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.  

“TOILERS OF THE SEA” by Victor Hugo (Les Travailleurs de la Mer first published in 1866; many English translations)

 

            Eight years ago on this blog, I reviewed L’Homme Qui Rit (The Laughing Man) by Victor–Marie Hugo (1802-1885). In passing I noted that 50-plus years ago, as a schoolboy, I found in my school’s library an old copy of an English translation of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea / Les Travailleurs de la Mer. I remember consuming some afternoons reading it and enjoying it before returning it to the school library. About four years ago, holidaying in Raglan, I found in a little second-hand bookshop an old Everyman’s Library copy of Toilers of the Sea and I snapped it up. I noted that it was printed in 1928, but it came complete with one of those original old Everymen’s Library orange-coloured wrappers. Indeed so well-preserved was this copy that I couldn’t help wondering if it had ever been read in the 90-plus years since it was printed. 

 

            Recently I got around to reading it, partly to recapture my schoolboy appreciation of it, but also to test how I would now react to Hugo’s prose.

            Consider, if you will, this paradox. If we are to judge by the number of films and TV adaptations made of his work, Victor Hugo is still the most popular French novelist of the 19^th century, rivalled only by Dumas. Les Miserables had, literally, been filmed more often than any other novel of any language before anyone decided to turn it into a musical. Notre-Dame de Paris / The Hunchback of Notre Dame has also been filmed and re-filmed in both Hollywood and Europe, including the crass Disney feature-length cartoon version. Even L’Homme Qui Rit / The Laughing Man has been filmed a couple of times. But how much is Hugo’s work popular more for the stripped-back versions of his melodramatic plots as depicted in the movies, rather than for the texts he actually wrote? In other words, how many people who have seen all the movie versions have ever read the novels themselves?

            The fact is, even in France, Hugo is now rarely seen as a great novelist by most literary critics. Of course he is still a figure of great historical interest, and left-wing commentators quote him with approval for his progressive beliefs – opposing the death penalty and the slave trade, promoting republicanism and universal suffrage as well as attacking the church. He is applauded for his poetry. He is honoured as the man who – after Chateaubriand – introduced Romanticism to France, especially in the plays he wrote early in his career (well do I remember having to study Hernani and Ruy Blas when doing an undergradute degree in French.) But he is not regarded as a serious novelist is the same way as Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or even de Maupassant and Huysmans are. His novels, modern criticism says, are entertaining melodramas with an overload of preaching and orating and nothing resembling real human beings as their main characters.

            How fair is this verdict?

While enjoying the yarn as a yarn, I used my recent re-reading of Toilers of the Sea to make my own judgment.

 

Victor Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea during the fifteen years (1855-70) that he lived on the Channel Islands, in exile from France after he had criticised the dictatorial Napoleon III.  (It was also there that, three years later, he wrote The Laughing Man.) The main thread of plot is simplicity itself. Gilliatt is a social outcast – a fisherman who lives alone, keeps to himself and is regarded with suspicion by the rest of the people of Guernsey, where the tale is largely set. Gilliatt falls in love  - at first sight – with the beautiful Deruchette, though he never speaks to her. Deruchette is the niece of the wealthy Mess Lethierry. The time is the 1820s, when steamships are still a rare and wondrous novelty. Lethierry prospers because he owns the steamship “La Durande”, which is able to ply between Guernsey and St Malo, the major port of Brittany, much faster than any sailing ships can. Lethierry can therefore deliver cargoes of fish and other produce to this important market more quickly than any rival can. But disaster strikes. In a thick fog and on stormy seas, “La Durande” is shpwrecked. All hands get away safely in a lifeboat, but the captain, apparently, stays nobly on the ship and perishes as it goes down. (Actually, we know that Captain Clubin is a treacherous criminal who has deliberately engineered the shipwreck in the belief that he will be able to abscond with his employer Lethierry’s wealth.) Yet, while the storm has smashed up most of the ship’s wooden superstructure, it has left jammed between two towering rocks out in the ocean, the mechanical heart of the ship – its iron engines, paddles and funnel. Lethierry is financially ruined. As people gather to commiserate with him, the beautiful Deruchette declares that she will marry any man who is able to salvage her uncle’s engine. Fired by his unspoken love for her, Gilliatt alone takes up the challenge. The second half of the novel is Gilliatt’s heroic, titanic, single-handed salvage mission as he battles tiredness, hunger, storms, huge waves and an octopus, rescuing what remains of the ship’s engine. In effect, everything that precedes Gilliatt’s lonely heroic endeavour is Victor Hugo’s build-up to this image of the solitary hero at his heroic work.

Of course it doesn’t end well. (Please remember, I am allowed to give “spoilers” while discussing a novel this old.) Gilliatt, after all the dangers he has overcome, makes it back to Guernsey with the engine he has rescued. But he discovers that in his absence Deruchette has fallen in love with another man, a handsome young clergyman called Ebenezer Caudrey. Nobly and heroicially, Gilliatt foreswears his love, steps aside and even arranges for Deruchette and Caudrey to marry. Then, as the happy couple sail off together, he climbs up an offshore rock and waits for the tide to rise and drown him. Just as Victor Hugo had a penchant for grotesque, outcast characters (the dwarf court jester Triboulet in his play Le Roi S’Amuse; the hunchback Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris; the mutilated Gwynplain in L’Homme Qui Rit), so did he have a penchant for suicide as an appropriately tragic ending to a novel (Gwynplain drowns himself rather than living without Dea; Quasimodo – apparently – dies of starvation as he clings to the corpse of Esmeralda).

In one sentence then, Toilers of the Sea is about a man who performs an heroic feat but whose reward is thwarted by Fate. In making this synopsis I have deliberately elided some side issues, such as the criminal dealings of the treacherous Captain Clubin with smugglers and with the embezzler and thief Rantaine.

