This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.
Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.
Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.
I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.
Off to London 1964
In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.
Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.
New York 1969
In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.
He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.
Isle of Man 1970 to 1972
Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.
This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.
As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.
My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:
Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:
There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.
(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)
He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.
Huddersfield 1972
In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.
In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.
Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).
Children and terraced housing
Terraced house and coal mine
Two men on a bench
Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975
There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.
In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.
Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.
This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.
This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.
It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.
Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.
At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.
Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975
Skinningrove 1982 to 1984
Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.
This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.
This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.
The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.
Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.
And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.
Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.
So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.
In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.
Killip’s caravan and car, 1983, with huge aluminium smelter in the background
Three lads in Killip’s caravan
Photography and music
Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.
Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.
But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.
A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.
But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.
In flagrante 1988
In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).
For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.
Revolt
Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’
What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.
Summary
Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.
The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.
In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.
Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.
The British Society of Wood Engravers (SWE) was founded just over 100 years ago, in 1920, by leading artists including Lucien Pissarro and John Nash. Its aim was to promote wood engraving for modern artists.
This lovely exhibition, ‘Scene Through Wood’, was first shown at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 2020 to commemorate the Society’s centenary. Now, a few years later, it has come to the small but beautifully formed Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner, north west London and you really should go and see it.
‘Scene Through Wood’ brings together about 70 wood engravings, from the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Society of Wood Engravers’ collection as well as private collections, and by artist engravers around the world, including Britain, Europe, Russia, Canada, the USA, China and Japan. It is curated by noted engraver and artist Anne Desmet (RA).
The exhibition amounts not only to a visual feast of some of the finest wood engravings from the past 100 years, but introduces you to some 50 not-so-well-known artists who have specialised in this format. And, as you slowly patiently make your way round the exhibits, you begin to get a feel of the great variety of styles and approaches which are possible in this monochrome format.
‘The Cyder Feast’ by Edward Calvert (1828)
Sections
The exhibition is arranged into a number of sections and so is my review.
1. Beginnings
‘Beginnings’ starts with by far the earliest piece in the exhibition, ‘Christ in Limbo’ by Albrecht Dürer from 1510. Dürer was one of the first European artists to use printmaking and produced produced around 346 woodcuts during his career.
But woodcuts are different from wood engravings, and wood engraving, apparently, has the distinction of being one of the only art forms to have been invented in Britain. By the 1770s Thomas Bewick was engraving end-grain boxwood using bespoke tools. His ‘invention’ quickly spread around the industrialised world and was adapted for a variety of purposes, commercial and fine arts. The first display case contains a selection of steel engraving tools, and a roundel of end-grain boxwood the surface of which has been ground perfectly smooth and level and ready for engraving.
Put very simply, the artist etches a design into the hardwood which is then inked. The wood which has remained etched takes the ink and this part is printed on paper when the inked block is applied to it. The parts of the wood which have been gouged, striated, etched or scratched do not take the ink and thus show up white in the print.
Early experimenters included the prolific poet-artist, William Blake, Edward Calvert and the wonderful painter Samuel Palmer, all represented here. When I was a teenager I read the Complete William Blake, memorised the Songs of Innocence and Experience, devoted many hours to memorising Blake’s convoluted personal mythology. But later, in my 30s, I found myself warming very much to the delicate, mysterious magic of Samuel Palmer’s paintings. ‘Harvesters under a Crescent Moon’ is the only wood engraving Palmer ever made and it’s tiny.
‘Harvesters under a Crescent Moon’ by Samuel Palmer (1826)
Size matters
This brings me to a general point about the exhibition as a whole, which is size. It would be easy for your initial impression of the exhibition to be that all the works are a bit samey. Almost all the exhibits are black and white. And they also tend to be on the small size, A4 size or so. Half a dozen are strikingly bigger than this but plenty are smaller and some are minuscule.
Hence the gallery supplies a number of magnifying glasses because the thing about wood prints, as a general rule, is that you really have to lean and and study them. Oil paintings and watercolours can afford to be on a huge scale and make great sweeping gestures of colour which immediately leap out and grab you. Almost all these wood engravings, by contrast, require you to lean in and pay attention.
2. A sense of scale
In fact the second section in the exhibition is called ‘A sense of scale’ and explores the question of size, exploring the range of sizes possible with wood engravings, juxtaposing the tiny Samuel Palmer with the biggest thing in the show, ‘Mirage I’ (2014) by the Chinese artist Shi Lei. From a distance the Shi Lei piece looks like the face of a man wearing glasses regarding us with a withering look, except that the entire image appears to be bubbling and melting, maybe some post-nuclear holocaust atrocity.
‘Mirage I’ by Shi Lei (2014)
Only when you look closely do you realise that a) it’s a composite image which has been created out of nine separate blocks and then stuck together, and b) that the overall image is, rather in the style of Salvador Dali, itself made up of figures of writhing naked bodies. Because of the uneasy, rather sickening effect, this was by far my least favourite image in the exhibition.
David Gentleman
In fact, talking of size and scale, arguably both the largest and the smallest engravings cited in the show were produced by the same artist, David Gentleman (born 1930), one of the most successful commercial artists of his day. Because among his huge range of work are:
1. Postage stamps commissioned by Royal Mail, in this case a 9p Christmas stamp from 1977 showing a partridge in a pear tree.
Christmas stamp by David Gentleman (1977)
2. And the huge mural lining the platforms at Charing Cross underground station in London. I doubt if many other wood engravings have been reproduced at such scale.
Mural at Charing Cross underground station by David Gentleman (1979)
3. The theatre of life
This is followed by a wall of images all falling under the loose heading ‘The theatre of life’. This brings together images of types of people or human activities, such as:
Peter Blake’s engravings of four characters from a circus (1974 to 78)
dark and powerful images from the 1930s depicting the Great Depression in America Clare Leighton
images of ‘Bowlplayers in Sunlight’ by Gwendolen Raverat (1922), the first woman engraver to come to prominence
Comparing and contrasting these figures made you realise that engraving does best when it goes with the tendency to stylisation intrinsic in the form. Trying to achieve the sinuous curves and slow of organic objects is a big ask for an art form which works with chisels and incising tools, and so I thought a piece like Point-to-Point by Rachel Reckitt (1936) didn’t really work. Or I didn’t like the way it worked. By contrast in Le Sporting Bar (1929), it seemed to me that Ian Macnab had worked with the grain of the form to create a kind of semi-geometric stylisation which I enjoyed. But then I love Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticists and all varieties of geometric modernism.
The standout piece in this section was a much more recent work, ‘Fallen Angel’ (2006) by Hilary Paynter, not particularly geometric, certainly not a thing of hard edges and angles, a showcase of how soft and mysterious and rather wonderful a wood engraving can be.
Fallen Angel’ by Hilary Paynter (2006)
4. Construction and destruction
Following on from this is a section titled ‘Construction and destruction’. If we’ve just been looking at human recreation, sports and leisure time, here are people at war, or coping with fires and floods. It includes:
‘Minesweeping Gear’ by James Taylor Dolby (1947)
‘Northern Waters’ (1942) and ‘Sharp Attack’ (1944) by Geoffrey Wales
‘Mill Fire’ (1997) and ‘Deluge’ (2000) by Ian Corfe-Stephens
‘Shot’ (2010) by Chris Pig where ambulancemen and bystanders crowd round someone lying on a stretcher who has, apparently, just been shot
For me the standout piece, and one which typifies many of the strengths of wood engraving, is a marvellous piece by Hilary Paynter, titled ‘Tree with a Long Memory’ (2003).
Tree with a Long Memory’ by Hilary Paynter (2003)
This is a classic example of the need to lean in and look closer at a wood engraving. The more I looked, the more the piece delivered up its wonders. For a start it took me a few moments to realise that the shape of the image represents the trunk of a mature tress which has been sliced across, as when a tree is cut down with a chainsaw revealing the rings of growth for you to count.
Anyway, only when I really peered into the image did I realise that it contains a wonderful set of symbols of humanity’s achievements over the past 3,000 years or so, namely Stonehenge, the Parthenon and a Roman amphitheatre (at the bottom), what might be a Renaissance encampment such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold hanging upside down in the middle, on the left rows and rows of white crosses as in a First World War cemetery, in the top left a jet plane looping the loop, and on the top right the sinewy shape of a 6-lane motorway snaking into the distance. And on the lower right-hand side the timeless labour of working the land, ploughing and sowing which was once done by horse-drawn ploughs, now by diesel-driven machinery, but the eternal round of sowing and reaping which is the basis of all civilisation, the row upon row of furrows echoing the growth lines of the tree.
5. The built environment
Next up is a section titled ‘The built environment’. Given the form’s predisposition to angles and edges, buildings, rooftops, windows, streets of terraced houses and so on are tailor made subjects for engraving. Thus I loved the very first piece in this section, ‘Yorkshire’ (1920) by the noted Modernist artist Edward Wadsworth.
‘Yorkshire’ by Edward Wadsworth (1920)
This section is dominated by an impressive set of unusually large engravings of a view of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, each coloured differently, by the exhibition curator, Anne Desmet. Desmet is on record as saying the sequence was in part inspired by Monet’s set of paintings of the facade of Rouen Cathedral at different times of day. They can be viewed on Desmet’s website.
This section also contains some interesting technical experiments by Desmet. ‘Babel Tower Revisited’ (2018) is round and uses slightly convex glass cover so give the impression the image is bulging out into the room. ‘Fires of London’ (2015) in which slender prints of engravings of the Great Fire have been cut out to form narrow tall images and glued onto 18 razor shells.
It also contains the striking (and tinted) ‘Petra I’ by Geri Waddington (2004).
‘Petra I’ by Geri Waddington (2004)
6. Storytelling (books)
Wood engraving is nowadays both an independent, creative art form and a versatile medium for commercial images. A display case demonstrates how the tendency to simplify and abstract subject matter can result in very striking images which can be used for book illustration. There are illustrations of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (by Garrick Palmer, 1994) and Goblin Market (Hilary Paynter, 2003).
More commercially, editions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been printed with dramatic wood engraved front covers by Andrew Davidson (2013). And, best of all, the fabulous engravings produced by Chris Wormell for Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ sequence of novels, which are outstanding.
‘La Belle Sauvage.’ Cover illustration for ‘The Book of Dust’ by Philip Pullman (2017) based on a wood engraving by Chris Wormell
This section also contains:
‘The Crucifixion’ (1927) by the famous poet-artist David Jones
‘The Entombment’ (1930) by Claughton Pellew
‘The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God’ (1932) by John Farleigh, for George Bernard Shaw
Illustrations for ‘The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta’ (1933) by Eric Ravilious
a vivid scene from ‘Moby Dick’ (1974) by Garrick Palmer
Illustrations for ‘Erewhon’ (1932) by Blair Hughes-Stanton
And another series or set of images (cf Desant’s Brooklyn Bridge), this time a set of 9 highly detailed studies of a bust of the Roman emperor ‘Marcus Aurelius’, depicted with the opposite of abstraction, with astonishing photographic accuracy by Simon Brett (2002).
Another part of the display tells us that wood engravings have been used to create entirely text-free books of illustration, where the reader is free to verbalise a sequence of images, exemplified by the work of the Belgian artist, Franz Masereel, whose text-free books of narrative images – such as ‘The Idea’ and ‘Story Without Words’, both on display here – were very popular, especially in Germany, during the era of silent movies, and can be counted among the forerunners of modern graphic novels.
I’d never really given it much thought but those labels you get which you can write your name on and stick in the front page of good quality books, bookplates, often feature exquisite miniature wood engravings. Examples included here are by Joan Hassall, 1946, Vladimir Kortovitch, 1990, and Grigory Babitch, 2004.
7. Abstraction and detail
This section is dominated by a work by a very distinctive artist who produced woodcuts and engravings of wonderful, beguiling and mind-bending visual puzzles, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher.
‘Fish and Scales’ by Maurits Cornelis Escher (1959)
8. The natural world
This is the biggest section, with the most examples, and so a fascinating opportunity to analyse and compare the very wide range of wood engraving styles available. There’s a ‘Stonehenge’ from 1962 by Gertrude Hermes which looks as if the sky is made out of angrily cross-hatched icebergs.
By complete contrast is ‘Dead Trees – Sheppey’ by Monica Poole (1976) where the trees look as if they’re touching a sky which is like an inverted pond, with dynamic ripples spreading out from the trees’ touch in a surreal manner which echoes Paul Nash in the 1930s.
There are also two different artist’s views of a car headlights at night illuminating a road scene through the windscreen, ‘Through the Windscreen’ (1929) by Gertrude Hermes and ‘The Night Drive’ (1937) by Joan Hassall.
Probably my favourite work was ‘Long-tailed Duck and Whiting’ by Colin See-Paynton (1988), possibly because the fish look identical to the fish in Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks. Aren’t the ducks extraordinarily realistic? From that level of precise naturalistic detail to another large and pleasing, semi-abstract image, in the slightly mysterious Paul Nash style:
‘Under water’ by Monica Poole (1986)
Go see and enjoy this lovely, fascinating, eye-opening and deeply pleasurable exhibition.
The video (6’24”)
Anne Desmet RA is one of only three wood engravers to be elected as Academicians in the Royal Academy’s nearly 250-year history. In this video she takes us through each step in creating a wood engraving, from tracing the original drawing through to printing a first proof.
Related links
Scene Through Wood continues at the Heath Robinson Museum until 11 December 2022
Cornelia Parker (CBE, RA) is a very well-known and successful figure in British art. Born in 1956, she’s become famous for her ‘immersive’ i.e. BIG works. Above all she is a conceptual artist. What is conceptual art? According to the Tate website:
Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
In some exhibitions you react to the painting or sculpture immediately, as an object in space which fills your visual cortex with sensations and impressions. You don’t necessarily have to read the wall labels. With conceptual art it is almost always vital to read the wall label in order to understand what you’re looking at. Sure, you could still respond naively and sensuously to the work’s appearance but you would be missing out on 99% of its meaning and intention.
The wonderful wall labels
This major retrospective of Parker’s career brings together almost 100 works, spanning the last 35 years. So that’s quite a lot of reading you have to do in order to understand almost every one of these pieces.
But a major feature of the exhibition is that the wall labels are written by Parker herself. Most wall labels at exhibitions are written by curators who, in our day and age, are obsessed with the same handful of issues around gender and ethnicity and lose no opportunity to bash the visitor over the head with reminders of Britain’s shameful, imperial, racist, slave-trading past etc etc.
So it is a major appeal of this exhibition that, instead of every single piece explained solely in terms of race or gender – as it would be if Tate curators had written them – Parker’s own wall labels are fantastically interesting, insightful, thought-provoking insights into her way of thinking and seeing the world. Instead of the world of art being reduced to a handful of worn-out ideas, Parker’s wall labels are as entertainingly varied as her subject matter, full of stories, anecdotes, bright ideas, explanations of technique, aims, collaborations.
They give you a really privileged insight into her worldview and into her decades’-long ability to be interested, curious, take everyday objects and have funny and creative ideas about how to transform them. After spending an hour and a half working through her thought processes for the different pieces, some of her creative spirit begins to rub off on you, you begin to see the everyday world the way she does, full of opportunities for disruptive and fun interventions. In this respect, this exhibition is one of the most genuinely inspiring I’ve ever been to.
Types of work
The exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, photographs, embroidery and drawings, as well as four large-scale, room-sized installations, and two rooms showing her art films. At the simplest, physical level, the pieces can be divided into two categories: Small and Large. Examples of the small will serve as an introduction to the large.
Introductory
In the downstairs atrium of Tate Britain stands a single sculpture, preparing you for the exhibition ahead.
It is, of course, a life-size cast of Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, wrapped up in a mile of string. A vague symbolic gesture towards ‘the ties that bind’ people in relationships, maybe. In the nearby wall label Parker describes this as a ‘punk gesture’, which I found very significant. It’s the only time she mentions punk but she was just 20 when it hit, maybe at art school by then, so its attitude of really offensive, in-your-face irreverence must have taken her art school by storm. The point is, various later wall labels repeatedly say that she is interested in destruction and violence – but not violence against persons, against things. Her art does violence to inanimate objects in all kinds of inventive, creative and often very funny ways.
But there is, as so often, a further twist to the tail. Wrapping The Kiss in string is a relatively tame thing to do compared with Dada, Surrealist, Duchamp provocations from 100 years ago. It becomes more interesting when you learn that some opponents of conceptual art within the art world, fellow young irreverent artists, vandalised the original version of The Distance by cutting up the string into short sections, thus ‘liberating’ the sculpture.
And best of all, that Parker was undaunted and promptly gathered up all the cut-up pieces of string and tied them back together around a mysterious object at the centre, ‘a secret weapon’, which is unnamed and unknown.
Parker realised that when an engraver engraves words into silver, for example into a cup like the Wimbledon champion’s cups, tiny fragments or curls of silver are generated. This piece is a pile of the shavings thus created. Parker contacted a silversmith, who agreed to her proposal, and it took several months to accumulate enough shavings for her to create the little mound, with sprinkled outliers, which we see on display here. As she points out, each sliver represents a letter, is the trace of a letter, is the inverse of writing, of language. They are absences made solid. This idea really resonated with me as I admired this carefully created little mound and its sprinkled outliers.
In the case next to it is an old dictionary. Under careful supervision, Parker arranged for a shotgun loaded with dice to be fired into the back of the book. The die penetrated to different depths into the text and jammed most of the pages together. As it happens the post-shooting dictionary automatically fell open at a page about ‘luck’. Hence the title, The luck of the draw. The roll of the dice.
Apparently it’s part of a series titled ‘Avoided Objects’, so-called ‘object poems’ which ‘explore the fractured, unmade and unclassified’. The series explores ‘the denied and repressed’, which sounds a bit hackneyed and stale until she goes on to specify what that means in practice – the backs, underbellies or tarnished surfaces of things, which is much more interesting. Hence shooting this dictionary ‘in the back’.
‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)
While in Hartford Connecticut, Parker asked to visit the factory where the famous Colt 45 handgun is made. She was surprised to discover the process began with blank featureless gun-shaped casts, before any working parts were added. She asked if she could have one and the Americans, obliging as ever, gave her two and gave them a nice smooth industrial polish. Adding the word ’embryo’ to firearm juxtaposes the birth of the gun with the general idea of the birth of a human being, alongside a tool which might potentially bring it to an end.
‘Embryo money’ (1996)
Fascinated by money, Parker asked permission to visit the Royal Mint in Pontyclun, Wales. She asked for some samples of coins before they were ‘struck’ i.e. had the monarch’s face, writing, value, corrugated edges and everything else added – just the blank dummy coins. Embryo money, before it has accrued any of the power which so dominates all our lives.
See what I mean by ‘conceptual’. You could relate to these just as intriguing objects, but the stories behind them – the anecdotes of Parker’s expeditions to interesting and unusual places to see industrial processes in action – add immeasurably to the enjoyment.
‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)
Parker developed a relationship with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She visited and got to know them at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. One of the many, many types of contraband objects they confiscate are drugs. Parker persuaded them to let her have a seizure of cocaine after it had been incinerated. A million pounds worth of cocaine turned to ash, which is on display here, as a sad little pile.
In her wall label, Parker adds the coda, which you’d never have got from a curator, that she really loves the way Customs and Exercise destroy things in such a theatrical way, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. ‘Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.’ This kind of casual, candid opinion is a lovely insight into her way of thinking.
Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)
A personal favourite was ‘Inhaled cliffs’. She asked Customs about methods people use to smuggle stuff into the country, especially drugs, and discovered that some drugs can be used to ‘starch’ sheets, so a set of innocuous looking sheets turn out to be drenched in heroin, cocaine or other illicit substances which can be extracted once they’re safely in the country. This notion inspired ‘Inhaled cliffs’ in which Parker starched sheets with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover, ‘smuggling’ those great symbols of England into bed with her. She is tickled by the notion of ‘sleeping between cliffs’.
I’m focusing a bit much on these objects in cases. There were conventional things attached to the wall, prints, flat objects treated in various ways. Photographs, for example. On her way to her studio past Pentonville Prison she noticed workmen plastering cracks in the perimeter wall, creating vivid white abstract shapes. They then started to whitewash the wall as a whole so, before these irregular, crack-shaped gestures disappeared, she quickly took photos with her phone and developed a set of 12 prints which are hung here, titled ‘Prison Wall Abstract’.
Or the ‘Pornographic drawings’ (1996). As part of her ongoing conversations with HM Customs she asked for examples of contraband and they gave her (along with the bag of cocaine ashes) chopped up lengths of pornographic film. Parker dissolved the fragments in solvent to create her own ink. She used this ink to create Rorschach blots i.e. poured them on one side of a piece of folded paper, pressed the other side down on the inked side and reopened it to have a symmetrical image. For some reason, all the ones she made (or chose to display) came out ‘to be particularly explicit’.
It dawns on me that these works are beyond ‘conceptual’ in the sense that they might better be described as anecdotal. Often there isn’t a grand concept, project or goal behind them – there is happenstance and accident. Seeing an opportunity to do something interesting and seizing it.
The other obvious thing is that she’s about transforming objects from one state to another. She starts with ‘found objects’ – gun moulds, unstamped coins, porn movies, cocaine and so on – and, in the examples I’ve given, doesn’t even transform them herself, but recognises their artistic potential.
Medium
Using this technique of remodelling the existing and everyday, is a middle-sized work titled ‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ from 2013. Parker describes playing hopscotch on pavements with her daughter. This led her to pay attention to pavements and to notice the antiquity of the old stone paving in Bunhill Fields near Old Street. She got permission to pour liquid rubber into the cracks in a path through Bunhill Fields. When the rubber dried she used the mould to make a metal cast, memorialising the captured cracks in bronze. She then suspended the mould on pins so that the cracks in the pavement hover a few inches above the floor, making it seem more spectral and ghostly. (It’s an accidental quirk that my photo of it features so many people’s feet.)
The interest in destruction I’ve mentioned earlier really comes to the fore in the three most famous room-sized installations in the exhibition. These are by way of being her greatest hits. They are:
Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 89)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
Perpetual canon (2004)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
I’ll quote her wall label in its entirety:
We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict. I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away. The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects. In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can’t be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine’s parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.
I’ve seen photos of this many times. Seeing it in the flesh I realised several things:
it is a mobile – a very complex mobile, but in principle the same kind of thing my son makes to hang his origami figures from his ceiling
it has a cubic, rectangular shape i.e. it is the opposite of chaotically exploding outwards; it is very contained
this is achieved by hanging multiple objects from the same string, not just one
as people walk slowly respectfully round it the eddies of air they stir
and placing a single light bulb at the centre of it means not only that is casts shadows on the wall, but as the string move gently, so a) your perspective through the multiple layers of debris shifts and changes b) the shadows they cast on the wall subtly change
I was invited to make a work for a circular space with a beautiful domed ceiling. I first thought of filling it with sound. This evolved into the idea of a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo. Perpetual Canon is a musical term that means repeating a phrase over and over again. The old instruments had experienced thousands of breaths circulating through them in their lifetime. They had their last breath squeezed out of them when they were squashed flat. Suspended pointing upwards around a central light bulb, their shadows march around the walls. This shadow performance replaces the cacophonous sound of their flattened hosts. Viewers and their shadows stand in for the absent players.
The ghosts of music past. I was really taken by the idea that the shadows of us, the visitors, stand in for the long-dead players of these instruments.
Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)
Tate own this piece. In Tate’s words:
‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.
And in Parker’s own words:
Drawn to broken things, I decided it was time to give in to my destructive urges on an epic scale. I collected as much silver plate as I could from car-boot sales, markets and auctions. Friends even donated their wedding presents. All these objects, with their various histories, shared the same fate: they were all robbed of their third dimension on the same day, on the same dusty road, by a steamroller. I took the fragments and assembled them into thirty separate pools. Every piece was suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. Inspired by my childhood love of the cartoon ‘deaths’ of Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry, I thought I was abandoning the traditional seriousness of sculptural technique. But perhaps there was another unconscious reason for my need to squash things. My home in east London was due to be demolished to make way for the M11 link road. The sense of anxiety lingers even now.
The biggest thing in the show is a big long room entirely lined with red paper with holes in, titled ‘War Room’, from 2015. As usual, you need to read the wall label to understand what this is about.
I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families. When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that. I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.
The story, the anecdote, is, as usual, interesting but the resulting work less so.. You walk in, you walk round, you walk out. Meh. A slightly shimmery effect is created by having two layers of hole-y red paper hanging everywhere but…this is a minimal effect.
‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)
One work dominates the penultimate room. It is an enormous, thirteen-metre long, hand-sewn embroidery of the Wikipedia page about Magna Carta.
It is a collaborative work which involved over 200 volunteers including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners. On the wall is a list of the worthies who signed up to be involved, an entertaining list of the usual suspects: media-friendly left-of-centre politicians (Tom Watson, 55), actors, psychotherapists (Susie Orbach, 75), academics (Germaine Greer, 83), other high profile artists (Antony Gormley, 72), writers (Jeanette Winterson, 63, Philip Pullman, 75) and so on.
What struck me was how old all these people are. Our generation is declining, now, Cornelia. We’ve trashed the planet, wrecked the economy and degraded the political system for our children: best to withdraw tactfully and not keep on shouting and marching and trying to dominate everything. We’ve had our time. Over to a younger generation and hope they can do better.
The videos
There are two rooms featuring 7 or 8 art videos running consecutively. The best thing in the first room is a new six-minute video titled ‘FLAG 2022’ and made specially for this exhibition. Very entertainingly this shows the creation of a Union Jack by seamstresses in a factory only run backwards – so we see the British flag being systematically unsown and unstitched. It’s accompanied by a straight orchestral rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. Shame. It would have been funnier if Jerusalem had been played backwards, too – but maybe that would be a bit too 1960s, too much like the old avant-garde.
The second film room is about America. Oh dear. That far away country of which we hear so little, which is so rarely in the news, whose cultural products we so rarely get to see. This room contains:
One film which Parker shot at the annual Halloween Parade in New York, that city we so rarely hear about. Personally, I’d have though New York has enough artists of its own to do this kind of thing.
Another film showing supporters of Donald Trump milling about in New York outside Trump Tower sometime during his election campaign. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Donald Trump? He was quite big in America, apparently.
Frankly, these films are a let-down. It’s disappointing to see Parker genuflecting to God’s Own Country – as if New York or America need the slightest bit more coverage or publicity than the saturation exposure they already enjoy in the British media, TV, radio, films, academia, all across the internet and the toxic marshes of social media. There are other countries in the world, you know.
I’d like to have shared FLAG or any of the others in t his review, but I can’t find any of them on the internet.
Politics
From here onwards – in the second half of the exhibition – politics emerges as an increasingly dominant theme.
As well as the flag movie, the British film room includes a film made in the empty chamber of the House of Commons in 2018 using a camera attached to a drone, titled ‘Left Right and Centre’. Not only did they make this film, but they made a film about the making of the film, in which I caught Parker telling us how damn difficult it was to make because of health and safety, fire risk assessment etc. When artists start to think they are heroes…
I thought the result was very underwhelming. The drone hovered over the table you see in front of the Speaker of the House’s chair, set between the two front benches, which usually has the Mace on it – except in this film it had been covered with copies of England’s daily papers, which fluttered in the downdraft of the drone’s little rotors.
As with Donald Trump, I am sick to death of Parliament, the succession of incompetent politicians we have had leading our nation for the past 12 years, and the corrupt newspapers which lie and distort in order to keep the ruling party in power. Watching a 10-minute film on the wretched subject of contemporary British politics went a long way to destroying the happy, creative, open impression inspired by the first half of the exhibition.
In 2017 Parker was the first woman to be appointed official artist for the General Election. In this role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, meeting with politicians, campaigners and voters and producing artworks in response. She made several films during this period including the aforementioned drone movie, and one titled ‘Election Abstract 2018’, a documentation of Parker’s observations during the campaign, posted on her Instagram account.
None of this, to my mind, is as funny or inventive as flattening a load of silverware with a steamroller, or displaying a little pile of incinerated cocaine, or soaking sheets in white cliff chalk, or taking a mould of Bunhill pavement. It just looks and sounds like the news, with little or no inventiveness and no particular insight. British politicians are idiots. Our newspapers are studies in bias and lies. So what’s new?
My heart sank even further when I read that another of her films is titled ‘Chomskian Abstract 2007’ and is an interview with the American social critic and philosopher Noam Chomsky, apparently about ‘the entwined relationship between ecological disaster and capitalism’.
Oh dear God. It’s not that Chomsky’s wrong or that hyper-capitalism driven on by American corporations and banks is not destroying the planet; it’s just that he is such a bleeding obvious choice for Great Man of the Left to interview. And so very, very, very old (born in 1928, Noam Chomsky turns 93 this year).
Is this the best Parker can do in the field of ‘radical’ or oppositional politics – interview a 93-year-old? It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you need to make a film about the environment and, after careful consideration, deciding you’d like to interview David Attenborough (aged 96) on the subject. Topics, and interviewees, don’t come more crashingly obvious than this.
Each year thousands and thousands of students in Britain graduate from international studies, politics or environmental courses. It would have been so much more interesting to interview the young, the future generation, and get their point of view rather than the done-to-death, decrepit old.
And he’s another Yank for God’s sake. What is it with the British cultural establishment and their cringing obeisance to American culture, artists, film-makers, politicians and intellectuals. Of the 200 contributors to the Magna Carta embroidery, in their summary of the show the curators single out just two – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (who stitched ‘user’s manual’ into the embroidery) and Edward Snowden (who stitched the word ‘Liberty’).
Notice anything about them? Yes, they’re both American. Americans just seem carry more weight with Britain’s art establishment. They have a little more human value than mere Brits like you and me. More pizzazz, more glamour.
Lastly, what has Chomsky actually changed in his 50-odd years of railing against the American government and global capitalism? Nothing. Come to that, what good does getting 200 media-friendly worthies to contribute bits to a 13-metre-long embroidery achieve? Nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise for everyone involved and maybe it makes some of the gallery visitors feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, too. Which is nice, but…
But meanwhile, out in the real world, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are destroying the economy, ruining Britain’s standing in the financial world, and declaring war on the poor, the unwell, the vulnerable, even trashing support among their own middle-class, mortgage-paying supporters, in a zombie march of ideologues divorced from reality.
Flying a drone round the House of Commons or stitching a room-length embroidery are not only feeble responses to the world we live in but, worse, I found them imaginatively limiting and cramped. If you’re going to tackle the terrible world of contemporary politics, at least do it with some style and imagination. Old newspaper photos of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn didn’t take me anywhere new – unlike the pile of silver shavings or a cast of Bunhill pavement or most of the pieces in the first half of the show, which opened magic doors in my mind.
Maybe Parker should stick to what she does best – blowing things up. Guy Fawkes Night is coming. Just a thought…
Related links
Cornelia Parker continues at Tate Britain until 16 October 2022
“Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning.
“Yes, I think so.”
“I think so too.”
(Charles and Sebastian as students discuss their drinking habits in Brideshead Revisited)
Brideshead Revisited is probably Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel, simply because of the huge success of the 1981 ITV dramatisation. Which is ironic, because there’s a strong case for arguing that Brideshead is the least representative of Waugh’s works.
