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.
 

JAZZ IN PARIS, SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE

Eh bien, mes amis, as you might know from earlier postings, I am very fond of the city of Paris, based partly on vague childhood memories of a visit there, but more potently based on three recent visits there with my wife (a fourth is in the offing as I write).

As you may also be aware, I am fond of jazz.

Put these two delights together, and I have over the years taken quite an interest in French jazz. My taste for this music was partly fed by a series of CDs that were marketed a few years ago under the title Jazz in Paris. As the generic blurb for the series correctly said, France was jazz’s “second home”. Outside the United States, there is no other country that has so consistently produced leading musicians in the genre and had such a large fan base for it. The Jazz in Paris series consisted of re-pressings of jazz performances recorded in Paris between the 1930s and the 1970s. Many of them were of American jazz people performing in Paris (Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Don Byas, Mary-Lou Williams, Miles Davis etc.), but even more were of French and Belgian performers. For a number of years, my search for CDs in this series was as earnest as my search for second-hand books then was. Riffling through the neglected jazz sections at the back of music stores, I eventually collected 74 CDs in a series which (the last time I looked) consisted of 100, but it may have expanded since I gave up the collecting.

Anyway, the series fed my already-existing taste for Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli and Le Hot Club of France; and for Henry Crolla, the guitarist who came after Django and (often on electric guitar) sounded like a softer and more sentimental version of Django; and for Jean-Luc Ponty, perhaps (sorry Stephane) the greatest of all jazz violinists; and for the great Belgian saxophonist Barney Wilen, especially on his wonderful Jazz sur Seine album..

Now you may understand how this taste stimulated my romanticised image of jazz life in Paris. I had in my head a chic black-and-white 1960s nouvelle vague film image of the Parisian jazz scene. We are in some fashionable, but very cool, club in, say, St Germain des Pres. It’s on the Left Bank, so the club is crowded with hip students from the Sorbonne (girls pony-tailed and skirted; guys all smoking and trying to look as cool as Belmondo in open-necked shirts). And there is this really cool jazz going on. Ponty or Crolla or Wilen or maybe one of the visiting Americans. We’re all very serioius about our jazz, but we also dance to it and discuss it and love it for the music’s sake.

Okay – there’s my mental image of jazz in Paris.

Now for the reality.

Cut to mid-2015. We take our second adult trip to Paris. We seek out and book ahead for a performance in an up-market jazz club and restaurant on the Right Bank (in the Marais district) “Au Duc des Lombards”. We get a table near the front thanks to an officious waiter who clearly expected a tip (but didn’t get it). The star performer is the Brazilian jazz chanteuse Catia Werneck, fronting a tight trio of jazz musicians. I note her huge smile, her crinkly, semi-ringleted hair waving all over the place and her long periods of dancing and shaking her seductive hips while the trio are riffing or taking great improvised solos. We know her banter with the French pianist, Vincent Bidal, is well-rehearsed and carefully timed, but the whole performance (she singing only in her native Portuguese) is infectiously joyful. We buy her CD after the show, which she signs for us. Actually we agree afterwards that Vincent Bidal was the real star of the show, and my wife (a trained music teacher) has some negative things to say about Werneck’s voice; but we are satisfied, as we cross back to the Left Bank over the Pont Neuf with a bright crescent moon on the horizon, that it was a good jazz evening. Even if we are uneasily aware that at a restaurant-club like that, the music is now really a pastime for the rich (Merdre! The price of that bottle of Chablis I bought to make the evening buzz!). We are a long way from pony-tailed and smoking Sorbonne students intellectualising in black-and-white.

Cut to December 2016.

Our third night in the City of Lights and we are a bit headachey and tired after a day trudging around the Musee de Cluny and the Pantheon and much of the Latin Quarter. But we once again make our way across to the Marais to a jazz date which we have again booked ahead. This is in the Sunset-Sunside Jazz Club, and we just have to climb down its narrow stairs to know we are in something like the stereotypical image of a Parisian jazz club. It is a cave (i.e.cellar), with whitewashed brick walls and arched brick ceiling – and mercifully free of any other English-speakers. This is a place for local jazz enthusiasts.

The performers are the Toumai Septet – a line-up of seven youngish men (median age about 30, I’d guess), mainly French but two or three apparently of Algerian or other North African heritage. Their music is an interesting fusion of European jazz and North African rhythms. On the left of the stage, an electric guitaist  whose instrument provided sophisticated commentary on the exotic rhythm. On the right, an expert player of the conga drum, whose beat really dominated the direction in which the music was heading. At the back,  a conventional drum-kit, whose percussionist only occasionally intervened, especially on sizzle cymbals. Also a bass player, whose steady rhythm was no rival for the conga drum. But out front the heart of the group – a line-up including a trombonist (who at one stage took up and played a conch shell); a trumpeter who doubled as MC (and who sometimes played cornet instead); and a lanky, smiliing saxophonist (who sometimes lay down his big instrument and took up a tenor sax).

