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 four or more years ago.

 

“FAHRENHEIT 451” by Ray Bradbury (first published in 1953)

When I tell you that I have read a book, I mean that I have really read it. I have held the book in my hands, deciphered those black marks on the pages, and turned the pages. But when I tell you I have recently re-read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, I have to admit that I am cheating a little. I first read this short novel years ago, before I kept such a thing as a reading diary. I recently “re-read” it by listening, on a very long car journey, to an unabridged version, on four CDs lasting over four hours. Recorded in 2005, this audiobook was read (very well) by the American actor Christopher Hurt.

What surprised me was how much more subtle the story was than I remembered it. Dim memories of my first reading, and equally dim memories of the movie version Francois Truffaut made in the 1960s, told me that it was about a future world in which it is the duty of firemen to burn books. This much is known, I think, even by anyone who has merely heard of the title Fahrenheit 451. (The title refers to the temperature at which paper is supposed to burn.)  Therefore I recalled it as some sort of dystopian satire on totalitarianism (burning books immediately brings to mind images of Nazi stormtroopers) and on the enemies of complex thinking and literacy. But, as I now understand it, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) had much more to say than that.

Here’s one of my notorious and verbose synopses based on my second “reading”.

In what is presumably the early 21^st century (there is passing mention of two atomic wars being fought after 1990), in what is clearly the United States of America, firemen do not put out fires. All houses are officially fireproof. Instead, the purpose of firemen is to burn all books and oversee the arrest and incarceration of anyone possessing books. Literacy has not been completely stamped out. People can still read comic books, basic manuals and the simplified pap of newspapers and magazines. But books are forbidden.

The novel’s protagonist is Guy Montag, a 30-year-old fireman who is, at first, apparently happy in his destructive role. But he begins to have doubts when, returning home after a hard night-shift of burning books, he falls into conversation with a neighbouring teenage girl, Clarisse, who talks to him about the way people no longer relate to one another, no longer look thoughtfully at the world around them, and seem somehow to be drugged and passive.

We soon learn why this is so when we meet Montag’s wife Mildred. All day she is at home, not relating to real people, but relating to the endless soap-operas and diversions that play on the three wall-sized television screens that dominate the lounge. She always has in her ears “seashells” which pipe into her inane music and soothing words, even at night when she sleeps. She is, in effect, zombiefied by the endless input of brainless mass media. And her condition is the common condition of most adults in the world Montag inhabits.

Montag becomes particularly distressed with his job when his team of fireman raid the home of an old woman who has an attic full of forbidden books.  In the process of destroying the books, the old woman is killed.

Now Montag becomes quietly rebellious. Can books really be so dangerous, or so powerful, that people are willing to die for them?

He secretes a forbidden book in his uniform and takes it home, intent on actually reading it. He also says a few odd things which arouse the suspicion of the fire-chief, Beatty, in the firehouse.

So one night, Montag’s boss Beatty comes calling to Montag’s home and has a little chat with Montag which is, in effect, the philosophical heart of the novel.

Beatty, who turns out to be an urbane and well-informed man, explains that real books simply make people think too much, and thinking makes people melancholy and unhappy. Philosophy? Sociology? Tragedy? Who needs them? They are only theory and useless fiction anyway. In such a diverse society as America’s, with many cultural and racial minorities, the great thing is to keep people happy and united; and this can be achieved only by keeping people active and busy with sports and distracted with soap-opera, trivia instead of real news, and pornography (“three-dimensional sex magazines” are mentioned). Beatty further makes it plain that the destruction of books hasn’t come out of nowhere and hasn’t really been imposed from above. It is what the people really want as they have progressively turned towards the simplifications of mass media and away from the difficulties of real reading. Mass media have the advantage of shortening attention spans and therefore preventing people from brooding.

Beatty tells Montag “Remember, we are in the happiness business.” Every book burned is another person liberated from the burden and angst of real thought.

Before he departs, Beatty pointedly tells Montag that most firemen take an interest in what is in books at some time. They may even take a book home out of curiosity and, if so, they may keep the book for 24 hours. But if they keep it any longer than that, there are serious consequences. Clearly Beatty is onto Montag.

Despite this implicit threat, Montag decides to pursue his course of keeping and reading books.

Thus far I have synopsised a bit over the first third of the novel. I will refrain from providing a detailed synopsis of the rest. Instead, just a few pointers as to where the story goes. Montag makes contact with an old man called Faber who secretly treasures books and schools Montag on their value – and at this point the novel shifts focus from being dystopian satire on brainless mass media to being philosophical discourse on the value of books, of written language and of literacy. Books are things that you can pick up, put down, read at your own pace and ruminate on in a way that is not possible with the intrusive urgency of piped mass media. In these passages, Ray Bradbury peppers the text with quotations from the classics. Interestingly, too, Faber explains that TV, radio and so on are not bad things in themselves. They are simply conduits of communication – but it is the uses to which they are put, and their potentially addictive quality, that render them harmful.  Fahrenheit 451 is therefore positioning itself as not being an anti-technology or Luddite tract.