It’s also odd that it’s so popular, considering it amounts to a prolonged description of the destructive effects of alcoholism, the bitterness of adultery and infidelity, and a sustained account of one of the most dysfunctional families in literature.
Brideshead Revisited is divided into five sections: a short prologue (13 pages) and even shorter epilogue (6 pages) and 3 long central parts which each cover a distinct period in the characters’ lives. At 331 pages in the Penguin paperback edition, Brideshead is by some margin Waugh’s longest book, his other novels averaging around 220 pages, the travel books a skimpy 160 or 170.
The novel begins in 1923 and tells the story of the friendship between Charles Ryder and the beautiful, debonaire Sebastian Flyte, second son of scandalous Lord Marchmain, who is the owner of the impressive country house of the title, Brideshead. (To be clear, the grand house is named after the little river Bride which runs through the shallow valley where the house is situated; the title the family own and pass on is ‘Marchmain’, so Lord Marchmain, Lady Marchmain and Marchmain House in London; but the actual family name as written in passports and legal documents is Flyte).
The 1940s perspective
But although the novel’s events are set in the 1920s, when Charles and Sebastian were carefree undergraduates, and then the 1930s, when they are young men exploring the world, Waugh goes to some pains in his 1959 preface to the book to emphasise that the novel is not of those relatively carefree times.
Very much the opposite, Waugh wrote Brideshead on a break from military duty from autumn 1943 through to June 1944, in the depths of the war, in the bleak winter of 1943, when not only the war against Nazi Germany was in doubt but, even if we won the war it had begun to seem to people like him as if the entire grand, upper-class, country house and high society world which Waugh had known and revelled in, would be swept away.
It looked increasingly as if a post-war England would be a grim, egalitarian, socialist place where the grand old families would be ruined by death duties (mentioned on page 96), the beautiful country houses would be pulled down to make way for council estates (as the family’s London base, Marchmain House, is pulled down to make way for flats) and that the frivolous hedonistic life he had enjoyed as a Bright Young Thing in the 1920s would be replaced by grim proletarian earnestness.
Therefore, Waugh’s memories of 1920s Oxford and 1930s London Society, his descriptions of the impossibly grand country house and the stirring nobility of its venerable owner, Alexander Lord Marchmain, even his descriptions of the food and drink consumed at various points, are all intensely coloured by wish fulfilment and fantasy, are the hungry fantasies of a man who, like everyone else in Britain, had had to put up with four years of rationing, for whom a really stylish meal was a distant memory, and who feared that everything he held dear in life was about to be crushed out of existence.
You could argue that one of the chief appeals of almost all Waugh’s other novels is their restraint, the way events, people and dialogue are, for the most part, clipped and understated. Several of his most shocking effects are created this way, by cutting dialogue or description at key moments right back to the bone and letting the reader do the work, imagining for themselves the characters’ responses.
It’s in this respect that Bridgeshead is so uncharacteristic of his oeuvre, because it is so overstated, so sumptuously over-written, so bloated.
Its unusual length, which I mentioned above, is one aspect of this, and both are related to the use of a first person narrator, Charles Ryder, to tell this long story (see below).
In the 1959 preface Waugh states all this very clearly and goes some way to apologising for the book’s florid excesses. But he also explains that, although he’s tinkered with phrasing all the way through and cut some passages (which ones?) he has not rewritten the entire thing, it would be impossible, it is what it is, a testament to a particular time and mood. His final sentence emphasises that it is given to the reader not as a souvenir of the 1920s or 1930s, which is so lavishly describes, but more as an imaginative fantasy spawned by the darkest days of the 1940s.
Prologue
The centrality of the war mentioned in the preface is immediately confirmed in the text itself by the short but grim prologue. We find ourselves in the depths of the Second World War and encounter a first-person narrative told by an erudite, self-aware, articulate person who is named half way through as Captain Charles Ryder. He is the somewhat insubordinate leader of C company in an infantry regiment.
He and his men are stationed in some sordid barracks in the middle of England in the middle of a rainy winter, with horrible food, broken windows and slack soldiers. He and the new colonel do not get on one little bit and his subtle insubordination brings down extra work and duties on his company, to the chiding of the regimental sergeant major.
The general crappiness of Ryder’s existence is crystallised in the person of Hooper (no first name is ever given), ‘a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent’. Hooper’s long hair, failure to shave and general slovenliness drive the colonel mad but Ryder grudgingly likes him because he sums up Ryder’s own disaffection with the army and its ways.
Ryder’s regiment are ordered to pack up and leave the barracks for new accommodation, a process which involves an enormous amount of fuss and bother and rules and shouting and loading up numerous lorries which pull out under cover of dark and drive miles through narrow lanes (no motorways and well-lit dual carriageways back in those days).
They eventually turn through the gates of some country house and drive up the drive and park alongside other lorries at a joining of the ways. It is only when someone casually mentions the name that, with a shock, Ryder realises this is Brideshead House, a place which meant so much to him in times past. And with that, the screen shimmers and we are transported back precisely twenty years to Ryder’s happy days as an innocent undergraduate at Oxford University.
Part one: Et in arcadia ego
Oxford 1923, giddy undergraduates living the high life. Charles Ryder is 19 and an undergraduate at (an unnamed) college and it is the heady celebrations of Eights Week. Ryder’s shy, secretive father had been to Oxford but in this as so much else slyly, and slightly maliciously gave him little preparation (‘Then, as always, he eschewed serious conversation with me’). It was a cousin, Jasper, who gave him the best practical advice on what to expect and how to survive. The old architecture, the friends, the parties, Waugh vividly conveys the cult of Oxford as a special place, a world apart, a glamorous, romantic fantasy world.
Charles’s father
Charles’s father is a grim figure. His mother went off to serve in the Red Cross during the Great War and was killed. It broke his father who, ever since, has dwelled in his London home, not far from the Edgeware Road, with one servant, Hayter, seeing no-one. Charles’s stays with him during the Oxford vacations are little wars of domestic attrition during which his father feigns indifference, occasionally rising to flickers of malice. His father is a deeply unhappy man and his unhappiness casts a pall over the grim little household and Charles when he’s staying there.
As usual with Waugh, the text is packed with lovely details and interesting reflections on the mood of the post-Great War generation of students, colourful characters and great scenes. But the core of the story is simple: it is a long account of the tangled relationship between the unhappy and self-conscious Charles Ryder with the glamorous but cursed Marchmain family, owners of the grand house at Brideshead, which starts with Charles’s student friendship with Lord Sebastian Flyte, fey, handsome, rich and blithely hedonistic, younger son of of the troubled family.
Oxford
In Charles’s first terms as an undergraduate, Sebastian is already a well known figure. Ryder is shy, a bit embarrassed, moves in much more modest circles, until, late one night, a very drunk Flyte sticks his head through Ryder’s open ground floor window and vomits copiously. Charles has a hard time explaining it to his ‘scout’ (or servant) Lunt, who has to clean it up the next morning. Feeling remorseful the next day, Sebastian invites Charles to lunch by way of apology.
And so begins the friendship which is to shape Ryder’s life. Sebastian’s social set is far above Charles’s, and includes the notable figure of the tall, south American, lisping, highly cosmopolitan and very camp homosexual Anthony Blanche, who is also to recur through the narrative, in that way novels have of introducing half a dozen characters who weave and bob throughout the text and the years to come.
Soliloquies
One aspect of Brideshead’s excess is the enormous great speeches its characters make. Half way through the first part the outrageously camp Anthony Blanche, turning heads wherever he goes with his loud, gay voice, takes Charles for dinner in Thame and talks at him non-stop for 8 pages. When Charles goes to stay with Sebastian at Brideshead during the long (i.e. summer) vacation, Sebastian is given to huge speeches of exposition, about the house and his family.
All this is in stark contrast with the tremendously clipped and abbreviated dialogue found in the previous novels. It makes you reflect that there is a relationship between brevity and wit (as Hamlet pointed out 400 years ago). A lot of the humour of the earlier novels derives from the clipped, snappy dialogue. The wittiness of dry understatement.
Whereas here the characters go on for page after page and this fact is closely related to the general lack of comedy. There is still the general self-regarding drollery of undergraduate humour – Anthony teasing the butch bully boys of the Bullingdon Club from the window of his rooms is very funny, and some of the repartee when Charles and Sebastian are drunk is funny. But by and large the story is darker and takes itself seriously in a way none of his previous books did.
Unhappy families
I never watched Brideshead when it was first broadcast. The clips of it I saw seemed painfully stereotyped, the same characters wearing the same clothes and drawling the same 1920s upper-class mannerisms as in a thousand Agatha Christie dramatisations. TV is all the same. I can’t bear its dull predictability, its glossy sameyness.
And I managed to skip it the last time I read all Waugh’s novels, going straight from Put Out More Flags to the start of the Sword of Honour trilogy. So this is the first time I’ve read Brideshead Revisited and I’m surprised by lots of things about it, but chiefly by how gloomy it is. I thought Sebastian came from this grand, successful, happy aristocratic family. I am very surprised to discover how broken, dysfunctional and miserable it is.
A decade earlier Lord Marchmain had gone off to fight in the Great War and met some French actress and never came back. Lady Marchmain now lives the life of the peripatetic rich, shuttling between the grandest hotels in Europe. In other words the grand house is not the seat of a happy, extended and sociable family but more like a shell which is only episodically inhabited.
The eldest son and heir, ‘Bridey’, as Sebastian calls him, with his ‘Aztec face’, is earnestly Catholic and has toyed with becoming a Jesuit priest, before reluctantly assuming the role of son and heir. Sebastian’s sister, Julia, is the spitting image of him, same intonation, same toss of the head, but harder and more cynical. And then there’s youngest sister, Cordelia, ‘a robust child of ten or eleven’ at a convent school.
With the result that Brideshead is very far from being the happy home and social hive I assumed it to be. It is a gloomy, empty, shuttered place, where the various family members briefly alight, unshutter a few rooms, have a few meals prepared by the discreet servants (led by Wilcox the butler), then disappear off again.
Sebastian’s strongest attachment is to his nanny, Nanny Hawkins. It’s that kind of family, where the son’s deepest attachment isn’t to his remote, absent parents, but to his plain (and rather stupid-sounding) nanny.
The impact of having a first-person singular narrative
A very important thing about the book is that it has a first-person narrator, the first Waugh novel to do so. In all the other stories the beady gaze of a third-person narrator encouraged the tough detachment which suits narratives about multiple characters, often seen from a distance, through crowds, briefly mentioned by other characters: the kaleidoscope affect of his social novels. Waugh’s earlier narratives skip and jump at will from one character or social scene to another with great speed and dexterity.
Adoption of a first person narrator, however, drastically alters that pace and feel, by forcing us into the mind of just the one person for a whopping 300 pages. With this shift, all other aspects of the novel become heavy and long. Instead of jaunty, snappy dialogue, we get these 8-page monologues. Instead of very precise and, more often than not, drolly clipped descriptions, we get Charles’s lugubrious, long-winded and precious reflections. Here he is describing how his long stay at Brideshead that first summer of his friendship with Sebastian, led him to study its interiors and design and changed his taste for good.
Since the days when, as a schoolboy, I used to bicycle round the neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.
This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.
1. Note the obsession with self, with one’s thoughts and impressions and tastes and so on, which is an inevitable part of having a first-person narrator. The third person narrator of Waugh’s earlier novels flitted about at will, often only settling on a scene for a page or less, leaving as soon as it got boring. With Charles we are stuck with page after page of the same thoughts and ideas, beautifully described, but increasingly monotonous.
2. Stylistic indulgence: that final sentence is 78 words long, and is an example of Waugh letting himself go, just one of many passages of stylistic self-indulgence. This kind of thing crops up in the earlier novels, for example in passages describing Hetton, country seat of Tony Last, but previously it was very disciplined, brief, trimmed back, before the narrative reverted to crisp dialogue, and used sparingly. Here, these kinds of indulgent descriptions go on for pages. Middle-aged spread.
Brief summary
Charles meets Sebastian i.e. Sebastian throws up through his window, is carried off unconscious. Next day he gets an invite to lunch with Sebastian by way of apology. Is introduced to Sebastian’s bear, Aloysius, an ironic affection of Sebastian’s. Charles is introduced to the flamboyantly camp Anthony Blanche. A week or so later Sebastian borrows another undergraduate’s car and they drive through the country to his family’s stately home, Brideshead House, which is empty and shuttered, except for Nanny Hawkins in her attic servant’s room.
The long vacation i.e. summer holiday: Charles returns to his father’s grim joyless house in London with its view ‘across the grimy gardens and irregular backs of Bayswater, at the jumble of soil pipes and fire-escapes and protuberant little conservatories’.
Then he gets a telegram from Sebastian saying he’s had an accident and needs looking after, so Charles joyfully packs a bag and catches a train to the country station nearest Brideshead. Here he is collected by Sebastian’s sister, Julia, and for the first time gets her measure, sees she is a female equivalent of Sebastian, only much tougher.
It turns out Sebastian fractured a tiny bone on his foot having a hissy fit during a croquet game. He is in a wheelchair. Julia happily hands over responsibility for caring for him to Charles and drives off. Charles and Sebastian spend an idyllic month sunbathing or exploring the architectural riches of the house. Charles, we discover, is an amateur artist and sketches the main fountain and other features and even starts decorating one of the rooms with painted panels.
This idyll is interrupted when Sebastian is invited by his father to his place in Venice. Venice. Yes, Venice. Home of artistic and social snobbery. ‘You simply must see the Tintorettos in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, they are so much more subtle and spiritual than his fresco in San Giorgio, don’t you think, dahling?’ And ‘We have been invited to the Corombona palace for a party; one simply must see the Corombona palace lit up for the ball, there’s nothing quite like it, is there dahling?’ All laid on with a trowel.
Charles is introduced to Lord Marchmain who is tall and Byronic and detached, carefully playing a part. And to his ‘mistress’, Cara, in the event, after all Charles’s nineteen-year-old fantasies, just a middle-aged woman like any other:
She was not a voluptuous Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a ‘little bit of fluff’; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met.
They go to the finest restaurants, eat the finest food, drink the finest wine, are invited to the finest parties, visit the finest churches and see the finest art because they are the finest people. It was about this point that I began to dislike the book and its characters and began to hope that bad things were in store for them, as there so often are in Waugh novels.
It’s almost as if Waugh himself shared this dislike which is crystallised when Cara very frankly tells young Charles that the Marchmain family hate each other, taking their lead from Lord Marchmain’s furious hatred of his wife:
‘He hates her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so calm and English — the milord, rather blasé, all passion dead, wishing to be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look after that one thing that no man can do for himself. My friend, he is a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too.’
Cara explains that all the roles for a man are filled in Sebastian’s family: his father is a Byronic hero-cum-Lothario, his elder brother a solid chap but also a closet religious fanatic. In a sense all there is left for Sebastian is to be the baby of the family, pretending to talk to his teddy bear.
Oh and Cara for the first time sounds the theme of concern that Sebastian might become a serious alcoholic; she’s seen the way he drinks, obsessively, compulsively.
Holiday in Venice over, Charles and Sebastian return to Oxford for the first term of their second year. (There were and still are three terms at the University of Oxford: Michaelmas – October to December; Hilary – January to March; Trinity – April to June. Note that each term lasts precisely 8 weeks and, since 3 times 8 makes 24, this means that if you attend Oxford University you actually spend less than half the year actually there. You can stay in college rooms or rented accommodation before or after the term dates, and there are social events a bit before and a bit after, but essentially an Oxford education takes up less than half of each of its calendar years.)
The find that Anthony Blanche has left the university (the correct terminology is ‘has gone down’). Sebastian drolly tells us: ‘Apparently he’s taken a flat in Munich – he has formed an attachment to a policeman there’. And it turns out Anthony was the centre of a circle of loud hedonists who, without him, break up into ‘a bare dozen lethargic, adolescent Englishmen’.
Charles had gone into debt in his first year and been forced to grovel to his distant father for money, something he determines to avoid in his second year, and so he lives more sensibly, buys sensible clothes, the kind you would wear for a country house party, takes his degree subject (History, like Waugh’s) fairly seriously, even attends a few lectures! He writes his two essays a week and signs up for an extra-curricular course in life drawing at the Ruskin School of Art (fancying himself, as mentioned above, as an artist). Sebastian, meanwhile, feels alone and alienated. They take to shunning their colleges and hanging out in low pubs in town.
One day Julia arrives en route back to London from a country house party, driven by a dashing 30-year-old Canadian Great War veteran named Rex Mottram. A few days later Rex invites them to a charity ball in London, along with Sebastian’s boyhood chum, Boy Mulcaster. They stay at the Marchmain family’s London house, which is inventively named Marchmain House.
The three of them get rat-arsed drunk and slip out of the charity party and off to a seedy nightclub-cum-brothel which Boy Mulcaster claims to know about. It is the Old Hundredth at 100 Sink Street, which some readers may remember is where Jock takes Tony Last to pick up a tart who they can pay to pretend to spend a dirty weekend in Brighton with him, in order to provide evidence for the divorce case, in A Handful of Dust.
Anyway, they get even more drunk at the club and pick up two ugly tarts, but Sebastian insists on driving back to Marchmain House (it only appears to be a few hundred yards away, down Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly). Unfortunately, Sebastian manages to do half the distance on the wrong side of the road before pulling up right across the road to let one of the girls out. This is when the police arrest them.
They are astonished to be actually arrested and thrown into some cells, where Sebastian and Boy kick up a fuss but Charles, being the moderately sensible one, gets a message out to Rex Mottram. Rex thoroughly enjoys visiting them in the cells and playing the part of older, more responsible friend. He very smoothly chats up the police and the authorities, gets them released, handles their court appearance, provide lawyers, deals with the press, and then with their college authorities back at Oxford. Quite the adventure!
The last few chapters of Part One describe Sebastian’s decline into depressed alcoholism.
Part two: Brideshead deserted
The end of their undergraduate degrees. Sebastian disgraces himself for the third time (the first was getting arrested, the second appearing drunk in front of the whole family before dinner) when he’s found at 1am wandering drunk as a skunk round Christ Church’s main quadrangle.
He is ‘rusticated’ (i.e. expelled) for a term and only lobbying by Lady Marchmain and a friendly don she cultivates named Mr Samgress ensure that he will be allowed to return, but only if he goes and stays with the respectable Catholic, Monsignor Bell which, predictably, Sebastian refuses to do.
I began to realise the novel was going to be about the decline and fall of this lovely pretty boy whose decline into alcoholism would be a symbol of the sad degrading of undergraduate innocence.
In the interim i.e. while he is forbidden to attend the autumn term, it is decided that Sebastian will be taken under the wing of this affable and obsequious don, Mr Samgrass, who will take him on a tour of the sites and sights of the Levant i.e. Turkey.
For his part, Charles realises he’s come to dislike Oxford and asks his father if he can leave without a degree and enrol in art school. His cold and indifferent father is delighted at his leaving the city of dreaming spires but predictably poo-poohs his chances of a career in art: ‘Do what you want, son.’ So Charles goes to art school in Paris.
Worth pointing out that Charles never seems to me to be a believable artist. For a start he is snootily dismissive of all modern art, reassuring young Cordelia that modern art ‘is all bosh’ (p.147).
Back from Paris at Christmas, Charles is invited to Brideshead and so goes for the traditional family time. Mr Samgrass gives a dull lantern lecture about his and Sebastian’s trip around Anatolia but the only thing on everyone’s mind is Sebastian’s further decline into alcoholism. Sebastian now smuggles whiskey up into his room, is tipsy all afternoon and offensively drunk at dinner time. The drinks tray which used to be on the sideboard is removed at Lady Marchmain’s orders. The butler, Wilcox, needs Lady M’s approval before bringing Sebastian the champagne he orders.
When Lady Marchmain announces she is too tired to go to Chapel and Lord Brideshead announces he will be riding to hounds tomorrow, breaking in Julia’s new horse, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the colossal, thick-headed, philistine boredom of these people’s lives. None of them appear to do anything productive at all except eat and bitch about each other.
Sebastian is now an alcoholic. The family have cut off his bank account, so he’s resorted to pawning his watch and cigarette holder for money for booze. Charles visits Sebastian in his room and remonstrates with him, as he sits numbly by the blazing fire. But it’s the same old argument: Sebastian’s dislike of his family, his wish to be left alone, has hardened into this escape into alcohol. Their attempt to deprive him of drink has come to stand for their attempts to stifle every aspect of his life.
So Sebastian surprises the family by saying he’d like to go hunting tomorrow. Maybe the fresh air and exercise will do him good, his mother says, hopefully. But naively. Sebastian lets on to Charles that his plan is to break away from the hunt as soon as possible and spend the day drinking in a nice quiet pub. He asks Charles for some cash to buy drinks and Charles loyally gives him two pounds.
(He also shares the big secret of the so-called Grand Tour he did with Mr Samgress, namely that he did a bunk as soon as he could, bumping into Anthony Blanche of all people and staying with his and his ‘Jew boy’ [Sebastian’s words] boyfriend. Blanche negotiated a deal with Mr Samgress, that the latter would continue with his tour, sending letters back to Lady Marchmain assuring her all was well, while splitting the money for the trip with Sebastian and letting him go his way, until they were reunited to return to England for Christmas. Now Charles realises why Samgress looked so damn nervous throughout his lecture and every conversation about the trip: he was lying through his teeth.)
So next morning comes and Sebastian is up and joins the merry throng in the stables and sets off on horseback, but as the pack breaks up makes his way to a remote country hotel bar. From where he has to be collected, blind drunk. That evening the family barely make it through an embarrassed dinner.
Next morning Charles bluntly asks Sebastian if he still wants him to stay and Sebastian bluntly says no. So Charles packs his things and prepares to leave. He goes to say goodbye to his hostess, Lady Marchmain, who bluntly asks if he gave Sebastian the money he used to get smashed the day before. Charles immediately admits it. Lady Marchmain takes an unusually high-handed line and says she is astonished at such wickedness. They all thought he was their friend. What on earth possessed him to do something so wicked, etc? Charles reflects it was very like being expelled from school, and suddenly wonders what he’s doing there.
As the car drives him away from the house Charles is only too glad to wash his hands of the whole silly family. Good riddance. He’s had enough. He returns to Paris, to his nice little apartment overlooking the Seine, to art school. This was Christmas 1924 going into the new year of 1925.
Rex in Paris
Only the Marchmains haven’t finished with him. Next thing he knows Rex Mottram is knocking on the door of his Paris flat. Seems he persuaded the family to let him take Sebastian abroad, to Switzerland, to a doctor who runs a clinic for alcoholics (‘Dr Borethus at Zurich.’). But, stopping over in Paris, Rex made the mistake of going to a club where he won a fortune at cards, coming home late at night, cheerfully telling Sebastian. In the morning Sebastian was gone and so were Rex’s winnings, a cool £300.
It’s infuriating for Rex because, as he explains to Charles over dinner at ‘a little place Charles knows’, he is far advanced in his campaign to marry Lady Julia. With disarming and rather repellent candour Rex explains how he has wormed his way into London’s high society by becoming Lady Brenda Champion’s lover, hence golf with the Prime Minister, influential friends in the City and so on. But having conquered that world, he now needs to mate, to make a permanent connection, and obtain the classiest dame at the cheapest price (remember Rex is a Canadian and lives for The Deal [I wonder why Waugh didn’t make him the more obviously mercenary nationality of American]).
Rex and Julia
All of Part Two, chapter two is devoted to a long exposition of Rex’s efforts to woo Lady Julia, starting with her coming out parties as a debutante in the 1924 season, through his slow patient wooing, including reassuring the family and Lady Marchmain of his good intentions, while carrying on a similar campaign to win over Julia’s absent father, residing in Monte Carlo.
Things are well advanced, and Rex is even prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and convert to Catholicism (though it means nothing whatsoever to him, to the comic dismay of his catechist, Father Mowbray). The church is booked, the bridesmaids have been chosen and the family are reviewing the guest list when Bridey walks into the living room at Brideshead and delivers a bombshell: Rex is already married, to a woman back in Canada in 1915.
Rex says he divorced her. Yes but in the Catholic faith you cannot divorce your partner, and you certainly can’t marry someone who has been married before. Rex doesn’t get this and thinks he can just throw money at the problem. In a rational world he would be able to, but these people are Catholics and so live their lives via a matrix of life-denying rules and obligations.
Julia insists she wants to marry Rex but it simply can’t be done in the Catholic faith, so they settle on a compromise, to marry in a hurry in an out of the way Protestant chapel with a handful of witnesses. It is exactly the opposite of the grand society wedding both of them wanted, it is a huge disappointment to their family, it is a scandal to all their Catholic friends, all the guests have to be disinvited, all the gifts have to be returned, it is a shamble all round, and gets Julia and Rex’s married life off to a miserable start from which it never recovers. Yay for Catholicism.
Lady Teresa a good and saintly woman and yet everything bad happens to her. She had to watch her handsome husband become an alcoholic and then an adulterer. She had to watch her beautiful son become another alcoholic. Now she has to watch her daughter apostasise from the Catholic faith in order to have a squalid little hole-in-the-corner wedding to Rex Mottram. Julia on her mother:
‘All through her life Mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved.’ (p.192)
The General Strike
Charles reads about it in the English newspapers in Paris. Very funny how all Rex’s grand plans were foiled by the family’s irrational beliefs.
Next episode is the General Strike of May 1926. Charles and other posh ex-pats genuinely fear that a revolution is breaking out and so he leaves his studies in Paris and returns hot foot to London – only to find everything absolutely as boring as usual, except his friends are now going to jazz clubs and getting drunker than ever.
He is inducted as a special constable and protects a convoy of milk churns, only once getting into a mild dust-up in the Commercial Road. He came from Paris with a colleague in the art world, a Belgian Futurist named Jean de Brissac la Motte. This chap was the only casualty of the General Strike that Charles heard about:
Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week. (p.199)
Very much in the same spirit of absurdity with which he describes the comically inept conflict in Waugh in Abyssinia and Black Mischief.
Anthony Blanche again
But in fact this brief return to London is mostly notable for bumping into the egregious Anthony Blanche in a very sleazy Soho club. Anthony is, of course, full of gossip about Sebastian, to wit, Sebastian came to stay with him in Marseilles, stole and pawned his belongings to keep himself in booze, so Anthony took him away from Europe to Tangiers, where Sebastian appears to have fallen in with some rough trade from the Foreign Legion. Not looking too good for young Seb, is it?
Julia contacts Charles while he’s in London and asks her to come visit Mama in Marchmain House. There Charles learns Lady Marchmain is dying, the docs say she has a few weeks at most. When they arrive Lady M is sleeping so can’t see him, but while he’s there Julia asks, begs, Charles to go to North Africa and rescue Sebastian.
Charles in Casablanca
So Charles finds himself dragged back in. He flies to Casablanca, is briefed by the British Consul who finds ‘young Flyte’ a worry and none too popular with the Moors who are anti-booze. Charles is directed down a warren of dodgy alleyways and comes to a filthy house at the end of a dirty alleyway, to discover Sebastian’s partner or friend, the disreputable German there. The German tells him Sebastian’s in a hospital run by monks, so off Charles goes. At the hospital they tell him Sebastian’s made himself so weak with drink that the slightest infection could carry him off. Sebastian is surprised to see Charles and Charles is distressed to see how poorly Sebastian has become, thin and lined.
He sorts out a deal between the family and a local British bank to supply Sebastian with a regular weekly stipend as long as he’s judged to live regularly, eat regularly and look after himself.
Back in London he discovers Lady Julia has died. In the Paris restaurant Rex had told him the Marchmain family had lived beyond their means ever since the war. Marchmain is hugely in debt. Now Charles learns the family are selling Marchmain House in London which will be turned into a block of flats. Bridey commissions him to paint it before it is demolished and these turn out to be the architectural paintings which launch Charles’s career as an artist.
Part three: A twitch upon the thread
Chapter one
‘I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,’ I said. ‘I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.’
I liked this part best. It seems the least immature and snobbish. It is ten years later. Charles has become a successful architectural painter, had umpteen exhibitions, published best-selling books of paintings of classic English stately homes and winsome cottages. Some six years earlier he married Celia, sister of Boy Mulcaster. Two years ago he discovered she had been unfaithful to him and it turned his heart to stone. He surprised everyone by setting off on a long tour through Mexico and Central America, painting and sketching ancient ruins being reclaimed by the jungle.
That’s all backstory. Part three opens with Charles having completed his South American odyssey and flown to New York to be reunited with his wife before boarding the liner to take them back to Blighty. Celia is bright and super-sociable, organising a farewell party then, as soon as they’re aboard, another party with a huge swan carved of ice in the ship’s main room which is soon packed to bursting with all their guests.
But reunion with Celia just proves to Charles he doesn’t give a damn about her, or the children he’s had with her. His heart is hard. He discovers Julia Mottram née Flyte, Sebastian’s sister is aboard. Realises he hasn’t seen her for ages. She’s invited to the party but doesn’t attend.
At the height of the party the ship begins to heave. Soon it is in the midst of a big Atlantic storm, bucking and rolling for days. Charles’s wife takes to her bed very sick and this gives Charles the opportunity to look up Julia. They walk round the ship in the storm, brave the dining room, talk for hours about their lives and hopes. She describes how her marriage to Rex Mottram became a sham as she slowly realised he was only part of a man, a big Ambition and nothing more. He managed to get her pregnant but the baby was stillborn which cemented their rift.
Julia tells him that since Lady Marchmain’s death and the sale of Marchmain House, her father refused to come back from his Continental dalliances and so she and Rex live in big old Brideshead, along with Bridey who has holed up in a room in the same tower as old Nanny Hawkins and become more and more reclusive. Nobody’s heard from Sebastian in years.
After some shilly-shallying, they try a walk along the ship’s rails but are thrown together by the ship’s roll, with the spray in their hair and suddenly the sun breaking through in glory, she whispers in his ear, yes, she will sleep with him, yes, and leads him below to her cabin where they commit adultery.
Adultery itself is a very boring subject as is the spurious air of tremendous importance it gives its practitioners, who think their little drama is the centre of the world – but I liked the setting of a luxury 1930s liner in a severe storm, that felt novel.
Chapter two
Charles arrives in England and almost immediately has an exhibition in a London gallery. His wife Celia a) knows nothing about the fact he’s fallen in love with Julia b) is his very capable manager; she organises his exhibitions, draws up the guest list, worries about reviewers and sales.
Charles is haughtily contemptuous of the whole circus as he had been of the huge party his wife organised on the ship. That is what makes this third part the most enjoyable, Charles’s withering contempt – for the critics, for the reviewers, for the cognoscenti, for his wife, for the minor royalty who pops in to shake hands, for the insincere snobs his wife has invited to luncheon, and finally, for his wife herself, who he still cordially despises as much as he did when he discovered her infidelity two years earlier.
By the way, Waugh captures the excruciating embarrassment of these kinds of occasions but he in no way at any point persuades us that Charles is an artist. Author and character’s failure to mention any art movements of the day or any living artist convinces the reader that Charles a literary man’s idea of an artist i.e. an observer of people and psychologies and characters and whatnot i.e. a novelist and not an artist at all. The artists I know are obsessed with how things look and light and angles and composition.