This was very good jazz, but it was composed jazz (at the beginning of some pieces, the front-stage trio read off music sheets as they established the main lines of the piece and before the improv began). It was exotic. It was fusion. It was the sort of jazz that didn’t exist when the 1960s played out. We swung along and tapped our feet and only began to droop into sleep towards the end as our day of much walking caught up with us. And we did not even mind the only vocal intervention, which was a Frenchwoman singing (badly) one English-language lyric.

Were it not for the clear modernity of the music, this evening would have fulfilled my dream image of the vibrant (and very warm) cave as the paradigm of Parisian jazz.

But not all Parisian jazz (so-called) is good jazz.

A few nights later it was Saturday night and we were at a loose end. The chap at the desk of our hotel helped us to find a jazz club that was playing on the Left Bank. The night was chilly (remember, it was December) but we decided to walk it. We walked down past the Place St Michel with its golden statue of the warrior angel. We turned right into the Rue du Petit Pont which in turn becomes the Rue St Jacques, and we walked up, up, up the long hill past the Sorbonne, past the Pantheon, until we were deep into bohemian land. Frankly, though non-gentrified and a little grimy, the uppermost reaches of the Rue St Jacques we were now in looked like a movie-set depicting student Paris.

And so at last we found the Café Universel (267 Rue St Jacques). The night was chilly, but when we opened the door into this little boite, we were almost knocked over by the blast of heat, infused with body odour, as fierce as the summer noonday sun. My glasses at once fogged up and all the windows were covered in condensation. Thus for a poorly-ventilated small café on a winter’s night.

The place was packed. There was a tiny stage upon which were a trio (clarinet, string-bass, electric guitar). They were fronted by a chanteuse, dirty-blonde, in her mid-30s I would guess. She began her set. “Zaire Raiting Zongs of Larve bart not furr mai”, “Larve mai orr laive mai”, “Wai Donchu Do Rait” (at a horribly slow tempo as if she didn’t understand the words.)

She was so bad. I am not (well, hardly…) making fun of her French accent, but of the fact that she had no place on the stage. If I were a novelist, I would at this point make up a back-story about a girl picked up by a jazz group when she was in her early 20s and was young and sexy enough to be an attraction for that alone; but who was now past the cute stage and really not up to performing. She simply could not hit the high notes, her voice was feeble, and she ended each song not with a bang but with a breathless gasp.

We responded to much of this with suppressed laughter. I pondered for a while on the awkwardness of chanteuses who have to stand centre-stage for long periods when they are not singing, bobbing their heads and pretending to have a good time while the combo plays on behind them. Our breaking point came when Mademoiselle Talentless launched into “Oo, Oo, Oo, Ai Wanna be Laik Yoo-o-o” and sang it as if it were a jazz lyric of the utmost seriousness.

After just six songs, we were out the door walking briskly back down to the Seine, howling with laughter at the abomination we had just experienced.

Ah me. There is good jazz in Paris, but it isn’t the type of jazz as was. And the fact that jazz occurs in Paris doesn’t necessarily make it good jazz.

Something New

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

“NEW ZEALAND RUGBY COUNTRY – How the Game Shaped Our Nation” by Desmond Wood (Bateman, $NZ39:99)

Any reviewer tackling a book on a specialist topic has to declare an interest – so before I get on to Desmond Wood’s New Zealand Rugby Country, here is the interest I declare. Despite being a male New Zealander of the baby boomer generation; despite going to an all-male (Marist Brothers) secondary school in which there was a strong rugby culture; and despite having spent most of my teaching years in all-male schools where rugby was played, I have never played rugby. In fact (and this shocks many Kiwi men when I confess it), I have never in my life even watched a complete rugby game. At best I’ve seen little clips of games on TV before I’ve switched channels or left the room.

I’ve seen a lot of real football (“soccer”) games, because two of my sons played that game (as did some of my daughters in their younger years) and I sometimes went with them to national matches against touring sides. And (though I never saw him in this capacity on the field), one of my sons reported with amusement that when he was attending an English university, he was dragooned into playing rugby because it was assumed that, as a New Zealander, he must be an expert in the game.