Later, Montag is involved in a ferocious fight in which somebody is killed (I won’t go into the details) after which he is declared an enemy of the state and has to flee from the city, at some stages pursued by a monstrous science-fiction contraption Bradbury has invented – a mechanical “hound” which can be programmed to sniff out and kill specific human beings. There are also sequences when Montag, in the forest, makes contact with groups of men (yes, they are all men – no women are mentioned) who have dedicated themselves to memorising literary texts as they look forward to the day when books can be printed and circulated openly once again.

The novel ends on a note of quiet optimism.

As I reacted to Fahrenheit 451 a second time, I was aware that it was written nearly 65 years ago and that therefore (as in all science-fiction and speculative fiction) some of its details reflect the age in which it was written. In effect, they had dated a little. The firemen still all smoke pipes – indeed everybody seems to smoke. The impending threat of nuclear war situates the novel’s imagery very much in the earlier stages of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons are apparently delivered in the jet aircraft that Montag often hears roaring overhead, so this story was conceived before there were such things as intercontinental ballistic missiles. The accelerant used by the firemen as they create fires is plain old kerosene, which sounds a little quaint.

Then there are some of the social assumptions. Montag’s wife Mildred stays at home passively while Montag is out working. She is very much the 1950s stereotype of the housewife at home all day watching game shows and soap-operas. And it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s that (in America, at least) television took off as a mass medium and for the first time intellectuals began to worry about its impact on literacy and culture.

I also can’t help noticing that to explain the rationale of this dystopia, Bradbury has the scene in which the embattled hero (Montag) is enlightened by the novel’s chief enforcer of the regime (Beatty). Such a scene – in which the antagonist neatly explains himself and his world – was almost standard fare in dystopian fiction even before Bradbury wrote. Think of the Controller explaining to the “Savage” John the whole rationale for the drugged, hedonistic, eugenically-selected social structure in Huxley’s Brave New World. Think of O’Brien of the Inner Party enlightening Winston Smith on the modus operandi of a totalitarian state in Orwell’s 1984.

Yet having noted all this, Bradbury’s novel still functions well and has point and punch because at least some of Bradbury’s “predictions” have come so true. Consider those “seashells” in people’s ears, cutting them off from physical reality and, in any location, hooking them to mass media. Since the days of Walkmans in the 1980s, they have been a reality. Look at any teenager hooked by earplugs to his/her cellphone and staring vacuously at nothing at all, and you know what I mean.

Bradbury wrote when television was still a small, fuzzy, black-and-white screen. Now we have gigantic wall televisions dominating a room just the way they do in the novel. The impact of this enlarged medium is also predicted accurately. There is a scene in which Montag challenges his wife and her friends to talk seriously about politics. They can only talk about how handsome one of the presidential candidates looked, and give this as their reason for voting for him. This anticipates the way presidential (and other political) campaigns have become contests to see which candidate has the looks and personality to play well on television. (Bradbury was writing nearly a decade before the first such “telegenic” presidential contest was waged between Kennedy and Nixon.)

I could go further and note that, though Bradbury had no way of knowing about the internet and “social media”, his vision does comprehend a world in which there is massive 24-hour-per-day sharing of trite slogans and personal gossip. Hello Facebook. Hello Youtube.

And what are these subtleties I now claim to see in the text?

I had forgotten the way so much of Bradbury’s descriptive writing borders on the surreal. Early in the narrative there is an episode where Montag finds his wife having drugs pumped into her by two medics, who say they attend dozens of such cases every night. The implication is that Mildred has attempted suicide – and that she, like so many other media-happy people, still has a core of despair, sensing the vacuity of her life. Yet the episode is presented in such colourful and metaphorical language that we are left wondering whether it is really happening or whether it is some sort of perverse wish on Montag’s part.

I had also forgotten how often the novel insists that the burning of books suits the wishes of the mass of the population. The novel’s totalitarianism – if so it be – is a “soft” totalitarianism, willed upon people by themselves; that is, the mass of people who shriek “elitism” (or “dead white men”) should anyone express a taste for opera, poetry, philosophy and great canonical works of art and literature. Democratic societies do not reject great works of literature and other nourishing reading because books are banned and suppressed by oppressive governments. They reject them because their populations are attracted to more facile entertainments and lose the habit of reading patiently, seriously and for long stretches.

A few concluding remarks: I have seen this novel interpreted as an attack upon censorship, and for some years after it was published, Ray Bradbury was willing to tell interviewers that he wrote it in the McCarthy years and sensed the pressure of powerful forces trying to sniff out, and suppress, dissident views. Later, however, Bradbury changed his tune, denied that the book was mainly about censorship and said it was more about the corrosive effects upon literacy of the mass media. Having recently reacquainted myself with Fahrenheit 451, I think the text itself mainly supports the latter view, although the idea of censorship is a part of it.

I was interested that the audiobook I listened to concluded with an afterword Bradbury wrote in 2003, on the 50^th anniversary of the novel’s first publication. He remarked that sometimes readers wrote to him asking why the character of Clarisse was so quickly written out of the story, and then saying that perhaps there should be more positive female characters in the novel. (Yes, Fahrenheit 451 was written before “third wave” feminism got going.) Robustly (and I think with reason on his side) Bradbury said that he would never edit or re-write a book he had already presented to the public, and so he was not going to present a new edition with positive female characters. But he did note that he had done a stage adaptation that gave more of a role to Clarisse. He also noted that Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film version of the story added women to the secretive society of people who wander the woods memorising books.