At the end of the opening day of his exhibition Charles cries off going down to their country seat (the Old Rectory) or seeing his small children, in preference for going with Julia to Brideshead. At that moment, Celia realises he is leaving her, is in love with Julia.
And he really is in love with her, the night of passion on the transatlantic liner really opened a door into a new world of wonderful love. He waits excitedly at Paddington till she arrives and they hop on the train, enjoying dinner in the dining car. Then a car collects them at the station and drives them to grand old Brideshead where Rex, older and thicker and coarser, is entertaining a gang of his friends in politics and finance, all roaring and shouting over each other. They are discussing the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936 and the British Abdication Crisis of November to December 1936.
Chapter three
It is two years later, 1938, and Charles has moved into Brideshead and is an accepted fixture there. Rex mostly stays up in London, Bridey drops in at mysterious intervals, Charles only sees his wife and children at Christmas of which there have been two since he and Julia became lovers.
At the end of another pleasant day spent trying to paint Julia, Bridey drops by for dinner and drops a bombshell. He is getting married, he will resume his ownership of Brideshead, Rex and Julia will have to move back to London to be nearer Rex’s constituency (he is an MP), Charles also will have to move out.
Bridey makes the insensitive remark that his bride-to-be is devoutly Catholic and so won’t allow a woman in sin to inhabit the same building. That would be Julia, living in sin with Charles. Julia bursts into tears and runs out onto the terrace where Charles goes to comfort her, which leads into a great long incoherent speech about Catholicism and sin she delivers, written in a completely different style from anything else in the book, and which is, apparently, a highpoint of the novel for many people. It’s her own acknowledgment of the Catholic faith and theology she has spent her entire lifetime running away from.
Chapter four
The details of the divorces. Charles divorces Celia. She retains the Old Rectory and the children. Rex asks Charles to ask Julia not to divorce him, hasn’t he been reasonable, he hasn’t minded his wife having an affair, he’s had a few of his own, but a divorce is different, bad for the reputation, old boy. But she persists. Lawyers, depositions, witness statements, accountants, settlements, properties.
Cordelia turns up. When Charles last saw her she was a religiose 15-year-old heavily influenced by the nuns of her convent education. 14 years later we learn that she packed all that religious stuff in and went off to serve in a hospital throughout the Spanish war. Charles is shocked to see she is so plain as to be ugly, blunt, to the point, efficient.
She tells a long story about how she heard Sebastian was in Tunis and went to see him. He really is an impoverished wreck of a man now. He had taken his German, Kurt, to Greece where he began to get better. But then got in a fight and thrown in prison which is where the Nazi authorities heard about him and had him repatriated back to Germany. Sebastian travelled to Germany to find him and took ages to track him down only to find he had become a propaganda-spewing Nazi. He refused to recognise Sebastian, but the latter’s doggedness eventually broke him down and, finally, the pair planned to escape back to Africa, but the authorities realised Kurt was about to defect so threw him into concentration camp. It was a long time before Sebastian learned he hanged himself there, and made his way back to North Africa.
When Cordelia arrived he was in absolute poverty and pestering a fellowship of monks to be sent to Central Africa as a missionary. Cordelia discovers that everyone who meets this ravaged shambles of a man is moved by him and convinced of his beatitude. He’ll become a poor servant of the brothers. Everyone thinks he is very close to God. Charles can’t see it. Cordelia patronise him. It’s because he’s not a Catholic. Catholics are special people. They know God. Sometimes it takes great suffering, oh me, oh my, tremendous suffering. But then one comes out of it with a greater sense of one’s faith. Doesn’t one?
Catholicism, in this guise, seems to be a way of proclaiming how special one is. Since all these characters are already frightfully special because they come from a special family and went to special schools and have special feelings, being Catholic on top is like being special squared, cubed, special to the nth degree. It’s an accusation often made against Waugh that his Catholicism was just another form of snobbery, only instead of being in with the aristocracy it meant being in with God. The ultimate club.
Of course one doesn’t like to brag or get above one’s station but one is just quietly confident that one knows a bit more about God and life and morality and the purpose of the universe than non-believers possibly can. Poor mites.
Chapter five
Bridey and his new wife were just about to take possession of Brideshead when, to everyone’s surprise, in view of the deteriorating international situation, Lord Marchmain announces he is returning to occupy his ancestral seat. Great fussing among the servants and tenants but it is a cold blustery day when the car draws up and Lord Marchmain emerges a tied, weak old man, who needs help getting out of the car and can only stand with a stick.
Charles and Julia remain with Cordelia, as Lord Marchmain has himself installed on the ground floor, in the old ‘Chinese room’. He wants them to be around him at all times, he is scared of being alone, he knows he is dying.
He candidly announces he has taken violently against Bridey’s new wife, a middle-aged divorcee named Beryl Muspratt, bourgeois wife of the deceased Admiral Muspratt. Over and over Marchmain reverts to the subject of the ghastly Beryl and tells the others he will not let her occupy the same rooms and role as his beloved wife and his mother before her. She is coarse and vulgar. Why, he’d rather gift the house to Julia and Julia, later, tells Charles she would love to inherit it, own it, and run it. And this opens up for Charles the possibility of becoming the man, the effective owner of Brideshead House!
But Lord Marchmain declines very fast and on the couple of times the lawyers are called to amend his will to let Julia inherit, he’s too ill to see them. He says he has plenty of time and, surprisingly, he has, lingering on into midsummer.
This gives him long enough to be given pages of rambling speech, mixing up the Chinese figures on the painted walls of his bedroom with a sentimentalised vision of Brideshead’s history, the old medieval castle, Agincourt, Nelson, Waterloo etc.
And for Marchmain to become the centre of a bitter tussle among his children and Charles. As Marchmain goes downhill and, eventually, can’t breathe without an oxygen cylinder, Bridey insists he is given the last rights by a local priest. Charles takes the agnostic view that the shock might kill him and recruits his doctor to back him up. Julia is in the middle and the theological argument gets mixed up in the psychology of their relationship.
In a nutshell, right at the very end, the local Irish-Scottish priest is a model of gentleness and restraint and it is Julia who breaks the deadlock by taking the responsibility for taking him into her father’s room. The priest says the last rites over Lord Marchmain’s unmoving body, they all kneel, even Charles who finds himself praying that Marchmain will make a sign and signal that he hears the priest, that he repents his sins, that he lets God into his life.
And there, at the book’s climactic moment, after the priest has finished anointing him, the half paralysed old man does feebly make a sign of the cross. He accepted the grace of God. They are all very moved.
Later that evening he dies. Julia meets Charles at the corner of the stairs and tells him she cannot marry him. He’s seen this coming for months, the rebirth of her Catholic faith. Now she says she cannot set up him as a worldly good in rivalry to God. She must forsake him in order to devote herself to God. She is condemning them both to lonely lives of regret and unhappiness but, hey, that’s what her religion is all about.
Epilogue
Back to the present and Charles is given a tour of the building by the Quartering Officer. He informs Charles that the place belonged to a Lady Julia Marchmain but she vacated it some time ago when the army requisitioned it. She is overseas, working as a nurse with the army (in Palestine, with Cordelia, it turns out).
The point if the tour is to show how the hooligans of the army have treated the house, damaging everywhere, boarding over panelling and paintings, pulling down trees to build an access road, driving three ton lorries into the balustrade, chucking fag ends into the dried up fountain. Yes the place has been trashed and vulgarised. In Charles’s eyes this all represents The Age of Hooper, his sordid, useless, layabout adjutant.
He bumps into a servant he knows who’s taking tea to Nanny Hawkins, the only original member of the crew in the place, and he sits and listens to her for half an hour talking of all the changes. But right at the end, despite the squalor, the emptiness and the echo of past tragedies and unhappinesses, Charles becomes convinced it all has been for something, because despite the house’s decline and fall a small red flame of faith was rekindled, in Julia’s breast and in his own heart. Out of ashes has come God’s grace.
Summary
Although its many flaws are obvious (the over-writing, the sentimentality, the snobbery and elitism, and then the peculiar heartlessness and cynicism) in the end I liked it. It feels significantly more… more serious than the comedies of the 1930s. And although his account of people screwing up their lives in the name of Catholicism reminds me all too much of Catholics I’ve known in real life whose religion made them deeply unhappy…on a fictional level, I was won over by the idea that Waugh’s aim was less a sentimental nostalgia for the heady days of his 20s, but a more hard-headed intention to show the playing out of the Holy Spirit among a cast of characters, centred on an old Catholic family.
I didn’t burst into tears when old Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross but I can understand people who might. I mean I enjoyed the plan, the composition of the thing, its design: in which old Marchmain finally repents for his sins and returns to the church after a quarter century of scorn, how it plays out in the strange haunted holy figure of the beggar-before-God Sebastian; how it plays out in the different characters of Julia and Cordelia who both become nurses and servers. And how it appears to revive his schoolboy faith in Charles himself. Brideshead Revisited is a long book. A lot happens. It has many vividly imagined scenes. it feels much deeper and richer than anything he’d written before. I can see myself becoming a little hooked by it…
Unashamed nostalgia
The old ways are best:
We shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that bathroom–the water-colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair–and contrast it with the uniform, clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.
Julia on Rex Mottram as a type of the ghastly modern world:
‘He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce.’
Silly billy modern world.
Gorging
Waugh freely admits in the 1959 preface that some of the descriptions were written by a man half starved by four years of severe rationing and fantasising about mouth-watering pre-war dinners. Here’s Charles impressing Rex Mottram at a restaurant in Paris:
I remember the dinner well — soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904. (p.166)
And wine:
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.
The British Empire
Lady Julia on Sebastian:
‘Well, I’m fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he’d behave like anybody else. I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know–Papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If Mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?’
Satirical in tone but an enduring reminder that John Bright’s famous remark that the British Empire amounted to ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ was, in fact, true. Failed in London, try in Kenya.
Credit
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1945. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.
‘This is the worst year of my life, and it’s only the seventeenth of January.’
(Private investigator Mick Stranahan, Skin Tight, page 134)
Skin Tight is the third of Carl Hiaasen’s scathing and savagely satirical depictions of the corruption, greed and environmental destruction infesting his home state of Florida. If its predecessor, Double Whammy‘s central subject was the surprising corruption and violence surrounding coarse fishing and its big-stakes competitions, Skin Tight‘s central theme is plastic surgery. But, as usual, from the central topic all kinds of weird, macabre and violent threads spin off in all directions.
Mick Stranahan, Private Investigator, is the tough and capable guy we’re used to in the thriller genre. He has killed 5 men, some in Vietnam (p.21), been married and divorced five times (all to cocktail waitresses, p.90), now lives as an ‘outsider’, on a house on stilts built over the ocean ‘in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville’ (p.11). (It’s worth noting in passing that Skink, Hiaasen’s great recurring character, also served in Vietnam.)
Mick had worked at the State’s Attorney’s office till he went to arrest a notoriously corrupt judge, Raleigh Gomper, who pulled a gun and, in the struggle, Stranahan shot Gomper dead. Though he was exonerated at the trial, shooting dead a judge didn’t sit well with an employee of the State Prosecutor and so Mick was forced to take early retirement. Hence, he is now a part-time private detective, the absolutely classic profession of the thriller genre, most famously embodied in Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlow.
Dr Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Graveline runs a plastic surgery clinic, the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Centre. In fact he himself is an unqualified butcher of a surgeon but is wise enough to concentrate on acting as the avuncular salesman and comforter of the nation’s many misfeatured and malshaped narcissists – taking their money but leaving the actual surgery to a team of four well-paid and infinitely more capable juniors.
The trigger for the plot is Maggie Gonzalez for Maggie knows that four years earlier, on 12 March 1986, Graveline ran a clinic called the Durkos Medical Centre and was giving a routine rhinoplasty (nose job) to a young woman, Victoria Barletta, when he accidentally killed her (p.39).
In a panic, Rudy called his brother, George Graveline, who had a gardening and tree surgeon business, and they disposed of the body in a timber grinder. When her family raised Victoria’s disappearance with the authorities, Rudy and all his staff swore she left the clinic after surgery, went and sat at the local bus stop but then disappeared, presumed kidnapped. To get them to agree to this cover story, he had to pay key members of his staff a hefty bribe. (A year or so later one of the doctors, Dr Kenneth Greer, tumbled to what had happened and started blackmailing Rudy, so Rudy paid for him to be disposed of in a ‘hunting accident’, p.285.)
Back to the present and, after a failed marriage and a series of pathetic failed relationships, Maggie is now broke and decides to cash in on what she knows (p.56). She goes to the New York office of a crime-investigating TV show, hosted by the unbearably preening TV presenter Reynaldo Flemm (who has a kinky penchant for doorstepping criminals and provoking them till he gets beaten up) and his long-suffering, clever and dishy producer, Christina Marks.
(It is typical of the duplicitousness of almost all the characters that we learn, late in the book, that the would-be smooth Hispanic Flemm is in fact really named Raymond Fleming and changed his name and appearance to appear more ethnic and glamorous.) Maggie tells Flemm and Marks her story and promises to repeat it on camera for $5,000.
Then it crosses Maggie’s scheming mind that she can probably have it both ways –getting money from the TV company and blackmailing the doctor – so she phones up Dr Rudy and says she’s scared because a Private Investigator, Mick Stranahan, has come snooping and seems to be about to revive the case. She has Mick’s name and number from back before he retired, was still an active prosecutor, and was briefly involved in the initial investigation. Now she just whistles his name up out of thin air as an entirely fictional threat solely in order to gouge more greenbacks out of Rudy.
Mick knows nothing about any of this but Maggie’s ploy not only persuades Dr Rudy to cough up some more hush money for Maggie but sets him thinking how to eliminate Mick as a threat. And so it is that when the TV people, Flemm and Marks, arrange a meeting with Dr Rudy, telling him they know all about the fatal accident though refusing to reveal their source, Rudy mistakenly believes that their source really is Stranahan (not, as it actually is, Maggie) and that Mick is about to blow the whole story and get him arrested for murder.
Thus it is that, based on this misunderstanding (Maggie’s deception), Rudy decides he has to get rid of Mick and so phones a contact in New Jersey, ‘Curly Eyebrows’. Rudy used to do basic plastic surgery for the Mob up there, nothing too complicated, just nose jobs and tummy tucks for the wives. Now he uses these contacts to hire a Mafia hitman, Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola (p.59).
The novel opens with Mick innocently sitting on the decking of his house out in the bay, watching the boat approaching carrying a guy who we, the readers, know to be this hitman. You don’t get many strangers round these parts so Mick retreats into his house, takes down the stuffed marlin head from the wall and, when the hitman makes his move, standing in the doorway with gun in hand, Mick leaps out and thrusts the marlin’s long frontal spike into the man’s chest, severing his aorta and snapping his spine. Ah. Oh.
All this information is conveyed in the book’s first 30 pages, as a scene-setter or prologue, a kind of powerhouse of information structuring and communication.
Undeterred, Rudy hires a second hitman who will turn out to dominate the novel, a freak called Chemo, 6 feet 9 inches feet tall. Chemo acquired his nickname after suffering a catastrophic accident during a routine electrolysis treatment for a couple of unsightly pores on his nose. The surgeon, Dr Kyle Koppner, had a stroke and swept the electrolysis machine right across Chemo’s face, with the result that it looks like it’s made of Rice Krispies.
He looked like Fred Munster with bulimia. (p.207)
In agony, Chemo killed Koppner on the spot. For added incongruity, Hiaasen gives Chemo (real name Blondell Wayne Tatum, age 38, six foot nine, p.223) a long convoluted backstory which has him orphaned at an early age, raised by the Amish relatives, before he finally rebels and holds up a bank,. However, Chemo then (typically for Hiaasen) discovers he has a talent for local politics, with its combination of intimidation and corruption. But the facial disfigurement and the murder of the doctor abruptly ends his career in politics which, in America, is all about appearance.
The plot ramifies outwards like ripples in a lake. We learn that Gravelines had planned to invest some of his millions in a crooked real estate deal at a property named Old Cypress Towers. When he comes under pressure from – as he incorrectly believes – Mick Stranahan, he lets the crooked authorities who were taking bribes to let the planning permission go ahead, know that he is going to pull out unless something is done about Stranahan.
And so the head of the cabal of crooked local councillors, Roberto Pepsical, goes to see two of the thickest, slimiest cops on the police force, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, and tells them there’s greenbacks in it for them if they can get rid of Stranahan.
Meanwhile, Stranahan, realising someone is out to kill him, calls up his philandering brother-in-law, Kipper Garth (married to Stranahan’s sister, Kate), a supposed lawyer who in fact runs a sort of phone sales operation which chases claims of malpractice or injury and passes them on to reputable lawyers (pages 113 to 114) in what he calls ‘the referral racket’ (p.309).
Stranahan tells Garth that, for once, he’s going to have to prosecute an actual case himself, against Rudy, and hands over files of over a dozen patients of Dr Gravelines who have made various failed attempts to sue him. Pick one and sue him for real, Stranahan tells his brother-in-law, otherwise he’ll tell his wife all about Garth’s numerous infidelities which, with his connections at the Prosecutor’s office, Mick has managed to get documentary evidence about.
The plot then thickens over 400 pages of increasing complications, farcical twists and violent outbursts:
Maggie goes to New York and records a video giving her eye-witness account of the death of Victoria Barletta. Rudy pays Chemo to track her down and kill her but, when he finally confronts her in her New York hotel room, Maggie is so touchingly sympathetic about his face and his crippled hand that they end up becoming an extremely odd item. It helps that she herself has just undergone some plastic surgery with a view to changing her identity, so they can compare scars.
Mick gets to know the TV producer Christina and ends up having an affair with her, showing her the delights of nature, far from the city, making love under the stars on the decking of his house on stilts.
Improbably but comically Rudy Graveline has an affair with a stunningly good-looking model and TV star, Heather Chappell, who insists he operate on her even though her body is absolutely perfect. To get a discount for the operation, Heather lets Rudy screw him every which way in a variety of unexpected locations.
Detective Al García from Dade-Miami Police Department (who Hiaasen fans will recognise from the first two novels) shows up, sympathetic to Stranahan but representing a kind of recurring threat that he (Mick) might be arrested at various points when various congeries of evidence point against him. For example, García doesn’t believe Stranahan’s claim that he has nothing to do with the macabre deaths of the two corrupt cops.
However, Stranahan steals a copy of the video in which Maggie describes the killing of Victoria Barletta and shows it to García who from that point onwards becomes a staunch ally.
In a dramatic scene Mick visits Rudy’s brother, George Graveline, at work as a tree surgeon. His questions rattle George so much that he whacks Stranahan over the head with a mahogany log and starts to feed his unconscious body into the timber shredder. However, García, who is quietly tailing Stranahan, sees this all happen and shoots Graveline, who drops Stranahan and himself falls head-first into the shredder and is blattered all over the place as Mick woozily regains consciousness.
Maggie reveals to Chemo the gravity of Rudy’s crime (murder) emphasising that Rudy is paying him an insultingly small amount. Angered, Chemo uses his garden strimmer on Graveline’s new apple red Jaguar.
Rudy takes a heavy suitcase containing $25,000 to meet the corrupt commissioner Roberto Pepsical in the confessional of a Catholic church but as they kneel, Rudy injects Pepsical with enough potassium to cause a massive heart attack, packs up and discreetly leaves. He is becoming a serial killer.
Meanwhile Kipper Garth had some luck with one of the plaintiffs Mick had turned up, one John Nordstrom who paid Rudy for his wife, Marie, to have a boob job which was so bad the boobs in question became rock hard and one day, during sex, she moved quickly and literally had his eye out, being blind in one eye leading him (Nordstrom) to lose his job as an air traffic controller. Savage comedy.
Garth pops round with the legal papers to see the couple and discovers that John is at work, in his new job as a sports coach. Seeing an opportunity, slimy Garth talks the wife, Marie, into letting him touch her rock hard boobs. He’s in the middle of doing it just when John walks in. John’s new job as as a jai-alai coach and so quick as a flash he fires off a hardball with his wicker-glove which hits Garth at the back of the skull, knocking him unconscious to the floor.
Maggie and Chemo help Rudy sell Reymondo Flemm’s corpse to a man named Kimbler who sells body parts to schools and colleges in Central America.
At some point in all this mayhem Chemo kidnaps Christina the TV producer from her hotel under Rudy’s orders. Rudy gets a messenger to deliver a ransom note to Mick out on his stilt house. However, Mick bites back by kidnapping the actress Heather Chappell who Rudy is boffing and taking her back to his house on the sea, leaving a written note for Rudy and his gang to bring Christina out to the house for a hostage exchange.
And it is this exchange of the two women which forms the climax of the novel: Rudy, Chemo, Maggie and their hostage Christina turn up in a boat at Mick’s stilt house expecting to do a hostage swap for beautiful Heather. Except Heather doesn’t want to go. Rudy had promised he’d give her light plastic surgery all over, had doped her out for a day, covered her in bandages and lied that he’d done the procedures. After kidnapping her, Stranahan removes all the bandages and proves that her ‘boyfriend’ is a liar. So now Heather doesn’t want to go back to Rudy.
Rudy, Christina, Chemo and Maggie clamber aboard Mick’s deck but as she gives him a helping push upwards, Maggie pickpockets from Chemo the keys to her and Chemo’s motel room, where they’ve stashed all the loot they’ve stolen from Rudy, meaning to head back by herself and take it all. When Chemo realises she’s done this he dives on top of her to seriously hurt her but Stranahan knocks him out with the butt of his shotgun.
When Chemo comes round, the boat has left with the women, Christina, Heather and Maggie. It’s just the men in the stilt house, Mick, Chemo and Rudy.
Mich has handcuffed Rudy spreadeagled to his bed. Mick has a cunning plan. He is going to recreate a nosejob on Rudy in order to terrify him into confessing everything, how he killed Victoria Barletta, got rid of the body, paid for a hit on the doctor colleague who was blackmailing him, hired Chemo to kill Mick, and so on.
But as the interrogation reaches its vital moment and as he has a small cold metal chisel stuck up Rudy’s nose as if he really is going to break the bone, unexpectedly Chemo gives it a big whack with a hammer and it goes right up into Rudy’s brain, killing him instantly. Shit. Stranahan had promised García he would hand over the culprit to the murder along with a full confession. Shit. Mick is going to have to come up with a plan B.
In the short concluding chapter Detective Al García is motorboated out to the stilt house by Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, a good guy, where they find Chemo by himself with the corpse of Rudy Graveline. No Mick anywhere. The cops immediately jump to a false conclusion about what must have happened. They mistakenly assume that Chemo lured Rudy out here and subjected him to a torture which went gruesomely wrong. It all fits together. The bad guys are either dead or going to gaol.
When they look for Mick Stranahan there is no sign and his skiff is holed and sunk under the house. Off in the distance, hard to focus on, García thinks he sees a porpoise or giant turtle amid the waves. Couldn’t be a man. Couldn’t be Mick Stranahan swimming in the distance. Nah. He turns back to the murder suspect. It is a happy ending. Sort of.
Gruesome violence
‘It’s like a nightmare of weirdness.’ Al García (p.323)
The book is littered with cruel, grotesque and macabre violent incidents:
Chemo’s face being wrecked by a plastic surgeon having a stroke.
Mick killing the hitman Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola with the spear of a stuffed marlin.
For a spell, Chemo hooks up with Chloe Simpkins Stranahan, one of Mick’s ex-wives. She tells Chemo that when Mick found her shagging one of the many men she was unfaithful with, Mick didn’t beat him up but glued him by the testicles to the bonnet of an Eldorado convertible (p.74).
Chloe eggs Chemo on to burn down Mick’s shack but eventually makes the bad mistake of ridiculing Chemo’s appearance while they’re driving a speedboat through the lagoons, with the result that Chemo chucks the boat’s 30 pound anchor at her, which knocks her straight over the side and down to the bottom of the lagoon, drowning her (p.99).
Mick feeds fish to a huge barracuda which likes to idle in the shade beneath his house on stilts. When Chemo comes to kill him, Mick shoots Chemo backwards off the decking and into the water where Chemo’s splashing attracts the big fish which darts up and bites off Chemo’s hand. Chemo survives and makes it back to civilisation where he goes to see a doctor. They offer him various prosthetic replacements, but Chemo’s preferred option takes across the narrative across a border into Hiaasen bizarro land when Chemo attaches a mini-lawn strimmer, a Weed Whacker, to his stump, powered by a battery tucked under his armpit, and which he uses to devastating effect in the second half of the book.
When the corrupt cops Joe Salazar and John Murdock hire a boat to motor out to Mick’s lake hideaway and bump him off, as ordered by their corrupt superior (in fact Mick is now staying in the rundown cabin of an old buddy, after his own house on stilts has been ransacked), Mick doesn’t wait for a shootout but ties super-strong fishing twine across the narrow entrance to the lagoon front of the house so that the two cops, approaching in a boat at 42 miles per hour, are instantly garroted. Well, one of them is, the other one takes a while to die in agony (chapter 23).
Stranahan goes to see George Graveline to try and get him to talk his brother into laying off the assassination attempts. George makes a bid to strangle Stranahan who punches him under the heart then in the balls, then treads on his neck to calm him down, then kneels down next to him to carry on the conversation. At which point George whacks him with a chunk of mahogany and starts feeding Stranahan’s unconscious body into the timber shredder. At which point, García, who’d accompanied Stranahan to the meeting but stayed in the car, shoots George Graveline who himself falls into the timber shredder and is shredded to a pulp and bone splinters (p.282).
See what I mean by violent and macabre?
But the cherry on the cake is the incident near the end of the novel when Reynaldo Flemm decides to go undercover at Dr Graveline’s clinic in order to get a TV scoop. He checks in under the false name Johnny LeTigre pretending to be a male stripper who needs liposuction and a nose job. The plan is that Flemm’s cameraman, Willie will burst in mid-nose job, toss Reynaldo a microphone and the latter will bombard Graveline with cutting questions about the Victoria Barletta murder and so get a TV exclusive.
But the plan all goes horribly wrong. 1. Instead of doing the nose job first, Graveline decides to do the liposuction, which requires a general anaesthetic so Flemm can neither shout out instructions to his cameraman loitering outside, carry out an interview or anything. 2. Graveline is an unqualified incompetent who barely knows what he’s doing. 3. When Willie finally finds the correct operating theatre and bursts in, distracting Graveline with his bright TV lights and bewildering questions, Graveline is so put off his stroke that he pushes the liposuction tube (the cannula) beyond the narrow band of fat he’s meant to be sucking out and deep into Reynaldo’s gut, sucking out one by one all his vital organs and killing him (chapter 30). Gruesome.
Clothes
There’s something deeply wrong and corrupt about a worldview which happily accepts the most violent incidents, corruption and casual murder, but is obsessed with identifying the exact labels and brands of what people are wearing:
[Flemm] was wearing another pair of khaki Banana Republic trousers and a baggy denim shirt. He smelled like a bucket of Brut. (p.50)
[Tina] wore a baggy Jimmy Buffett T-shirt over a cranberry bikini bottom. (p.86)
[Stranahan] was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a khaki short-sleeved shirt, open to the chest. (p.87)
[Chloe] was wearing a ridiculous white sailor’s suit from Lord and Taylor’s. (p.94)
[Al García]’s J.C. Penney coat jacket was slung over one arm, and his shiny necktie was loosened half-way down his chest. (p.101)
Kipper Garth wore grey European-cut slacks, a silk paisley necktie and a bone-coloured shirt, the French cuffs rolled up to his elbows. (p.114)
Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. (p.132)
He saw a god-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safaris shorts hop off the shrimp boat… (p.149)
The man wore blue jeans, boots and a flannel shirt with the left sleeve cut away. (p.167)
Chemo was dressed in a tan safari outfit… (p.183)
She wore a red windbreaker, baggy knit pants, and high-top tennis shoes. (p.227)
Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy grey workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan worse jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. (p.248)
Rudy Graveline was wearing a tan sports jacket and dark, loose-fitting pants and a brown striped necktie (p.278).
[Marie Nordstrom] wore electric-blue Lycra body tights, and her ash-blond hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. (p.310)
[Rudy] was wearing Topsiders, tan cotton pants, and a Bean crewneck pullover. (p.351)
[Stranahan] wore blue jeans, deck shoes, a pale yellow cotton shirt and a poplin windbreaker. (p.353)
Odd that so many modern American writers are so obsessively precise about clothes and brands and so utterly indifferent to the value of human life.
Anti-Florida
Amazing that a man with such a bilious view of his own home state could keep a job on its premiere newspaper and in some sense become its literary representative, despite the outrageous examples of corruption he chronicles in his novels, and the throwaway references to the ubiquity of corruption and graft at every level of Florida life.
One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption; there was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you. (p.108)
When some of his maltreated patients organise a suit against Graveline, he simply buys the hearing officer a shiny new Volvo station wagon and all charges are dropped. Not only that, but:
The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s licence and sealed all the records from the public and the press – thus honouring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are his patients. (p.109)
All the commissioners have off-the-record accounts in the Cayman Islands to stash the earnings they make through corruption and graft (p.110).
Commissioner Roberto Pepsical… found himself surrounded by ruthless and untrustworthy people – nobody played a straight game any more. In Miami corruption had become a sport for the masses. (p.228)
Miami, home of corruption and coke dealers.
Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a tribute to local prosperity but Stranahan recognised it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. (p.316)
And crooked lawyers:
‘But lawyers aren’t supposed to solicit.’
‘Al, this is Miami.’ (p.324)
And all-purpose criminals:
‘Neighbourhoods like this are hard to find, Mick. You know, we’ve only been burglarised twice in four years. That’s not bad for Miami.’ (p. 322)
Hiaasen does have a few good characters: Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, in his boat, warns him if trouble is coming. The old black guy, Cartwright, who Stranahan helped in a battle with crooked property developers back in the day (is there any other kind?).
And he creates a heavily symbolic figure, Timmy Gavigan, a retired cop who is lying in a hospital bed far gone with terminal cancer. He’s an old friend of Stranahan’s who visits him several times during the course of the novel, as does the TV producer Christina Marks as part of her investigations.
Gavigan is pretty obviously designed as a symbol of old-school Integrity and so it is no accident that he’s wasting away and dying, symbol of an old world of integrity and decency being drowned in a sea of scumbags.
There’s a scene where Gavigan is in bed, barely able to breathe, being visited by compassionate Christina, when the two piggish and corrupt cops, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, barge in and try to bully Gavigan into incriminating Stranahan, while she tries to moderate their behaviour. Worthy old symbol of honour harassed to the grave by swinish corruption.
Against this one good man is set a panorama of everyday corruption at every level and in every area of Florida life. And the terrible thing about corruption is it’s so dynamic, it has so much energy.
The county had hired [George Graveline, Rudy’s tree-trimming brother] to rip out the old trees to make space for some tennis courts. Before long a restaurant would spring up next to the tennis courts and, after that, a major resort hotel. The people who would run the restaurant and the hotel would receive the use of the public property for practically nothing, thanks to their pals on the county commission. In return, the commissioners would receive a certain secret percentage of the refreshment concessions. And the voters would have brand-new tennis courts, whether they wanted them or not. (p.275)
Anti-American
From time to time, Hiaasen suggests it’s not just Florida, that the vista of unreasoned violence and chaos which he so furiously depicts extends out across the entire United States. For example, he jokily refers to the occurrence of the ‘regular’ mass shooting in Oklahoma as if mass shootings are now a boringly familiar occurrence; or jokes that a shootout and fight at Chemo’s New York apartment (when Chemo finds Stranahan has broken in and is going through his things) barely even makes the papers in that ultra-violent city (p.223).