Of course I have read quite a bit about rugby when I have read New Zealand history, because it is unavoidable when the country’s culture and social structure are discussed. I also remember that when I was quite a bit younger, one of my elder brothers (an army officer who did play rugby) bought me as a Christmas present the former rugby-player Chris Laidlaw’s funny and iconoclastic 1974 book about rugby Mud in Your Eye, which I recall as containing much rude nose-thumbing at the conservatism of the game and of the men who administered it. I enjoyed it, but I think it is the only book completely dedicated to rugby that I have ever read.

All this lengthy prologue is by way of saying that I am absolutely no expert on rugby and therefore cannot judge Desmond Wood’s commentary on the game iteself in New Zealand Rugby Country. But I can judge how much it really tells us “how the game shaped our nation” as the subtitle says.

Of which more later.

Desmond Wood, lawyer and sports historian, tells us in his Preface (as well as giving acknowledgements) that he is taking up James Belich’s challenge to write about rugby from a “social history perspective.” (p.5) He is not writing a systematic history of teams, players and tours. His Prologue proceeds into an heroic account of New Zealand winning against the French in the Rugby World Cup final of 2011. He then declares: “The story of how a small nation at the foot of the globe is able to achieve and maintain its status at the summit of an international sport is an integral part of the story of this country. It is descriptive of its society and the aspirations of the people who have made it what it is.” (p.10)

This raises the expectation that this book will consider the impact of rugby on New Zealand society at large. At first this expectation appears to be met as Wood, in his Introduction, links the game to the New Zealand “classlessness” that transformed what had been a “gentlemanly” game, born in English public schools, into a game for the masses. His first chapter (“Beginnings”) sees New Zealand’s 19^th century adoption of the game as reflecting the social aspirations of a flood of middle-class settlers in the late nineteenth century (1850s-1880s). Rugby first built its strength in New Zealand towns and cities, where the middle-class lived and where the most enduring clubs were founded (small town and country clubs tended to be more ephemeral). There was a big boost to the foundation of clubs in the 1880s, the era of  Vogelism, assisted immigration and big public works programmes on the back of loans from London. Provincial unions had coalesced into the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) by 1892.

When Wood launches into rugby’s glory years in New Zealand (Chapter 2 – “Rugby’s Warm Embrace”) up to about the middle of the twentieth century, most of the class-aware commentary disappears. This long chapter concerns itself especially with tours of New Zealand by overseas teams and overseas tours by New Zealand teams. From the 1880s onwards there were tours of New Zealand by club teams (not national representatives) from Australia and elsewhere, and in 1903 there was the first New Zealand rep. team touring overseas. The black jersey with the silver fern (originally accompanied by white knickerbockers) was already adopted by 1890s for the national team, and once black shorts replaced the white knickerbockers, the team was already referred to informally as “All Blacks” before the term was used in print by an English provincial newspaper during the team’s 1905 tour of Britain.

According to Desmond Wood, the two most influential tours by the All Blacks in the early 20^th century were in 1905 and 1924. In the 1905 tour the All Blacks won 34 out of 35 matches against British sides. On the whole, says Wood, the British were surprised as they had expected the raw colonials to be easily defeated. However, there was much hostile comment in the British press on the aggressiveness and “illegality” of much of the New Zealanders’ play. This became the enduring British image of the All Blacks – the rough colonials who had subverted the public school game by turning it into rough-house. On the other hand, Wood also notes the fact that the British were equally surprised by the innovative tactics and the All Blacks’ well-drilled playing. It seemed to come as a surprise that the colonial team had been so well coached. (When I read this section of Wood’s book, I couldn’t help remembering that old satirical song by Flanders and Swann about how the English dislike foreign sports teams because “they practice beforehand and spoil all the fun”.) Incidentally, to his great credit, Wood hastily sweeps aside all the inane and inflated commentary that has been written about the disallowed try in the 1905 match against Wales (p.47), the only match that the touring team lost.

In passing, Wood makes it clear that commercialism impinged on the “amateur” game from very early in its story. Even before the First World War, some Rugby Union players deserted to “the other game” Rugby League when they knew they could be paid better. (p.64) Wood goes on to chronicle the introduction of the Ranfurly Shield for inter-provincial matches in 1902, the soldier’s teams in the First and Second World Wars, and the unbeaten All Blacks team which toured Britain in 1924.

In the midst of this, however, there are two big questions which Wood chooses to tackle. (1.) Did the game encourage a dated stereotype of (rural and farming) New Zealand maleness? And (2.) Did the game encourage violence?