 

Reported as I have synopsised it, Toilers of the Sea sounds like a novel of action and event, and at his best Victor Hugo can deal with action vividly. The episode of “La Durande’s” shipwreck is masterly, with the drunken helmsman losing control and the panic of the passengers, lost in the fog and fearful of the sea. Hugo’s descriptions of early steamships, and the almost magical effect they had on their beholders, are both credible and informative. We might not quite believe in Gilliatt never talking to Deruchette but nevertheless faithfully standing by her garden wall and frequently playing Bonnie Dundee on his bagpipes because he has heard her playing it on the piano. Indeed, to some modern sensibilities, this may sound suspiciously like “stalking”. Even so, it makes for a memorable sentimental tableau. Hugo was also adept at the cliffhanger though (unlike routine-cliffhanger-deviser Charles Dickens) he was not writing for serial publication. The biggest cliffhanger in Toilers of the Sea, and the one that holds us in suspense for the longest, concerns the disappearance of the criminal Captain Clubin. In the fog, he steps off the foundering “La Durande”, imagining that he will be able to swim safely to shore. Instead, we are told that his leg was grabbed by something… and we hear nothing further of his fate until near the novel’s denouement, a couple of hundred pages later, when Gilliatt confronts the “Devil Fish”, finds Clubin’s skeleton in an undersea cavern, and realises that the “Devil-Fish” killed him. Incidentally, Gilliatt’s fight with the “Devil-Fish” (clearly described as an octopus, though some mistaken postings refer to it as a giant squid) is brief, brutal and credible – a masterly example of narrative compression.

 

I could add to this list of good, vivid things that I found in Toilers of the Sea as I re-read it, firing the same sort of pleasure I had in it as a teenager.

But, to an adult reader, the negatives really do pile up. There is an odd naivete about Hugo’s Romantic-era writing (already falling out of favour when this novel was being written). Characters are presented in broad, unsubtle strokes, with Hugo all the while trying to nudge us into believing that they are of epic proportions. Their conversations tend to become long, windy orations. As I remarked in reviewing The Laughing Man, they resemble operatic arias waiting for somebody to compose the score.

Captain Clubin cannot be simply a cheat and a liar. He has to be a monster of titanic wickedness. Thus Hugo launches into a page dissecting his diabolical impulses: “ His conscience rejoiced in the sight of its own monstrous nakedness, as it stepped forth to take its hideous bath of wickedness. The long restraint of men’s respect seemed to have given him a peculiar relish for infamy. He experienced a certain lascivious enjoyment of wickedness. In those frightful moral abysses so rarely sounded, such natures find atrocious delights…” and so on and so on through a tiresomely long paragraph. (Part One, Book 6)

Gilliatt himself, chained to a rock and toiling away heroically, is frequently compared with Prometheus in his defiance of Nature, or Job in his suffering. Even before his long ordeal begins, we are told how wonderfully gifted he is in so many crafts – fisherman, carpenter, worker in iron, wheelwright, boat caulker, engineer – a paragon of practicality. So when he is alone on the barren outcrop of rock, surrounded by the sea and with few tools to hand “He put the forge in operation at once. Tools were wanting; he set to work and made them. For fuel he had the wreck; for motive force the water; for his bellows the wind; for his anvil a stone; for art his instinct; for power, his will.”  (Part Two, Book 2)

Verily, he is a superman. Indeed Hugo turns him into a force of nature -  “The very ocean seemed astonished. He passed to and fro across the tottering wreck, making the deck tremble under his steps, striking, cutting, hacking with the hatchet in his hand, pallid in the gleam of the lightning, his long hair streaming, his feet naked, in rags, his face covered with the foam of the sea, but grand still amid that maelstrom of the thunderstorm.” (Part 2, Book 4)

His endurance is extraordinary – almost beyond belief: “There was no form of distress with which he had not become familiar. He had been compelled to execute great works without tools, to move vast burdens without aid, without science to solve problems, without provisions to find food, without bed or roof to cover it, to find shelter and sleep.” (Part 2, Book 4)

What drives Gilliatt on? Apparently it is the triumph of the will, upon which subject Hugo’s rhetoric takes on a Nietzschean tone: “Exhaustion of the bodily strength does not necessarily exhaust the will. Faith is only a secondary power; the will is the first. The mountains, which faith is proverbially said to move, are nothing beside that which the will can accomplish. All that Gilliatt lost in vigour, he gained in tenacity. The destruction of the physical man under the oppressive influence of that wild surrounding sea, and rock, and sky, seemed only to reinvigorate his moral nature.” (Part Two, Book 2)

Unless such oratorical pronouncements put you under some sort of rhythmic spell, your rational mind will soon note the implausibility of many of the things Gilliatt is said to be able to do single-handedly.

At the other end of the unreality spectrum, Deruchette and Ebenezer Caudrey are so thinly characterised that they are little more than picturesque paper cut-outs. The novel’s ending, with Gilliatt giving Deruchette away in marriage, is both illogical and ridiculous. Isn’t Gilliatt the man whose titanic, solitary endeavours were inspired by his burning desire for Deruchette? Wasn’t she his motive for all that superhuman work devising tools, hauling loads, fighting storms, killing the octopus etc. etc? So are we meant to believe that this titan among men would so meekly surrender his desire in the face of a pale and timid rival?.... Ah, but then if the tale were to end with him marrying and settling into domesticity, wouldn’t that mess up Hugo’s Romantic and very theatrical image of the solitary, brooding Byronic (or Nietzschean) superman spurning society? Best allow him his solitary suicide by drowning which, to my adult reader’s eyes, now sounds awfully like an expression of teenage self-pity.

Now I grant you that Hugo could sometimes produce quite good splenetic satire, even if it is rather broad. Consider this portrait of a minor character, a sea captain: “He had enriched himself by serving all causes. No man in this world could have been more Bourbonist, more Bonapartist, more absolutist, more liberal, more atheistical, or more devoutly Catholic. He belonged to that great and renowned party which may be called the Lucrative Party.” (Part One, Book 5) Too often, however, Hugo’s satire is predictble and repetitive, especially when he launches into one of his anti-clerical rants. He is an equal-opportunity anti-clerical, taking pokes at both Catholics and Calvinists. But in his zeal to mock he sometimes reveals his limited understanding of such matters. For example, Ebenezer Caudrey is introduced into the novel in company with a clergyman whom Hugo calls a Puseyite, that is, one of those 19^th century Anglicans who wanted to insert Catholic liturgical practices into Anglican worship. Having established this, Hugo then has the clergyman talking like a hard-core Calvinist, lauding the work ethic and material profit and not for one moment raising the key concerns of Pusey’s followers. (Incidentally, this character is also anachronistic, given that the novel is set in the 1820s when the young Pusey had barely begun on his theological career and was little known in the Anglican church.)