There are numerous other minor, casual incidents which highlight the casual sexism, violence and cynicism of American culture. At the start of the novel Mick boats it back to the house on stilts to discover that while he’s away a speedboat of young people has deposited their young women to sunbathe (nude) on his decking while the guys goof around and waterski on the boat.
Mick is polite to the women, who quickly cover up and is only a little disconcerted when one of them, Tina, strolls into his shack and asks him to assess her naked body. Why? Because she wants to have plastic surgery to perfect it.
But the point of the story is that when the young men return to the shack, Tina’s boyfriend, Richie, is jealous when he sees her walking out of the shack naked and accompanied by Mick. Mick courteously ferries the girls out to their boyfriends’ boat and has turned and is making away, when he hears and sees Tina’s boyfriend start badmouthing her and then smacking her. Mick turns his skiff round, jumps onto the speedboat and beats the crap out of the boyfriend.
I take the point that Mick is a beacon of chivalry in a sleazy shitty world but… not really. He himself is liable to violent rages and violent attacks. Everyone is. It comes over as a very, very violent place.
Even without the corruption, violence and killing, Hiaasen often appears to simply not like Americans, especially the chavvy scum he sees visiting the Sunshine State.
[Maggie and Chemo] got in line at the Pan Am counter, surrounded by a typical Miami-bound contingent – old geezers with tubas for sinuses; shiny young hustlers in thin gold chains; huge hollow-eyes families that looked like they’d staggered out of a Sally Struthers telethon. (p.221)
Bands
An entertainingly comic thread running through the book is the way that Chemo, in between his jaunts as a hit man, has a crappy job as a bouncer at a low-rent venue called the Gay Bidet, which hosts a succession of ‘punk’ rock bands, such as the Fudge Packers (p.163), Cathy and the Catheters, Queen of Slut Rock (p.236) or the Fabulous Foreskins (p.302).
I found these band names, and the fights which generally break out at the gigs between neo-Nazis and rednecks or rival gangs of skinheads, much more realistic and fun than any of the laboured, would-be ‘cool’ band references in the rock-obsessed novels of William Gibson.
Mind you, Hiaasen’s rock references are nearly as dated as Gibson’s. As a test to see whether they’re going to be compatible, Stranahan routinely asks his girlfriends to name the Beatles. Most fail. After sleeping with young Tina (who he rescued from her violent boyfriend and who, later, comes back to see him alone) a couple of times, Mick realises she’s far too young for him and, when she fails to name all the members of the Beatles, gives that as a reason for dumping her.
Whereas when he eases into an affair with the investigative TV producer, Christina Marks, taking her nude swimming at midnight etc, the fact that she not only names all four members of the Beatles but throws in early member Pete Best, jokily cements the affair (p.248). 1989 it was published, nearly 20 years after the Beatles split up. Hiaasen comes over as a textbook example of ageing Dad Rock.
Human relationships
I know it’s meant to be grotesquely extreme and fiercely satirical, but Hiaasen’s novels confirm the sense I get whenever I watch modern American TV or read about American novels or movies, which is that – Americans have stopped being able to relate to each other as decent human beings.
Everyone in Hiaasen’s fiction uses everyone else instrumentally, as tools to an end: the bad guys egregiously so, but even the good guys like Brian Keyes or R.J. Decker (in the previous two novels) or Mick Stranahan in this one, they also manipulate and use the other human beings around them, lying, deceiving and manipulating as necessary to achieve their goals.
There’s no-one in these novels who isn’t a crook or a user, in the sense of someone who takes advantage of or exploits others. The relentlessly bilious cynicism can, eventually, become a little wearing. And so, despite the presence of many comical and farcical moments, the book somehow lacks the joi de satiriser of the first two novels, the sprezzatura. The portrait of a society mired in corruption and casual violence is too persuasive and too depressing.
The name’s Bond
In my reviews of William Gibson’s novels I pointed out the slight but detectable ‘anxiety of influence’ they evince, the text’s feeling that, at key moments, it is veering very close to James Bond territory (Machiavellian mastermind, handsome omni-competent hero, dishy woman, state-of-the-art gadgets) and how Gibson tries to address and defuse the perception with a couple of jokey references to Bond movies or villains.
Interestingly, Hiaasen does the same. Sooner or later one or other of the characters realises the all-action adventure they’re in is coming perilously close to Bond territory, and Hiaasen anticipates the reader twigging this by making his own jokey reference. In the previous novel the slippery vamp, Lanie, tells the hero that her favourite Bond is Sean Connery. Here, the reference comes when Mick’s ex-wife Chloe is goading Chemo:
‘Have you got your plan?’ Chloe asked
‘The less you know, the better.’
‘Oh, pardon me,’ she said caustically. ‘Pardon me, Mr James Fucking Bond.’ (p.95)
Soon afterwards Chemo chucks the anchor at Chloe which drags her to the bottom of the lagoon and drowns her. Don’t mention Bond. That said the book contains more references to the TV series Miami Vice which was undergoing an explosion of popularity at the time and, maybe, threatened to steal Hiaasen’s thunder. In America, competition, for everything, is always fierce (pages 307, 348).
Recurring characters
Mick Stranahan returns to feature in Hiaasen’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip.
Chemo returns in the 2010 novel, Star Island.
Credit
Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1989. All references are to the 1991 Pan paperback edition.
The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable.
(Borges’s 1954 preface to A Universal History of Infamy)
Long ago
One thinks of Borges as a modern classic so it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn just how long ago he was writing. Born in 1899, Borges published his first book in 1923 and wrote steadily for the next 60 years (he died in 1986). In his long life he published an enormous number of volumes (‘In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies’) and the Wikipedia bibliography lists 66 volumes of prose, poetry and essays, in total.
Which makes it all the more odd or unfair that he is still best known in the English-speaking world for more or less one volume, Labyrinths, and a handful of lesser works. Borges had published the following before we get to the book under review:
Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) poetry
Inquisiciones (1925) essays
Luna de Enfrente (1925) poetry
El tamaño de mi esperanza (1925) essays
El idioma de los argentinos (1928) essays
Cuaderno San Martín (1929) poetry
Evaristo Carriego (1930) essays
Discusión (1932) essays
You’d expect poetry from a starter author, but it’s notable that so many of these early volumes contain essays, in other words short prose explorations of ideas – about other authors, historical events or topics etc. It was for his short essays on imaginary or fantastical subjects that he was to become famous and A Universal History of Infamy, more or less the earliest work by Borges you can read in English translation, gives an indication why.
A Universal History of Infamy
A Universal History of Infamy is not, in fact, a universal history of infamy or anything like that ambitious. In reality it is much smaller in scope, and consists of:
seven ‘biographical essays’ – witty, ironic accounts of legendary bad guys and women from history whose stories Borges has cherry picked from his highly eclectic reading
one relatively straightforward short piece of fiction
eight summaries of stories or anecdotes he had come across in arcane sources and which attracted Borges for their fantastical or humorous aspects
Most of the essays had been published individually in the Argentine newspaper Crítica between 1933 and 1934. The 1934 collection was revised and three new stories added in the 1954 edition. There are two English translations of the book. The one I own dates from 1972 and was translated by Borges’s long-standing English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni. The 2004 English edition gives the stories slightly different titles.
The title A Universal History of Infamy derives from the fact that the seven biographical essays are fictionalised accounts of real-life criminals. The textual sources for each biography are listed at the end of the book: for example, the essay about the Widow Ching cites a 1932 History of Piracy as its source, the essay on Monk Eastman cites Herbert Asbury’s 1928 history of The Gangs of New York, the essay about Lazarus Morell cites Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, the one about Tom Castro cites the Encyclopedia Britannica as its source, and so on.
So the sources are a) not particularly recondite and b) they were often fairly recent to Borges’s time of writing, in some cases published only a year or so before Borges wrote his potted summaries.
That said, Borges treats his sources very freely, changing dates, incidents and even names as he fancied to make his fantasy biographies deliberately fanciful and untrustworthy.
Part 1. Seven infamy stories
So these are stories Borges found in other books during his wide and eclectic reading and which attracted him for their elements of the macabre or gruesome, and which he chose to retell, dropping or adding details as he saw fit.
The Dread Redeemer
Lazarus Morell is poor white trash who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi and as an adult comes to be a leader of crooks who devise the following scam: they persuade gullible black slaves to run away from their owners and allow themselves to be sold on by the Morell gang who promise to liberate them and share the proceeds of this sale. But they don’t. They have ‘liberated’ some 70 slaves in this manner until the gang is joined by Virgil Stewart, famous for his cruelty, who promptly betrays them to the authorities. Morell goes into hiding in a boarding house, then, after 5 days, shaves off his beard and makes an escape to round up what remains of his gang and try to create a mass uprising of the southern slaves and lead a takeover of the city of New Orleans. Instead he dies of a lung ailment in Natchez hospital in January 1835 under an assumed name.
This story is quite florid enough to satisfy anyone’s taste for the lurid and melodramatic. What tames and raises it from being a shilling shocker is Borges’s dry wit and irony.
Morell leading rebellions of blacks who dreamed of lynching him; Morell lynched by armies of blacks he dreamed of leading – it hurts me to confess that Mississippi history took advantage of neither of these splendid opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (or poetic symmetry), did the river of his crimes become his grave.
We expected a grand finale? Sorry folks.
If Borges’s narrative ends playfully, it opens even more so, with Borges referencing Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas. Why? Because it was de las Casas who (apparently) had the bright idea of importing African slaves to work the silver mines of the newly discovered New World. Borges phrases this with characteristic irony (or is it facetiousness?)
In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines.
That is an example of what you could call literal facetiousness, the repetition of the initial heartless description being so unexpected as to be funny. But it then expands into a more grandiose type of joke as Borges goes on to deliver an unexpected perspective on the results of de las Casas’ brainwave i.e. the vast and numerous consequences of the invention of African slavery, and proceeds to a mock encyclopedic list of some of its untold consequences, namely:
W. C. Handy’s blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy; King Vidor’s impetuous film Hallelujah; the lusty bayonet charge led by the Argentine captain Miguel Soler, at the head of his famous regiment of ‘Mulattoes and Blacks’, in the Uruguayan battle of Cerrito; the Negro killed by Martín Fierro; the deplorable Cuban rumba ‘The Peanut Vender’; the arrested, dungeon-ridden Napoleonism of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the cross and the snake of Haitian voodoo rites and the blood of goats whose throats were slit by the papaloi’s machete; the habanera, mother of the tango; another old Negro dance, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the candombe.
The intellectual pleasure derives from the combination of mock scholarliness with the pleasing randomness of the examples selected. And not only surreal but – and this is an important part of Borges’s appeal – conveying an enormous sense of spaciousness; the sense of an enormously well-read mind, overflowing with wonderful facts and references, from the obvious to the fantastically recondite and abstruse. And that by reading along with Borges, we too, become as fantastically learned and knowledgeable as him.
If you like this kind of subject matter, and the dry ironical tone, then the world of unexpected and outré references is like a door opening in your mind, hundreds of doors, revealing all kinds of wonderful, mind and spirit enhancing vistas and possibilities.
Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter
Arthur Orton was born in Wapping in 1834. He ran away to sea and resurfaced decades later in Sydney Australia where he had taken the name Tom Castro. Here he became friendly with a stately, clever black man, Ebenezer Bogle and the two set up as con-men. In 1854 a British steamer sank in the Atlantic and one of the passengers lost was slender, elegant Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to one of the greatest Roman Catholic families in England. His mother, Lady Tichborne, refused to believe he was dead and advertised widely throughout the colonies for his return. With wild and hilarious improbability Orton and Bogle decide to reply to her and claim that obese illiterate Tom Castro is in fact her slender, elegant aristocratic son…after some years of living in Australia!
Most of this is comic but Borges milks it for further comic ideas, such as the notion that it was the very outrageousness of the entire idea which gave Bogle and Orton confidence; the more ridiculous it seemed, the more emboldened they were to tough it out in the light of lawyers and Lady Tichborne’s heirs who violently rejected their claim. Very funny is the notion that so mad is Lady Tichborne to have her son restored that she will accept anything Orton says and so when he completely invents some tender childhood memories, Lady T immediately accepts them and makes them her own.
Finally, the relatives bring a trial where all is going well until Bogle meets his death at the hands of a passing hansom cab and Orton loses all his confidence. He is sentenced to 14 years in prison but, here again Borges emphasises the humour, pointing out that Orton so charmed his imprisoners that he was let off for good behaviour and then took to touring theatres giving a one-man show retelling his story.
It is typically Borgesian that, at each venue, Orton is described as starting out maintaining his innocence but often ends up pleading guilty depending on the mood of the audience.
A story, any story, about anything, is infinitely malleable.
The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate
China at the turn of the 18th century and the story of a redoubtable woman pirate who, when her husband Ching is killed in battle, takes over his pirate crew and leads them in 13 years of ‘systematic adventure’. The emperor sends one admiral against her, Admiral Kwo-lang, who she comprehensively defeats, and before leading her ‘six hundred war junks and forty thousand victorious pirates’ on devastating attacks on China’s seaboards. A second expedition is sent under one Ting-kwei. This one defeats Madame Ching who, on the night after a huge and bloody battle, has herself rowed over to the admiral’s ship, boards it and presents herself with the appropriately flowery oriental rhetoric: ‘the fox seeks the dragon’s wing.’ She was allowed to live and devoted her later years to the opium trade.
There is something immensely satisfying in the way Borges creates a scene, a historical period, its key characters and conveys a series of big events in just nine pages. More than that, the first page is devoted to two women pirates of the Western tradition, Mary Read and Anne Bonney, before we even get round to China.
Their speed and brevity, their exotic setting and subject matter, the tremendous confidence with which Borges cuts from scene to scene, zeroing in on key moments and drilling down to one line of dialogue, and all told in a wonderfully humorous, often tongue-in-cheek style, make these bonne bouches immensely appetising and pleasurable.
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
Borges freely acknowledges his source for this narrative as Herbert Asbury’s 1928 volume The Gangs of New York, and gives a 2-page summary of some of the most notable hoodlums from New York’s Victorian underworld described in that book, before arriving at his potted biography of ‘Monk’ Eastman who is the particular subject of this narrative.
Born Edward Osterman, Eastman he was Jewish but grew into a ‘colossal’ and violent killer who lorded it over the whole goy underworld. He hired himself out as a hitman and led a violent gang. They were involved in a shootout so epic it became known as The Battle of Rivington Street, then a two-hour fistfight with the leader of the main rival gang, Paul Kelly, watched by a shouting crowd. He was repeatedly arrested and, after the final time, in 1917, decided to enlist in the US Army which had joined the war in Europe. This, like everything else in the story, is told with detached facetiousness:
We know that he violently disapproved of taking prisoners and that he once (with just his rifle butt) interfered with that deplorable practice…
On his return Monk quipped that ‘a number of little dance halls around the Bowery were a lot tougher than the war in Europe.’ He was found dead in an alley with five bullets in him. These throwaway endings, without any Victorian moralising, give them a Modernist, ‘so what’ aspect, a throwaway bluntness which contrasts vividly with the extreme scholarly punctiliousness about the sources.
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
Scenes from the life of William Harrigan aka Billy the Kid. For a start, it’s factually interesting to learn that Billy was a street hoodlum born in the very tough slums of New York before he headed out West. Borges amuses himself by assigning Billy’s life to different stages, namely:
The larval stage
Go West!
The Demolition of a Mexican
Deaths for Deaths’ Sake
He killed his first man aged 14. There’s a running joke that whenever Billy boasted about the number of men he killed he always added ‘not counting Mexicans’ who he held in utter contempt.
Borges’s wonderful fantasy-mindedness, the way he can introduce a mind-teasing idea into even the most obviously material occurs when he casually mentions that, despite his best efforts to turn himself into a hard-riding cowboy, Billy:
never completely matched his legend, but he kept getting closer and closer to it.
This implication that the legend of Billy the Kid existed before he began enacting it, and that he was fated to aspire to match his own legend… there is something wonderfully dizzying about this metaphysical-magical perspective, a dizzying magic metaphysical worldview which was to emerge more powerfully in his famous mid-career stories and excerpts.
The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké
To be honest I didn’t understand this one, even after reading it twice. It’s set in Japan in 1702. An imperial envoy comes to stay with Asano Takumi no Kami who has been ‘trained’ by a rude and dismissive master of etiquette, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké. Asano was rude to the imperial envoy who, as a result, had him executed. Asano’s other retainers came to Kira Kôtsuké no Suké and told him, that since the error stemmed from his poor training of Asano, he should commit hara-kiri, but he refused and ran away and barricaded himself into a palace. Asano’s 47 retainers laid siege to the palace, broke in, discovered he had hidden, found him and killed him. That is why the story is sometimes called ‘The Learned History of the Forty-seven Retainers.
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
The story of Hakim, born in 736, who grows up to assume the identity of the Prophet of the Veil and establish a religion to rival Mohammed’s, by telling the impressionable that a messenger from God had come down from heaven, cut off his head and carried it up to heaven to receive a divine mission from Allah. He crystallises his position when, amid a crowded caravan, someone releases a leopard which Hakim appears to quell with the power of his eyes alone. He becomes the Veiled Prophet or Masked One and leads his followers to military victory, taking cities. He keeps a harem of one hundred and fourteen blind women.
He promulgated a belief system derived from the Christian Gnostics, namely that the world is a parody of Divine Reality, created by nine emanations from the original.
The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations.
Five years into his rule, Hakim and his followers are besieged by the army of the Caliph when a rumour goes round from one of the women of his harem that his body has various imperfections. He is praying at a high altar when two of his captains tear away his permanent veil to reveal that Hakim bears the revolting disfigurements of the leper, and they promptly run him through with spears.
Part 2. A short story
Man on Pink Corner
This is a surprisingly poor short story and a good explanation of why Borges focused on writing his metaphysical-brainteasing essays rather than trying any attempt at conventional fiction. It’s the account of a street hoodlum, a junior member of a gang in the unfashionable poor north side of Buenos Aires, and a supposedly fateful night when he and his gang are at a dance hall when in crashes a massive hard man, Francisco Real, who muscles his way through the crowd to confront the head of the local gang, Rosendo Juárez, at which point, inexplicably, Rosendo backs down and Real takes his place as head honcho and steals his woman, La Lujanera.
I found a lot of this inconsequential, silly and hard to follow because nobody seemed to be obeying any rules of human nature I’m familiar with. Rosendo disappears, and Real takes La Lujanera outside, presumably to copulate with her in a ‘ditch’:
By then they were probably going at it in some ditch.
Our narrator wanders out to take the air then returns to the dance where old gang members and new gang members seem to be dancing happily. Then there’s a banging on the door, and in stumbles the huge bruiser Real with a big gash in his chest. He collapses on the floor and bleeds to death. The hoodlums of both gangs strip him of his clothes, appear to rip open his guts and pull out his intestines, cut off his finger to steal his ring, then chuck him out the window into the river Maldonado which flows just outside the building.
In the final paragraph, the narrator mentions Borges’s own name as if he is recounting this story directly to him:
Then, Borges, I put my hand inside my vest – here by the left armpit, where I always carry it – and took my knife out again…
And in the last sentence implies that it was he, the narrator who, when he slipped out, managed to fatally stab Real – in which case why wasn’t there a description of this presumably fairly melodramatic scene, how did he manage to do it if Real was shagging La Lujanera in a ditch? How come La Lunajera didn’t point out our narrator to everyone in the hall as the murderer?
It seemed to me a collection of 1930s noir crime, lowlife clichés thrown together with no plausibility and no account of human psychology. Borges himself seemed bemused by the story’s popularity. Thank God he abandoned this mode of altogether in favour of the ‘baroque’ and mind-bending essays gathered in Labyrinths.
Part 3. Etcetera Etcetera
Being short 2 or 3-page excerpts from scholarly books which presumably struck Borges because of the surrealism or bizarreness or humour of their content. The excerpts are interesting or amusing or ghoulish in their own right, but what really impresses is the arcane nature of their sources, and the range of reading and learning they imply.
A Theologian in Death
From the Arcana Coelestis by Emanuel Swedenborg (1749 to 1756).
The Protestant theologian Philip Melancthon (1497 to 1560) dies and goes to heaven but doesn’t realise this is what has happened because the angels recreate his worldly house and study. However, as a great and learned man, they pester him to write about charity. But Melancthon obstinately persists in writing that charity is unnecessary because, like a zealous Protestant, he believes we are justified by faith alone. The result is that the angels , as warning and punishment, slowly degrade his house and then his own body. Day by day ghost Melancthon awakes in a further degenerated condition, till the last that’s heard of him he is ‘a kind of servant to demons.’
The Chamber of Statues
From The Thousand and One Nights numbers 271 and 272.
In the Andalucian city of Ceuta was a citadel with a door to which each successive king by tradition added a lock. Then a wicked man usurped the throne and, against the advice of holy men, insisted on ripping out the locks and opening the door to find what was inside. He discovered a series of rooms containing wonders, the last of which contained an inscription saying whoever opened the door would be overthrown. And, indeed, within a twelvemonth, the Arab leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad overthrew the usurper and sold his women and children into slavery.
Tale of the Two Dreamers
From The Thousand and One Nights number 351.
A merchant in Cairo falls asleep in his garden with a fountain and a fig tree and has a dream in which angels tell him to seek his fortune in Isfahan in Persia. So he packs up and off he sets.
After a gruelling journey, overcoming numerous threats and natural disasters, he finally arrives in Isfahan and falls asleep by a mosque.
But that night a house next to the mosque is robbed, the owners raise the alarm, the stranger is apprehended, thrown into prison and tortured. He is brought before the captain who asks who he is and why he’s here.
The merchant tells the story of his dream, and the captain laughs and says he also has a dream of a garden of a house in Cairo with a fig tree and a fountain which has treasure buried under it, but he knows it’s just a dream and has never acted on it.
He lets the whipped merchant go, who returns all the way back to his house in Cairo, digs under the fountain, and discovers a vast treasure. So the dream came true, just not at all in the way expected.
The Wizard Postponed
From the Libro delos enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor at de Patronio (1335) by Juan Manuel.
A beguiling story in which a Dean from Santiago, wanting to learn about magic, visits the noted magician Don Illán of Toledo and promises him anything if he will teach him magic.
So the Don takes him down into a cellar deep underground and submits him to a test, namely telescoping the next thirty years of their lives together. In this quick journey through the future the Dean is blessed with a series of promotions within the Catholic church, ending up being elected Pope.
At each step of the way the Don asks for some grace or favour but the newly promoted Dean puts him off, until he finally gets fed up of him and tells the Don to stop bothering him or he’ll have him thrown in prison.
At which point the entire future they’ve lived through disappears in a puff of smoke and the Dean finds himself back in the deep cellar with Don Illán who says ‘I told you so’, escorts him to the door and wishes him a pleasant journey home.
The Mirror of Ink
From The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) by Richard Burton.
How the wizard Abd-er-Rahman al-Masmudi threw himself on the mercy of the tyrant of Sudan Yaqub the Ailing, who orders him every morning to show him visions and wonders, until one day al-Masmudi shows him a figure being dragged for execution. When Yaqub demands that the figure’s veil be taken off, it reveals his own face and he watches the executioner raise his great sword and, when it falls and severs the neck of the man in the vision, Yaqub the Ailing himself falls dead.
A Double for Mohammed
From Vera Cristiana Religio (1771) by Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Since the idea of Mohammed is so closely linked to religion in the minds of Muslims, Allah ensures that heaven is overseen by a kind of deputy or second Mohammed, whose identity actually varies. A community of Muslims was once incited by evil spirits to acclaim Mohammed as their God, so Allah brought the spirit of the actual Mohammed up from under the earth to instruct them.
The Generous Enemy
From the Anhang zur Heimskringla (1893) by H. Gering
In 1102 Magnus Barfod undertook to conquer Ireland. Muirchertach, King of Dublin, sends him a nine-line curse which, by roundabout means, ends up coming true.
On Exactitude in Science
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J.A. Suárez Miranda.
A fragment which tells of a magical empire where the geographers at first essayed maps so huge that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the Empire itself an entire Province. These were eventually replaced by the ultimate map of the empire which was the same size as the Empire itself, and coincided with it point for point. Over the years it fell into neglect and now only a few tattered fragments survive in the Western Deserts, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.
Borges’ approach
Bookish
The content of the seven infamy tales is lurid and melodramatic, with plenty of murders, assassinations, beheadings, shootouts and suicides. But they are all refracted through a highly bookish, ironic sensibility which does at least two things: 1. It is very careful to cite the sources of the story, in a parody of a learned or scholarly article, and 2. it mocks the content of his own story with irony and knowing humour.
The first quality (a showy, pseudo-academic concern with indicating sources) is most evident in the opening of The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv:
If I am not mistaken the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number: a) those passages from The History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b) The Giant’s Handbook, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the Dark Rose, or Hidden Rose, which was the Prophet’s Holy Book; and d) some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian railway. (p.77)
‘If I am not mistaken’, that’s a nice touch. The effect of these kinds of learnèd references is to give the very pleasurable sense that you are entering the magical realm of books and stories. Not the everyday books we encounter in our lives or local bookshops, glossy gardening books or biographies of celebrity chefs or tedious accounts of adulteries in North London – but that we have been transported to the realm of old-fashioned stories, stories of extreme actions and derring-do and marvellous deeds in exotic settings.
Stories from our remembered childhood which fired our imaginations before we were forced to grow up and become sensible. It is a very old-fashioned tone and it’s no surprise that Borges, throughout his career, said his earliest and most enduring inspiration derived from the yarns of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Exotic
This old-fashioned, bookish tone overlaps with the wonderfully exotic settings of many of the narratives: slave plantations of the Deep South; Australia; the China seas; 18th century Japan; the Wild West; 12th century Ireland; medieval Spain; medieval Persia.
In the first preface he mentions Robert Louis Stevenson as a source and you can feel Stevenson’s restless quest for exotic locations shared by Borges.
Intellectual themes
One of the most obvious recurring tropes of the stories is (the currently very modish theme of) ‘identity’. The seven historical characters freely change their names or have names assigned them by contemporaries or historians. Writing of Monk Eastman, he says:
These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit his real name – presuming there is such a thing as a real name.
The most flagrant example is Tom Castro who has already changed his name once before he embarks on the criminal project of impersonating Roger Charles Tichborne, which leads to the sensational trial in which the nature of ‘identity’ is central. A great deal could be said on the subject of fiction and identity but I’m going to pass.
Two prefaces
After the fact, Borges commented on his own stories in two prefaces, one written for the 1934 edition, one for 1954.
1934 preface
The 1934 preface is only one page long and Borges admits that the stories stem, in part, from:
my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, and also from Sternberg’s early films, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego
combined with the over-use of certain tricks:
random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man’s whole life to two or three scenes
I found it very interesting indeed that he casually says:
They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.
Traditional literature, and many short stories, focus on a psychological crux, a decisive moment in someone’s life, and investigate the ‘moral’ and psychological aspects of it. Borges consciously turns his back on that tradition and exploits his sources to create pen portraits which are not at all concerned with anyone’s inner life, but use the content as 1. entertainment, creating striking scenarios and tableaux, as if in paintings or – as he frequently remarks – like scenes from movies. In the 1954 preface he elaborates that:
The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable
They are intended to be all surface. That partly explains why they end so abruptly and with no moralising whatsoever: to emphasise their shiny metallic surfaceness.
2. What Borges doesn’t mention is that the stories are also quite clearly used as starting points for ironic and amused meditations on ideas, the more metaphysical and paradoxical the better. And that this was a harbinger of the work which was to come later.
1954 preface
The 1954 preface is twice as long as the 1934 one, being an extravagant 2 pages in length. Borges immediately launches into a consideration of ‘the baroque’, claiming it is a style:
which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody… [that] only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks.
He goes on to link this to a fundamentally comic worldview:
The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has stated that all intellectual labour is essentially humorous.
I disagree. Having attended a big London exhibition about The Baroque I came away with the strong conviction that ‘the Baroque’ is above all about Power, the Complete Power wielded by monarchs who believed in their Divine Right to rule and the Total Power over all believers claimed by the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church.
Apart from anything else, Baroque works of art and churches are massive and imposing whereas Borges, if he is anything, is a precise miniaturist. He is more like a Swiss watchmaker than a Baroque architect.
But we are not reading Borges for accurate scholarship, in fact the precise opposite, we are reading him for his whimsical playing fast and loose with facts and figures and ideas for our amusement, an attitude he makes explicit when he writes that the stories are:
the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of others.
Borges may be correct in using the term ‘Baroque’ to indicate an interest in following every detail or narrative possibility to its logical conclusion, in the compulsive inclusion of every finial and architectural flourish possible. But his work is at the opposite end of the scale from The Baroque style in art and architecture.
And the Baroque is, above all, deadly serious, whereas Borges’s work is informed throughout by a dry, metaphysical humour, that comes from somewhere else. This bookish humour is entirely Borges’s invention, filtered through the gentlemanly, ironic tone of the late Victorian British authors he loved so much.
Literary influence
Apparently (or, as Borges might write, ‘If I am not mistaken’) the Puerto Rican critic Angel Flores (1900 to 1994) was the first person to use the term ‘magical realism’ and dated the start of the Magical Realist movement from this book.
This is echoed by the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition which claims that Borges intended the stories simply to be light entertainments, newspaper squibs:
‘yet after its appearance in 1935 its influence on the fiction of Latin America was so profound that its publication date became a landmark in the history of Latin American literature.’
This is the first novel in what became known as the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy. I was wondering what Blue Ant would turn out to be, my mind alive with images of mutating insects, or maybe it was the nickname of some groovy digital weapon, or a piece of cyberspace code.
But no, my heart sank when I learned that Blue Ant just refers to a fictional advertising agency set in the contemporary world i.e. turn of the century New York and London and Tokyo. And that the lead figure in the book is a ‘brilliant’ young logo expert, 32-year-old (page 2) Cayce Pollard who is a freelance fashion spotter, ‘an actual on-the-street cool-hunter’ (page 32), ‘a very specialised piece of human litmus paper’ (page 13):
‘What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognise a pattern before anyone else does.’ (page 86)
All the time she’s spent on the world’s various streets, scouting cool for the commodifiers. (page 195)
‘I find things, or styles, for other people, companies, to market. And I evaluate logos – trademark emblems.’ (page 231)
Just like the character Count Zero in the Neuromancer trilogy or Colin Laney in the Bridge trilogy had special, almost supernatural gifts for spotting trends, nodes and emerging meanings in the endless flow of data in cyberspace, so Cayce is credited with a special, almost supernatural gift to spot new fashion trends –
She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backwards, asking the next question. She’s that good! (page 32)
Except that Count Zero and Laney were dealing with the genuinely weird, visionary idea of dataflows, set in interesting futures, whereas Cayce has a special ability to spot… the latest trends in footwear. Or shirts. Or handbags. It feels like a crashing descent into the banal.