I won’t linger over Truffaut’s film, save to say that it was filmed in England, the ambience was English, and Truffaut really disliked directing it as his own English was very limited. Although Bradbury himself said he quite liked the film, the screenplay (on which Truffaut collaborated) departed radically from the novel in many ways, and could as well be called “suggested by” rather than really “adapted from” the novel. I found the gentle-faced Oskar Werner as Guy Montag and the mild Cyril Cusack as the fire chief far too pale and meek for characters who are both much more virile and aggressive in the novel. The film played the silly trick of having Montag’s wife and the equivalent of Clarisse (both characters were given different names in the film) played by the same actress, Julie Christie, perhaps to suggest two sides of womanhood (domestic and rebellious).

For the record, at the time the 92-year-old Ray Bradbury died in 2012, the film rights to Fahrenheit 451 were in the hands of the contentious actor Mel Gibson, and there was talk of Gibson doing a new film version – but it came to nothing.

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.    

MIND-BODY IDENTITY THEORY IN ACTION

I confess, dear reader, that I am at best an amateur philosopher and psychologist, although I have a number of times valiantly read my way through texts in both philosophy and psychology.

One thing I have heard of, in a distant sort of way, is that old chestnut “the mind-body identity theory”. As I understand it, this theory is an empirical and materialist counterblast to the idealist view that the mind is a non-physical entity not to be equated with the brain.

The mind (according to Platonic idealists and some Cartesian rationalists) is more than the neurones and nerve connections and gloopy grey matter that reside in the skull of each of us. Though the brain may host and be the physical seat of the mind, the mind is detachable from our physical being. In fact, in the idealist view of things, the mind is very simlar to the soul – the non-physical moral and emotional essence of what each of us is.

Not so, say empricists and materialists, sweating along in the footsteps of Locke and Hume. The mind is simply the sum of the functions of the physical brain. Emotions and thoughts are as much products of our physical being as digestion and excretion. No physical brain, no mind – and certainly no non-physical entity separable from the brain.

I do not know enough to discuss this matter in any detail, but I do understand the general plan of the battlefield, and at different times of my life I have been persuaded one way or the other.

Item – as a sometime manic-depressive (“bipolar dysfunction”, according to a more recent jargon), I have often found myself labouring under oppressive and debilitating feelings which sap my vigour, slow my brain down to a crawl and of course leave me feeling totally miserable. But in such thoughts (myself almost despising), my mind asserts itself and tells me that I have a capacity which I call “unconquerable reason”. I can see beyond the immediate present moment – beyond the physical pressure upon my brain, which the empiricists and materialists say is all my mind is. Like Descartes, at such moments I become a convinced rationalist, embracing the dualism of mind and body, knowing that the one is not the other.

But let me also speak of the contrary case.

Recently I had a particularly nasty bout of gastroenteritis.

It began as a rising nausea, which slowly crept up my gorge.

I took the afternoon off work as a malaise began, then took the following day off as well.

Once I got home, I vomited copiously in the family loo. When you have nausea, vomiting is a great relief. I thought I had expelled the evil thing that had invaded me – but no. Having made an appointment to see the doctor, I was backing my car down the drive when I had to stop and managed to get out the car door just in time to vomit copiously on the grass verge.

I made it to the doctor’s, and waited (as one always has to do in a GP’s surgery) for about half-an-hour. The nausea built up again. I dashed to the loo in the surgery and vomited expansively for the third time. As I emerged, pale and shaken, the receptionist asked me if I needed some help, so I had the humiliation of knowing that the whole waiting room of patients had heard my wild bodily evacuation. Halfway through my consultation with the doctor, I had to dash out for a diahorreic excretion in his surgery loo. As well as giving me a prescription, the doctor gave me a robust plastic bag, with closeable top, should I have to vomit before I got home.

I went to the pharmacy. While waiting for the prescription to be filled out, I had the embarrassment of vomiting for a fourth time – this time into my handy plastic bag. The pharmacist was as understanding and helpful as the doctor had been, and discreetly helped me to dispose of the filled bag in the appropriate receptacle.

Home I crept wearily and achingly. The mere thought of food or other nourishment was disgusting to me. I was tired. My body ached. I crawled to bed early and slept for about six hours. At about 2 in the morning I woke, dashed to the ensuite, and disgorged oceanic proportions of vomit – my fifth and final big vomit within less than 24 hours. My body had nothing left to expel. I was cleaned out. I would feel no more nausea. But the virus had to punish me in some other way. When I woke for the second day’s torture, my limbs and muscles ached, my backbone felt as if it has been misused by a contortionist. Unable to make me nauseous, the evil thing decided to make me feel in amplified form every minor bump, grossness or imperfection of my body.

Thus for my physical condition.

And what was my mind doing all the while? As I experienced nausea, ached, felt fatigue and physical pain, my mind was telling me that there was no joy in life, than my life was worthless, that all effort was a waste, that nothing ultimately mattered, that I was a wretch, and that oblivion was better than the stress of living.