This raises another negative matter in Hugo’s work. Regularly he veers away from his narrative to lecture us on sundry matters – about the superstitions of the Channel Islanders; about meteorology and the nature of winds; about engineering; about commerce; about heroes of the past. Apart from so often appearing “mugged up”, these interludes also often come across as bogus. Hugo is attempting to impress us with his erudition often on subjects about which he clearly knows little. Worst of all, however, are the long, long, long descriptions inserted into the text. Hugo cannot note the existence of a house without describing it in detail that flows over many pages, whether or not it is important to his story. When it comes to the wind and weather and seas that Gilliatt faces, the descriptions reach a baroque complexity, so long, so filled with vague evocations and blur words, that after a few pages one realises that he is talking about nothing at all. The appropriate word is bombast. I suspect that many readers simply skip these passages, which are in such profusion that they smother the story.

If I were to sum up the effect Toilers of the Sea now has on me, I would say that it tells a good melodramatic story, sturdy enough to hold the reader’s attention even if its characters are puppets; but that in the end its prose style is overblown, bombastic and unconvincing – and certainly not conveying any high philosophy about humanity, such as Victor Hugo imagines he is giving to us. Good reading for a literate teenager, perhaps.

All this may simply mean that I am out of sympathy with some of the conventions of Romantic-era novels, which were already passe when Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea. While I stand apart from the addled camp aesthetic of Jean Cocteau, I can’t help citing his much-quoted witticism: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo”. I get the point. Victor Hugo was always trying to live up to the image he had created for himself as the great oracle who confronts the mighty universe. What it leads to is verbal fudge.

 

For the Record: Unlike Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Toilers of the Sea has hardly ever been filmed, and never with any success. There were a couple of  film adaptations in the 1920s, when films were still silent; and a cheaply-made British film in the 1930s, where all the characters were given English names. Wikipedia tells me that in 1953 there was a Hollywood “adaptation” of the novel called Sea Devils, but a glance at a synopsis of its swashbucking plot and you find it has nothing to do with Hugo’s novel. Bizarrely, though, the characters are given the names from the novel.

 

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.

VAN GOGH AS FAST FOOD 

            The whole thing was devised and put together by two French art directors, Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron. It finally came to Auckland’s Spark Arena having been seen in many other countries. It was an “immersive” experience. Over 200 paintings by Vincent Van Gogh were projected on huge screens by a system called “Total Image”. As the moods of the paintings changed, these gargantuan images were accompanied by [what the French duo thought of as] appropriate mood music. Beethoven for vigour, Satie for pensiveness – that sort of thing. The paintings were presented more-or-less chronologically from the artist’s first dark Dutch canvases through his Parisian and Provencal periods to his final mental disintegration. They were also interspersed with [English translations of] various wise things that Van Gogh had written.  

            The images were not projected onto just one screen, but simultaneously on all the walls of the venue. And the images never stopped moving, being shown in full-form or as enlarged details at the same time, or sharing the many walls with projections of other paintings. Sometimes – but only occasionally – animation was added to Van Gogh’s images. On a couple of occasions, where he had painted birds flying overhead, the birds flapped their wings and flew. According to one puff, the whole experience added “emotional depth” to each image and allowed us “to live and feel the creative energy” of the artist.

            Of course we went along to the Spark Arena show. We enjoyed the ante-chamber in which we could wander at leisure past framed reproductions of Van Gogh’s works, with detailed placards attached, explaining the when and where painted etc.etc. We chuckled at the silly bits, like the alcove painted up like one of Van Gogh’s depictions of his bedroom, with chairs added so that tourists could be photographed as if in the bedroon. Or like the “immersive” mirrored room filled with sunflowers that we could wander through. Or, outside the display itself, the car painted up with Van Gogh-ish stars.

            But the main attraction was the big son-et-lumiere show itself, projected and heard in a large darkened display hall.

            It was fun up to a point – a quick run through some of the best-known of Van Gogh’s work, with the enlarged paintings beautiful in themselves. For us it was also very nostalgic. As I noted in an earlier posting SomeProblems with Cultural Sensitivity , we have three times visited Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum which has, I believe, a larger collection of Van Goghs than any other gallery or museum in the world. (Not that all Van Gogh’s works hang there – the famous “Starry Night” is in MOMA in New York and the “Café Terrace at Night” in a different Dutch museum.) Thrice we have walked slowly and with close attention through the Van Gogh Museum, taking the time to appreciate each canvas, being able to exchange our views on them or just quietly enjoy them.

            And this is exactly what the less-than-one-hour-long magnified light-show does not allow you to do. Approximately 200 paintings gallop before you in less than one hour, which works out as approximately thirty seconds per painting. As a primer on, or introduction to, Van Gogh’s work it’s effective enough. But it is a little like Van Gogh served as fast food. And it’s ironical that one of the wise words of Van Gogh on display says “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”

            Just as troubling is the giganticism of it. Van Gogh’s crows in a cornfield are simply not meant to be seen as a series of huge panels with every brushstroke magnified to the size of a garden rake. Ditto Van Gogh’s delicate petals on trees in early bloom. The real ability to appreciate the work is destroyed.

 

            Of course everything I’m complaining of here takes me back to arguments in Walter Benjamin’s influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), only I think the case is more extreme now than it was in Benjamin’s time. To reproduce is to distort and deprive the work of art of its uniqueness.

            Yet there is another line of thought that gives me pause.