In the first 150 pages of this book the one piece of actual work which Cayce performs for the Blue Ant agency is they show her a new logo designed for a client which looks a bit like a sperm.
‘They wanted me here to tell them whether or not a new logo worked.’ (page 190)
She doesn’t like it so it’s sent back to the designer (Heinz) in Germany, who amends it to more of a squiggle – which she does like. That’s it. That’s how her supernatural abilities are put to use. Felt pathetic, to me.
The novel opens as Cayce arrives in London for a meeting with the Blue Ant advertising agency with a bad jet lag.
She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering carnivores. (page 6)
The prose from the get-go is whip-smart and street savvy and cool and all those other adjectives, but cannot conceal what for me, as a person completely indifferent to fashion, is the crushingly dull and vapidly narcissistic world of fashion and marketing. And this is the first novel in which the real thinness of Gibson’s plots became clear.
Characters
The book is cleverly constructed and has a number of strands. Cayce is staying at the flat of a mate of hers, Damian, who is off shooting a documentary in Russia. The Blue Ant agency was founded and is run by the preposterous Hubertus Bigend, who drives a fast car, wears a stetson hat, looks like Tom Cruise with big teeth, and has advanced views about how advertising bypasses the rational mind and goes straight for the primitive hippocampus, the basic mammalian stem of the brain (page 69). Just, in fact, like all the pretentious, high-talking heads of all advertising agencies are ‘visionaries’, ‘gurus’, ‘geniuses’, prophets, intellectuals, blah blah blah.
Hubertus Bigend and contempt for the reader
Calling his central character Hubertus Bigend struck me as being a gesture of contempt by Gibson. In the third of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, Hannibal (1999), written some time after the smash hit success of the Anthony Hopkins movie version of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Harris has a scene where the psychopath moves amid the crowd in the London Dungeon and freely expresses his loathing and contempt for the shallow philistines who love being titillated by gruesome murders. Peasants! Plebs! It seemed to me that Harris was deliberately gobbing in the face of the people who bought his books and paid to see the movies.
Something comparable struck me as happening here. It seems to me Gibson that is taunting his readers, saying if you can believe in a character I’ve named Hubertus Bigend, you’ll believe anything; if you swallow this stupid, insulting name, it just goes to prove what gullible mugs you are, falling over yourselves to associate yourself with my shimmering street-savvy prose, to slip on a leather jacket and shades and a ripped t-shirt and pretend to be in on the latest thing, in a pathetic attempt to hide from yourself how middle-aged and white and boring you are.
In fact it’s not only Hubertus Bigend who has a stupid name, they all do:
Cayce Pollard
Hubertus Bigend
Damian Pease (page 104)
Boone Chu (page 100)
In the Neuromancer trilogy Gibson really did feel like he was writing about gutter punks strung out on future drugs as they hacked in and out of cyberspace in gorgeously whip-sharp prose. You are totally in that world.
The Bridge trilogy which followed felt to me more contrived: its focus is on solidly lowlife types, or people bumping along the bottom of society – a security guard and ex-bike courier and rasta shopkeeper and a damaged teenager – giving the impression of a world which is fly and sharp and cool and street and happening, man. It’s only when the story refers to the authorities who actually run all the amenities of post-earthquake California – for example when the fire brigade gets called in to put out the climactic blaze on the Golden Gate bridge – that you realise that beyond Gibson’s handful of street types and scandi noir assassins, there is actually a great big world of grown-ups, where taxes are gathered to pay for schools and hospitals and police and fire brigade, where bureaucrats and businessmen commute to work every day and get things done. Where people aren’t lowlife drifters, living in cardboard boxers, mixing with cool assassins in long black coats.
Suddenly, the story felt…well… juvenile, wilfully focusing on a handful of rather pathetic outsiders with no particular redeeming qualities or features, certainly in no way representative of the wider world.
The Blue Ant novels feel like they continue this downward arc – that what began as something genuinely subversive and new in Neuromancer has metamorphosed into something shiny and empty and corrupt. The triumph of style over soul. It feels like he’s sold out. The Clash lyric, ‘Huh, you think it’s funny – turning rebellion into money’ kept coming to mind (The Clash are actually quoted on page 130 and the novel features Gibson’s usual clutch of supposed rock stars and fake rock bands).
When you’re a kid you think the music and look of your time is the big deal which is going to overthrow the corrupt old order. Then you watch as the record labels and promoters and stadium bookers and the TV pundits and fashion journalists and style gurus turn it into just another brand, and next thing you know it’s being sold back to you at extortionate prices, marketed and advertised by would-be cool, creepy, slimey, 40-something sell-outs in designer leather jackets.
That’s what this book felt like to me: a creepy exercise in cynical box-ticking set among a jet-setting international advertising and media elite who know all the right people and who are all so fabulous – fabulously well dressed, fabulously well connected, fabulously stylish, and so fabulously interesting, dahhhling, Hubertus has just got the most fabulously interesting theory of why advertising works, dahling, you must hear it, the man is a complete genius!
Absolutely fabulous characters
Cayce, as is repeatedly pointed out, is supernaturally gifted at spotting fashion trends, and this is one of the obvious examples of pattern recognition which crop up throughout the book. Her father was Win Pollard, a leading security expert who made American embassies round the world secure. He had many wise words and sayings like a good father should, well, certainly in an airport thriller.
He advised her to always ‘secure the perimeter’. He warned her against apophenia which is the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things when there are none. It is a way of overdoing pattern recognition, a form of paranoia. (It crossed my mind, reading this, that creating patterns out of human activity is, in a broad sense, the core approach of all narratives.)
Cayce’s mother, Cynthia is equally as interesting and eccentric, a gen-you-ine Virginia eccentric (page 31) who lives in a nutty community who all believe in Electronic Voice Phenomena, a form of pattern recognition gone wrong (page 115).
Cayce had a therapist, Katherine McNally (page 253) (later this turns out to have been a string of therapists). She goes to a café in Camden and bumps into the famous Billy Prion, lead singer in the famous band, BSE. Her friend Damian is off in Russia making simply the most amazing documentaries ever.
In other words, her life is just so effortlessly glamorous, dahhling. It’s a Sunday Times Style supplement version of cool.
The shiny people in their black leather jackets, black Fruit of the Loom t-shirts, black skinny 501 jeans (page 2) and black shades, collars moodily turned up on their long black coats, or black leather and shiny nylon and squared-off shoes (page 153), smoking Gitanes like Albert Camus, drinking expensive Colombian coffee, hanging out in their cool redesigned interiors and stylish cars are like the pencil-thin, heroin-chic young things out of any number of indistinguishable fashion shoots from the last 30 years, or which populate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cynical, smooth, stylish, utterly empty car ads.
An ex-boyfriend of Cayce’s (oh, dahhling, how many have there been?) once compared her to a Helmut Newton portrait of Jane Birkin. Well, of course he did. A character she knows looks like Michael Stipe on steroids – ‘Oh I simply love REM, don’t you!’ (page 21).
Later Boone’s luggage is described as ‘one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids’, page 172. In other words Gibson is starting to write in clichés and to repeat those clichés.
Cayce’s New York apartment is painted a shade of blue she discovered in Northern Spain and had the paint people mix from a Polaroid she took of it, she’s that good!
The book keeps up a steady stream of name-dropping, trailing any number of undergraduate cultural references from Tarkovsky to Baudrillard (page 48) because the book has intellectual pretensions as well, in much the way that high-end fashion magazines and style outlets like to quote Deep Thinkers, or at least put their faces onto t-shirts, turning them into yet another kind of shiny surface reflecting the characters’ bottomless shallowness.
They’re just names on labels, like all the other brands the text carefully namechecks – Tommy Hilfiger, Levi 501, Volvo, Agnes B, Molton Brown, Burberry, Gucci (127), Prada (188), Gap, L.L. Bean, Louis Vuitton (188), suede boots from Parco, Armani, Versace (271), Cartier (309), Hermès (310).
Everyone is just so fabulously fabulous, thus:
Hubertus is a philosopher king who founded the coolest ad agency anywhere (‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ gushes a member of his staff on page 87)
Cayce’s friend Margot is doing a course at NYU in disease-as-metaphor (‘Oh how wonderfully Susan Sontag of her!’), as it happens, she is a former girlfriend of Bigend’s – small world, when you’re this brilliant and that good !
the text drops key names from an undergraduate media studies course like car keys – Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Jameson, August Strindberg, Andrei Tarkovsky (at least three times pp.146), Truffault, Peckinpah, Apocalypse Now (180), William S. Burroughs (186), James Joyce and Tennessee Williams (286), it’s a shopping list of rather dated intellectual ‘cool’
characters wonder whether the director of the fragments is some kind of ‘Garage Kubrick’ (page 47)
film-makers are all auteurs
Cayce is stopped in the street by someone who thinks he saw her at a fabulous event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ (page 19)
not one but two of her former boyfriends were fans of Japanese actor Beat Takeshi, star of existential gangster films (page 167); of course they were, haven’t you heard of Beat Takeshi, oh dahling, where have you been hiding?
Cayce keeps bumping into rock singer Billy Prion, you all remember Billy Prion the famous rock singer, don’t you?
The text drops not only names but fashionable buzzwords, too, like a checklist from a student reading list of critical theory – liminal (54, 253), discourse, semiotics (‘semiotics of the marketplace’ 2, ‘a semiotic neutrality’ 89, ‘semiotic agoraphobia’ 264), hegemony, hermeneutics, God aren’t we clever and well-read.
As you can tell, I found Pattern Recognition unbearably pretentious, elitist and dull. It’s such a shame because in the Neuromancer novels Gibson seemed to have invented a dazzlingy jazzy, funky, street prose style to match the extraordinary goings-on in his digital future. But in a book like this, the style is broader, deeper and more accomplished, but now feels like it is dressing up distressingly lame, boring, fashion magazine material.
The McGuffin
All Gibson’s previous novels managed to cook up a sense of expectation and mild dread because they all contrived to have a Big Secret at their centre, a secret the characters slowly stumble across and which, in the case of the Neuromancer books, is genuinely mind-expanding (in the second novel a self-conscious, self-aware being emerges from the world’s data; in the third novel, it becomes aware that there are others like it out in space).
However, this entire Big Thing-at-the-heart-of-the-story strategy begins to run out of steam in the Bridge trilogy: in the last of those books we spend the entire narrative being promised that something big, really, really big is going to happen, something that is going to change the world forever, so we spend the entire novel on tenterhooks. And then… it doesn’t happen. Nothing happens at all. Well, the Golden Gate catches fire and then, er, is put out. That’s it.
The McGuffin in this novel is ‘the fragments’. Someone is releasing onto the internet brief fragments of what appear to be a movie. This cryptic procedure has spawned a community of obsessives around the world who have swiftly assigned themselves a ‘cool’ name, the ‘footageheads’, who have wasted vast amounts of time speculating what The Footage means, who took it and why and where it’s all going to end. Footageheads are obsessives and addicts. They think repeated watching of the various fragments, in various orders, gives them a sense of an opening into something, a universe, a narrative (page 109).
There are web communities devoted solely to analysing The Fragments, including one named F:F:F, which stands for Fetish: Footage: Forum, maintained by someone named Ivy, with about 20 regular posters including Parkaboy, La Anarchia, Maurice and Filmy, and where Cayce has been posting thoughts for some time.
As the novel begins and Cayce flies into London to undertake her brief job assessing the new logo for a Blue Ant client (why couldn’t the logo have been emailed or faxed or posted to her?) she is fussing and fretting over the release of the latest fragment, #135.
This silly idea really is the centre of this long novel, I kid you not. When, on the evening of her 1-minute logo-disapproving meeting, Cayce is invited out for dinner and then drinks with the swashbuckling Hubertus Bigend (‘Isn’t he brilliant?’), Hubertus takes Cayce to a cool designer bar in cool Clerkenwell (natch) where he springs on her the real reason he paid for her flight from New York — turns out Hubertus is a footagehead himself and is prepared to pay Cayce big bucks to find out who’s making The Fragments and why.
Before she knows what’s happening, Hubertus introduces her to a Chinese-American named Boone Chu. Cayce initially says no to the whole proposition, but, like Cayce herself, Boone is a genuine footagehead and his passion is contagious.
Tokyo
Cayce spends the first hundred and fifty pages mooching round the environs of her mate Damian’s flat in Camden i.e. up to the Lock, around the market, there are walks up Primrose Hill, she meets people in cafés, has a bizarre encounter in the street with three dudes who are buying and selling a suite of fake hand grenades which contain wind-up calculators (named Voytek and Ngemi), the nips over to Notting Hill and the Portobello Road. Then there’s all the taking of cabs to and from meetings at Blue Ant’s HQ in Soho. In other words, fashionable north and west London are given a good going over in Gibson’s slick stylish prose. Cool.
But via the community of footageheads Cayce has learned that there are various footage experts in Tokyo and so, once Boone Chu has helped persuade her to agree to Hubertus’s commission to track down the footage maker, she finds herself handed a Blue Ant Mac, ipad, mobile, credit card and plane tickets to Tokyo and whoosh! she’s aboard a British Airways flight to Japan. ‘New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody’s talking ’bout… pop music!’
There’s quite a bit of reportage about what it’s like to arrive in Tokyo, deboard the plane, catch a cab into town, all the skyscrapers, the bombardment of foreign signs which every tourist since Roland Barthes has felt compelled to write a book about. The Blue Ant Tokyo office is terrifyingly prompt and efficient and, after she’s checked into a luxury hotel, arranges an hours-long pampering session with seaweed facials, wax and haircut. Then a new outfit, all in black, obvz.
Then, finally, we arrive at the point of the whole trip, which is some of her pals in F:F:F have identified a certain ‘Taki’, a Japanese footagehead, who claims to know of a ‘coven’ of other footageheads who have discovered a watermark on fragment #78.
Do you care? No, neither do I. Her friends then devise an elaborate scam which is to invent a horny, porny anime babe, call her Keiko, and persuade this Taki to a meeting on the promise that in exchange for his information, he’ll get a picture and contact details for this Keiko. I suppose they could have just rung him up and asked him or asked to meet for a coffee and asked him, But this way creates more cloak-and-dagger suspense.
So Cayce meets Taki in a seedy bar which he has chosen, he hands over the number he claims is in the watermark of fragment #78 and she hands over the bosomy photo of a made-up Japanese babe, goes for a pee and Taki is gone when she gets back.
Out in the dirty alley she is mugged by two guys dressed all in black (obvz) who seem to have Italian accents. But it turns out Cayce was trained in self-defence by her spy father (of course she was) and gives one of them a Glasgow Kiss before stamping on the other’s one’s shoe with her stilleto and running. At the end of the alleyway a lone figure on a moped is waiting, who lifts the visor of his helmet to reveal… it is Boone Chu! He flew out on the same plane as her and has been tailing her.
Long story short, he sweeps her off to a hotel, drinks and recovers and throws on new clothes (all black, natch), then a plane back to London.
Back in London
Boone and Cayce are collected by Hubertus in a cab, so he can debrief them about everything that happened. Boone does the talking and leaves out the mugging and his rescue of Cayce.
Back at Damian’s Cayce is disconcerted to discover Damian has returned to his flat from Russia, and brought along a moody sulky Russian girlfriend, Marina (dresses only in Prada, only in black, natch). Cayce crashes, the others go for meals, Camden is so cool.
Burglary I forgot to mention that after Cayce arrived in Damian’s flat she unpacked then went for a walk. When she came back she realised someone had been tampering with the laptop she uses i.e. had broken into the flat, but using the correct keys. This led to an outburst of paranoia which led her to barricade Damian’s door, then to get new locks.
Logophobia I also forgot to mention that Cayce has a severed phobia which is the other side of her having such a phenomenally good feel for fashion and logos, which is a phobia of logos. Thus a visit to Harvey Nichols upscale department store makes her nearly pass out, and conversation leads to the fact that the Michelin man, logo of Bibendum in Knightsbridge, gives her panic attacks. Thus it is no accident that when she gets back to Damian’s flat after some outing she finds a model of the Michelin man nailed to the door. She nearly throws up and has to detach it without looking directly at it.
Now, no sooner has she arrived back in London than she’s called to a meeting at Blue Ant with Hubertus. On the way in she almost collides with… the man who tried to mug her in Tokyo and is sporting a very broken nose. When she asks reception who he is, reception tells her that’s Dorotea’s driver, Franco (page 199).
Dorotea? Yes we met Dorotea Benedetti (page 9) in the early scenes. She is another freelance, this time an imposing executive, who had been liaising with the German designer about the sperm logo. Boone explains that Dorotea was angling for a senior job at Big Ant and thought Hubertus had flown Cayce to London to consider her for the post i.e. to be a rival. And that’s why Dorotea commenced this barrage of psychological attacks against Cayce.
But in this new meeting at Blue Ant, also attended by Boone, Cayce now discovers that none of it was Dorotea’s idea, she was put up to it by a Russian who paid her, a tax lawyer based in Cyprus (described as being a centre of Russian money laundering, page 204). Not only did this Russian pay Dorotea to unsettle Cayce but someone passed on to her deeply personal information about Cayce’s logo phobia which she had only shared with her New York therapist. I.e. the Russians appear to have burgled Cayce’s therapist’s office.
So there’s some kind of deeper conspiracy against Cayce going on. When all this comes out in this boardroom meeting, Cayce is speechless with rage and calls Dorotea a ‘vicious lying cunt’ (page 203). But Hubertus stuns Cayce even more by announcing that he hashiredDorotea to Big Ant. Cayce reels out and goes to a Starbucks with Boone who explains that Hubertus doesn’t trust Dorotea but wants her on the inside of the tent pissing out.
Boone announces he’s flying to Columbus Ohio because that’s the location of a firm, Sigil, which specialises in watermarking movies. He thinks it might be them who placed the watermark on the fragment which they swindled out of Beat in Tokyo. So we’re back to The Footage, again, as providing the main narrative engine.
Bournemouth
Remember the oddballs Cayce walked past in Portobello Road, gathered round a car boot where she was astonished to see full of hand grenades till she went closer and discovered that they were only novelty calculators, one of the only hand-wound calculators in the world. To add a bit of grit, the story goes on to explain that they were designed by a Jewish designer Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.
Now we learn that the two guys gathered round that boot were collectors and aficionados, being Voytek the Slav, Ngemi the black guy. They were waiting for a potential purchaser, Hobbs Baranov to show up. But he didn’t, so they packed up and left, disgruntled.
Well, Voytek gets hooked up with Damian somehow I can’t quite remember, and is part of the ‘Camden set’. Cayce sees him a few times in Camden cafés, even round Damian’s place. Conversation reveals that Baranov is well connected as well as being a fanatical collector. He’s the son of a Soviet defector from the 1950s, possibly recruited to American intelligence (page 242).
We are told that a rare and valuable artifact, a prototype Curta calculator, went at auction to a Bond Street dealer, Lucian Greenaway. Cayce finds out the black guy Ngemi is catching a train down to Bournemouth to see Baranov the purchaser and asks Voytek to ask Ngemi if she can accompany him.
Yes. So Cayce catches a cab to Waterloo (with comic descriptions of British Rail announcements, sandwiches and English tabloid newspapers. Yuk.) Train to Bournemouth, borrows a car, drives out to derelict Ministry of Defence test centre, a handful of pitiful caravans, this is where Hobbs Baranov lives. He is very unpleasant but a fanatical collector of early computers and calculators.
The T diagram The F:F:F people continue to dangle the bait of a made-up hot Japanese footagehead babe in front of Taki i.e. continue sending fake emails from her to him and, having been given the photo Cayce gave him, he more than ever believes she is real and big-breasted and gagging to meet her if only he will hand over Footagehead facts. So Taki excitedly emails Cayce a diagram. It is an image which shows a sort of T-shaped piece of geography and written all over it are numbers. One of them is the same as the number watermarked into fragment #78 as revealed by Taki. So presumably they’re all watermarks to do with the Footage.
Now Cayce has come all the way down to this dingy caravan outside Bournemouth to show it to the collector and expert in the arcane, Hobb. She shows the image to Hobbs and he nods knowingly. Cayce makes Hobbs a deal. She’ll buy the Bond Street piece for him in exchange for information: she wants the email address to which the particular encrypted number Taki gave her was sent.
Back at Waterloo Ngemi tells Cayce that Hobbs, before he became a shambling alcoholic recluse, was something to do with setting up Echelon, an American system that monitors the entire traffic on the web. As so often with Gibson, this snippet is heavy with implied meaning, but light on actual content.
So Ngemi and Cayce go to this Bond Street dealer who is the epitome of superior snobbishness but sells them the Curta calculator, which they promptly hand to Baranov who was waiting outside with the email address Cayce wanted (stellanor@armaz.ru).
Cayce goes sits in Kensington Gardens where, on her iBook, she writes an email to the address asking who he or she is and what they’re aiming to achieve with the footage. (Email is written as e-mail throughout the book.)
Throughout the book she’s plugging her phone into her I-book in order to receive emails. Maybe this was cutting edge in 2002 or 3 but quite obviously it was to be completely superseded with the advent of smartphones by 2007 or 8.
Anyway, Cayce investigates the domain name @armaz.ru and discovers it’s owned by an Andreas Polakov based in Cyprus. She phones Bigend, asks the name of the Cyprus-based Russian lawyer who paid Dorotea to frighten off Cayce and it is… Andreas Polokov (page 259). One and the same man: so, Is the man who appears to be disseminating The Footage the same one who paid Dorotea to put the frighteners on Cayce? And if so, Why?
The guy at the other end of the email replies within half an hour saying he’s in Moscow. Cayce immediately gets Blue Ant’s people to buy her an Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
Moscow
There is the same kind of travelogue description of driving into the city from the airport which Gibson has already given us for London and Tokyo. ‘New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody’s talking ’bout… pop music!’
The constant shifting of locale is like a James Bond movie and just like in the movies we get a lot of local colour and background information, almost like a tourist brochure.
We get descriptions of Moscow motorways, signage, the imposingly huge hotel (the President), the crappy hotel room, the poor cellphone reception, the rude staff, a couple of super-sexualised hookers hanging round in the lobby. It all sounds like notes Gibson has made on his travels promoting his earlier books.
Throughout the novel Cayce’s closest friend on the Fetish: Footage: Forum has been Parkaboy. He’s been avidly following her investigations into the source of the footage. Now in an email exchange he begs to be allowed to join her in Moscow.
Now, back when Hubertus originally hired Cayce to track down the Footage Maker, Hubertus said she could have anything she wanted, unlimited expenses, buy cars, take flights anywhere, stay in the best hotels etc. So Cayce now tells Parkaboy she’ll get him a plane ticket to Moscow, whereupon he tells her his name for the plane ticket, Peter Gilbert (page 278).
She gets another email from the footage guy telling her to meet him in a Moscow café. So she’s very surprised when the figure who weaves its way through the cafe to her turns out to be… a woman, introduces herself as Stella.
The big reveal
Stella explains everything, explaining the entire plot.
Stella was one of twin sisters, Stella and Nora born and bred in Russia. She and her sister were in a terrorist attack, a claymore mine stuck in a tree, which killed both their parents immediately, Nora was very badly injured with shrapnel lodged in her brain. She had been a film student in Paris. She had been working on several films which she cut shorter and shorter in line with her minimalist aesthetic.
After the injury she spoke only to Stella and only in the special private language which twins often develop. Stella and friends bring Nora her film equipment from Paris which is the only thing which perks her up. She resumes editing her film and paring it down till it ends up as just one shot.
Then they notice Nora staring at the monitor showing closed circuit TV footage of the reception area of the hotel. She is entranced by it. So, hoping to aid her cure, one of the doctors hooks Nora’s recording equipment to the CCTV camera, she begins recording it and editing it. And that, children, is the origin of The Footage which has been dazzling and puzzling the worldwide community of Footageheads. Bit disappointing, isn’t it.
They part, Cayce goes back to her hotel and sleeps, has calls with Boone, Hubertus, then receives a long email about his archaeology project from Damian. Then Stella’s car comes to collect Cayce and take her to an abandoned cinema, which became a squat in the chaotic 90s and is now where Nora sits in a shawl obsessively editing and re-editing fragments of her ‘film’. And where Stella sits for hours watching the genius of her sister, the Creator, the Maker.
Dorotea in Moscow
In the middle of all this, Cayce is astonished when Dorotea turns up in the Moscow hotel. Dorotea urgently takes Cayce for a drink, telling her that the twins (Stella and Nora’s) uncle, the one Stella says is rich and powerful and has been protecting them, well he’s not happy that Cayce has discovered who Nora is. She also casually reveals that she, Dorotea, knows all about The Footage, in fact is the most irritating member of the F:F:F, Madam Anarchia.
But even as she explains all this, Cayce realises Dorotea has drugged her Perrier water and she starts to pass out.
Cayce kidnapped
Cayce wakes up in what feels like a hospital ward, in a hospital ward, strapped to a bed. She dozes, wakes again, is no longer strapped down, climbs out of bed, finds her bag with her clothes stuffed in it underneath, gets into them, goes tentatively out into a corridor, walks towards a door showing daylight, out into the grounds and away from the nasty 1960s building before anyone notices, down rough paths, going down, then up and up and eventually coming to a wire fence topped with razor wire, which she gets over (at the price of ripping her precious Rickson’s leather jacket) and walks on across bare red soil till night begins to fall. She has no food, no water, no idea where she is and no idea where she’s headed.
Parkaboy
When out of nowhere a helicopter with a searchlight comes swooping overhead, lands, and a guy with night vision goggles walks up, oh my God is it Russian Security, the FSB, the Mafia? Is he going to shoot Cayce, take her back for torture and interrogation, is he…
No. As in any Hollywood action movie the dark, helmeted figure walks right up to her to create maximum threat and… introduces himself as Parkaboy! Her friend! From Chicago! Who she helped arrange the plan ticket for.
Parkaboy gives Cayce water then bundles her into the chopper taking them back to the facility while he explains everything (it’s lovely how people do that in thrillers, explain everything. I wish they’d do that in real life).
Back in the hotel bar Dorotea drugged Cayce with rohypnol. But as she went under, Cayce went postal and attacked Dorotea, giving her a bloody nose and black eye. Ambulance was called. All this just as Parkaboy walked into the hotel bar. In one of her last emails to him, Cayce had sent Parkaboy Stella’s contact details so Parkaboy rang rich, influential Stella and within minutes an expensive car with private goons turns up. Cayce was flown to the establishment where she woke up and which she’s just escaped from. Parkaboy explains it is an experimental private prison run by Stella and Nora’s super-rich uncle, really rich, maybe the richest man in Russia. Of course.
Prison? Yes and what are the inmates of this model prison being paid to do? To watermark every frame of the fragments of the movie which mad Nora is creating. Why?
Parkaboy now amazes Cayce by telling her that he was in the room when Volkov and Bigend first met. And talked. He says it was like watching spiders mate.
All this during the helicopter flight. Now the chopper lands. Cayce is cleaned and showered, her bleeding feet tended by a doctor, dressed and taken up to the tower overlooking the facility where she is dazed to meet Hubertus Bigend – he gets everywhere, but then he is a genius! – who suavely introduces her to the oligarch Andrei Volkov.
Over dinner everything is explained
Volkov looks like Adolf Eichman, a non-descript middle-aged man except with a chunk missing from his right ear (page 334). Through a translator he apologises to Cayce for the trouble she’s been through, shakes hands, says something in French to Bigend and departs with his three security guys, flying back to Moscow.
Cayce is introduced to Volkov’s Polish head of security, Wiktor Marchwynska-Wyrwal and Sergei Magomedov, as he, Bigend, Parkaboy and Cayce sit down at a cloth-laid table as an expensive dinner is brought to them and served up.
Marchwynska-Wyrwal takes up the explanation. Volkov is now the richest man in Russia. The claymore mine attack was an assassination attempt on him which failed but killed his brother, Nora and Stella’s father. From that point onwards, out of guilt for his dead brother, nothing was too good for his nieces, Nora in particular, and Volkov paid for an editing suite to be installed in her Swiss clinic.
As Nora created footage, her sister Stella wanted it to be conveyed to the world, but it was Sergei who developed the methodology of releasing it in numbered fragments, each containing watermarks, with a view to creating a cult following.
They monitored the various forums and chatrooms and groups which set themselves up as footageheads but it was a casual remark of Cayce’s, in her early days of posting, a casual throwaway remark that maybe the entire thing was the whim of a Russian mafiosi, which made all their security operations sit up.
Turns out Volkov had two security operations, a traditional KGB one and a web-based one. The traditionalists broke into Cayce’s flat and bugged all her devices. The less conventional ones hired Dorotea to sabotage Cayce’s career. Now, Volkov’s security guys already knew that Bigend had been making strides in discovering the footage creator, so when they learned that Cayce was going to join Bigend’s company the team went into overdrive and Dorotea was ordered to bug Cayce’s London base (Damian’s flat), then to try and mug her in Tokyo to get the watermark number which Taki had just given her.
All this is explained over this formal meal in a Russian prison-turned-hospital. As if all this wasn’t enough, Cayce’s father comes up in the conversation. For a moment I thought he was going to actually walk through a door and turn out to be a key player in this bonkers conspiracy to get a psychologically damaged young woman’s movie fragments out to a waiting world. But no. Volkov’s security people think Cayce’s father is dead, as she does. Nonetheless there is what is presumably meant to be a deliciously ironic toast to Wingard Pollard and men like him in the security services of the West who kept capitalism alive, for without him where would the oligarchs to today be? Lol.
Possibly this was wicked satire in 2003 but now it just reads like factual description of Vladimir Putin’s oligarch capitalism.
This bizarrely tranquil climax to the story prompts the thought that thrillers are ultimately comforting because, although a bunch of people might get shot or tortured along the way, things always turn out to be entirely comprehensible and loose ends are always neatly tied up like the ribbons tying up a fancy birthday gift.
It’s this childlike explanatoriness of thrillers, the neat tying up of loose ends, the complete explanations of the world, which makes them, ultimately, genre fiction and not literature.
Trouble is the explanations always happen right at the end of the text and are often contorted as hell in order to explain away the exciting but contrived scenes from earlier in the book, when it was still in ‘thrill mode’. As here. All those thrills and spills, burglaries and muggings and high-speed escapes, boil down to very little in the end.
Bigend walks Cayce to her room and explains that Dorotea was playing both sides. Only when Cayce used the .ru email address did Volkov’s security operation really leap into action, and Dorotea’s position become exposed. She flew to Moscow and was quizzing Cayce about the source of the email trying to identify who Cayce got that email address from (we know it was Hobbs) because Dorotea thought it would be a bargaining chip with Volkov’s people. But instead Volkov’s people arrived at the bar of the Hotel President to discover Dorotea assaulting the new best friend of Volkov’s nieces, so it was all up for her.
The long and the short of it is that nobody knows her current whereabouts. Best not to ask, Hubert advises. The implication is that Dorotea has been liquidated. Bigend bids Cayce goodnight, leading her to the small motel room she’s been assigned within the facility.
Immediately after dinner Wiktor Marchwynska-Wyrwal had given Cayce an envelope. Opening it she sees it’s a summary of Volkov’s security people’s extended efforts to track down her father. But no joy. Missing presumed dead in south Manhattan on the morning of 9/11. So, once again, what has been trailed throughout the novel as an exciting and mysterious disappearance of her father the senior American security official turns out to be… a damp squib.