With regard to (1.) Wood takes a number of pages (pp.75-82) stridently refuting Jock Phillips’ thesis in his book A Man’s Country? that rugby players represented the farming, pioneering side of New Zealand and its attendant hardy virtues. Wood shows that the great majority of New Zealand reps. were city boys and other townies, often from professions. Strictly speaking, Wood is correct, but to me his answer somehow misses the point. Even if the majority of best-known reps. were townies, the image of the game that was promoted among the general public was still a retro one of the rural “hard man”. Remember, until very recently, you saw TV ads of farmer Colin Meads planting fence posts. You did not see TV ads of All Blacks going about their townie business. It is only very recently indeed that we have begun to see campaigns starring sensitive new-breed All Blacks preaching against domestic violence or promoting consideration for sufferers of depression.

With regards to (2.), on-field violence and biffo, Wood remarks correctly that “… the single most influential factor limiting the incidence of violence in the sport appears to have been the advent of television.” (p.85) His own account tells us that, until the age of action replays (often slow-mo ), where a huge viewing audience could see foul play in detail, most appeals from the NZRFU and elsewhere to limit violence fell on deaf ears. To me it does seem a little facile for Wood to sign off this chapter with Tana Umaga’s flip reply to an Aussie referee; “We are not playing tiddlywinks here, mate. This is a contact sport.” (p.86).

Much to my surprise, the longest single chapter in the book (65 pages) is the third one, which chronicles the way the New Zealand game became mired in controversy and almost broke under the strain. It is called “The Unravelling – South Africa and Why It Mattered”.

As early as 1919, South African rugby officials signalling that they did not want any Maori or other “natives” in visiting New Zealand sides. The Springboks in the 1920s were “disgusted” when they were required to play a Maori team. When there was a 1928 tour of South Africa by the All Blacks, the NZRFU excluded three Maori players, including George Nepia (a famous player known even to totally non-rugby people like this reviewer). By 1936, Maori groups lobbied to have no Maori competition matches against Springboks because they objected to the (white) South Africans’ attitudes. But even after the Second World War, and as full apartheid was implemented on South Africa, the NZRFU continued to acquiesce in the South African Rugby Board’s (SARB’s) request that there be no Maori in touring sides. So Maori were excluded from tours to South Africa in 1949 and 1960.

But attitudes in New Zealand were changing towards South Africa, after the 1956 Springbok tour where there was the clearest bitter rivalry between the two national teams. By 1960, there were the  “No Maoris, No Tour” protests when the NZRFU sent off another team of all white All Blacks to South Africa. There followed a decade in which the SARB promised it would accept Maori players in touring New Zealand teams (the “honorary white” status was mooted), but they still did not do so. By the 1970s, the issue was clearly no longer one about the inclusion of Maori players. The issue was whether there should be New Zealand sporting contacts with South Africa at all,  as the apartheid regime was being boycotted in sport by most of the world. Increasingly the issue divided the country and there was more pressure for the government to intervene and no longer allow the NZRFU to make decisions on tours.

Came 1981. When he made a final broadcast appeal to the NZRFU, who were on the point of accepting a Springbok tour of New Zealand, prime minister Robert Muldoon’s words seemed opposed to the tour, but his final appeal to the NZRFU really gave a clear indication that there would be no government intervention. The 1981 tour went ahead with huge protests and much civil disruption. Desmond Wood makes it clear that by in effect allowing the tour to go ahead, the main aim of Muldoon was to secure the support of marginal and mainly rural seats in a forthcomng general election. (Showing, pace Wood’s earlier argument, that the strongest appeal of the game was still with a rural heartland.) Really the 1981 debacle ended naivete about the national implications of sporting contacts. By the late 1980s apartheid was collapsing and that effectively ended the controversy as we moved into the era of apology.

Desmond Wood says “A game for which New Zealanders were widely admired was hampered by less admirable qualities, like self-interest and closed minds…. [the 1981 tour] exposed far from desirable qualities in a nation and a people who thought they were better than that.” (p.150) He also notes that 75 years of rugby competitions with South Africa “required a forgetting, a discounting, of what it really meant to be a New Zealander.” (p.151)

I assume that the length Wood devotes to this issue is intended to show us how momentous rugby was in the way the national consciousness was shaped. But does this really show “how the game shaped our nation”? Surely it was largely a reaction against the game, and against its attendant culture, that in this case did the shaping.

Most of the rest of New Zealand Rugby Country is less contentious.  Half of the chapter called “Race and Demographics” is a long consideration of Maori “native” teams and their players and the respect they gained. There are only a few pages on the increasing input of Pacific Islanders (Michael Jones etc.) There is a tentative awareness at the end of this chapter that the growing population of Asian (mainly Chinese and Indian) New Zealanders are largely uninterested in rugby, and this will doubtless lead in due course to fewer spectators of the game.