My mind was dancing to my body’s tune and totally at one with it. Pure mind-body identity.

On the third day, after a full night’s deep sleep (most unusual for a chronic insomniac such as I), I awoke fully recovered. No nausea, no pain, no aches. The beast had passed through me and left me unconquered. I reflected that, in a world where people die of hunger and in wars, my 50-or-so hours of suffering were trivial, minor and the type of thing that only privileged people would choose to comment upon.

The sun was shining and my mind rejoiced. The world was good, full of promise, full of things to look forward to. I was glad my body had been cleaned out, and decided to profit from this fact by being a litle more frugal in my diet. There was a spring in my step and no hint of mental fatigue.

My mind was again dancing to my body’s tune.

Something New

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

“THROUGH THE LONESOME DARK”” by Paddy Richardson  (Upstart Press, $NZ 34:99)

            I confess freely that I approach most new “historical” novels with some trepidation. It’s not simply the possibility of anachronisms, though the darn things are distracting when they turn up in “historical” fiction. Nor is it the fact that, more often than not, such novels present a simplified version of the past and play to stereotype. What really gets me is the tendency “historical” novelists have to insert our current ideas and attitudes into the minds and mouths of characters supposedly living in a past age. This means that the most sympathetic characters in such novels usually turn out to be people from our own time who mysteriously have got dressed in the clothes of a different time.

            As “historical” novelists go, Paddy Richardson is not too guilty of these things. I could not, I am glad to say, find any anachronisms in her latest novel Through the Lonesome Dark, and the values expressed by the characters are credibly of their age, although Richardson does play up those values that would be most congenial to us now. Certainly a good part of the novel is like a feminist treatise on how women were once more limited in their choices and penalised by the law. But, though it is in its own right a robust and readable narrative, Through the Lonesome Dark suffers from a really strange structure.

Of which more anon.

Let’s get our bearings first. The earlier half of Through the Lonesome Dark is set in the West Coast mining town of Blackball in the years just before the First World War. When most people think of the history of Blackball, they think at once of the big miners’ strike in 1908, which has been dramatised and novelised more than once (see, for example, Eric Beardsley novel Blackball ’08, published back in the 1980s). Wisely, Paddy Richardson does not dwell on this oft-told tale. The strike is referred to in only one brief, retrospective conversation (pp.127-128) and we get a small child’s disjointed memories of it.

Richardson’s focus is the child Pansy Williams, about 10 when the novel begins. Pansy’s home life is raw. Dad is a miner, frequently drunk and too ready to use his fists. Mum is Catholic. Dad isn’t. Dad resents Mum’s religiosity and blames her for “driving away” their sons, leaving only little Pansy at home with them. Dad frequently beats up Mum when he’s been on the booze. The child hears all the noises and desperation.

Little Pansy has some avenues of apparent escape. She is good friends with two boys of her own age, Clem Bright and the German boy Otto Bader, both children of miners as Pansy is, but not of miners as brutal as Pansy’s father. In the early stages of the novel Pansy and the boys wander the nearby creek and bush in a sort of childhood idyll, and make plans to be good friends for ever. But as puberty approaches, and as Pansy’s mother acquaints her with the awful fact of menstruation, Pansy suddenly begins to realise that boys and girls are assigned different roles in the world, and the two boys begin to treat her differently:

“Weren’t they to have stayed friends and be together? Hadn’t they said always, not only in their words, but in their hearts and minds, in their running and catching and laughing? But now? She sees in their faces turned towards each other that she’s only a girl they used to play with. It’s what she is now and what she’ll be in the future when they’re the men they think they’ve already grown into.” (p.53)

Pansy is intellectually bright, an adavanced reader in her primary school, top of the class and capable of getting a higher education. She qualifies for a scholarship to a secndary school in Greymouth, where all her fees would be paid. Her sympathetic teacher Miss Tinsdale tries to get her to take up this opportunity, but Pansy needs her parents’ permission and her brutish father won’t give it. Who says girls need an education anyway and besides, why should Pansy think she’s bound for better things than her working-class parents? She’s just getting above herself.

Instead, Pansy has to become a domestic servant to a hard employer.

Things at home get worse as Dad continues to thrash and abuse Mum and Pansy grows to resent her mother’s view that it’s her wifely duty to put up with it.

Pansy reflects:

“Ma’d see that as her duty; it’s her duty to wash her husband’s back, her duty to cook his dinner and to get his crib ready every night for the next morning and to wash his clothes and her duty and all to lie on her back with her legs open when he wants that. She hears it, still, through the wall, his grunting then a groan before he starts up with his coughing. She hears the bed creak as they turn over facing away from each other and then nothing until he starts to snore.” (p.78)

Pansy sours on the whole notion of inequitable marriage:

“If there’s any worshipping or laying down of life or anyone swept off their feet out of love, it’s not in Blackball. What she sees here is the women bringing in the coal to keep the stoves going, and cooking with what’s the cheapest they can buy, and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing the soot off the tables and the floors with the sandsoap taking the skin off their hands and when they get out for once in their lives it’s to the Miners’ Picnic or church or blackberrying. And there they are, them and their family, in the clothes made by them and washed clean despite the water from the tanks on the tar roof sometimes coming down so black you have to start the wash all over. Washed clean and starched and ironed.” (p.79)

When Pansy, now a teenager, concocts a plan to secrete some of her wages so that she might make her escape, her father finds her stash, confiscates it, and says all wages coming into the home are his. He gets even more abusive to Mum, finally thrashing her when she’s pregnant again so that she miscarries bloodily and nearly dies of a fever.