And Cayce was given another envelope. It contains a stylish handbag containing lots of fresh cash. Parkaboy drops by with bottled water. She tells him everything and starts to cry about her father. He gives her a hug and says, Well, at least they found the Maker.
Epilogue
The short final chapter ties up loose ends.
Cayce sends the money she was given to Voytek so he can stage some mad art exhibition involving lots of scaffolding.
Billy Prion the former rock star she kept bumping into in Camden is chosen as the face of some new yoghurt drink.
And she sends some cash to her mum, which helps pay the lawyers who are establishing her father’s legal status as deceased so as to free up his pension and insurance.
Her friend Margot writes to say she just saw Bigend on telly with some oligarch.
Damien writes to say he’s finished shooting his archaeology documentary about digging up a Stuka on some Second World War battlefield. Cayce had gone to visit him and ended up down in the digging trench, shovelling mud and crying helplessly. For her buried past. For her dead father.
Cayce’s therapist is pleased to hear that her panic attacks, her logophobia, her abreaction against all kinds of branded consumer goods, seem to have disappeared, but offers her a few slots in the autumn. Somehow this whole crazy experience has been therapeutic. Cayce is cured!
The book ends with her lying in bed in Paris, spooned up next to Parkaboy aka Peter Gilbert, who, we learn, is now her boyfriend. She’s in no rush to go back to work. Which must be nice. Nice swanning round the world on other people’s expense accounts. But then that’s the life which, ultimately, this book portrays.
New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, expense accounts, upscale therapists and cabs everywhere, Cayce is a perfect epitome of the globalised, international, jetsetting advertising and media élite.
If you want a more realistic account of London advertising agencies try this.
Early on Cayce describes how her dad, Wingard Pollard, was in New York on the morning the twin towers were blown up. His family doesn’t know why, he didn’t live in New York. He left his hotel in lower Manhattan on the fateful morning and was never seen again (pages 185 to 187). Cayce’s dad was a security expert. Security. 9/11. Russians. The reader suspects there might be connections. The reader hopes there might be interesting and mind-stretching connections. But no.
Cayce herself was also in Manhattan that morning and saw the attacks from the room of a business contact she’d gone to see.
She looks up, then, and sees, borealis-faint but sharp-edged and tall as heaven, twin towers of light. As her head goes back to find their tops a vertigo seizes her: They narrow up into nothing at all, a vanishing point, like railway tracks up into the desert of the sky. (page 227)
Great writer, isn’t he, Gibson? Great creator of snappy, vivid sentences, acute imagery. Shame his plots can’t quite match his prose style.
Looking back to 2003, we can assess how 9/11 seemed so important for a long time. For quite a few years afterwards, it felt like it had ushered in an entirely new era, one of perma-fear and anxiety, periodically stoked up by further terrorist atrocities in England and across Europe. I suppose the book was written in the immediate backwash of 9/11 and that including it as a thread lent the book a kind of hyper-charged paranoia, giving a dark halo to the story about mysteries, espionage and paranoia.
But one of Donald Trump’s many achievements has been to bring America to such a verge of social upheaval that 9/11 seems like a tea party now. Al-Qaeda never got to storm the Capitol. Feels like the real terrorists are all-American patriots and the next bloodbath / atrocity might be carried out by guys wearing baseball caps or the American police mowing down an apparently endless list of unarmed black men. 9/11 was eclipsed by the war in Afghanistan and then by the massive fiasco in Iraq. And then the near collapse of the entire financial system in 2008, and… so on and so on.
Reading the 9/11 passages in this novel made me realise it will have been 20 years ago this September. 20 years. It feels well settled in the past, now, superseded by many more recent events.
9/11 references pages: 136 to 137, 185 to 187, 232, 348 to 349.
Black
Gibson has a really tedious obsession with black, the teenage colour of cool. Black jeans, black t-shirts, black leather jackets, black sunglasses. He is, as my last review suggested, the Lou Reed of science fiction, the man in black wearing a black leather jacket, ripped t-shirt and black shades.
Except that, with this book, Gibson abandons science fiction altogether. But not the obsession with black as the colour of cool. On every page someone’s clothes or car or room is black, it is so oppressively ubiquitous that way before page 100 I began to wonder whether he was sending himself up, or maybe his readers; maybe he’s parodying himself.
The hotel room in Japan has all-black furniture. The replacement keys Cayce gets for his flat are black. Cayce has a black Rickson’s jacket, which comes folded in black tissue. Boone wears an old black horsehair coat. On the plane back to London she wears a black blindfold. Damian’s girlfriend Marina only wears black Prada. Damian wears a black hooded sweatshirt. Cayce wears black Levi 501s, black t-shirt, black shoes. Hubertus’s associated Bernard wears a permanently rumpled black suit. To dress for a meeting Cayce wears a black t-shirt, a black skirt, black leggings, black Harajuku Japanese schoolgirl shoes, a black leather jacket and a black East German handbag. Ngemi wears a black faux leather jacket. He wears black 4-eyelet Doc Marten boots. The make figure in the fragments wears a black leather coat. In dreams she sees her father holding a black Curta calculator. The cases passengers are wheeling towards the Eurostar terminal are black. Dorotea wears an entirely black Armani outfit. The German designer from whose apartment she watches the World Trade Centre burn wears black glasses (136). Cayce’s Pedipole at the Pilates gym includes black foam stirrups (247). Cayce wears a black nylon flight jacket (249). When Cayce first saw the Albert Memorial it had been black (253). Stella’s drivers wear black leather jackets. They drive black Mercedes (290). Cayce wears a black cardigan (297). When Dorotea turns up in Moscow she is dressed all in black (312). When Parkaboy turns up he is wearing a heavy black shirt (326). After the scene in the hotel bar three dudes with black leather coats turn up (327). Cayce’s blistered feet are put into black felt house slippers (332). Cayce has a shower and changes into her black cardigan (332). Parkaboy has a shower and changes into new black jeans (333).
Men in Black. Back in Black. Paint it black. Gibson’s obsession with black could be interpreted psychologically, as a form of displacement activity. As his plots became more complex but more contrived and, in the end, more trivial, so Gibson upped his concern with style and surface, and the growing obsession with black clothes and shirts and boots and shades is a kind of compulsive attempt to make the characters ‘cool’ even as the plots become more complex and inconsequential.
Credit
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 2003. All references are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition.
When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.
Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the army generals. From this secure base he made attempts throughout the Protectorate, 1653-58, to reach out to:
in religion, episcopalians, moderate Anglicans, Presbyterians and independents
in politics, to moderate Royalists, to republicans and to the revolutionaries who had denounced his regime after the regicide
in Scotland and Ireland to moderate leaders prepared to accept his authority and work with him
These two central elements a) military authority and b) the intricate skein of negotiated settlements with all these constituencies, often based on personal acquaintance – vanished with his death.
The actual sequence of constitutional, parliamentary and political events following Cromwell’s death are extremely complex, but a high-level summary is that the general in Cromwell’s army tasked with running Scotland, General Monck, got in touch with representatives of the king and offered his services to broker a restoration.
Monck’s main concern was the material demands of the army:
there was to be a general pardon for actions carried out under orders
arrears of pay were to be fully met
titles to former Crown and Church lands bought during the Interregnum were to be confirmed
religious toleration for moderate sectarians was to be guaranteed
Charles and his advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that offered a free pardon and amnesty to everyone who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return. However, Charles was canny enough to avoid the main points of contention, saying he’d put them off to be agreed by the first Parliament elected.
The result of these negotiations was the Declaration of Breda, signed by Charles on 4 April 1660, Breda being a town in the southern part of the Netherlands, where Charles had relocated for the negotiations.
Copies of the Declaration were sent to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. A new Parliament had been elected in April 1660, and when Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to it on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.
Timeline of the Restoration
The timeline below gives some sense of the confusion and potential anarchy which spread after Richard Cromwell was forced to abdicate and then nobody knew what was happening or what to expect.
1659
May 7 – Richard Cromwell forced by the Council of Officers to reinstate the Rump Parliament.
May 24 – Resignation of Richard Cromwell after Parliament refuses to recognise the Protectorate.
June 7 – Parliament commissions Charles Fleetwood commander-in-chief of the armies in England and Scotland but retains the power to appoint or promote officers.
July 3 – Viscount Mordaunt arrives in England to co-ordinate a general Royalist insurrection.
August 5-19 – Booth’s Uprising: Royalist revolt in Cheshire, suppressed by Colonel John Lambert.
September – Officers of Lambert’s army meet at Derby and draw up a petition setting out their demands for the government of the nation.
September 22-3 – Parliament forbids any further petitioning by soldiers. Sir Arthur Hesilrige calls for Lambert’s arrest.
October 12 – Parliament revokes the commissions of Lambert and eight other senior officers.
October 13 – Lambert’s troops occupy Westminster and prevent Parliament from sitting.
October 15 – The Council of Officers appoints a ten-member Committee of Safety to consider how to carry on the government.
October 20 – General Monck sends a declaration from Scotland demanding the return of Parliament.
October 25 – The Council of State dissolved; the Committee of Safety re-appointed by Army leaders.
November 3 – Lambert marches north from London with 12,000 troops to block Monck’s route into England.
November 12 – Monck’s representatives arrive in London for talks with the Council of Officers.
November 24 – Former members of the Council of State appoint Monck commander of all military units in England and Scotland and empower him to take military action against the enemies of Parliament if necessary.
December 3 – Sir Arthur Hesilrige secures Portsmouth for Parliament.
December 5 – Riots in London for the return of Parliament.
December 8 – Monck crosses the border and establishes his headquarters at Coldstream.
December 14 – Vice-Admiral John Lawson sails for the Thames, threatening to blockade London in support of Parliament.
December 26 – Fleetwood forced to recall the Rump Parliament.
1660
January 1 – General Monck marches from Coldstream for London.
January 9 – Sir Henry Vane expelled from Parliament for having sided with the military junta.
January 11 – Lord Fairfax meets Monck at York and urges him to restore the Monarchy.
February 3 – Monck’s army arrives in London.
February 9 – Parliament orders Monck to remove the City gates and portcullises after citizens of London demand the reinstatement of Presbyterian MPs purged in 1648.
February 11 – Monck demands the re-admission of the purged MPs and apologises for his actions in removing the City gates.
February 21 – The Long Parliament restored: surviving MPs purged in 1648 re-admitted to Parliament under Monck’s protection.
March 5 – John Lambert imprisoned in the Tower of London.
March 16 – The Long Parliament calls free elections and votes for its own dissolution.
April 10 – Lambert escapes from the Tower and tries to rally resistance to the Restoration.
April 22 – Lambert and his followers defeated at Daventry; Lambert returned to London as a prisoner.
April 25 – The Convention Parliament assembles.
May 1 – Charles II’s manifesto the Declaration of Breda read in Parliament.
May 8 – The Convention Parliament declares Charles II to have been King since 30th January 1649.
May 14 – Parliament orders the arrest of all surviving regicides.
May 25 – Charles II lands at Dover.
May 29 – Charles II makes a triumphal entry into London.
The reign of Charles II, the 1660s
Charles’s reign breaks up into a number of periods and is dominated by a few key themes.
First, was how to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. Charles was in favour of forgiveness and tried to steer the first Parliament of his reign, the Convention Parliament, in that direction. However, the second Parliament, which came to be known as the Cavalier Parliament, not to mention the newly restored House of Lords, contained many who had suffered severely, lost land and family to the Roundheads. They were determined to push the clock back, to recover their lost land and money, to savagely punish all those responsible for the wars and the regicide, and to re-establish a rigid conformity in religion.
Convention Parliament
The Convention Parliament sat until the end of 1660. It was responsible for implementing the terms for the initial Restoration settlement under which Charles II established his administration.
The Convention passed the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which was intended to reunite the nation under the restored monarchy by pardoning the majority of those who had opposed the Crown during the civil wars and Interregnum. It also undertook the task of disbanding the army which had underpinned the Commonwealth and Protectorate régimes. First steps were taken towards settling disputes over lands which had been sold off during the Interregnum, and initial legislation to provide revenue for the restored monarchy was set out. Charles dissolved the Convention Parliament on 29 December 1660.
The Clarendon Code
The Restoration religious settlement comprised four acts of Parliament known collectively as the Clarendon Code. The name derived from Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who served as Charles II’s lord chancellor – though Clarendon was not the chief instigator of the acts and even argued against some of the more severe aspects.
The Corporation Act (1661)
This required all office holders in towns and cities to take oaths of allegiance to the Crown, to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to take the sacrament in accordance with the doctrines of the Church of England.
The Act of Uniformity (1662)
This brought all ordained clergymen under the doctrines and liturgy of the established Church. Candidates for the ministry had to be ordained by a bishop according to the rites of the Church of England. They were required to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to declare their acceptance of the revised Book of Common Prayer and all doctrinal articles sanctioned by the Church. Hundreds of Presbyterian and non-conformist clergymen were expelled from their livings on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1662 for refusing to comply with the Act of Uniformity.
The Conventicle Act (1664)
This was intended to prevent clergymen ejected by the Act of Uniformity from forming their own congregations. Fines or imprisonment were imposed on anyone attending an independent prayer meeting or act of worship (a so-called ‘conventicle) that was not in accordance with the Anglican liturgy.
The Five-Mile Act (1665)
This was intended to curb the influence of dissenting clergymen by prohibiting them from residing within five miles of any living they had held before the Act was passed. Furthermore, they were required to take an oath of non-resistance to royal authority before accepting any appointment as tutor or schoolmaster.
Money
Once again a Stuart king let himself become poor, spending a fortune on the two stupid Dutch wars and frittering it away on mistresses and favourites at home.
A timeline of the 1660s
1661 Corporation Act – aimed at Presbyterians, the Act provided that no person could be legally elected to any office relating to the government of a city or corporation, unless he had within the previous twelve months received the sacrament of ‘the Lord’s Supper’ according to the rites of the Church of England. He was also commanded to take the Oaths of Allegiance and the Oath of Supremacy, to swear belief in the Doctrine of Passive Obedience, and to renounce the Covenant.
1662 Act of Uniformity compels Puritans to accept the doctrines of the Church of England or leave the church.
1662 Royal Society for the improvement of science founded
Catherine of Braganza
Charles married Catherine of the Portuguese royal house of Braganza. He married her for money but her dowry was quickly spent and then Britain found itself drawn into Portugal’s war against Spain. And, crucially, Catherine turned out to be ‘barren’ or incapable of conceiving children. Charles wasn’t. He was to acknowledge fatherhood of eighteen bastards (the most famous being the Duke of Monmouth, born as early as 1649, when Charles himself was only 19).
The lack of a male heir from the Braganza marriage meant the throne would pass to his brother James who was an overt Catholic i.e. more or less condemned the Stuart line to come to an end. As with Henry VIII, the infertility of a royal marriage was to have seismic consequences for the British.
1664 England seizes the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, changing its name to New York.
1665 Outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War
1665 The Great Plague strikes London and over 60,000 die.
1666 The Great Fire of London rages for four days and three nights. Two thirds of central London is destroyed and 65,000 are left homeless
1667 As part of The Second Dutch War A Dutch fleet sails up the River Medway captures the English flagship The Royal Charles and sinks three other great ships. This humiliation provided Charles with a pretext to blame and thus get rid of the Earl of Clarendon, the statesman who had guided and mentored him in exile and dominated the first seven years of his rule.
Fall of Clarendon
Clarendon was replaced by a set of five statesmen or advisers who come to be known as The Cabal and held power from 1668 to 1674.
The Cabal
The linchpin of the Cabal was probably George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Although he only held the household office of Master of the Horse, with responsibility for overseeing the King’s travel arrangements, Buckingham was a long and close associate of King Charles II. They had practically been raised together since they were children, during the close association of their fathers, Charles I and the first Duke of Buckingham, a relationship they consciously compared themselves to in adulthood, and might have replicated, had the younger Buckingham possessed the skills of his father. Nonetheless, Buckingham was in constant contact and a clear favourite of the king, and the centre of the Cabal’s grip on power. Gilbert Burnet, who knew some of its members personally, said that Buckingham stood apart from the rest of the Cabal, hating them and being hated in return.
The Lord High Treasurer Wriothesley having died just before Clarendon’s departure, the Treasury came under the nominal chairmanship of George Monck (Duke of Albermarle). But as Monck was practically retired from public life, control of the Treasury commission was taken up by Sir Thomas Clifford (Comptroller and soon Treasurer of the Household) and Anthony Ashley Cooper (Chancellor of the Exchequer). With the assistance of their close associates John Duncombe (Ashley’s deputy at the Exchequer), Stephen Fox (the Paymaster of the Forces) and Sir George Downing, the secretary to the Treasury commission, Clifford and Ashley overhauled the monarchical finances, placing them in a much more solvent state than before.
Foreign affairs was directed by Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington (Secretary of the South), with occasional assistance from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. (Although foreign affairs were notionally in the purview of the Secretary of the North, the Cabal bullied Sir William Morice into selling the seat to Sir John Trevor, and then sidelined the latter.)
John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale (Secretary of State for Scotland) had already consolidated his position in 1663 by securing the dismissal of his principal rival, John Middleton (Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland) and his replacement by the more pliable John Leslie, Earl of Rothes. In 1669, Lauderdale went one step further, and got Leslie dismissed and the Lord High Commissioner position for himself, consolidating his hold and ruling Scotland as a virtual autocrat for the remainder of his career.
Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Royalist lawyer who had prosecuted the Regicides, and who took over Clarendon’s duties as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1667, was outside of this inner circle, although cooperated with their goals.
Despite their comparative energy and efficiency, the Cabal was a fractious and unpopular group. Although perceived as a secretive and unsavoury junta, they rarely formed a united front, and their internal quarrels often spilled over into the public arena.
J. P. Kenyon suggests that the King actually encouraged the Cabal members to quarrel, in the belief that this made them easier to control. They in turn, never trusted him not to bring them down as he had brought down Clarendon, and as Kenyon remarks, they hardly dared turn their backs on him for fear of sudden dismissal.
It was said that the King treated his ministers very much as he did his mistresses: ‘He used them, but he was not in love with them, and was tied to them no more than they to him, which implies sufficient liberty on either side’.
Sir William Coventry, the Secretary to the Admiralty, resigned from office following a duel challenge from the Duke of Buckingham, and re-emerged in the House of Commons at the head of a group of MPs known as the ‘Country Party’, which loudly opposed the Cabal and its policies.
Charles II acceded to the Cabal’s recommendation to prorogue parliament repeatedly, keeping it out of session for as long as he could, and leaving the Cabal to run the country on their own. When he found himself in financial difficulties following the Great Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 and the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles was obliged to re-convene parliament in 1673 and the parliamentarians were bent on revenge.
Fall of the Cabal
The Cabal began to split in 1672, particularly over the autocratic nature of the King’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence, the financing of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and Britain’s relationship with France.
Personal rivalries and a conflict over foreign policy between Buckingham and Arlington escalated. The Ministry became very unpopular. The public saw them as ‘untrustworthy, venal and self-seeking, their eyes always on the main chance”.
Towards the end of the year, Ashley, now the Earl of Shaftesbury, became Lord Chancellor, leaving Treasury matters to Clifford and the Exchequer to Duncombe. He pressed publicly for greater reform of government, taking the side of the Opposition against his colleagues and the King.
Clifford resigned over the in-fighting and retired from public life: as an open Roman Catholic he would in any case have been debarred by the Test Act of 1673 from holding office in the future. Shaftesbury was replaced by Viscount Osborne, soon to become Earl of Danby, in the summer of 1673, on the recommendation of Buckingham and Clifford.
Danby immediately established his authority over the remaining members of the Cabal. Buckingham’s feud with Arlington saw him leak the details of the Treaty of Dover and fall from favour in 1674. Arlington survived as Southern Secretary until September of that year. Lauderdale retained his position and his relatively autonomous power in Scotland, becoming an enemy of Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury began to agitate against Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II. He briefly returned to government in the Privy Council Ministry and took a lead in forming the partisan group that would eventually become known as the Whigs.
Reign of Charles II, the 1670s
1670 – Charles signs the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles agrees to declare himself a Catholic, suspend penal laws against Catholics in England in return for secret subsidies from Louis XIV of France.
1670 – Second Conventicle Act
1670 – Hudson Bay Company founded in North America
1672 – Charles issues the Declaration of Indulgence, allowing dissenters and Catholics to practice their religion in private
1672 – Outbreak of the Third Dutch War as part of the secret treaty with France, the French invading the Spanish Netherlands while the British fleet engaged the Dutch fleet. The Dutch defeated the British fleet at Sole Bay and repelled a land invasion by France by flooding their dykes.
1672 James Duke of York’s wife, Anne Hyde (daughter of the disgraced Earl of Clarendon) died in childbirth, having delivered him two daughters, Mary (b.1662) and Anne, both of whom were brought up as Protestants. Who suspected, then, that they would both reign as queens of England?
1673 – James, Duke of York remarried, taking as his second wife Mary of Modena, a Catholic who was only four years older than his daughter, Mary. James came out publicly as a Catholic which caused a scandal.
1673 – When Charles allowed the Cavalier Parliament to sit again in 1673, it was inflamed by rumours of Charles’s deals with the King of France and Catholic influence in British statecraft, and so the vengeful Anglicans passed a Test Act which required everybody holding public office to take Anglican communion and swear an oath against a belief in transubstantiation – that the wafer of bread and the wine administered during communion actually and literally become the blood of Christ, a central premise of Roman Catholicism. In other words, the Act was expressly designed to keep Roman Catholics out of political office. The Catholic Treasurer Lord Clifford resigned his office then took his life. Charles’s brother, James Duke of York, resigned as High Admiral of the Navy.
In 1677 the Earl of Danby, who had emerged as Charles’s most capable minister, persuaded both Charles and James to let him make a strategic alliance by marrying James’s daughter Mary to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. William was the son of the King’s late sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession after James, Mary, and Ann. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day’. She was 15.
Reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after
1678 – The fantasist Titus Oates concocted the Popish Plot, the notion of a complex, far-reaching plot to murder Charles and convert Britain to a Catholic dictatorship. His initial claims were passed up the chain of command to Charles himself who handed them to Danby to investigate, and with each telling they became more fantastic and baroque. They played into the sense that Britain was being sold into Catholic influence which had haunted the 1670s, what with James’s overt Catholicism, his marriage to a Catholic princess, with Charles repeatedly allying with Catholic France against the Protestant Dutch. Oates’s fabrications helped create a McCarthy witch-hunt atmosphere. Even when he accused the Queen of being a member of the plot to assassinate her own husband, he was widely believed.
A second Test Act (1678) was passed which excluded all known Catholics from both Houses of Parliament. Known Catholics were ordered to leave London and many Protestants in the city openly carried weapons to defend themselves against the impending Catholic ‘onslaught’. Shops in London were boarded up, chains were stretched across major roadways, ferry passengers were detained for questioning, a fleet of lesser crooks and narks emerged to inform on their neighbours and rivals. Some twenty-four utterly innocent people were tried and executed, while Oates was awarded rooms in Whitehall and a pension.
The hysteria lasted from 1678 to 1681. A new Parliament was elected in March 1679 which presented a bill seeking to prevent the succession of the Catholic James. Charles worked on numerous fronts to address concerns, taking opponents into his Privy Council, sending James out of the kingdom, being prepared to sign a bill limiting the power of a Catholic monarch. But he would not concede the right to determine the royal succession to Parliament and so he dissolved this Parliament and called a second one. The second Parliament of 1679 was called amid mounting hysteria and opposition was orchestrated by the Earl of Shaftesbury amid press campaigns and petitions.
The coalition of allies which Shaftesbury put together around this central anti-Catholic approach was arguably the first political party in Britain and became known as the Whigs. The king’s supporters quickly copied the new organisational tactics of the Whigs and began to be known as the Tories. Charles refused to let the second Parliament sit, proroguing it seven times over the course of a year. Whig propagandists played on fears of Catholic tyranny; Tories revived memories of 1641 and the way a Parliament trying to seize the king’s prerogatives had led to 20 years of chaos.
Whigs and Tories
The term Whig was originally short for whiggamor, a term meaning ‘cattle driver’ used to describe western Scots who came to Leith for corn. In the reign of Charles I the term was used during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was then applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the King’s Episcopalian order in Scotland.
The term Whig entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681 when there was controversy about whether or not King Charles II’s brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles’s death. Whig was a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. The fervent Tory Samuel Johnson often joked that ‘the first Whig was the Devil’.
In his six-volume history of England, David Hume wrote:
The court party reproached their antagonists with their affinity to the fanatical conventiclers in Scotland, who were known by the name of Whigs: The country party found a resemblance between the courtiers and the popish banditti in Ireland, to whom the appellation of Tory was affixed. And after this manner, these foolish terms of reproach came into public and general use; and even at present seem not nearer their end than when they were first invented
In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs’ strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months but when it did in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but Charles was in attendance when it was rejected in the Lords and Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681.
As Mark Kishlansky summarises, ‘the governing class was now irredeemably divided.’
The next attempt at a Parliament met in March at Oxford, but when it also determined on the Exclusion Bill, Charles dissolved it after only a few days. He then he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and ruled for the rest of his reign without Parliament.
In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, which directly implicated many of them.
1683 The Rye House Plot a conspiracy to kill Charles and his brother James and return to parliamentary rule is uncovered. The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. The royal party went from Westminster to Newmarket to see horse races and were expected to make the return journey on 1 April 1683, but because there was a major fire in Newmarket on 22 March (which destroyed half the town), the races were cancelled, and the King and the Duke returned to London early. As a result, the planned attack never took place.
There seems to have been disagreement among the plotters on almost every aspect, including whether there even would be an assassination or whether it should be a kidnapping, and exactly how the subsequent uprising would be started and managed.
Once information about it was leaked, the plotters incriminated each other and letters and diaries were discovered which spread the net wider and wider.
Unlike the Popish Plot, Rye House was a genuine conspiracy involving an extended network of Whigs, politicians and non-conformists. Twelve were executed including William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, two condemned to death but pardoned, 10 imprisoned including the ageing Leveller John Wildman, 10 fled into exile including the noted philosopher John Locke and, most importantly, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been the effective leader of the Whig party. These formed a core of Whig opposition in exile, in the Netherlands.
As Anglican pledges of support flooded in from round the country, the authorities took the opportunity to crack down in dissenters and over 1,300 Quakers were imprisoned over the next 12 months.
Charles undertook a policy of reincorporation, systematically placing loyalist country officers around the country.
Death of Charles II
Charles died on 5 February 1685, aged just 54, only barely outmatching his father, who died aged 48. On his deathbed he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In the absence of any legitimate male heirs, the crown passed to his younger brother, who became King James II.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her. And if I don’t want to fuck her, she shouldn’t be in the movie’ (Don Simpson, President of Worldwide Production, Paramount Pictures, after seeing a showreel of Shelley Duvall, quoted on page 370)
Turns out lots of the senior people in the ‘New Hollywood’ of the early 1970s were know-nothing scumbags.
Also turns out the movie business is first and foremost a business i.e. even the most ‘radical’ far-out types in the late ’60s-early ’70s were concerned to make a profit – lots and lots of profit – win prizes, gain respect, engaged in extremely serious, dog-eat-dog competition with their peers and rivals. Basically, same old same old.
And it turns out that these young New Hollywood types were into awesome amounts of sex, adultery, free love, were ‘pussy addicts’, ‘pussy struck’ (p.212) and ‘pussy hounds’ (p.208), propositioning any girl who walked by, had multiple mistresses, girlfriends, even ordering up partners from modelling catalogues (a technique pioneered by Brian de Palma who recommended it to Steven Spielberg).
And that they ingested a whole heap of drugs – at first everyone smoked pot, riskier types took acid, and then in about 1971, the whole town discovered cocaine. By 1980 Hollywood was a winter wonderland of white powder. Martin Scorsese alone seems to have been a one-man pharmaceuticals factory (p.377).
None of these things are, by themselves, that much of a revelation. What makes this book such an epic read is the awesome amount of detail that Biskind goes into on all these and many other topics, and the amazing eye-witness testimony he appears to have coaxed out of everyone who was there.
Easy riders
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a big, intensely researched and hugely absorbing book, turning in at just over 500 pages of smallish print, including the index and ‘Cast of characters’.
The idea is simple. The later 1960s saw the final collapse of the Old Hollywood which had dominated from the 1920s, with its rigid studio systems, production quotas, stars under strict contracts, subject to carefully managed images and appearing in movies with, by and large, squeaky clean subject matter (Doris Day & Rock Hudson) or, if a bit more gritty (gangster movies, Westerns), nonetheless featuring clear heroes, baddies and well-upholstered love interests.
In this Old World, directors were simply hired hands who took pride in subsuming their own style to the requirements of the studio and the project (mostly – though you could still tell a Howard Hawks movie from a John Ford movie etc).
The late 1960s saw the arrival of a Completely Different Approach, with writers and directors and actors determined to tear down all the old restrictions, to portray more explicit violence and sex and controversial political and social themes in their movies, and to have a lot more say about the kinds of movies they wrote and directed. They wanted to be auteurs, not just directors but film-makers, free to convey their special visions in their own personal ways.
The new young generation of writers, directors and actors who came through at the end of the 1960s created a Golden Age of Independent Cinema in a new kind of Hollywood, which slowly adapted to more grown-up, controversial and ‘difficult’ themes.
The audiences were younger, too, and better educated, college kids who wanted to see the unsettling reality of the world they lived in – the endless carnage in Vietnam and student protests and Black Power and drugs and free love – portrayed up on the screen.