            When this blog was young, I wrote a review of Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues, her account of how white enthusiasts interpreted, and often misinterpreted, the nature of a black musical genre. In it, she told the tale of such enthusiasts, in the 1940s and 1950s, eagerly hunting in junkshops for old, scratched recordings made by bluesman in the 1920s. These fans, as I put it, felt “the thrill of the hunt for them, the sense of having found undiscovered treasure, and especially the sense that – even though one was only collecting records – one was actually a lonesome rebel against the commercial mainstream.” But then there was a mass revival of interest in such music “the old recordings began to be re-pressed and mass-circulated in LPs (the vinyl equivalent of a CD collection). And suddenly [the enthusiasts] lost interest in them. If they had become the property of a mass audience, then they were no longer an elite, rebel taste. They too were now ‘commercial’ and no longer ‘authentic’.”

            Now, as I search my conscience scrupulously, I wonder if I’m not like those fans. Is part of me miffed that a mass audience, who can’t see the original paintings, is now able to taste these masterpieces, albeit in a different form? In short, am I being a snob?

            I hope not. I think the show is a good primer and could be an incitement to find out more about the artist’s work. But that fast food aspect really does trouble me.

Something New

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

“WHAT YOU MADE OF IT – A Memoir 1987-2020” by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, $NZ49:99)

            I really do play the game of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds as I review the third volume of C.K.Stead’s autobiography. But it’s hard for me not to do so. When I reviewed on this blog the second volume You Have a Lot to Lose, I found myself methodically drawing up a list of things I admired and things I found a little repellent – or, as I put it, things where C.K.Stead’s opinions and prejudices coincided with mine, and things where they didn’t. You Have a Lot to Lose covered the thirty years from 1956 to 1986 when Stead had a career as an academic. What You Made of It covers the 34 or so years after he decided to leave academe and be a full-time writer. And again I weigh up the pros and cons.

            There are many things in this book to enjoy and savour. There are Stead’s various encomia on France (Chapter 2 and elsewhere); and his vivid account of the impact movies had on him as a youngster and his desciptions of California while discussing the genesis of his novel Sister Hollywood (Chapter 4). His version of his long-lasting friendship with Allen Curnow (Chapter 10) is fair, balanced and affectionate, though he doesn’t fail to note the cantankerous and crotchety side of the man, which was probably downplayed by Terry Sturm in his Curnow biography Simply By Sailing in a New Direction. His account of visits to South America are vivid and exemplary in evoking the heat, culture and alienness of the place. His recall of physical trials after having a stroke, and his awareness of ageing, are convincing insights into what it is to be a near-nonagenarian.

            Then there are the arguments Stead proposes which seem to me sane and well-considered.

            I find it hard not to agree with his robust argument that the worth of a poet should be judged by the quality of the poetry and not by the political or social beliefs of the poet – as in his discussion of anti-semitic Ezra Pound and sort-of anti-semitic T.S.Eliot (Chapter 3 pp.52 ff. ). In chapter 6 there’s more detail on Pound in relation to Stead’s book Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement.  The issue is raised again in a disagreement he had with his friend Craig Raine (in Chapter 14). On a related topic, broadly speaking I agree with Stead that criticism of the actions of the state of Israel is not the same as being anti-semitic. This is sounded in Chapter 12, where Stead has a disagreement with his long-time friend the photographer Marti Friedlander.

             When he writes of the importance of our inherited European culture  - though he is mainly at this point talking of France  - he argues that being in Europe gives “locations and states of being that make one reflect on the human spirit, and what it is enriched by, and how places have grown in value by human occupation – how history and culture and nature have developed in unison there, and how we New Zealanders are inextricably linked to, and enriched by, our European past, and foolish if we try to sever inherited connections.” (p.49) Quite so.

            As a one-time high-school teacher I endorse most of this statement, relating to the 1970s and 1980s: “I was resistant to ideas strongly prevalent at the time that it was wrong to correct the written language of the schoolyard because that undermined the confidence of vulnerable youngsters who needed self-belief. I favoured an education system that exposed young people to the best in literature, and the streaming of classes according to ability, so that those with real talent would not be held back by those who lacked it.” (p.55) My quibble here would be that some schools streamed too rigorously and in effect created a rigid caste system.

            I sympathise with his views on the flawed nature of the Treaty of Waitangi and its subsequent fetishisation (see p.64 and also p.201). Related to this I agree, a propos controversies surrounding his novel The Singing Whakapapa, that to present a Pakeha viewpoint was not the same as being anti-Maori, though he was aware that some of the things he wrote “put me sometimes in unwholesome company and in places I would prefer not to be” (p.189) Elsewhere he refers to presenting the argument that welfare should be distributed on the basis of need rather than of race, he knowing that the need was greatest in Maori communites and that therefore Maori would benefit most. But his argument was taken up by those (like the politician Don Brash) who wished to promote the fiction that Maori were being unfairly favoured in terms of welfare. This is not, and was not, Stead’s view at any time.

            When he comes to Witi Ihimaera, he notes that his earlier work was “simple, direct, authentic… before he developed a tendency to overwriting and the grandiose” (p.211). Again, I endorse this critique. But I do note that, waspishly, (on p.210), Stead has to tell us that Ihimaera, as a student, wasn’t able to cope with the Maori language and managed to get a degree by avoiding it; and Stead clearly resents the fact that both Ihimaera and Albert Wendt were able to be given high academic positions when they quite simply didn’t have the qualifications for them (pp.211-212).

            And, of course, I can’t deny the argument that the literary world can be a fractious, bitchy, competitive place. Stead endorses an essay by Karl Miller. Speaking of spite, he says “the literary world was full of it, and it was important that it should be recognised and ignored, walked around rather than confronted” (p.179).

            I could add much more in the same vein. There is much admire in Stead as poet, novelist, essayist and controversialist, and I hope that what I am writing here is not seen as part of a calculated mission to denigrate him. 

            But having run with the hares I now have to hunt with the hounds. There is a downside to much of What You Made of It.

            It is only fair that Stead discusses his own books in some detail. After all, he did say at the beginning of You Have a Lot to Lose that he was intent on writing about books and the making of books. But he has the awkward habit of not only telling us about the real characters and events that fed into his novels. He tends also to synopsise his own novels in laborious detail, as with Talking About O’Dwyer in Chapter One (where he insists the novel is clearly not [only] about a version of Dan Davin);  or Villa Vittoria in Chapter 7; or The Secret History of Modernism in Chapter 12. In each case, it is as if he is offering us a primer to pre-empt other possible interpretations and readings of his work. I turn rebellious. Ultimately the biographical and autobiographical detail he attaches to each of his novels is a distraction from the novels themselves which (like all books) should be judged by “the words on the page”.