Then the First World War breaks out.

Okay, so what have we learnt as we near the halfway point in this novel? That women (maybe especially working-class women) one hundred years ago had limited property rights; that advanced education was out of reach for many; that fathers had the right to control their wives’ and daughters’ behaviour; that pregnancy was expected to be frequent and sometimes had dire consequences. It’s all lined up neatly for our inspection.

We are expecting to follow Pansy into adulthood and see how she fares. Instead, the novel takes an odd turn. When the war comes, Pansy is given a lecture by one of the two boys she used to knock around with. He says things of which we would now possibly approve, though they were very much the minority view at the time the novel is set:

“Think about what’s happening , Pansy. What’ve we in New Zealand got to do with all this warmongering? Most came here because they wanted something new but look what’s happening with this government kowtowing to England and sending men off to die for nothing to do with us. They’re using the newspapers to push their ideas, all those pictures of soldiers marching up the streets, looking smart and cocky in their uniforms. What do you think that’s for other than to trick men into thinking it’s their duty and all a bit of a lark, getting dressed up in a unoform and going off on a ship with everyone cheering to mess about with guns for a bit?.... The industrialists will be rubbing their hands together and they’re the one with the power. Do you think they’ll want to stop it now? Do you think they give atoss how many are killed so long as they get their dirty money? It’s the same old story, workers slaughtered to make capitalist fat.” (pp.122-123)

I will not be the cad to spoil the plot by revealing all its twists. But I can say that the novel suddenly switches focus from Pansy Williams to Clem Bright. (The third member of the childhood trio, Otto Bader, is mainly a “noise off”, apparently introduced into the novel solely so that Paddy Richardson can have a few lines about how people of German descent were placed under suspicion for the duration of the war.)

For reasons I won’t reveal Clem, despite having an anti-war dad and comrades, decides to enlist and – as a miner – ends up in the army’s mining corps in France, contributing to trench warfire by digging tunnels under German lines to set explosives etc. In effect, the novel’s strange structure is its sudden switch from being a domestic story about one character to being a war story about another. Paddy Richardson’s depiction of the young miner-soldier’s life is credible enough, as she has clearly done her research. There is even the posibility that Clem’s soldier life in France is intended as implicit comment on the sexual “double standard”. For unmarried Pansy to lose her virginity is a disaster. Clem casually visits brothels and has other sexual dalliances. What’s okay for men is not okay for women.

But even if this comparison were Paddy Richardson’s intention, the two halves of the novel simply do not fit together. Sure, there is a relationship between Clem and Pansy, and the novel does have some hasty thread-tying to bring Clem back to Blackball (one element of which is very improbable and depends on having withheld information from the reader).

We are really left wondering what has become of Pansy and why we have not had the chance to see her grow into a adulthood. That was what the novel seemed to be promising us, but the promise is not kept.
I would be completely misrepresenting this novel if I failed to note that it is well-written, that Paddy Richardson has clearly done her research and knows the historical period well, and that the premise is a credible one. A pity about that split.

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 four or more years ago.

“’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE” by John Ford (probably first performed in 1629; first published in 1633)

As you may have noticed before on this blog, one of my pastimes is reading Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. Hence, on this blog, you can find postings on George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, the anonymous Arden of Feversham, John Marston’s The Malcontent, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. The attractions of these plays for me are obvious. They are short enough to be read at a sitting or two, and no matter how convoluted, bombastic or melodramatic they (all of them) can get, they are written in a robust language that (more frequently in some than in others) can rise to poetic heights.

So on a recent holiday, as I basked in a folding chair on the black sands of a beach on the North Island’s west coast, I took out a copy of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and read it with considerable pleasure. It was the first time I had encountered the play since seeing an execrable film version of it in the early 1970s – of which more later.

In my usual pedantic way, I begin with a few words on the author.

John Ford (c.1586 - c.1640) trained as a lawyer, did not begin any sort of literary career until he was well into his 30s and did not begin writing plays until he was about 50 (in other words, he began writing plays at the age when William Shakespeare ended his writing career and died). Even then, he apparently spent some years in the 1620s writing plays in collaboration with the prolific hack Thomas Dekker.

According to Keith Sturgess’s introduction to his Penguin edition of Three Plays by John Ford, there are seven or eight plays by Ford alone which survive. Four of his plays (including ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore) were published first in the one year 1633-34 and were apparently seen through the press by Ford himself, which means there are few controversies about their texts. This year was not, however, the year when the plays were first written or performed. It is probable that ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore was first performed in 1629. Anyway, it is clear that Ford was mainly a Caroline playwright, flourishing in the two decades before the civil war and the Puritans shut down the theatres.

So to the play itself.

Popular in Ford’s own time, and revived in the Restoration period, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore basically disappeared from the published canon and was not regularly performed again until the mid-20^th century. The reason is obvious. Its central subject is incest.