The chapter called “Changing Society – Changing Game” promises some insight on how rugby affects society at large, but it is mainly about how society at large affects rugby. Wood discusses women as spectators and enthusiastic supporters of the game and the fact that there was the occasional women’s rugby team. But women’s rugby as a sport got going on a national level only in the 1990s. The NZRFU took the women’s game under its wing in 1992, and in 1998 the name Black Ferns was adopted. As defensive as he was in documenting the urban basis of the game, Desmond Wood at pains to point out (pp.182-185) the number of university-educated women who like the game and its strength in Auckland. (Nearly 18,000 New Zealand women were playing rugby by 2014).

The “changing game” also includes the development of Sevens and its Olympic status, and the foundation of the Rugby World Cup in 1987, after a period in which interest in the game had been steadily waning. Says Wood:  “in the lead-up to the tournament, New Zealanders’ enthusiam for rugby football had ebbed away during a very difficult period.” (p.195) Touch rugby became a sport in its own right, but it mainly overlaps with Rugby Union and has the same players. The impact of the “alternative” code Rugby League – less of a “gentleman’s” game in origin and often operating in semi-professionalism – was never a threat to Rugby Union in terms of dominance, but it has sometimes been a “protest” outlet when Rugby Union has been seen as too staid and slow-moving.

When he discusses rugby as a media phenomenon, Wood notes that it was born in an age of mass-circulation newspapers; sustained by radio (he has separate passages on the radio commentators Winston McCarthy and Murray Deaker); then faced the possibility of television, except that the NZRFU for years did not allow live broadcasts of games. Finally came the era of pay TV and dedicated sports channels.

It is Wood’s final chapter, “Commercialism and Globalisation” which seems to me to miss most opprtunities to comment on the game’s current impact on New Zealand society. Wood admits the hard fact that club and provincial rugby have declined in the face of television and the fact that communities are no longer organised around activities like organised sport. The Ranfurly Shield has become a secondary contest compared with professionalised (and televised) rugby franchises. “Provincial rugby appears to have become much like club rugby. It was once representative of the pride of the province. It has appeared to decline in the face of other competitions and other interests. It is rare to hear of a sponsor or a group expressing an interest in provincial rugby.” (p.227)

In the section on First XV rugby in boys’ secondary schools, Wood mentions the in-group of “prestige” schools that run the championships, but only briefly and politely touches on scholarships etc. to attract promising players. (pp.232-236) What I understand is widespread concern about the “poaching” of promising players from one school by another is never discussed. Finally, we come to the professionalisation and the abandonment of anything like amateurism in our supposedly representative national team. (Wood fingers the Aussie media magnates Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch for leading the way in the TV-driven professionalisation of the sport.) We now live in an era where there is a  “foreign legion” of New Zealanders who contract to play for overseas teams; rugby agents to secure terms for them; and big money changing hands. Wood’s closing pages gamely appropriate from soccer the term “the beautiful game” and apply it to rugby, though I leave it to other to decide whether he has really made his case.

To end where I began – as a self-confessed non-rugby man, I found much that is interesting in Wood’s account of the game’s history in New Zealand, and I see that the author has made use of much solid research and a very extensive bibliography. But I do not believe Wood has really proven that this shows “how the game shaped the nation”. Parts of it tell us how the nation shaped the game (middle-class aspirations in its foundation; eventual revulsion against South African racism etc.). Too many opportunities are lost to tell us about the game’s status in New Zealand society as a whole. In the whole book there is no reference to how rugby is doing vis-à-vis “soccer” in schools, when it is clear that the numbers playing real football are still growing and the nature of the sporting community is changing. Three times Wood mentions the All Blacks’ ritual pre-match haka. But there is no discussion of concerns about the implicit violence and aggressiveness of this, especially the disgusting “throat-slitting” gesture in the dance’s most recent incarnation. (Please don’t let any nitwit try to tell me that this universally recognisable gesture represents “the breath of life”.) Most egregiously, there is no mention of how New Zealand rugby has been depicted in novels, movies and other dramatisations, from Maurice Gee’s The Big Game in the early 1960s to Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament and beyond. Foreskin’s Lament is widely regarded as a seminal play representing a completely different attitude to what was once the “national” game. (The only mention of McGee is the listing of his book on Richie McCaw in the bibliography.)

In the end, then, this conscientious book is more about the game than the nation, and reinforces my view that the former does not represent (or “shape”) the latter.  

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.

“ALDOUS HUXLEY – AN ENGLISH INTELLECTUAL” by Nicholas Murray (first published 2002)

            As you will know from this blog (see the postings The Toil of Biography and Why Write a New Biography?), I am very exercised by the subject of biography, and often wonder how it can be possible for different biographers to say something new about lives that have already been well documented. I am also interested in how biographers are able to come up with diametrically opposed views on the same person’s life (see, for eample, the posting Rosebud, which compares different biographies of Orson Welles).