            There are moments when he shows a certain blindness to the reason for social movements in his time. There were controversies related to his novel The Death of the Body. Stead asserts that the novel was not “anti-women” and goes on to say that “the radical feminists of the time were less liberators of oppressed women and more accurately seen as manifestations of sexual puritanism.” (p.61) But where did this “sexual puritanism” come from? Wasn’t it in great part an inevitable reaction against the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s when it was men who mainly benefitted from the notion that casual affairs were there for the taking and  “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”?

            Much heavier to bear is, alas, Stead’s propensity for self praise. Of his own essays on social and cultural issues in New Zealand he writes “how refreshing those essays now look, how clear-eyed and sharp and truthful. I was one voice and a good one” (p.56). On a short story he wrote, which caused some controversy, he says “it still strikes me as full of charm and cleverness and humour” (p.269). Once again I have to say that judgments like these might reasonably be made by other people who read his work, but it’s embarrassing to see them made by the author himself. “I have been chastised for quoting favourable reviews” Stead notes (p.299) before quoting some favourable reviews. He rarely quotes unfavourable ones, and then only to dismiss them.

            Then there is Stead’s desire to prove that he was right in every debate in which he has been involved. His intent here appears to be to nail down definitively what he sees as the facts. And often this involves calling out, as dishonest or conspiratorial, anyone who has criticised him.  In Chapter 3 he claims that he was subject to attack by interested parties in the media and that he was right in the biffo about having a flat in London as a retreat for New Zealand writers. He attempts a veritable hatchet-job on Vincent O’Sullivan (pp.74-77) describing him as the cunning eminence grise of New Zealand literature always plotting to undermine him. (I’m tempted to comment “Look who’s talking, mate!”)  Later, after presenting a reasonable case for his view of Maori matters, he blots it (central paragraph p.189) by descending to virtual conspiracy theory as he berates those who criticised him on these matters. And when he does more-or-less apologise for something,  he does so in a very roundabout, ambiguous way. I refer to his take (Chapter 7) on his part in the sending of a foolish letter to a national magazine when he was a young man.

            Stead, according to this memoir, was right about everything, and apparently more perceptive then anyone else. He quotes A.S.Byatt telling him “You see very clearly, Karl, but sometimes there are things you don’t see.” Stead replies “What I don’t see is usually the Emperor’s clothes.” (p.103)

            Oddly enough, the self-righteousness and the self-praise come with a large sense of grievance.

            While Stead has sometimes reasonably noted the commercial nonsense involved with book awards, there’s a strong smell of sour grapes when he fails to win at the New Zealand Book Awards: “I didn’t win either category, and tried to suppress the feeling that the whole distracting and disappointing business was a commercial matter we (or I) might be better without.” (p.346) Later (p.380) he consoles his son for not winning an award by saying “The Montanas are like that - homely and idiotic.” He is upset that one of his novels, Villa Vittoria, was well reviewed in New Zealand but ignored in the UK (Chapter 7).  He notes that “In the years around 2007 honours seemed to pour upon me and it felt (however it appeared from the outside) that the more I was rewarded in New Zealand the more I was punished.” (p.365) He continues to be angry that his novels Mansfield and My Name was Judas didn’t win Montana Awards and “I swore that that was the last time I would attend one of those ghastly events, which were more about commerce and hype than literary quality.” (p.366 ) I sympathise with some of his views on book awards – they are never definitive guides to the worth of any book – but these really are the grumbles of somebody who wanted more applause. And he wanted more applause for a few friends. He notes that there was the (distant) possibility that Janet Frame could win the Nobel Prize for Literature. But J.M.Coetzee won that year. Stead of course tells us that Coetzee was a writer “whose work I disliked and thought hugely overrated” (p.337). So that puts him in his place.

            Pace Janet Frame, Allen Curnow and perhaps a few selected others, there is the pervasive sense that Stead sees most New Zealand literati as a poor lot in comparison with those illustrious people he has befriended and socialised with in England, America and Europe, and of whom he tells many (generally not particularly enlightening) anecdotes. In his introduction Stead describes What You Made of It as “the report of one who consistently reflects, looking out rather than in and reporting what he sees.” (pg. x) Perhaps he should have done a little more “looking in” – a little more self-questioning. Then he might have reflected that self-praise tends to alienate readers and make him look like the smartest kid in the class who keeps telling us dullards how smart he is.

            Yet here’s the Stead paradox. In many respects he IS the smartest kid in the room, through his commentary, poetry and novels. Perhaps he should have left these real achievements to speak for themselves without puffing them.

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

Here endeth my review, except for…

A Necessary Footnote: I apologise for stating the bleeding obvious, but the hard fact is that C.K.Stead’s autobiographies (or “memoirs” if he prefers)  will now be read in the light of his novelist daughter Charlotte Grimshaw’s very different memoir The Mirror Book, which deals with many things Karl Stead has not mentioned. The Mirror Book has been noted and dissected on many platforms over the last couple of months. It was the (long) cover story of one issue of the Listener (issue of 3 April, 2021), and drew letters to the editor (some applauding the memoir, some reproving) over the following two weeks. A couple of on-line reviews by women uncritically applauded The Mirror Book as evidence of a woman bravely telling the truth. One “reviewer” seemed to spend his column proving to us how well he knew the Stead family. Another condemned Stead both pere et fille for (in his interpretation) living privileged lives. Then, some weeks after the original feature article in the Listener, which reproduced Charlotte Grimshaw's view of things, there was another, shorter, feature in the Listener (issue of 8 May 2021) giving the view of Grimshaw's younger sister Margaret. Her account of her parents was far more benign than Charlotte's, though she did not address any of the specific issues Charlotte had raised. I come from a larger familiy than the Stead family, and I'm pretty sure that if any of my siblings were to write an account of the familiy it would be very different from what I would write. Even people who grow up in the same house can have very different perspectives. Be that as it may, Margaret Stead's article couldn't help looking like an exercise in damage control.