All of this is fairly well known, as is the list of New Hollywood directors:
Robert Altman (b.1925) M*A*S*H*, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville
Mike Nichols (b.1931) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Teach Me!, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge
Roman Polanski (b.1933) Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess
William Friedkin (b.1935) The French Connection, The Exorcist
Woody Allen (b.1935) Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories
Peter Bogdanovitch (b.1939) The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Nickelodeon
Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939) The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now
Brian de Palma (b.1940) Carrie, Scarface
Martin Scorcese (b.1942) Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull
Terence Malick (b.1943) Badlands, Days of Heaven
George Lucas (b.1944) THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars,The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark
John Milius (b.1944)
Steven Spielberg (b.1946) Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The key New Hollywood actors:
Warren Beatty, James Caan, Robert de Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Jon Voigt, Ryan O’Neal, George Segal
New Hollywood movies
And the movies themselves. In this list I’ve 1. highlighted in bold the movies Biskind treats in real detail 2. and indicated their directors. The others are included as context. And I’ve included the movies which won Best Picture Oscar for each of the years. The idea is that there a few forerunners in 67 and 68:
1967 – Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn), The Graduate (Mike Nichols), Cool Hand Luke – Best Picture Oscar: In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison)
1969 – Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Best Picture – Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)
1970 – M*A*S*H (Robert Altman), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson), Catch-22, Little Big Man (Arthur Penn), Woodstock: Best Picture – Patton (Franklin Schaffner)
1971 – The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovitch), Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby), Dirty Harry, Klute, THX 1138 (George Lucas): Best Picture – The French Connection (William Friedkin)
1972 – The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson), Cabaret, Deliverance, Jeremiah Johnson: Best picture – The Godfather(Francis Ford Coppola),
1973 – American Graffiti (George Lucas), The Exorcist (William Friedkin), The Last Detail (Hal Ashby), The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman), Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese), Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovitch), Badlands, Sleeper: Best Picture – The Sting (George Roy Hill)
1974 – Chinatown (Polanski), The Conversation (Coppola), Daisy Miller (Bogdanovitch), The Parallax View, The Taking of Pelham 123: Best picture – The Godfather part II
1975 – Nashville, Shampoo, Love and Death, Jaws,Three Days of the Condor: Best picture – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Foreman)
1976 – All The President’s Men, Bound For Glory (Hal Ashby), Marathon Man, The Omen, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Taxi Driver: Best picture – Rocky (John G. Avildson)
1977 – Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Best picture – Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
1978 – Coming Home (Ashby), Days of Heaven (Malick), Blue Collar (Schrader): Best picture – The Deer Hunter (Cimino)
1979 – Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 1941 (Spielberg): Best picture – Kramer v Kramer
1980 – Popeye, Heaven’s Gate (Cimono), American Gigolo (Schrader), Raging Bull (Scorsese), Tess, The Elephant Man: Best picture – Ordinary People
1981 – Reds (Beatty), Raiders of the Lost Ark: Best picture – Chariots of Fire
Qualities of New Hollywood movies
To summarise: the ‘New Hollywood’ was a brief historical window when a new generation of writers and directors, unfettered by Hollywood traditions, felt empowered to tackle challenging new subject matter, shot more cheaply on location (away from the technical and stylistic limitations of studios), starring attractive young actors (Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway), with more graphic treatments of violence and sex.
And a troubled, haunting tone. The best New Hollywood films capture a wistful sense of the loss of shared values and social certainties besetting late-60s America, exacerbated by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and the general disillusionment with politicians and the ‘old’.
Matching this disillusionment, many New Hollywood films specialise in an atmosphere of uncertainty – uncertainty about plots and characters and values.
The demographics are interesting. In the 1950s and into the 1960s movie-going audiences tended to be middle-aged, high school-educated i.e. not too intellectual. The Sound of Music suited them just fine. But the arrival of the New Hollywood period coincided with a marked shift in the movie-going public, which changed to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic. By the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college. Radical students. Peace, man. Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.
It was a more studenty audience ready to lap up more extreme violence and full-frontal nudity undreamed of by the Hollywood of the 1950s. The old studio heads couldn’t understand these pot-smoking hippies at all and the New Hollywood period can be seen as a hiatus while the Old Guard gave unprecedented autonomy (and money) to a bunch of new, young, wannabe directors.
In reality it only took 4 or 5 years (Martin Scorsese says the period lasted from 1971 to 1976 ‘because we were just starting out’, p.233) before a new generation of studio executives figured out new ways to cater to / exploit the new audience, new genres, subjects, and approaches to marketing and releasing movies, which would restore big money profits and revenue streams to the studios, and the era of happy-go-lucky experimentation ended (see below).
The stories
Gossip Biskind loves gossip. His book is basically a gossip fest. Donna Greenberg has a rich husband and lives in a big beach house in Malibu. She knows Julie Payne, daughter of John Payne and child actress Ann Shirley. Julie has a perfect American body. She is fierce and wild, chainsmokes and drinks, is liable to turn up at Donna’s house at one in the morning, screaming: ‘I want to use your swimming pool to have a fuck.’
There’s lots of stuff like that. If you find that kind of thing interesting or entertaining, then this is the book for you.
Wanna know about the time Dennis Hopper threatened to pull a knife on Rip Torn in a bar? Or ordered 50 nubile young women up to his apartment for an orgy he could film (p.134)? Or beat his wife, who eventually ran away with the kids, terrified he was going to kill her? Or was married for six days to a gorgeous dollybird he met on the location of his second movie – but that once he got her home he took to roaming round the house, off his face on drugs, firing live ammunition, slapping her about, and handcuffing her to the bed so she couldn’t get away… until after six days of this, at a moment when the cuffs were off, she fled?
It’s all here, plus hundreds and hundreds of other stories of the same ilk. The way Warren Beatty’s Winebago on location was besieged by nymphets and spent hours rocking up and down, day and night, as he screwed them? Studio execs lounging by the pool giving all the bikini-ed nubiles who passed by numbers out of ten, Bert Schneider trying to persuade his wife to screw all his friends so he’d feel less bad about his flings, powerful men thinking it run-of-the-mill to say things like ‘Nice tits, honey’ to every woman they met.
The hundreds of outrageous stories behind the bloated, disaster-struck production of Apocalypse Now (the drugs, the no script, Brando’s refusal to act, Martin Sheen’s heart attack, the typhoon which destroyed the set, Coppola’s nervous breakdown), the extraordinary drug intake of Martin Scorsese which almost killed him (pp.386-7), the overdose which saw Hal Ashby being stretchered off to hospital after a hard night partying with the Rolling Stones (p.353).
Sex Biskind loves this stuff and loves describing the sex lives of the directors and executives and stars. Once Peter Bogdanovitch arrives in Hollywood, he and his wife do a good job inveigling their way into the highest Old Hollywood circles.
When their friends went away, they house-sat. Like X-rated Goldilockses they went through the closets of Beverly Hills mansions trying on clothes and fucking in every bedroom. (p.115)
Yes, ‘fucking’. The book starts with everyone being foul-mouthed as you can imagine, and then goes downhill. Everyone was fucking everyone else. Well, to be more precise, pretty much every male in the book is unfaithful to whatever partner they have (wife, mistress, girlfriend). Some, like Beatty, are natural babe magnets. Others set out to systematically screw the wives and girlfriends of all their friends.
A whole lot of women are interviewed who give a lamentable collective portrait of a generation of ‘pussy addicts’. Ted Ashley, chairman of the Warner Brothers film studio from 1969 to 1980 was, according to producer Don Simpson, ‘the pussy freak of all time’ (p.82). Peter Bogdanovich casts his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in flop after flop because he is ‘pussy struck’.
Once Francis Ford Coppola made it big (very big) with The Godfather he bought a huge house with a pool in San Francisco, gave big parties, as soon as his wife went to bed, he was touching up all the nubiles in the pool. ‘It was no secret that Francis was a major pussy hound,’ says Marcia Lucas (p.208).
Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson emerge as particularly colourful characters. As Biskind puts it, ‘Bert [was] a man for whom the term ‘mindfucker’ was invented…’ (p.130) and he screwed his way through an armada of women, a highlight of whom was the beautiful actress Candice Bergen. He tried to get his wife, Judy, to sleep around too, so he wouldn’t feel so guilty about his affairs, and encouraged his friends to hit on her (p.129). He drove Candice (Candy) mad by his incessant lecturing her about life, how to behave etc, acting Svengali to her Trilby.
Bob Rafelson directed one of my all-time favourite movies, Five Easy Pieces, but is bluntly described as a ‘bully’, raving, shouting, blustering and browbeating everyone around him (p.119).
Drugs And the drugs. Obviously drugs of one sort or another had been around for a long time but mostly on a tiny marginal fringe. The success of Easy Rider made every young producer, director, actor or executive worth his salt feel like he had to be au fait with hash and pot, and the radical ones tried acid. Biskind describes some of the small independent production houses where the secretaries had the task of rolling the joints in preparation for big meetings.
Drugs were even involved in the actual production of the films. Bob Rafelson controlled the pacing of Jack Nicholson’s performance in Five Easy Pieces by managing his drug intake. He and the producer would discuss whether it was best to give Jack some hash or some grass before each scene, depending on the acting requirements (p.119).
Everyone knew Dennis Hopper would scarf down any pharmaceuticals from anywhere within reach. During his acting career, some directors never used him after lunch, when he would be trolleyed; another director sent Hopper calls sheets which included annotations suggesting which drugs he should use before which scenes (p.136).
Then cocaine came in. It went from being a secret vice to a social norm. Bowls of cocaine were laid out at the best parties. Wearing a little gold coke spoon on a necklace became a fashion statement. ‘Cokey’ becomes an adjective. The movie Personal Best is powdered with the stuff.
It was a cokey set. A production designer referred to [the movie’s writer-director] as ‘old write-a-line, snort-a-line Towne’. (p.395)
Scorsese at the Cannes Film Festival had good coke flown in from Paris for himself and his entourage. When studio executive Robert Evans flew out to visit the set of Robert Altman’s movie, Popeye, shooting in Malta in 1980, his luggage contained large consignments of coke for the director and crew, which made it embarrassing when his luggage got lost and opened by customs. Biskind tells a wild story of a panic-stricken Evans ringing studio head Don Simpson in the middle of the night, making him realise the stakes were that a senior exec and a major film could go down in a drugs scandal, and telling him to get no less a personage than Henry Kissinger on the case! (p.370).
Business All this sex and drugs stuff is initially entertaining, but after a hundred pages has got a bit oppressive. More interesting is the insight into the movie business as a business. We are told about umpteen ‘business meetings’ where decisions are made about greenlighting numerous projects, or where Old Hollywood executives are persuaded to fund risky experimental new ventures, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studios. That said, they’re not like the meetings I used to go to at government departments, which go on for one, two or three hours with an agenda, minutes and action logs. In Biskind’s hands most of these ‘meetings’ quickly turn into shouting matches, where executives and directors shout and swear at each other.
It wasn’t exactly a meeting, but it gives you a flavour of the business relationships to learn that whenever super-producer Robert Evans phoned Francis Ford Coppola with yet more criticism about the Godfather project, Coppola invariably ended up yelling obscenities, slamming the phone down, and kept a hammer nearby so he could smash the phone to pieces (p.153). After which a secretary replaced it with a new one.
When producer Stanley Jaffe, at a pre-production meeting for The Godfather, was so insistent that Marlon Brando wouldn’t be in the movie that he slammed his fist on the table, Coppola feigned having an epileptic fit, and fell to the floor in spasms, to convey just how imbecilic the suggestion was (p.153).
Money And there’s a lot of talk about money, about how much a project will cost, how much the studio will put in, the shape of the deal i.e. will director and stars get cash up front or a percentage of the profits, and how those profits could be calculated differently, taking into account all kinds of overheads, what John Landis calls ‘numbers and deals and phone calls’ (p.245).
Warner Bros exec John Calley pays $125,000 up-front to direct the screwball comedy, What’s Up, Doc? Brando gets $50,000 for appearing in The Godfather while Coppola only got $110,000 (plus 6% of the take, which ended up making him a multi-millionaire). Robert Towne was paid $250,000 to write Chinatown plus 5% of the gross. Lots and lots and lots of financial detail like that.
The process So, putting to one side the sex and drugs gossip, it’s interesting to get really embedded into the way the whole system worked: the way producers, directors, actors and execs were constantly having business meetings and/or social gatherings, hanging out in bars, discussing books or plays which have the potential to become movies, discussing who would be right to develop it, to turn it into a treatment or a script, who to offer the parts to, and the complexity of schedules and commitments, which meant your first choice of director or star actor or whoever, were continually being changed, adjusted, projects dropped, projects revived and so on. Like spinning plates. Like moving between multiple stages where multiple producers, directors, writers and actors are all spinning multiple systems of plates, an awful lot of which crashed and shattered, often very expensively.
And Biskind seems to have staggering access to it all. He seems to have carried out interviews and garnered eye-witness accounts from everyone present at all the key moments, parties, meetings, phone calls and sets. Some critics have complained that Biskind distorted evidence and stories and accounts in order to fit his wildly cynical and jaded narrative, but he indicates where accounts conflict and anyway, who cares? The point is rarely in the detail, it’s in the overall atmosphere of grotesquely appalling behaviour at every level, in every way.
As a small example of how it works – legendary cinéaste and would-be director Peter Bogdanovitch – before he’d directed anything – and his wife production designer Polly Platt, were sent by a magazine to write a feature about the making of what turned out to be John Ford’s last movie, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn. They got friendly with young actor Sal Mineo, the only person on the set their age. Sal gave Polly a dog-eared copy of a trashy paperback titled The Last Picture Show and said it would make a good movie and he’d love to be in it.
Thus began the long process which led to the eventual production of the movie, The Last Picture Show, released in 1971, one of the defining movies of the New Hollywood, Bogdanovitch’s first and arguably greatest film. During filming he fell in love with the female lead, Cybill Shepherd, aged 20 at the time, and left his wife who – the book emphasises – had played a key role in not only adapting the book, but even on set, helping to direct it. Biskind describes in excruciating detail the torment Polly went through as she helped her husband with every aspect of the day’s filming, only to go back to their apartment alone as he spent every night with pneumatic young Cybill.
None of which stops The Last Picture Show being a masterpiece and one of my favourite movies.
So from the hundreds of examples in the book, you get a good sense of the very extended series of accidents, insights, conversations, commissions, scripts, hirings and firings which are all involved in the convoluted processes which lead up to the production of any movie.
Networks And you get a good sense of the extended network or matrix which all this takes place in. Parties mattered. As a small example, Peter Fonda’s agent, Sue Mengers, had parties where people hooked up and did deals: Ann-Margret met director Mike Nichols and got a part in Carnal Knowledge; Burt Reynolds met director Alan Pakula and got a part in Starting Over; Lauren Hutton got chatting to director Paul Schrader and got a part in American Gigolo (p.132).
The socialising was important. Anything could happen at tonight’s party, someone could tip you off to the script going round, or that so-and-so’s looking for a director or actor for some project they’re considering… and it could be the Big Break. You never knew.
‘I went to every party, talked to everybody I could to get a picture made. I looked at people in terms of whether they could help me.’ (Scorsese, quoted page 238)
So this is why personal relationships really mattered. This is where the gossip comes in. Information about who was up and who was down, who was friends with who or had fallen out with who, who was looking to take revenge or sabotage someone else – all this was potentially vital business information as it made the landscape of opportunities much clearer.
That said, almost all the friendships, marriages and relationships in the book sooner or later turn sour, and often toxic. Because of the nature of the business.
Beatty and Towne had been friends since the ’60s. They were as close as two men could be, but it is hard to maintain friendships in Hollywood where the stakes are so high, where there are vast disparities of money and power, where the lines between affection and business are blurred, and people never know whether their success is earned or accidental. Enough is never enough, and the poison of envy eats away at the fibre of friendships. (p.305)
Types of director
The dark, yellowy feel of The Godfather derives almost entirely from the Director of Photography, Gordon Willis. I was surprised to read Biskin stating that Francis Ford Coppola’s strengths were not really visual – he was good at story-telling, writing dialogue and getting on with actors. Willis gave The Godfather that unparalleled look.
Obviously there are different kinds of directors, but I hadn’t quite realised just how different. Whereas Coppola loved actors and working with them, Polanski hated them and behaved like a dictator, like Napoleon. ‘Who gives a fuck about your motivation, your paycheck is your motivation, just say the fucking words’, he shouted at Faye Dunaway on the set of Chinatown (p.189). On on occasion she was sitting in a car holding a coffee cup while Polanski yelled at her, until she finally flung it in his face, at which point he realised it was full of pee. Hers, or co-star Jack Nicholson’s, sitting grinning next to her?
Hal Ashby, by contrast again, was immensely easy-going with his actors, one of the greatest ‘non-directors’ of all time according to Nicholson, but the downside was scenes often lacked bite and intensity so that the script got washed out (p.179).
Robert Altman created a ‘wonderful atmosphere’ on his sets, where he worked alongside the actors to get at the ‘truth’ of a scene (p.215). But he also ‘fucked everybody over’, limited other people’s pay but made sure he got the full rate, sacked crew members arbitrarily and was, of course, a womanising s.o.b.
William Friedkin was a very technical kind of director, very involved with the lenses and the technical effects, but he didn’t like actors, he went on record as saying he’d rather direct tree stumps (p.218). And we hear about the time he permanently injured Ellen Birstyn’s spine, during a special effect for The Exorcist.
And Terrence Malick (Badlands) was so notoriously indecisive that he took two years (!) to edit Days of Heaven (finally released in 1978), after which he retired from the business for decades.
One of the best bits of the book, I thought, was the one-page biographies of all the key directors.
Hal Ashby was raised on a farm and one day found his dad in the barn who’d put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger; he never recovered, bottled it up, but it came out in titanic rages.
Coppola was stricken with polio when he was eight-years-old, and spent a year in bed, all friends and most family forbidden from visiting him, lonely and isolated, a sense of loneliness and victimhood he carried into adult life.
Scorsese was a short, skinny, sickly momma’s boy with allergies to everything and bad asthma, ‘filled with phobias and anxieties’ (p.238). He was timid, bordering on cowardly, hated confrontation, always smiling. But he bottled up the rage from being a short skinny kid in a rough neighbourhood – he was a wall puncher, a phone thrower (p.239) – and projected his anger into his films – which is why I’ve never liked them (p.227).
He was not very confrontational. Which is one of the reasons I think he gets so confrontational in the films, he’s just letting all that out. All the stuff he can’t do in his day-to-day life. (Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver)
William Friedkin grew up in a tough neighbourhood of Chicago and was arrested for armed robbery (!). After the success of French Connection and The Exorcist, he thought he was a genius and behaved intolerably to everyone, many enemies being thrilled when his next movie, Sorcerer, shot on location in the Dominican Republic, was a catastrophe.
Paul Schrader’s upbringing was one of religious terror and beatings by his pious mother and father. The God-fearing upbringing of screenwriter Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, with its parental beatings and hellfire terrors, is itself the stuff of fiction (or nightmares). His obsession with suicide, with always having a loaded gun by his bedside, the fantasies of mass violence, all this was to spill onto the screen in the script of Taxi Driver.
Steven Spielberg was the nemesis of the counter-culture, immune to politics, never took drugs, shared his parents’ values, wanted to do good business and entertain.
George Lucas very similar, brought up in provincial nowheresville by philistine parents, small, frail and ill (he had diabetes cf. Scorsese’s asthma and Coppola’s polio). On his arrival in LA he initially thought he wanted to be a rebel like the swaggering cool dudes, de Palma and John Milius and Paul Schrader – till he had a eureka moment when he realised he wanted to make people happy, he wanted to entertain them – which led to the good-time American Graffiti (1974) and then the epoch-making, childish simplicities of Star Wars.
Lucas and Spielberg were in the vanguard of the counterattack by small-town and suburban values that were to reclaim Hollywood as their own. (p.343)
This is partly because it sheds light on the individuals. But also because they’re one of the few places where you get a bit of depth and variety, and an insight into other lives, other American settings and contexts, outside the pussy-grabbing, dope-smoking, egomaniac film world.
The end of an era
The very same ‘film school brats’ who helped to pioneer the new age, unwittingly brought about its demise.
The air of artistic freedom which had come in with Easy Rider (1969) began to reverse itself when the commercial success of Jaws (1975) and then the epic Star Wars (1977) led the studios to realise the potential of a new kind of blockbuster, whose profits could be amplified by careful control of production, marketing and merchandising. Slowly that heady air of half-amateur experimentalism and freedom of subject and tone drained away.
Films like Alien (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) incorporated all the technical innovations pioneered in the previous decade, but had somehow morphed them into a slick new professional look. The moral and stylistic ambivalences of the best New Hollywood movies of the very early 70s had been turned into slick product which went on, as we all know, to become highly profitable franchises, complete with TV spinoffs and a world of merchandising.
Alongside the invention of a new type of blockbuster, went a further change in the demographic of people consuming movies. If 60s radicals had applauded the change in demographic from middle-aged to student-aged audiences, they were not so happy when this downward trend continued towards actual children.
By the mid-1970s 50% of the American movie-going public was aged 12–20. The thing about actual children is they tend to be as socially conservative as their parents, and so the downward trend in the age of the movie-going public was accompanied by a move away from the brief political radicalism of the early 70s towards a reborn conservatism of subjects and approach.
George Lucas understood this extremely well. He is quoted as saying American Graffiti was targeted at 16-year-olds, Star Wars at ten to 12-year-olds (p.318) and that is the basically childish demographic where most movies have stuck ever since.
The Indiana Jones series, like the never-ending Star Wars series, are, basically, films for children, and they were the future, the grandparents of today’s endless X-Men and Marvel Superhero franchises.
Film critic Pauline Kael realised this at the time and wrote essays warning about the trend towards juvenile feelgood movies, not least in an essay titled ‘Fear of Movies’ (p.342). Biskind quotes Spielberg himself as saying he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind entirely to conjure up that child’s sense of wonder, and goes on to point out how the movie’s protagonist abandons his adult responsibilities to his wife and son, regresses to childhood enshtusiasms and then, by entering the alien mothership, effectively goes right back to the womb, relinquishing all adult worries.
It’s hard to think of a more infantilising vision. (p.363)
Biskind’s analyses
Biskind provides fascinating accounts of the random conceptions and lengthy travails of all the key movies of the 1970s, accounts which are drenched, as I’ve said in gossip about personalities, sex and drugs, along with the intricate wheeler-dealing between directors, stars agents and studio executives, that more often than not continued right the way through the shooting, editing and preview stage of the films, sometimes even after they’d been officially released.
But at the point where the narrative reaches the actual release of each of the signature movies of the movement, he also subjects the key movies to interesting ‘criticism’ and ‘analysis’.
Thus he as a very insightful (to me, at any rate) page about The Exorcist which he sees entirely as ‘a male nightmare of female puberty’, drenched in fear of emergent female sexuality, which is why the movie can be seen as a conspiracy of all the male characters to torture and torment the pubescent girl, Regan, back to her pre-sexual innocence (p.223).
Biskind is good on how the unique visual look of The Godfather owes everything to director of photographer Gordon Willis (pp.156-157) but he goes on to give an insightful interpretation of how the movie as a whole, despite its status as the masterpiece of the New Hollywood’s leading figure, Coppola, is in fact a profoundly conservative if not reactionary movie, in its psychological and cultural tendency – promoting the huge importance of family and loyalty at a time when the counter-culture was busy trying to undermine The Family as a bourgeois, sexist construct (p.164).
To bring this out Biskind usefully contrasts the scene where Michael and the Don acknowledge their love for each other with the comparable scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicolson’s character completely fails to communicate with his stroke-bound father.
The Godfather embodies a type of blockbuster sentimentality which points towards the neo-conservative values of the Reagan era, whereas Five Easy Pieces embodies the low-key, on-location, moral and psychological ambiguity and frustration which was the signature note of the New Hollywood. Which is why, although I can acknowledge that The Godfather is a masterpiece, I prefer the low-key, realistic ‘truths’ and perplexities of Five Easy Pieces more.
On another level, Biskind discusses the role of genres. He details the struggles Coppola had to get the movie made, not least the scepticism of every studio exec that gangster movies were passé, and so brings out how its unexpected success marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of old genres in a new blockbuster style.
This reinvention of worn-out genres would turn out to be the modus operandi of Spielberg and Lucas, reinventing scarey (Jaws), science fiction (Star Wars) and adventure (Indiana Jones) in the new blockbuster idiom.
Biskind neatly calls their achievement ‘genre gentrification’, and that captures the way a rough, edgy, arty neighbourhood (New Hollywood) ended up being taken over by smooth-talking young urban professionals (Spielberg, Lucas) and how the tired old Hollywood genres were made over, given a technological lick of paint, and resold at vast profits (p.342).
When you read Biskind’s very useful potted biographies of Spielberg and Lucas, what comes over is what utterly conventional personalities they are, coming from bland provincial backgrounds, completely lacking in political edge, timid and unworldly, who knew about life mainly from TV, who arrived in the Sodom and Gomorrah of 70s Hollywood but didn’t sleep around and didn’t take drugs, just wanted to make movies.
Their lack of rock’n’roll behaviour should have warned all the other bullshitting blowhards of the movement (de Palma and Schrader and Friedkin and Rafelson spring to mind) that here was something new, and quiet and understated, which was going to steal the carpet from under their feet.
Biskind sees this triumph of the homely, the popular, the regular guy and the mass popcorn-eating audience embodied in the story of Jaws itself. In it the rough, tough, right-wing macho man Quint gets eaten. ‘The intellectual Jew of the left’ (Biskind’s words, p.279), despite all his college talk, is ineffectual and runs (or swims) away. It is the unreflective, unflashy, everyman cop, Brody, who saves the day. The movie’s representative of precisely the kind of ‘familymanregularguy’ who Spielberg would aim his following movies at (with such dazzling success).
Politics and society
I warmed to lots of Biskind’s analyses because he relates the movies to their social, cultural and political context, which is much the same way as I think and write about art and literature in this blog.
1969 was the high point of the Vietnam War, protests against the war, and the hippy counter-culture, Woodstock etc. Easy Rider provided images, characters and a popular soundtrack which crystallised that cultural moment. But by spring 1975 it was over. In fact the Paris Peace Accords ended the war in January 1973 and by March 1973 all US forces had been withdrawn. There followed two more years of conflict before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army in April 1975, but the entire raison d’etre of the anti-war movement evaporated in 1973. Alongside it, the enmity of all right-thinking left-wingers and liberals to Richard Nixon’s presidency were vindicated when Nixon resigned in August 1974, rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.
So by 1974 the main bogeyman and the central issue of the counterculture had both disappeared, depriving the movement of its focal points and energy. Instead, America had a whole new set of worries. The country was stricken with an energy crisis from the autumn of 1973 which brought to a juddering halt the run of economic growth which had fuelled increasing affluence ever since the end of the Second World War.
A huge middle ground of public opinion, which had been prepared to let the hippies get away with the benefit of the doubt, who had let themselves be persuaded that America was an evil imperialist power or had dabbled with pot, now found themselves unemployed and scrabbling for work.
George Lucas is quoted several times as saying ordinary people were fed up of being told by New Hollywood directors that they were wicked racist imperialist pigs exploiting the workers. They wanted to see movies which would leave them feeling happier as they walked out the cinema than when they went in, not wretched and depressed (pp.363)
Hence American Graffiti, a feelgood movie deliberately set in the early 60s before the whole shitstorm of Vietnam and the counterculture kicked in. And then Star Wars, the ultimate in apolitical escapism, set in a universe long ago and far away, where the good guys wear white and the bad guys dress in black.
You can hear it in the rock music, too. In 1969 hipsters listened to the hairy ugly dudes in Steppenwolf, singing their signature track Born To Be Wild which runs through Easy Rider, ‘head out on the highway, lookin’ for adventure’. Young film studio executives were taking pot, even acid, experimenting with open marriages and free love.
Just four years later (in 1973) The Eagles released Tequila Sunrise, laden with slick worldweariness, and the young studio execs were now wearing carefully ironed jeans and cheesecloth shirts, everyone was snorting cocaine and looking for the next Godfather.
By the late 70s Bert Schneider, the buccaneering executive behind BBS Productions which funded a lot of the early New Hollywood productions, now felt tired and old. The BBS building on La Brea, once the headquarters of everything hip and happening, now felt like a dilapidated old ‘head’ shop, covered in yellowing posters from the hippy era, relics from a different age (p.299).
When Barry Diller, who came from heading TV channel ABC arrived as new CEO of Paramount, he sacked a lot of the old staff and installed a young Michael Eisner as President.
When Eisner came in as president, the atmosphere at Paramount changed completely. They wanted to do what they had done at the [TV] network, manufacture product aimed at your knees. (Richard Sylbert, Head of Production at Paramount at the time, quoted on p.297)
Biskind explains that it was the ‘TV regime’ at Paramount that ‘helped to put the New Hollywood in its grave’ (p.397).
New ways of doing business
The era of experimentation came to an end when Hollywood discovered new ways of making big, big money from blockbusters. Frankly, I didn’t understand the minutiae of the new ways of funding projects which Biskind describes, but I did understand the three other key elements which were ‘new’:
1. Breaks Previously movies had been released in a relatively limited number of cinemas round the country, and in waves or ‘breaks’ – alpha cinemas first, then, when the first wave of popularity had passed, in beta cinemas – all in a bid to stretch out a movie’s paying life. With Godfather, the studio opened it across a much larger number of cinemas right at the start – and made a ton of money (total box office something like $280 million). Having seen this work so well, Universal Pictures copied the tactic with Jaws – its first weekend it opened in 409 cinemas and made a huge profit – the total take ended up being $470 million. So mass openings right across the country became part of a new ‘blockbuster’ strategy.
2. TV promotion Conventional wisdom throughout the 1960s was that television was the rival, the competitor, which was slaying the film industry, taking ads away from the screen, but much more importantly, allowing people to slump on their sofas after dinner and watch high-grade entertainment without having to schlepp through bad weather and wait in line to get into a movie which may, or may not, be any good.
It was a business strategy breakthrough when marketing departments realised that heavy investment in TV commercials could make a massive difference to box office. Seems obvious to us now, nearly 50 years later, but it was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time. Thus Universal spent $700,000, an unprecedented amount, on half-minute ads during prime time TV slots to promote Jaws and the results were spectacular.
Jaws change the business forever, as the studios discovered the value of wide breaks – the number of theatres would rise to one thousand, two thousand, and more by the next decade – and massive TV advertising, both of which increased the costs of marketing and distribution, diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. As costs mounted, the willingness to take risks diminished proportionately. Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws. (p.278)
3. Merchandising The third aspect of the ‘blockbuster revolution’ was merchandising. There’d always been book tie-ins and cheap trinkets, but they had never been commercially important. Once again it was Jaws that began the process, with toys and t-shirts, but Star Wars which took it to a whole new level. What’s fascinating to learn is that George Lucas knew this from the start.
Until Star Wars, merchandising was a relatively trivial cash centre. Lucas understood its importance (p.320)
Lucas was fascinated by money, studied the bottom line, analysed the sources of profit and realised from the start the immense potential of Star Wars merchandising. After all, from the get-go he conceived it as a movie for kids, and you sell kids toys, right? He aimed to make ‘the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make’ (p.321), and recoup the money on the toys.
Star Wars drove home the lesson of Jaws, that kids and young adults would come back again and again to a movie without stars… It woke up the studios to the potential of merchandising, showed that the sale of books, T-shirts, and action figures could be a significant profit centre. Star Wars‘s merchandising efforts, instead of merely promoting the movie, as had been the case in the past, took on a life of their own and sucked up well over $3 billion in licensing fees as of the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy in 1997, adding an incentive to replace complex characters with simple figures that could be turned into toys. (p.341)
Taken together, massive ‘breaks’, TV advertising and mass merchandising (combined with the more obvious element of ‘popular’, mass-audience-pleasing subject matter) provide a good working definition of the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon and are, quite clearly, the exact opposite of the low-budget, improvised, ambiguous art movies that New Hollywood directors got to make in their brief window of opportunity.
Which is why critics and insiders date the New Hollywood era from 1969’s Easy Rider, which seemed to blow the film world right open, to 1975’s Jaws when the window for interesting art movies began to close, and then 1977, when Star Wars slammed it shut.
Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and soul of Hollywood. It created the big budget, comic-book mentality. (Screenwriter Paul Schrader, p.316)
Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars is like when MacDonalds got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. (Director William Friedkin, p.344)
Dennis Jakob coined the term ‘twerp cinema’ for the movies of Lucas and Spielberg.