In Parma, in Italy, Giovanni is madly, passionately, carnally, wilfully and incorrigibly in love with his sister Annabella. He cannot be argued out of his passion by his confessor Friar Bonaventura. Bonaventura presents all the arguments against the perversity of incest, counsels Giovanni to fast and pray, and threatens him with hellfire. Giovanni persists, claiming that erotic love alone is his moral criterion and it trumps all other arguments. It is clear that Annabella (encouraged by her lewd – and appropriately named – maid Putana) reciprocates Giovanni’s love and is a willing partner in incest. They sleep together a number of times. As Giovanni says to Annabella at the beginning of Act Two:

“Come, Annabella, no more Sister now,
But Love, a name more gracious; do not blush,
Beauty’s sweet wonder, but be proud to know
That yielding thou hast conquer’d, and inflamed
A heart, whose tribute is thy brother’s life.” [Act Two, Scene 1]

Speaking to Annabella, the lewd maid Putana encourages incest thus:

“Nay, what a paradise of joy have you past under! why, now I commend thee, charge. Fear nothing, sweet-heart; what though he be your brother? your brother’s a man, I hope; and I say still, if a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take any body, father or brother, all is one.” [Act Two, Scene 1]

Going once again to Friar Bonaventura, Giovanni refuses to repent of the carnal delights he has enjoyed with his sister. Thus the essence of Acts One and Two as I understand them.

But in Act Three comes the inevitable climax. Annabella is now pregnant to her brother. What to do? Earlier in the play, Giovanni had already suggested that, for respectability’s sake, Annabella could marry somebody else while continuing to be his mistress. Now the need to marry and provide a pretext for her pregnancy becomes urgent.

As we have known since the beginning of the play, Florio, the father of Giovanni and Annabella, is already seeking a suitable husband for Annabella. There are two chiefs suitors. One is a nitwit called Bergetto, who provides the play’s (forced) comic relief by his inept wooing, which greatly embarrasses his uncle, the level-headed Donado. Bergetto is so inept that at one stage his idea of paying court is to tell Annabella that he loves her almost as much as Parmesan cheese. Annabella definitively rejects clownish Bergetto at the end of Act Two and later Bergetto is killed in a brawl with a third possible suitor called Grimaldi. The more serious suitor is the stern and wealthy nobleman Soranzo. In Act Three, the pregnant Annabella visits Friar Bonaventura and, unlike her brother, seems now to repent sincerely of her incest. She follows the friar’s advice that it is her duty to marry, to be a good wife and to raise her child. She has already confessed that if she were to marry anyone, it would be Soranzo.

So she chooses to marry Soranzo.

But she is not aware that there are strings attached to Soranzo. For years he had had as his mistress a married woman called Hippolita. Now Hippolita’s husband is dead and Hippolita has expected Soranzo to marry her. Knowing that Soranzo is about to marry Annabella, Hippolita plans to poison him. Her plan is thwarted by Soranzo’s loyal servant Vasques, who tricks her into drinking her own poison in a spectacular wedding-feast scene (Act Four, Scene 1) where Hippolita dies in front of all the guests assembled for the nuptials of Soranzo and Annabella. It is at this point that the play descends into sensational melodrama. I agree with T. S. Eliot, in his 1932 essay on John Ford, that “The subplot of Hippolita is tedious, and her death superfluous.” The tedium is extended by a further element of the subplot in which we discover (yawn!) that Hippolita’s husband Richardetto is not really dead and has business of his own to attend to and fiddle-dee-dee and who cares?

Let us get back to the central matter of Giovanni, Annabella and Soranzo.

Once Annabella’s pregnancy become obvious, Soranzo is aware that he has been cuckolded. In a scene of considerable violence (Act Four, Scene 3), Soranzo rages:

Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that is stuff’d
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb! —
Why, must I?

He slaps Annabella about and drags her by her hair as he tries to get her to divulge the name of her lover. But she refuses to give it, and indeed taunts him. For the second time in the play, it is his servant Vasques who comes to Soranzo’s aid. Vasques advises Soranzo to treat Annabella more gently, and when the married couple have left the stage, Vasques quizzes Annabella’s lewd accomplice Putana. Vasques pretends to be as appreciative of salacious gossip as his fellow-servant Putana is, and easily gets her to reveal that Annabella’s brother Giovanni fathered the baby. At once, Vasques whistles up a troop of hired banditti who haul Putana away and (offstage) torture her and have her eyes put out for encouraging the crime and mortal sin of incest. (I could stretch a point and see blinding linked with incest as being an echo of Oedipus, but if it is, it is not emphasised by the playwright.)

Act Five gives us the outcome. Annabella is now completely and sincerely disgusted by her incest and has no desire to renew her love for Giovanni. This is made clear in two scenes between them. More to the point, on the occasion of their father Florio’s birthday, Vasques is arranging for Giovanni’s sin to be revealed and Giovanni to be killed. Getting wind of this, Giovanni has his last long conversation with his sister. He rebukes her for betraying their love. Then he stabs her to death, also killing the baby in her womb. At Florio’s birthday feast, he appears before the assembled party with, dripping on his dagger, the heart of Annabella, which he has ripped out of her copse. General melee, wherein both Giovanni and Soranza, the brother and the husband, are killed, and the servant Vasques is banished to his native Spain for his part in the violence.