            In his introduction to What You Made of It, Karl Stead explains “my family are mostly background to a literary life – but to treat them otherwise always threatened to expand the memoir beyond reasonable limits” (p. xi) On page 277 he says of his children “there have been only glimpses of them, and they will have their own stories to tell.” You betcha, as The Mirror Book focuses on the dynamics of the Stead family and says some harsh things about Karl and Kay Stead.

            In at least one post-publication interview (with Catherine Ryan on Radio New Zealand  National, Thursday 8 April), Charlotte Grimshaw made many positive remarks about her parents, saying her memoir presented “no blame, only explanation” and that it could be read as a tribute to her mother. But her tone was more combative in a Newsroom post headed “My literary family were too busy deciding whether to sue” (posted 14 April 2021). Here she said her parents tried to dissuade her from having The Mirror Book published at this time.  “Kay pointed out to me and others… Karl was about to publish his third autobiography, in which he drove a nail into the arguments of X, and put readers straight on the issue of Y, and made sure the question of Z was put to rest, and now I’d got in the way of this with my appalling self-indulgence…” The phrasing of this suggests an awareness of Karl Stead’s strong desire to have the last word on every controversy in which he has been involved. Meanwhile I’m left wondering if the Croatian woman Stead discusses in Chapter 11 of What You Made of It is the same person to whom Charlotte Grimshaw refers in The Mirror Book on p.149. I think many people will be playing similar intertextual games with these two very different memoirs.

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. 

“A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON” (first published 1981) and “ALMOST A GENTLEMAN” (first published 1991). Two books of autobiography by John Osborne 

 

 

            It’s amazing how a writer’s reputation can change over decades. The best part of 70 years ago, in 1956, John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger appeared and was hailed by some reviewers as the rebirth of British theatre. For some years it maintained that reputation. Look Back in Anger was said to have introduced hard realism and honest colloquial language to the English stage and banished forever the more genteel dramatic schools of Terence Rattigan, Christopher Fry, Noel Coward et al. Goodbye upper-class “anyone for tennis”. Hello working-class and lower-middle-class “kitchen sink”.

The angry orations of Jimmy Porter were heard as the authentic discontents and frustrated hopes of young men in drab post-war Britain. A PR man invented the phrase “angry young man” to publicise the first production of the play, and “angry young men” stuck as short-hand for a new breed of gritty British working-and-lower-middle-class realist novelists and playwrights. In his lengthy verbal abuse of his upper-crust wife Alison, Jimmy Porter rails against the Establishment and the class-system. Because of this, it was assumed that the 26-year-old John Osborne (1929-1994) was a left-wing radical.

            Thus it seemed through the plays Osborne was writing up to the mid-1960s, especially The Entertainer (his best play in my opinion) which could be read as a condemnation of Britain’s foolish Suez expedition; and Luther, where Martin Luther rails and rants very much in the style of Jimmy Porter.

            Then, as it always does, opinions began to change. It was noticed that Osborne’s later – and less successful - plays were becoming more condemnatory of things other than the Establishment. His letters to the press were increasingly conservative, even crustily reactionary. Slowly it dawned on critics and audiences that the anger of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger and the desperation of Archie Rice in The Entertainer were not the creations of a radical. The discontents of these characters were really a lament for the lost power and eminence of Britain in a world which it no longer dominated. They embedded much nostalgia. The Entertainer is as much about the long-lost glamour of Edwardian music-hall as it is about a topical war. Jimmy Porter is not angry at the Establishment because he wants a socialist revolution. He’s angry because he can’t be part of the Establishment. Be it noted that Osborne’s royalties made him a very rich man, allowing him to buy a country house and play the part of a tweedy squire. As one obituary noted, he re-embraced the Anglican Church he had left in childhood and offered a large sum of money to the local church’s roof-restoration fund, only on the condition that the vicar reverted to using the 16^th century Book of Common Prayer rather than more modern liturgical texts.

            And then there was the impact of feminism, now damning Osborne for his misogyny. Jimmy Porter’s wife Alison, always ironing clothes, was really a symbol of women’s subjugation which Jimmy Porter (and by implication John Osborne) fully endorsed. Here I quote shamelessly, from the internet, the introduction to an article by a woman student who “takes to task the established critical view of Look Back in Anger as an essentially radical play about our class-ridden society… It is not class but sex that is really the main focus of Osborne's abusive attention in the play… The play is, in fact, a blatant and particularly vicious attack on women. It seems to me that Osborne uses the insubstantial class element in the play not to attack the 1950s world of privilege and snobbery but to disguise in pseudo-social terms his fear and loathing of women.”

            Very well. There have been other revolutions in taste since this first revulsion from Osborne’s work. His earlier plays have been revived with some success in the 1990s and 2000s (just as Terence Rattigan’s and Noel Coward’s have been) and Jimmy Porter is seen as a product of his time, his angst real even if his anger is misdirected. Even so, nobody now would see Osborne’s plays as essential works.

            In case you were wondering (if you haven’t yet snoozed off), all this is by way of talking about the two volumes of John Osborne’s autobiography that I have read. In A Better Class of Person, first published in 1981, Osborne deals with his life from childhood to the first production of Look Back in Anger in 1956. This is, in effect, a book about the making of the playwright. In Almost a Gentleman, first published in 1991 (three years before his death) Osborne covers the years from 1955 to 1966, when his play A Patriot for Me was first produced. It is interesting to note the class-conscious title of each book. Years later, the two books were published in a single volume under the title Looking Back – Never Explain, Never Apologise.

            A confession on my part. I read A Better Class of Person, when it was new, and before I adopted the habit of writing copious notes on every book I read. I therefore recall moments of it from memory. Little John Osborne was very much of the lower-middle-classes. His father was a commercial artist and his Cockney mother was a barmaid. What I remember clearly from A Better Class of Person is the boy’s attachment to his quiet and reflective father, who died of tuberculosis when Osborne was ten. Less genteel was Osborne’s mother. The most vivid moments in the book record Osborne’s deep loathing of her. Young Osborne and his mother attend a film premiere and join the line to greet Paul Robeson. Young Osborne cringes as his mother shakes Robeson’s hand and says “I always liked you darkies”. At every turn, his mother is presented as uncouth, loud-mouthed, crude, vulgar and domineering. He hates her.