            As you are probably also aware, because I noted it in earlier posts, for some reason I sat down a few years ago and read my way, in the order they were written, through the collected novels and short stories of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). That is why I have already inflicted on you posts about Huxley’s Mortal Coils and Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza and After Many a Summer.

After I had read Huxley’s fictional oeuvre (I have not yet cracked all his non-fiction), I then sought out a biography of him to read – which brings me to the subject of this week’s “Something Old”. In a second-hand bookshop I found, at a very reasonable price and in well-preserved hardback form, the two volumes of Sybille Bedford’s Aldous Huxley – A Biography, published in 1973 and 1974, just ten years after Huxley died. I ploughed my way through it (a bit over 700 pages all up). I found it informative. I found it filled with interesting documented detail. But I also found it rather bland. Dedicated to Huxley’s son Matthew, it read like an official “authorised” biography, which it may well have been (I do not know its publishing history). The biographer simply assumed that Huxley was a great man and sage, and then proceeded to – very scrupulously – document the fact.

Huxley was not such a obsession of mine that I immediately sought out another biography of him (apparently there have been four or five). But a few years after this, when I had what passes for a spare moment, I borrowed from a university library Nicholas Murray’s Aldous Huxley – An English Intellectual, first published in 2002. It was much shorter (300-plus pages) and much brisker than Sybille Bedford’s effort, and less afraid to make negative judments on Huxley. Perhaps more time had passed since Huxley’s death to get the man into perspective. Perhaps Murray was better attuned to the biographic form than the (esteemed novelist) Bedford. Murray has also written biographies of Andrew Marvell, Matthew Arnold, Bruce Chatwin and  Franz Kafka among others.

Murray wants to celebrate Huxley as a genuine intellectual who was constantly searching for ultimate truths. Inevitably much of the book is a chronicle of places visited, other intellectuals whom Huxley knew, speeches given, publishers’ contracts sgned and deadlines met. In one sense, it is a curiously external book, given that Huxley is best known for his fiction. (The “general reader” probably knows Aldous Huxley only as the author of Brave New World.) There are only perfunctory comments on the novels, with little real analysis; and the commonsensical conclusion that Huxley was a better polemicist and essayist than he was a writer of fiction.

As Murray makes quite clear a number of times, it is likely that the house fire in 1961, which destroyed most of Huxley’s personal and most intimate unpulished papers, deprived Murray (and any other biographer) of much personal detail on the author’s writing methods and the links between his fiction and his lived experience.

Given that Murray wants to celebrate Huxley as a bona fide Seeker for Truth, the tone of this biography is sometimes a little defensive.

Murray sets himself up as the defender of Huxley’s reputation on two grounds:

Huxley’s private life: Murray is clearly irked by the common and widespread view that Aldous Huxley’s marriage to Maria Nys (which lasted from 1919 to Maria’s death in 1955) was merely a marriage of convenience, because Maria Nys was a lesbian and Aldous Huxley had very many casual affairs with other women in the 1920s and 1930s. Murray asserts that not only was it a true and loving marriage (producing a son, Matthew), but that Aldous and Maria were mutually dependent, she was devoted to him, and despite her affairs with women, she was never part of the lesbian “sewing circles” of southern California, where they spent the last 20 years or so of their marriage. Murray has much good evidence for these assertions, including his chronicle of their largely stay-at-home life when they weren’t travelling, the fact that Maria was obviously the practical organiser of the couple’s domestic and social lives, and the fact that Huxley was devastated by her death (from cancer). On the other hand, he does admit that the Huxley-Nys marriage amounted to a menage-a-trois in the 1920s, when Mary Hutchinson was Maria’s live-in lover; and he is aware that much of the couple’s personal story cannot be accessed because of that 1961 fire. Murray also defends the American Laura Archera (Huxley’s second wife, whom he married in 1956) from the common perception that she was a flaky gold-digger, by noting that most of Huxley’s circle of friends were accepting of her – though I wonder sceptically if this does not simply mean that they were a tolerant bunch. It is interesting, by the way, that Christopher Isherwood (who, like Huxley, sometimes sold his soul to Hollywood scriptwriting) was close friends with Huxley in the 1950s, as was the bogus visionary Gerald Heard and the talented scriptwriter Anita Loos. This friendship with Isherwood is interesting because (despite his first wife’s proclivities), Huxley had a lifelong dislike of male homosexuals. (Murray occasionally describes him as “homophobic”).