It is left to a Cardinal to speak the play’s last words, describing Annabella and giving the play its title:

We shall have time
To talk at large of all; but never yet
Incest and murder have so strangely met.
Of one so young, so rich in nature’s store,
Who could not say, ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore? [Act Five, Scene 6]

What can one make of this melange of tragic moments, melodrama, clumsy comedy, sheer sensationalism and much robust poetic dialogue? At the least I can say that it kept me reading and would doubtless have kept Caroline and Restoration audiences watching, but I’d be dodging my duty if I did not say something about that central matter of incest.

T. S. Eliot commends the play for not being prurient inasmuch as it deals with incest directly and openly and therefore does not indulge in the sly nudge-and-wink insinuations found in other plays by Ford. More recent commentators have taken Giovanni’s passionate declarations of love for his sister at face value, and have concluded that John Ford is morally neutral in the matter of incest.

My own reading of the play makes me reject both views.

Pace Eliot, nobody in 1629 would have written a play about incest without wanting to attract an audience by the sheer audacity of the subject – in other words, by its sensationalism. In that respect it is a prurient play. As for moral neutrality – it depends on how you read the character of Giovanni, and I read him as an intelligent, articulate and self-centred young man who borders on being a psychopath. Again and again he blames fate or destiny for his choices. In a soliloquy (Act One, Scene 2) he declares that “ ‘tis my fate that leads me on” to commit incest with his sister. He morally blackmails Annabella by telling her  “ ‘tis my destiny that you must either love or I must die” (also Act One, Scene 2). He sounds the same note elsewhere when Friar Bonventura attempts to reason with him. The argument is, in effect, that he is not responsible for his own actions – that he is compelled by forces he cannot control. This is the psychopath’s standard reasoning for doing what he knows to be vicious. More tellingly, note how in the last two acts, Giovanni brushes aside all of Annabella’s remorse and real concern for him, as if she is merely ruining his own feelings.

When she is locked up by her angry husband, the soliloquy with which Annabella opens Act Five makes her own feelings plain:
Beauty that clothes the outside of the face,
Is cursed if it be not cloth’d with grace.
Here like a turtle, (mew’d up in a cage,)
Unmated, I converse with air and walls,
And descant on my vile unhappiness.
O Giovanni, that hast had the spoil
Of thine own virtues, and my modest fame;
Would thou hadst been less subject to those stars
That luckless reign’d at my nativity!
O would the scourge, due to my black offence,
Might pass from thee, that I alone might feel
The torment of an uncontrouled flame! (Act Five, Scene 1)

She, in other words, still has some regard for her brother’s feelings and the danger he is in. But he, in his murder of her and her child, does not reciprocate such feelings. Her rejection of him is an offence to him. The clear characterisation of such an egomaniac is no endorsement of incest. And yet, as a last thought on this matter, is John Ford pulling the old Cecil B. de Mille trick of attracting an audience by the depiction of lurid vice and then preaching a moral lesson on it? (Have the exciting orgies in The Ten Commandments and then have Moses coming in to condemn them.) For all that, the conversations between Giovanni and Friar Bonaventura, and Giovanni and Annabella, are dramatically the most arresting scenes in the play.

As I feel about so many other plays of the late Jacobean and Caroline periods, there is in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore the sense that John Ford is plundering and copying theatrical tricks from earlier plays. To that extent ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a “decadent” play. Putana’s scenes with Annabella are like the (forthright, but far less corrupt) Nurse’s scenes with Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Indeed the whole situation of Florio trying to marry off a daughter without knowing that she is already involved in a love affair echoes Romeo and Juliet, just as the scene in which Friar Bonaventura, in his cell, pronounces Annabella and Soranzo officially engaged echoes Friar Lawrence’s secret wedding of Romeo and Juliet.

Friar Bonaventura on the whole is treated as a positive character. However, in an English play written in the 1620s, you can expect at least one anti-papist dig. It happens when a Cardinal takes Grimaldi under his protection, even though Grimaldi had just killed the foolish Bergetto. Florio gets to say to Bergetto’s grieving uncle Donado:

O impudence!
Had he the face to speak it, and not blush?
Come, come, Donado, there’s no help in this,
When cardinals think murder’s not amiss:
Great men may do their wills, we must obey,
But Heaven will judge them for’t, another day. (Act Three, Scene 9)

            Of course the play, being set in Italy, assumes that Italians are tricky, devious and morally lax – but then that is a convention of the dramaturgy of the age, allowing English audiences to pretend that they didn’t share the same vices.

I could stretch a point and see a vague imitation of the “echo” scene in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy in Act Three, Scene 2, where Annabella turns down Soranzo, but their conversation is overheard by Giovanni, allowing for the sort of three-way ironical dialogue that B. and F. used. But that is it for my comments on the play itself.

It read easily. It held my attention as I sat on a folding chair over black sand and saw the Tasman breakers come crashing in. I cannot be ungrateful to a 400-year-old play which does that, can I?

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Now for that execrable film version of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore which I mentioned early in this notice.