Other parts of the book record Osborne’s truncated schooldays. He tells a tale of warding off a pederast in his holidays. He was expelled from one school for striking a teacher who had first struck him in punishment for some small misdemeanour. Unlike Jimmy Porter, Osborne received no higher education after schooldays and first tried his hand in journalism before attending a drama school and drifting into repertory theatre. On the whole, this is presented as negatively as he presents his mother – seedy provincial theatres, dismal digs for actors, meagre wages and some desperate measures to attract audiences. This includes an account of putting on a Christmas panto, Aladdin, so bad that the mother of the child-“star” marches into the theatre and drags her daughter away from the humiliation of it. Still, Osborne learned the craft of the theatre by being an actor, and developed an ear for dialogue. He also married an actress whom he later divorced. She was clearly the model for the much-abused Alison in Look Back in Anger.

This first volume of autobiography ends with the triumph of Look Back in Anger but you can see where many of Osborne’s obsessions came from – loss of father at the young age (nostalgia for the good old days); detestation of mother (a strain of misogyny); frustration and class-envy (on every page).

 

 

So I come to the second volume of his autobiography Almost a Gentleman, which I read recently. It goes through the ten years up to 1966 when, despite one or two theatrical flops, John Osborne was still being hailed as a major and dynamic figure in British theatre.

If A Better Class of Person shows his hatred and loathing of his mother, Almost a Gentleman ramps up the misogyny to hysteria as Osborne eviscerates each of his many wives. Wife Number Two was the actress Mary Ure (who first played the role of Alison in Look Back in Anger). She left him for the actor Robert Shaw. Osborne gleefully tells us that ten years and four children after she left him, she died in her own vomit. Wife Number Three was the film-critic and occasonal novelist Penelope Gilliat, who bore him a daughter (whom he later disowned). Apparently her main crime was that she worked too hard as a critic and so didn’t act as Osborne’s servant, the way he expected a good wife to act. (For the record, Gilliat died of chronic alcoholism a couple of years after Osborne wrote this book). Fourth and last wife was the acerbic actress Jill Bennett. Osborne presents her as a tight-fisted, avaricious bitch who, when she died, left half-a-million pounds to a home for dogs, not because she liked dogs but because she simply wanted to annoy people. He also quotes with delight the comments of other people as to her complete lack of talent as an actress.

Writers often damn their ex-spouses, but as all this bile is being poured out, one can’t help wondering what attracted Osborne to any of these women in the first place. Perhaps more to the point, what attracted these women to Osborne when all he does is spit out his contempt for each of them? We also get accounts of some of his affairs, including the charming tale of a Swiss mistress who ended up running a brothel in Mexico.

The same sort of contempt is poured upon the liberal-leftish political affiliations he was once assumed to have. In his sixties at time of writing, Osborne speaks of CND Aldermarston marchers in the 1950s and 1960s as pathetic dupes who didn’t understand how the world works. Occasionally he hits the nail on the head when he notes that the Establishment he attacked in his younger years has simply been replaced by a new sort of Establishment. He consciously cultivates the image of a Tory squire, declaring his liking for John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Max Miller and other such solid English stuff. There is plenty of ammunition here for the view that the “angry young man” was angry only because he lacked the social status he so desired. Little wonder that the cover photograph of the original edition of Almost a Gentleman (taken by celebrity nitwit Lord Snowden no less) shows Osborne in tweedy country gentleman attire.

All books relating to show-business – which includes “serious” drama –become at some point a welter of names and dates as colleagues, actors and directors are listed. There is much such in-talk in Almost a Gentleman. 

 

 

Two points are of interest.

Osborne was a randy, and apparently quite brutal, heterosexual. (At one stage he quotes from his diary, thanking God that he is both English and not queer.) Yet being in the world of theatre, he inevitably spent much time in the company of homosexuals. His expressed attitude towards them is one of tolerant amusement, sometimes breaking down into his habitual contempt. Oddly enough, however – given his deep disgust for his four ex-wives -  his greatest words of affection go to other men, particularly to George Devine, the producer at the Royal Court Theatre who “discovered” him and championed his first plays, and (more guardedly) to the director Tony Richardson. Mind you, Osborne detested Richardson’s sometime wife Vanessa Redgrave, whom he contemptuously dubs “Big Van”.

Second point – reading this bilious memoir, it is odd to find the conjunction of gritty Brit kitchen sink drama with Osborne’s accounts of travels to the USA in the late 1950s, luxuriating in hotels and enjoying a life quite unlike the constricted, depressed people his early plays dramatised.

One final thought: Both of Osborne’s autobiographies, but especially Almost a Gentleman, are so vitriolic, violent in their abuse, egotistical and negative about current pieties, that I can’t help thinking they were written in the spirit of provocation. Osborne wants to outrage and annoy readers, the better to get their attention. And getting attention is what showbiz is all about, isn’t it?

 

 

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.   

WAS BILLIE KILLED TWICE?

           

            I have a confession to make which will probably reveal my age and the antiquity of my tastes. For quite a few years I was, and in a way still am, a fan of Billie Holiday. Don’t get me wrong. Billie Holiday died in 1959, at the age of 44, when I was a young child. She had been long dead before I’d ever heard of her or been old enough to appreciate her.  But once the age of CDs came around, I hunted out re-pressings of her work and revelled in them. This wasn’t to the taste of my then-teenaged elder children, who sometimes made scathing comments on what I was listening to, or even did rude impressions of Billie Holiday’s distinctive growling and soothing voice. But – bless him – one of my sons bought me, as a birthday present, a boxed set of Billie Holiday CDs called Billie Holiday – The Legacy 1933-1958.