Huxley’s literary reputation: Murray is aware that Huxley is largely seen as the Bright Young Satirist of the 1920s who became the flaky, mystic mescalin-and-LSD-taking California sage from the late 1940s to his death in 1963. He aims to contest this view by showing that there was a consistent moral underpinning even to his earliest satire, and that he was always a seeker after truth and essential values, moving from hedonism to pacifism to his final mystical sense of the Oneness of All. Additionally, Murray wishes to show that Huxley was correct in many of his views of the social, political and especially ecological issues of his time, and that he was very well-informed on scientific matters.

In these respects, however, Murray has his work cut out for him, and in the end he often confirms the very perspectives he seeks to reject.

(i.) He himself argues that Huxley’s later attempts at fiction, including his woeful last novel Island, are really tracts. Huxley had long since ceased to be somebody who read much new fiction, so that his style and manner became increasingly ossified and old-fashioned. Repeatedly and unsuccessfully, Huxley attempted to become a successful playwright, trying to earn a better income. But he was out of synch. with his times and was still fixed in the Shavian tradition of brittle, intellectual, middle-class dialogue in which Big Issues were neatly spelled out. By the 1950s he was disparaging the plays of Arthur Miller for their crudity and condemning the “brainlessness” of Tennessee Williams’ characters. In other words, he was incapable of connecting with both credible stage dialogue and the lower orders, and was stuck in the mode of intellectual debate on stage rather than the exploration of the emotional life. Understandably, his plays remained unproduced.

(ii.) Murray chronicles Huxley’s pursuit of an income in journalism and in writing articles for magazines. In doing so, he shows a man who picked up and dropped enthusiasms almost yearly. There is nothing wrong with changing one’s mind, but much of this amounts to serial faddism.

(iii.) Finally, Murray has a hard time controlling his own distaste for many of the views of Huxley in his later years. He is aware that the eye-exercises Huxley promoted to cure his blindness were medically worthless and in no way resulted in better sight. He is very suspicious of the influence on Huxley of his guru and friend Gerald Heard, whom he had known since he joined the pacifist movement in the 1930s. He is equally suspicious of Huxley’s assumed mysticism. Above all, he is repelled by Huxley’s drug-taking in the 1950s and the destructive cult it helped kick off in the 1960s via Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. (The former tract gave its name to The Doors, one of the many talentless druggie rock groups of the era.) For this reader at least, it was very funny to read the passages in which Huxley and Heard (who invented the term “psychedelic”) attempted to argue that their drug-induced mystical experiences were genuine truth-seeking and were superior to other people’s drug experiences, which were mere hedonism and self-indulgence. Thus do intellectuals often delude themselves. Heard’s and Huxley’s critique sounded to me (between laughs) as alarmingly similar to D.H.Lawrence’s view that his own sexual experiences were uplifting religious epiphanies, whereas the sexual activity of all those unenlightened bourgeois people was merely sordid and dirty.

All of which brings me to another impulse that Murray has difficulty disguising. This is his awareness of the intellectual snobbery in Huxley, in some ways typical of the Bloomsbury circle. In his introduction, Murray takes issue with John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses (first published in 1991), which argued that Bloomsberries, including Huxley, were basically contemptuous of ordinary (working class and middle class) people. Carey pushed his argument to extremes, but did make some valid points. But the evidence of Murray’s own account often confirms some of Carey’s views. Sometimes it does so in horrifying detail. Like his biologist brother Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley subscribed to the view that the “mentally unfit” should be forcibly sterilised to prevent a population of “half-wits”, and that intelligent and educated people should be given financial rewards to have more children. Murray has a hard time justifying Huxley’s hard-core eugenics (pp.274-276), having to fall back lamely on the statement that “he was not alone amongst ‘progressive’ thinkers of his time in playing with this concept” and telling us that, after all, his intention was humanitarian. Often Murray uses of Huxley the term “cerebrotonic”, meaning one who is cerebral to the point of valuing ideas, books and intellectualising more than he/she values real people. This is consistent with both Huxley’s eugenics, his self-absorbed drug-taking which he mistook for an expansion of consciousness, and his contempt for stage dialogue which actually sounded like real people.

I finished reading Murray’s book, then, with the sense that the author was what is now called gracelessly “conflicted”. He wanted to admire Huxley unconditionally, but was too honest to ignore the negative side of the man. Hence the book’s often defensive tone. It is still, however, a better read than Sybille Bedford’s double-decker.

Silly footnotes: Quite apart from the silliness of Huxley and Heard about their drug-taking, there were other moments in this biography that made me laugh out loud.