There’s no way of escaping the fact that the main thing attracting film-makers and theatre producers to this play now is the subject of incest, and the possibilities of showing it explicitly on stage and screen. A number of films (including the Scandinavian My Sister, My Love) have been very loosely based on Ford’s play. All of them titillate audiences with the promise of “forbidden love” and then proceed to show Giovanni and Annabella bonking and fondling and rutting. The same is true of modern stage presentation. Google ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and look at the images associated with it. They are mainly theatre posters and stills of bums, boobs and bonking. Of course this would not have been possible in John Ford’s day (all female roles were played by boys or young men, remember?) and the text of the play naturally keeps all sexual intercourse offstage.

In 1971, the Italian Giuseppe Patroni Griffi directed a film version of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which was called in Italian Addio, Fratello Crudele (Farewell, Cruel Brother). Charlotte Rampling played Annabella with her usual icy demeanour, and the very minor English sex-symbol Oliver Tobias played Giovanni. Only a limited part of the dialogue (in the dubbed version I saw) belonged to John Ford, most of it being Hollywoodese. Visually, its Italian Renaissance setting was okay, but its emphasis was the “forbidden love” titillation angle. So roll on Rampling and Tobias shagging in various angles and positions against moans and seductive music. The aesthetics of a smutty magazine basically.

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.    

THE BAD AGAINST THE WORSE

Amazing how quickly full-length documentaries can get get shared and aired.

Within less than a week after the second round of the French presidential elections,  Netflix was already showing a 90-minute documentary, directed by Yann L’Heroret, called in English Emmanuel Macron: Behind the Rise (original French title: Emmanuel Macron: Les coulisses d’une victoire) – in French with English subtitles. It was a documentary in the tradition of the 1993 American documentary, The War Room, about the election of Bill Clinton. Like The War Room, it was a view of a presidential campaign as seen entirely from within the camp and strategy rooms of the winning candidate. There were brief and fleeting shots of rival candidates (Le Pen, Fillon), only when they appeared in television debates with Macron. There were very brief shots indeed of Macron facing off against protesters who didn’t like him, such as a group of aged pieds noirs from Algeria who didn’t like what he’d said about the evils of colonialism. Otherwise, the aim of the film was to show the enthusiasm of Macron’s (often young) followers; Macron’s cleverness in out-debating his rivals; the silly side-issue of a sex scandal which a journalist fabricated, but which Macron was easily able to refute; and finally the triumph of the winning tally. It was notable that much context was missing – no reference to the big riots staged by left-wingers in Paris when their preferred candidate got trounced in the first round. Hardly any reference to the Le Pen phenomenon and, of course, in the debate sections it was only Macron’s zingers that were displayed, not those of the other candidates.

One can only imagine that much of the film had already been edited and put in place before the final results. It would have required only an extra ten minutes or so of selected footage to be added, after the election, before the film was ready for its very topical release.

Though essentially an exercise in cheer-leading, some of it was enlightening. As in all political campaigns, there was horse-trading. Other candidates gave in to Macron after the first round of voting, and agreed to encourage their supporters to vote for Macron in the second round. There was the interesting issue of the size of the halls in which Macron’s rallies were to be held – make them too big, and the television cameras will pick up all the empty seats.

Macron, former finance minister in Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party, formed his “En Marche!” party only last year.

And here we come to the most obvious thing that Emmanuel Macron: Behind the Rise did not consider. There was virtually nothing about Macron’s policies, except that he is a “European” (i.e. a strong supporter of the EU) and that he is open-minded on the subject of immigration. Much can apparently be forgiven him in that he is young and handsome (at 39, France’s youngest preseident to date) and – to the purring delight of those who consider surfaces only – that he has declared that his preferred cabinet would have 50% men and 50% women.

BUT there are two major unconsidered issues.

First, Macron will get his dream team only if France’s (yet-to-come) parliamentary elections go his way. At time of writing, the newly-invented “En Marche!” party has no representation in the French parliament whatsoever. In the end, the most likely outcome is that President Macron will have to work with a parliament that is predominantly Socialist and Republican (formerly known a Gaullist).

Second, some people appear not to have read the fine print. Macron may believe in Europe, immigration and gender equity, but he is also clearly a neo-liberal. One of his policies is to reduce the tax rate on corporations, in order to (he says) stimulate jobs and productivity. My political rear-vision-mirror sees an image very like Tony Blair – young, telegenic, personable, and in fact part of the process that further wound down the welfare state. It is not as if Macron – the former banker – has begun this process in France, but he is certainly going to continue it.

Considering the nature of Macron’s electoral victory, there is another important point. Essentially, for the French electorate, he was a negative candidate. The Socialists, Republicans and minority party-supporters who voted for him were largely voting against Marine Le Pen, the other candidate left standing after the first round of presidential elections. The French had a choice between an extreme nationalist and a smooth neoliberal. They chose the neoliberal, which in the circumstances was fair enough.

I know I’ve quoted it before on this blog, but I am once again reminded of that line in C.Day Lewis’s 1943 poem “Where Are the War Poets?”:

“It is the logic of our times,

No subject for immortal verse –

That we who lived by honest dreams

Defend the bad against the worse.”