            I still listen to it and other CDs of Billie sometimes, enjoying everything from her 18-year-old debut belting out “My Mother’s Son-in-Law”, through the swing years with “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, to her rich middle period with “Lover Man”, “Fine and Mellow” and “God Bless the Child” (one of the very few songs she actually helped to write). Later came her very regrettable decline. Understand, please, that not everything she recorded was great, and in a way her very last recordings – especially the ones caught “live” in nightclubs – are an embarrassment, the result of years of smoking, heroin and physical abuse. It’s said that in her very last years, she was sometimes so zonked out on drugs that she had to be helped on stage and her voice was reduced to a faint croak.

 

            In 1972 there appeared the film Lady Sings the Blues, purporting to be the life story of Billie Holiday and starring the Motown singer Diana Ross. I was a young rookie film reviewer for the now-long-gone Auckland evening newspaper the Auckland Star.  I saw the film and wasn’t very impressed. I won’t belittle Diana Ross’s real talent as a pop singer, but her voice in the singing sequences sounded nothing like the voice of Billie Holiday and, apart from being African-American, Diana Ross’s public persona was nothing like that of Billie. To put it simply, she was badly miscast. Worse, the film’s depiction of Billie’s life was heavily fictionalised, and at some points glamourised.

            I would call this film the first killing of Billie Holiday.

            I have a copy of James Baldwin’s book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, which is his critique of the American film industry from a black perspective. In it, Baldwin tears apart the film Lady Sings the Blues, basically arguing that it’s a complete betrayal of Billie’s life, made to pander to white audiences and concluding dishonestly with the expected Hollywood happy ending. The film closes with Billie giving her triumphant performance at Carnegie Hall which was, in fact, many years before she died.

            One of Baldwin’s constant complaints was that the film was not true to Billie’s “testimony”, her autobiography also called Lady Sings the Blues (published in 1956), which Baldwin regarded as authentic. But there’s a great irony here. Apart from the fact that the book was (obviously) ghost-written, and based on interviews, many critics believe that it was also heavily fictionalised. This view has been contested recently, but it is upheld by Donald Clarke in a much better biography of Billie Holiday which sits on my shelf called Billie Holiday – Wishing on the Moon (published in 2002), a very detailed and documented tome, 500 pages, with Donald Clarke’s preface calling the book Lady Sings the Blues “hopelessly inaccurate”. Later he calls the film version “one of the worst films ever made”.

 

            Now nearly half-a-century has gone past since Diana Ross failed to embody Billie Holiday. A new feature film about Billie has been released, The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

            I ask myself, is this the second killing of Billie Holiday?

            The film is clearly produced for a generation that believes Black Lives Matter, and it is angled to present Billie as “the godmother of civil rights”. One of its central plot points is that Billie heroically insisted on trying to publicly perform Abel Meeropol’s famous anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit” but, says the film, the song was banned and Billie was arrested by a phalanx of police when she tried to perform it. This is at best half-true. The song was indeed controversial and, as the film correctly says, Billie was often required by club-owners to strike it off her repertoire. But the song was never officially banned, Billie first recorded it in the 1930s and her recording was widely distributed. She also performed it frequently in clubs and theatres without harrassment, even if there were grumblings from conservatives and some white Southerners. There was one episode where she was forced off stage while singing “Strange Fruit”. You could say that this is something that the film has “hyped up”.

            Sad to report, much that The United States vs. Billie Holiday says is historically accurate. When she was a little girl, Billie did indeed work as a cleaner in a brothel. She was raped as a little girl. She did tend to pair with abusive men who beat her up. (It’s frightening to hear her incarnation in this film singing “I’d rather my man hit me / Than he up and quit me” and “I swear I’ll call no copper / If I’m beat up by my poppa”). A BBC documentary about her some years back suggested she had a strong masochistic streak. It’s also true that she became hopelessly addicted to drugs, served jail time and was hounded by the FBI who wanted to take her down as “an example”.

            Unfortunately the film fumbles some of these details. It presents one (African-American) FBI agent infiltrating Billie’s entourage and then falling in love with her, becoming her lover, and later regretting that he’d ever been asked to spy on her. There was indeed such an FBI agent who later regretted his actions, but there is no evidence at all that he became her lover. Unfortunately, too, the (white) G-men hounding Billie are presented in cartoonish, unconvincing stereotype form, uttering what sounds like comic-book dialogue. (I’m not such a stickler for historical accuracy that I expect a film to show everything about a character’s life, but for the record, the film does not mention Billie’s long and loud tiffs with her mother; and it does not mention that early in her life she had a septic abortion which rendered her sterile and left her pining for children and being a soft touch when she met children. This was a big factor in her emotional life.)

            All this relates to distortion of facts, but the worst of is that The United States vs. Billie Holiday has such a slack and uncoordinated screenplay. Again and again we see Billie and her entourage shooting up. I’ve rarely seen a film with so many shots of needles plunging into flesh, in one case with blood spurting back.  Again and again we have sequences of Billie either having crazy sex with her men or being beaten up by her men. By the time we get to her deathbed, face puffy, body fading, we wonder if the film’s real purpose was to warn us about drugs. There is little dramatic momentum to it.

            So am I condemning this film as the second killing of Billie Holiday?

            Oddly enough, not really. For the film is redeemed by one factor and one factor only, and that is the stunning performance of Andra Day in the starring role. Unlike Diana Ross, Andra Day can sing in a voice that sounds convincingly like Billie Holiday’s. Indeed, there were some times when I wondered whether the producers had done what was done in the 2007 film about Edith Piaf La Mome (released in English-speaking countries as La Vie en Rose) – re-mastered the original singer’s recordings and dubbed them in. But this technique is not used in The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Andra Day does her own singing. I suspect she has been at it for some years. “Andra Day” is a stage name, derived from Billie Holiday’s sobriquet (bestowed on her originally by Lester Young) “Lady Day”. Obviously Andra Day has aspired to be Billie Holiday for quite some time.

            Andra Day has won the Golden Globe Best Actress Award for her perfomance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday and was nominated for an Oscar, which she did not win.  She, when she sings, is what makes the film worthwhile. But it’s a real pity about the inept screenplay, even if it is more truthful than the film Lady Sings the Blues.