* Huxley’s first venture into print was a precious collection of poems published in a series of what the publisher called “Young Poets Unknown to Fame”. Apparently the best blurb the publishers could find for the series was a quotation from a newspaper review saying “The get up of the series is very attractive. Type, paper and the shape of the pages are all good, and the poems are printed with a nice regard for margins.” Nicholas Murray adds dryly that the newspaper “was silent on the actual merits of the poems that positioned themselves so prettily between these margins.” (p.77)

* Murray notes that by the end of the 1920s, having himself been a book reviewer for some years, Huxley  concluded “The art of reviewing books appears to consist in variations of the formula, ‘This book is on the one hand good and on the other hand at the same time bad’ ”. Quite so.

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.     

OPERA SURTITLES

For the last week or so, I have been racking my brains trying to remember a witty line by W.S.Gilbert (of Gilbert-and-Sullivan). I remember the meaning of the line, but I cannot recall the actual words. Therefore word-searches on line have been to no avail. Tant pis! I will simply have to give you the meaning as I dimly recall it. In a brisk and witty song (sung by a chorus, of course), Gilbert opined that when a chorus are (is?) all singing together, nobody can understand a word they are singing.

You may think you know what the ensemble is singing, but that is only because the general context will convey to you the sense of sadness, happiness, thoughtfulness and so on.

Of course it needn’t be this way when individual singers are singing, so long as their diction is clear – but even then, if the music is complex enough, the meaning of the words may be lost in trills and lengthened vowels following a melodic line and so on.

I have this in mind because about fourteen years ago my wife and I attended an opera at London’s English National Opera. Unlike Covent Garden, the English National Opera insists on singing only in English – so any non-English-language opera will be sung in an English-language translation. The opera we attended was Cosi Fan Tutte. We knew the jolly old warhorse pretty well already, and on the whole had no problem in followed its general plot. Two blokes go into disguise to test whether their girlfriends Dora and Lil (oh very well – Dorabella and Fiordiligi to you) will cheat on them when they’re away. Easy-peasy plot and no probs seeing where it was going in a general sense. BUT it was very hard to follow what the singers were singing at any given moment because they were singing in English and there were no surtitles. As we left, we concluded that we would have been happier had it been sung in the original Italian, with English surtitles provided. Moment by moment, we would have understood more.

To the horror of those who thought that being sung in English would make operas more accessible, our conclusion turned out to be the conclusion of a large part of the English National Opera’s audience. Increasingly, audience members asked why the ENO didn’t have surtitles like every other modern opera house. Reluctantly, in 2015, the ENO gave in and now the English-language singing is accompanied by English-language surtitles.

There has been some rearguard grumbling about this. Rather sniffily, in an interview with the Guardian in 2015, the ENO’s director said that they would continue to have surtitles but that his aim was to render them redundant by the clarity of the singers’ enunciation. (I would have thought he’d already lost the battle on that one.) He foolishly went on to opine that opera was more about music than about words, and that it was essentially music rather than drama. My friends Hugo von Hoffmanstahl and Lorenzo da Ponte vigorously disagreed with this idea, of course, arguing that if the drama is unimportant then why have libretti at all? Why not just have the singers making wordless musical noises if the music conveys all that opera offers? (Wagner wanted to chip in at this point to note that opera should be “total” theatre – music, drama and spectacle working together – but I cut him off before he started one of his rants.) More obviously, if the ENO’s director really thinks the words are of secondary importance, then why make such a fuss about singing them in English anyway. After all, the words don’t matter, do they?

I know that ideally, I would not be reading surtitles but listening and looking all the while at what is going on on stage. But comprehension demands surtitles

I have another reason for preferring surtitles over translations at the opera.

Kindly remember that when the (French, German, Italian, Russian etc.) librettist wrote, in his own language, the words to go with the music – or in rarer cases when the composer wrote the music to go with the libretto – it was those words with those sounds that were married to that music. Mozart wrote for Italian or German words and their sounds. Bizet wrote for French words and their sounds. Tchaikovsky wrote for Russian words and their sounds. To present an opera in a translation of those words is to present only a selection of the sounds that were intended to make up the opera. Indeed to wed a different language to the music of the opera is to present a grave distortion of what the opera is.

I regard opera translations in the same way that I regard dubbed films. They are not as good as subtitled films, which let us get the actors’ full performances and not merely part of them. (And have you noticed, by the way, how the habit of dubbng foreign-language films has basically died out?).

To end where I began – in any ensemble piece in opera (try the quartet in Rigoletto), or in any chorus, many of the words will be lost to listeners anyway. I know this, and I have not touched on the fact that, sans surtitles, much of the text of an English-language opera with be lost on an English-speaking audience. But please do not expect me to hear some buffoon sing “Woman is fickle” when Verdi intends him to sing “La donna e mobile”.