neighbours always seemed to be fighting. Kids in the playground weren’t always sympathetic to “wog” ways and food, and they moved away from Spiri smartly when she produced such odiferous delicacies as squid sandwiches. So young Spiri was very self-conscious about who she was and where she came from and went through a mildly rebellious teenage phase where she refused to eat meat and did other things that baffled her parents.

Childhood visits to grandparents in Greece could be daunting. The ancient, evil-smelling long-drop the village used. The lack of amenities. But then there was grandma’s home-baked Greek bread, drenched in olive oil and cooked with tomatoes. In fact it is Greek grandma’s home-baked bread that greets us on the first page of this book before the autobiographical background is painted, and this points to another aspect of Afternoons in Ithaka.

It is a book about food.

The imperative to eat, overcoming other circumstances, is well caught in one childhood memory, which is recorded thus:

“I try not to look at the lamb’s eyes, or at the mouth clamped shut with wire, the sharp teeth still visible as it turns around, slowly, slowly. The lamb’s body has been secured to the spit so that it doesn’t move, metal skewers pushed through the flesh and clamped on. I feel sorry for the animal, but it know I will not be able to resist eating it – it smells delicious”. (p.77)

Even childhood tenderness about baa-lambs is overcome by the smell of roasting lamb.

Nearly every chapter is followed by a recipe for mainly ethnic Greek dishes. The opening chapter on grandma’s bread is followed by a recipe for said bread. A chapter on meeting other kids in Greece is followed by a recipe for chicken stew. When Mum’s struggles as a seamstress are described, there follows the recipe for Greek coffee. When expatriate Greeks discuss Greek politics and the right way to preserve cucumbers, we are given advice on how to dry seeds. So, in afterword after afterword, we run through spinach pie and moussaka and sundry other delicacies. In some cases, the recipes give way to recorded accounts from elders on how they conduct their kitchen life, and occasionally there is testimony on other aspects of Greek culture and peasant superstitions, such as the advice Spiri’s mother gives on the evil eye.

Afternoons in Ithaka takes us through Spiri’s adolescence and young adulthood, student years and backpacking trips around the Mediterranean (Greece, Italy, southern France) with a student pal, but all the time leading to her greater identification with her ethnic roots when at last she finds a husband, has children and gets to visit Ithaka. Symbolically, it ends with the building of a Greek-style peasant oven.

In the end, this is a sunnily optimistic story of the genre that entices readers with exotic food. I have not always responded favourably to this genre in the past, but in this case the author’s sweet earnestness is seductive.