No-one knows
One of the most fascinating things about the book, is no-one knows when a movie is going to be a hit or a flop. I found it riveting to read about the disasters which plagued the production of Jaws, I had no idea it was such a screwup all the way through the filming and editing, and right up to the last minute Spielberg and a lot of the suits thought it was a disaster. Even more amazingly, Lucas was at moments suicidal about Star Wars which he thought was a piece of junk, incoherent twaddle, and so did many of his friends and family!
It’s fascinating to see just how contingent so many of the films were. Nobody knew, not even the makers, whether they would, by the time of the final edit and the final sound mix, be Oscar winners or humiliating failures.
This helps explain the relentless anxiety, the uncertainty, paranoia and angst of the leading directors. As the budgets got bigger, the pressure on them, and the producers and studio execs, became unbearable. Here’s one snapshot from hundreds:
Scorsese went into Raging Bull twisted into a knot of bitterness, defiance and self-doubt. He was overwhelmed by a sense of fatality… Scorsese was edgy and irritable as ever, prone to sudden outbursts of anger… Scorsese had such a severe anxiety attack on the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo that he couldn’t catch his breath and was convinced he was having a coronary… (pp.391-2)
One consequence was the drugs, which were easily available and were the easiest way to escape the crushing anxiety of each day. But it also explains the prevalence of adoring groupies and yes-men which Biskin describes the uber-directors as surrounding themselves with (Friedkin, Ashby, Bogdanovich, but especially Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese). Because the closed-shop of adulatory groupies was like the drugs – a vital prop, a psychological survival strategy for men who came under immense pressure, not only to deliver big budget hits, but from their own inner demons telling them they ought to have been making the artistic masterpieces they’d come into the business dreaming about.
It was a recipe for endless malaise, anxiety, anger, frustration and depression. And masses of drugs. And the terrible treatment of women.
Jews in Hollywood
I don’t particularly care whether there are or have been lots of Jews in senior positions in Hollywood. It’s well known that some of the most prominent executives who set up the first studios in the 1920s were Jews who’d moved out from New York (Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg), but a lot weren’t. Similarly, a number of key players in the New Hollywood movement were Jewish… and a lot weren’t.
But it does appear to matter to at least some of the characters themselves, and it palpably matters to Biskind. He consistently note a person’s Jewishness, and quotes their own remarks about their Jewishness:
[Robert] Towne’s melancholic, hangdog expression and pale, feverish eyes, along with the Talmudic slope of his shoulders gave him a rabbinical cast he would never entirely shake. (p.30)
[Robert Towne] was a born kibitzer. (p.50)
[For The Graduate, director Mike] Nichols turned the [originally Gentile] families into Beverly Hills Jews and gave the part to Dustin Hoffman. (p.34)
[Bob Rafelson] was handsome in the Jewish way, a shock of dark brown hair over a high forehead, rosebud lips frozen in a permanent pout under a fighter’s battered nose. (p.53)
Director Henry Jaglom remembers [Bert Schneider] from Camp Kohut, for Jewish kids, in Oxford Maine…(p.55)
Bert and his princess Judy [Feinberg] were truly Jewish royalty. (p.56)
‘These were people who didn’t feel authentic,’ says Toby [Carr]. ‘Artists suffer and upper-middle-class Jewish boys from New York didn’t feel they had…’ (p.58)
Evans, according to his number two, Peter Bart, ‘idolised gangsters, but he was fascinated by Jewish gangsters – Bugsy Siegel – not Italian ones’. (p.142)
Evans and Bart screened mob movies, realised they had all been written and directed by Jews (p.142)
Everyone who worked for [Charlie Bludhorn] was certain he was Jewish, but if so he took great pains to conceal it. (p.144)
Bart recalls, ‘We were in London together, going out for dinner. I picked Frank [Yablans] up in his room. He was finished dressing, looking at himself in the mirror, and he said, “You know, I’m a really ugly man, I’m a homely fat Jewish man.”‘ (p.145)
[Robert Towne and Roman Polanski bickering over Chinatown] ‘What’s her name?’ ‘No, it can’t be that, it’s too Jewish.’ ‘Who says it’s Jewish?’ (p.166)
[Transamerica bought the struggling studio United Artists.] ‘There was a lot of resentment because UA had had twelve, fifteen years of success, then the Jews had taken the goys for a fortune…’ (p.214)
According to Jennifer Nairn-Smith, ‘William [Friedkin] denied his whole background…He hated being Jewish. Think Yiddish, dress British.’ (p.220)
Says Friedkin, ‘If The Exorcist had previewed it would never have come out ’cause people would have written on their cards, “This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jewish bastard.”‘. (p.222)
[Verna Fields] was a large, warm lady with short brown hair and half glasses, hung on a string, perched on the tip of her nose. She was like a Jewish aunt, except that instead of talking gefilte fish recipes, she talked editing. (p.237)
Spielberg’s mother opened a kosher dairy restaurant in Beverly Hills, but her son avoided it. He disliked his stepfather, who was an Orthodox Jew.Some of his more Jewish-identified friends regarded him as a self-hating Jew. (p.331)
‘Can you imagine Walt Disney turning over in his grave, just thinking about opening his doors to do business with a Jew!’ (p.371)
And Biskind also sprinkles the text with Jewish or Yiddish vocabulary. I had to look up terms like:
meshuggah (craziness, or a crazy person)
a macher = big shot, important person (p.39)
a gonif = a thief or dishonest person or scoundrel (p.101)
tsuris = aggravating troubles (p.111)
zoftig = [of a woman] a full, rounded figure, plump (p.132)
a pisher = a neophyte, somebody new to a job (p.152)
a mensch = a person of integrity and honour
a nebbish = pitiful, ineffectual man (p.239)
a shiksa = a Gentile woman, often blonde and bosomy
kibitzing = chatting informally (p.284)
shtick = a person’s routine, talent or area of interest (p.287)
mishegoss = craziness; senseless behaviour or activity (p.319)
alter cockers = older generation, granddads (p.413)
Why does Biskind dwell on the Jewish origins of his characters, and litter the text with Yiddish idioms? I don’t know and I don’t much care, but I found it a persistent and intriguing aspect of the book.
And it added piquancy to one of the promotional quotes on the back cover, from the critic of the Spectator magazine who described Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as having ‘the most dislikeable cast of characters since William S. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’.
That’s a brilliantly insulting quote, but it’s given added – and, I assume, unwitting – undertones by the Jewish flavour of a lot of the text.
Women in Hollywood
1. Husbands dumping their wives
Director William Friedkin lived as man and wife with partner Jennifer Nairns-Smith for three years until she announced she was pregnant. When she had the baby, in November 1976, he dumped her (p.311)
Martin Scorsese had a relationship with writer Julia Cameron and got her pregnant. During the filming of his musical New York, New York Scorsese started an affair with star Lisa Minnelli. When Cameron had his baby, he dumped her (p.326)
Just a few flagrant examples of the way these powerful, egotistical men treated their women. And the hundreds of examples of the everyday sexist attitudes of all the men on display are far too many to quote.
#metoo
This book was published in 1998, almost twenty years before the outing of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in the #metoo social media campaign.
What puzzled me about #metoo was that it seemed to come as a shock and a surprise to so many people. Hadn’t they read this book – which catalogues the appalling way most women were treated by powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1970s (and into the 1980s)? Or its sequel, Down and Dirty Pictures, published in 2004, which chronicles the appalling behaviour of, yes, the exact same Harvey Weinstein? Or any of the hundreds of other exposés of Hollywood’s ‘dark underbelly’? Wasn’t the exploitation of a lot of the women who worked there a core part of most people’s vague impression of Hollywood?
When I was a kid I read books about the silent movie starts which chronicled the ‘scandalous’ sexual behaviour of the likes of Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks and the outrageous incident of Fatty Arbuckle and the wine bottle. When I was only 12 or 13 I read David Niven’s memoirs of Hollywood, which revolved around sex, especially when he shared a house with Errol Flynn.
From hundreds of references, articles, jokes, on TV, in novels and biographies, I acquired a solid impression of Hollywood as a Sodom and Gomorrah of know-nothing executives ranting, of preening stars making impossible demands, and dictatorial directors reducing their leading ladies to tears; of wild parties, booze and drugs and shameful, disgraceful behaviour.
And a key part of this lurid mythology was the widespread cliché about ‘the casting couch’ and how generations of leading ladies had had to screw or give blow jobs to all manner of directors and execs in order to get jobs. Hadn’t people read about the sexual humiliations Marilyn Monroe had to put herself through before she ended up killing herself, stories which have been repeated in umpteen documentaries and sensationalising biographies.
My point being, I thought that the sexual harassment and abuse of women in Hollywood was common knowledge and one of the most basic aspects of anyone’s mental image of Tinseltown.
‘In Hollywood men put enormous pressure on women to fuck them, even if it’s only once. It’s like the dog that pisses on the lamppost, even if it’s only once. They want that kind of connection and then maybe they can relax.’ (Actress Beverley Walker, quoted on p.234)
It seems that the #metoo revelations about Harvey Weinstein took place when a handful of brave women decided to finally stand up to the climate of fear which Weinstein and others like him were able to exert over Hollywood’s female population. And it struck such a nerve because it turned out that millions of women in not just film but all kinds of other industries, and not just in America, but around the world, had had to, and were continuing to have to, put up with outrageously exploitative, bullying behaviour from men in power.
All well and good. I wholeheartedly support the #metoo movement and all its goals. I’m just bemused by the way so much of this information was already out there. It suggests something about books like Biskind’s – that they can be bestsellers, widely read and reviewed and yet… somehow, not change anything.
It points towards the difference between static channels like books, and even magazine or newspaper reports – and the much more dynamic medium of twitter, where what are, in essence, the same kind of accusations, could go viral very quickly and create momentum, create a movement.
There’s a lot more to be said on these issues, #metoo and the (in)effectiveness of books to change anything, but I thought it was worth recording a few thoughts here.
3. Strong women
Meanwhile, Biskind does make the point that not all the women are downtrodden wives and bimbo girlfriends; that there were some very strong, achieveful women in the Hollywood of the time. One of the most striking gossip-type facts to emerge was the important role played by their partners in both Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Rafelson’s early successes.
Bogdanovich’s wife, Polly Platt, was a production designer but all accounts have her intimately involved with the actual directing of his masterpiece, The Last Picture Show, sitting beside his director’s chair, discussing shots. He dumped her to begin his infatuated affair with Cybill Shepherd, and never made such a good film again.
Similarly, Bob Rafelson’s wife, Toby Rafelson was also a production designer, and had a big impact on his early masterpiece, Five Easy Pieces. After his womanising and drug-taking drove her away, Rafelson never made a good movie again (a point made by actress Ellen Burstyn, quoted on page 273).
There were also a number of notable women film editors.
Verna Fields edited Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc? but really made her reputation co-editing American Graffiti and then almost single-handedly saving Jaws, whose rushes were an epic mess (and for which she won an Oscar).
Marcia Lucas, George’s wife, also had an editing role on American Graffiti,then cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, New York New York and – seismically – Star Wars.
(It’s worth noting that Woody Allen – who doesn’t feature much in the book, being neither a New Hollywood rebel or a New Blockbuster mogul – has always used woman editors, Susan E. Morse 1977-98, Alisa Lepselter from then to the present.)
I don’t want to just repeat the outrageous attitude of most of the men in the Hollywood of that era, but also want to put on record the achievement of strong, talented women who managed to survive and thrive in it.
A craft, not an art
I use the term ‘movies’ throughout this blog to describe the way American films are, ultimately, products of American hyper-consumer capitalism and not works of art.
I myself have worked as a television producer/director, directing about a dozen commercial videos, and have also hired and employed very talented TV directors for a period of six years (1994 to 2000). I’ve worked very closely with producers, directors and editors (in television).
Granted, TV is not the same as film. But these experience are the basis of my opinion that film is a craft and not an art. Some people in these areas really are amazing, genius craftsmen and women. But, in my opinion, to call it an ‘art form’ is ludicrous – specially when you read scene after scene of blustering, know-nothing executives shouting and yelling about who or what they insist is in the movie, when you read how many ‘great’ movies were in fact bodged and botched and stitched together out of ramshackle compromises, deals, bankruptcies, disagreements, technical and logistical disasters.
As a small example, I was struck by the fact that producer Philip D’Antoni told William Friedkin, director of 1971’s The French Connection, that part of what had made Steve McQueen’s 1968 classic, Bullitt, so great was the epic car chase, so he should put a car chase into Connection. So Friedkin did (p.204). It’s a great car chase, a really brilliant car chase. But it’s not ‘art’.
Similarly, I hadn’t realised that the actual filming of Jaws had been such an epic catastrophe, taking three times as long, and costing three times as much, as budgeted. The script wasn’t finished when they began filming, so many of the scenes were improvised in the evening in Spielberg’s hotel room, with the scriptwriter, Carl Gottlieb, jotting down the best bits – and then filming these ad-libbed scenes the next day.
They made three giant plastic model sharks, but one sank and the others looked terrible, and so it was only because of the accidental fact of their ridiculous look and impact in the early filming that led Spielberg (or others, depends whose story you believe) to completely rethink the script and re-edit the movie so that the shark rarely appears until the end – thus you don’t see it in the first half of the film, which, combined with the brilliant music by John Williams, makes its unseen menace infinitely more threatening and scarey.
Most of the movies described here involved similar amounts of chaos, bad planning, script crises, changes of mind or emphasis, random elements chucked in at the last minute, the studio insisting on reshoots or re-editing the whole thing, and so on and so on.
That’s not art. It’s a shambles. It comes as a shock to learn that Spielberg, at one point, suggested that, at the climax of Jaws, after Chief Brody has blown up the shark and been reunited with Dreyfuss and as they paddle towards the shore, that, in a black joke, they see a fleet of shark’s fins appear on the horizon heading towards them!
‘Art’ is an excuse
Here’s another way of thinking about the ‘Is film an art?’ question.
It’s an excuse. A lot of these people behaved appallingly, not so much the obvious sexism and getting drunk and hitting people, but the shouting at everyone, the bullying coercive behaviour, the exploitation of young women, ripping everyone off, sacking people arbitrarily, using people’s life stories without crediting them, using their ideas, scripts and stories without credit, stabbing their business partners in the back – the book is an awesome catalogue of despicable behaviour.
And their justification? “It’s art. I’m making great art. I am a great artist.”
So all this ‘art’ talk can easily be reinterpreted as an excuse to justify monstrous egotism and abusive behaviour. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contains more than enough examples of the jaw-dropping egotism, selfishness and the brutal mistreatment of women by some of cinema’s greatest ‘artists’ to wither and kill your opinions of them forever.
(It also kills your respect for ‘film critics’, people employed to suck up to monsters and overlook their abusive behaviour in the name of promoting their ‘art’ — and for ‘film studies’ academics, trying to persuade their students that these hugely compromised products of consumer capitalism are some kind of ‘art form’. Films can be very well crafted – having produced and directed broadcast TV I understand that very well, and how you can take to pieces all aspects of a script, of the techniques of direction, framing, lighting, editing and sound mixing a movie, yes. But that doesn’t make Jaws or Star Wars, let alone Rocky or Finding Nemo or Home Alone 2, works of art. They’re just very well-crafted products designed to be consumed by a mass audience and as nakedly intended to generate profits for their investors as MacDonalds chicken nuggets or a Samsung Galaxy.)
Pictures, not movies
I use the term ‘movies’ to indicate the blunt fact that movies’ are products of American hyper-capitalism, and deliberately don’t talk about ‘film’ or ‘films’ as this is what pretentious ‘film studies’ people say when they start talking about auteurs and ‘artistic vision’.
So it was interesting to realise that everyone in this book, including Biskind, refers to movies as ‘pictures’ – as in the title of the memoirs of über-producer, Robert Evans, The Kid Stays In The Picture, or the obvious fact that the Academy Award each year goes to ‘Best Picture’. Everyone in the business, including Biskind, seems to call them ‘pictures’, not films or movies. Pictures.
And that reminds me of a story which Oscar-winning producer Sam Spiegel tells in his autobiography about an earlier era, about the time when director Elia Kazan had made his first Hollywood movie, and the studio liked it but, after the screening, a studio executive took Kazan aside and told him he had to change his name to something less ethnic. ‘How about Cézanne?’
Kazan was appalled. ‘But Cézanne was a great artist, I couldn’t possibly compete.’
‘Nah,’ says the executive. ‘You make one good picture, everyone’ll forget the other guy.’
Credit
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind was published in 1998 in America by Simon & Schuster. All references are to the 1999 Bloomsbury paperback edition.
I went back to the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography exhibition at the Barbican for second helpings.
I spent another hour and a half going round again, but this time ignoring all the American photographers, and concentrating on everyone else from the rest of the world, the photographers I’d largely overlooked first time round, starting with the eight Brits.
First a few general points:
1. Liberation from heterosexual white men
Going round a second time, One Big Thing became much clearer: this exhibition isn’t even an attempt to represent what you could call ordinary or everyday masculinity. I hadn’t really grasped the significance of the title. When it says liberation it means gay liberation, women’s liberation and black liberation.
Liberation from whom? From heterosexual white men.
In the 1970s women, homosexuals and people of colour spontaneously generated nationwide and worldwide movements devoted to liberating themselves from what they felt was centuries of oppression, objectification and second class citizenship created and maintained by straight white men.
The fundamental impulse of this exhibition is to show how this worked through photography, through the work of gay, black and women photographers who rebelled against the straight white patriarchy.
This is an exhibition about the social and cultural liberation of these groups from heterosexual white male hegemony through photography.
This explains why Part One of the exhibition bombards us with a series of overblown, hypermasculine images – of American soldiers in Iraq (Wolfgang Tillmans), American cowboys (Isaac Julien and Collier Schorr) and American footballers (Catherine Opie). It’s a bit more mixed up than I’m implying but this first part of the exhibition establishes the images, concepts and behaviours of aggressive white masculinity which these groups are trying to flee.
So that Part Two of the exhibition shows us how these three key constituencies of progressive ideology – gay men, black men, and straight feminist women – achieved liberation from these toxic male stereotypes.
Photography is the medium, channel, gateway and door through which gay men, black men, and feminist women escaped from the grotesque, heteronormative hypermasculinity which we are bombarded with in the opening.
Huge though the exhibition is, it is not really about masculinity – it is about the escape from masculinity.
Which, for example, explains why the entire section on FATHERHOOD featured work by just four photographers (each of them good in their different ways) and this is the same number as the section devoted to FEMINIST photographers (and there are many more feminist photographers scattered round the show).
Simple maths shows you that, for the curators, feminist liberation from the patriarchy is more important, certainly more represented here, than what you or I might think of as a pretty a central element of any concept of masculinity – fatherhood.
Then again both feminists and father photos are swamped by the sheer number of gay artists and photographers.
I counted twenty gay snappers for definite, but had the impression that there were many more. Some were so popular with the curators that they featured more than once – notably gay Indian (score double) photographer Sunil Gupta, who was represented by three separate series of photographs, hung in different areas around the show:
Exiles – gay men in India, often forced to hide their true sexuality, 1987
Pretended Family relationships – a work lamenting the way gay couples had to disguise their relationships after the Section 28 legislation was passed by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1988
The pretty obvious conclusion is that the image of masculinity the women curators, and the art world in general, is most comfortable with, is gay men. Almost all the images of heterosexual men were accompanied by labels criticising or chastising or scolding them.
2. Liberation from American masculinity
My first review ended up lamenting the way the exhibition is dominated by American photographers, American subjects, and American academic rhetoric.
But first time round I missed the significance of a big quote printed on the wall right at the start of the exhibition. It’s from the black, gay, American (score three points) writer, James Baldwin:
The American ideal, then, of sexuality, appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden – as an unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
This is the Key Quote, right at the start of the exhibition, and it clearly signals the extent to which the curators really, deeply, and profoundly see the entire condition of masculinity through American eyes.
I read that quote and simply thought, well, this ‘American ideal of masculinity’ may have been a deeply problematic issue for Baldwin, for other Afro-American men, for other American gay men, and for a large number of American women who have to put up with it… But it has absolutely nothing to do with me’.
When I was a boy I wanted to be Michael Caine in The Battle of Britain or Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare, I wanted to be John Hollins who played left half for Chelsea, and like my mates idolised Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton. I envied John Noakes off Blue Peter for all the brilliant adventures he had like climbing up Nelson’s Column. At school we all tried to do impressions of the excitable naturalist David Bellamy. On Saturday nights I watched Patrick Troughton as Dr Who, followed by Morecambe and Wise lying in bed together making jokes, or maybe Dad’s Army with its cast of hilariously ramshackle amateurs. I loved Sid James’s laugh in the old Carry On films, and a little later on I was bowled over by Monty Python, and when I was about 15 my favourite radio DJ was Kenny Everett.
My point is that the chronically hyper-masculine, ridiculously macho and extremely violent world of the American Wild West or the corrupt streets of New York depicted in Starsky and Hutch or Kojak seemed, literally, thousands of miles away. Nothing to do with me or my life or my friends or my Dad or my uncle or my teachers. Nothing.
Thus the strange sense of disconnect as I walked round this Americanised exhibition for the second time, the sense of entering a wretchedly macho culture in which more or less the only way for a decent normal civilised man to escape the hyper-competitive, hyper-macho and hyper-violent world of American maleness is to be gay.
It struck me that it was a really profound mistake, and possibly a deceit and a lie, to view the entire concept of masculinity around the world through the prism of American masculinity.
Isn’t that a form of American imperialism? Judging everything according to American standards? Defining everything according to American ideas?
I was disappointed that the Barbican curators were such willing accomplices to American cultural imperialism.
Anyway, Fuck America and its bankrupt, corrupt and negative influence.
I went back specifically to ignore the Yanks and to pay more careful attention to everyone else, to the photographers from the rest of the world, starting with the Brits.
3. The Brits (8)
John Coplans: Frieze Number 2 (1994)
This is a grid of 12 large black-and-white prints of a big, hairy, overweight, naked man. They’re just some of the many self-portraits Coplans took of himself as – born in 1920 – he entered his 60s. in the 1980s. In fact this big grid is the first thing you see as you enter the exhibition, and is one of the many ways the curators set out to puncture the exaggerated images of masculinity which they depict elsewhere.
The most obvious thing that struck me as I confronted this sizeable display is that all the photos are artfully posed so you don’t see his willy. In fact, I must say I was surprised at the relative scarcity of willies on display.
It is a… a touching image of the male body, don’t you think? A realistic depiction of the middle-aged, naked male body, a photographic parallel to all those unglamorised paintings of fat male nudes by Lucien Freud.
Jeremy Deller: So many ways to hurt you (the life and times of Adrian Street) (2010)
This is a 30-minute video showing the life and times of the wrestler, ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street who was born in 1940 into a Welsh mining village. Street is a brilliant subject because he combines hard-edged working class attitude, with a taste for dressing in wigs and make-up as part of the identity or brand which distinguishes him from the other amateur wrestlers on the circuit.
The video was playing on a fairly big monitor which was itself embedded in a huge wall-sized painting by Deller, depicting a naive, stylised portrait of Street in his cross-dressing wrestler’s outfit, set against a stylised depiction of a Welsh town and the hills beyond.
The film reflects on the performativity of gender.
Anna Fox: My mother’s cupboards and my father’s words (1999)
On my first visit I was so dazzled by the Herb Ritts and Arnold Schwarzenegger and American soldiers in Iraq and Andy Warhol and all the New York queers that I completely overlooked this small and brilliant display. In many ways it’s one of the best things in the exhibition.
My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words consists of a grid of 15 frames each containing a small, precise photo of the contents of the cupboards in the artist’s mother’s home, each one neat and tidy and filled with banal kitchen utensils and belongings.
And very neatly, in a florid calligraphy reminiscent of wedding invitations, opposite these nice neat drawers is printed the ferocious, vile, poisonous rants of Fox’s father, overflowing with bile and abuse, but laid out as elegant free verse poems. For example:
I’m going to
tear your mother
to shreds
with
an oyster knife
Or:
She wants
her bum
scraped
with
a rusty saw
He threatens to cut his wife’s bum off and feed it to her like slices of ham. He threatens to fry her in hot oil. It’s a kind of anti-poetry, or maybe the poetry of the damned.
The smallness of the images just as much as the prissy tidiness of their contents, and the satirically ornate calligraphy of her father’s drunken ranting, create an incredibly charged display, a screaming sense of claustrophobia and misery.
This, I thought, captures the true English misery, the misery of Philip Larkin, rainy afternoons in provincial towns where couples who hate each other are forced to spend long Sunday afternoons, or weeks, months and years in each other’s unbearable company.
Ten million miles away from bloody American cowboys and footballers and Mad Men jocks striding up Madison Avenue. The curators spoil the effect by translating it into their sociological jargon:
Fox invites the viewer to reflect on how notions of hegemonic masculinity are sustained within patriarchal structures.
Is that what this delicate, subtle and intensely charged work of art is doing?
Isaac Julien: After Mazatlan (1999) and Looking For Langston (1989)
Julien is black and gay and a film-maker so he presses a lot of art world buttons, so much so that he is represented by not one but two entries:
After Mazatlan – In 1999 Julien made a film titled Long Road to Mazatlán, which tells a cowboy story ‘brimming with frustrated homoerotic desire’ and shot in Saint Antonio, Texas. The first installation was a grid of four large stills from the film, titled After Mazatlán.
Looking For Langston is a 44-minute-long black and white homage to the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, set in scenes which move between a sort of 1920s speakeasy and a 1980s nightclub, with archive recordings of readings of their poems by Harlem Renaissance poets. As you might expect, the film ‘reflects on the relationship between gay culture and the gaze, with the white gaze, the racist gaze.’
Note how the ‘white gaze’ is elided with the ‘racist gaze’. This is, frankly, insulting.
Note also how both Julien’s films are in thrall to American culture and stereotypes and thus, in my formulation, a kind of cultural betrayal.
Hilary Lloyd: Colin #2 (1999)
There are two TV monitors on raised stands. Underneath them are ancient VHS tape players. On one screen a fairly buff young man takes off a red vest, very, very slowly. On the other screen he puts it back on, very, very slowly.
Lloyd’s penetrating gaze and carefully orchestrated presentation demand that the viewer move back and forth between the screens in a dance of observation and voyeurism.
Not really. The main feature of this piece for me was the ancient VHS recorder/players – I’m amazed you can find any which still work. Like a lot of other things in the exhibition, somehow this super-annuated technology made you realise how old and out-of-date a lot of the stuff here is.
(By the way Hilary Lloyd is a woman.)
Peter Marlow: Magnum photos 1980s to 1990s
Peter Marlow (1961 to 2016) helped set up the London office of the famous international photographers’ agency, Magnum. Unusually for this exhibition he doesn’t seem to have been gay, and is represented by a selection of fly-on-the-wall photos catching different types of very ordinary English men in various matey, group situations. These include:
This is something like the masculinity I experienced growing up.
At school I was forced to play rugby and then take communal showers afterwards, it was always bloody freezing. Photos like this bring back the sound of studs clattering on an unforgiving concrete floor and those shapes of mud punctuated with the round stud holes which used to get stuck to your boots and everyone banged against the doorframe or changing room benches so that the floor was covered in them with slivers of mud punctured by perfectly round holes.
Marlow’s photos of the shitty, windswept shopping centre at Runcorn perfectly convey the misery of English provincial life and the great betrayal of post-war town planning and architecture which turned so many English towns into concrete wind tunnels.
For the curator Marlow’s photos of the rugby players taking a communal bath:
highlight how sport has become synonymous with masculine hegemony and male solidarity.
Clare Strand: Men Only Tower (2017)
Strand has taken 68 copies of the softcore publication Men Only and piled them one on top of each other to create a ‘tower’. She has ‘subverted’ the sexist basis of the magazines by inserting into twenty of them twenty ‘images of resistance’ tucked into black envelopes and slipped between the pages of the lucky magazines.
The gushing feminist commentary points out that Strand choosing to ‘erect them in a vertical pile is a satirical reference to the male phallus, while also being an obvious reference to Trump Tower’. Of course.
When I was a teenager the top-shelf porn magazines at the local newsagent were Mayfair and Men Only and Penthouse. The point is that they were large, glossy, magazine-sized magazines, so I was intrigued that the objects in Strand’s art work are small, square-bound, with almost plain beige covers. They look disconcertingly like the cheap communist party editions I own of the works of Marx and Engels, or a set of obscure poetry magazine.
When I looked closely I saw that the editions Strand’s chosen of Men Only start in 1947! and the most recent is 1963. For me, then, this work was much more about a delve way back into post-war history, than anything at all to do with porn or men’s magazines or what the wall label called women’s exclusion from ‘the corridors of power’.
Richard Billingham: Ray’s A Laugh (1996)
Like the Anne Fox piece this is a deep dive into the profound misery of the really poor – the sick and alcoholic and uneducated poor whose lives are filled with drink and anger and violence.
It consists of ten very big colour prints of ragged, spontaneous, unposed documentary photos of Billingham’s alcoholic dad, Ray, and his obese mother, Liz. both caught in the seedy, shabby and poky-feeling flat in one of the crappier parts of Birmingham.
The curators blithely comment that this is a rare pictorial insight into English working class life and the visitor can’t help feeling this is partly because what gains commissions, wins prizes and gets you known is stylish films about cowboys and the Harlem Renaissance.
God, could anything be further away from the blow-dried queers of Christopher Street or Castro.
Brief summary
So that’s the work of the eight British photographers and artists and film-makers included in Masculinities: LIberation through Photography. I’m really glad I went back a second time and focused just on them, because taken together they do amount to a sort of sketch of British masculinity, a million miles away from the macho jocks or ‘faggots’ (I’m quoting James Baldwin) which dominate American culture.
The Peter Marlow photos are very good, but for me the top two were the grim and unrelenting insight into the lowest of lowlife existences in Ray’s A Laugh; but maybe the best is the hyper-charged, controlled explosion of Anne Fox’s sequence. Wow.
Europe (11)
Bas Jan Ader (Dutch)
I’m too sad to tell you is a black and white art film from 1971 in which performance artist Bas Jan Ader filmed himself crying.
Knut Åsdam (Norway)
Åsdam made a short art film titled Pissing showing a close-up of the slacks or sensible trousers of a man who proceeds to let himself go and wee himself.
While the film reflects on masculinity’s position in relation to the patriarchal order, it also highlights the significance of the phallus as a signifier of male power.
Rineke Dijkstra (Holland)
Dijkstra has a set of four fairly big colour photos of Portuguese bullfighters or forcados shown after they’ve finished the fight and exited the arena, looking elated and marked with blood
Dijkistra’s Bullfighters explores aspects of homosociality, a term coined by theorist Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick to describe ‘the structure of men’s relations with other men’.
Thomas Dworzak (Germany)
Dworzak is the guy who found a trove of photos taken by family photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, improbably showing them posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes.
Eijkelboom is represented by two distinct photographic projects.
In With My Family from 1973 he went knocking on doors of a middle class suburb during the day when the husbands were away working, and asked if he could pose as the father in family photos with the wives and children of the absent men.
The result is pretty creepy and you suspect he’d get arrested if he tried that today. 1973 is quite a long time ago, nearly half a century ago. The curator comments:
With my family operates as a critique of the nuclear family as well as exposing outdated gender roles that demanded that women stay in the home caring for children while the father went to work and earned a living.
In The Ideal Man from 1978 Eijkelboom asked women to describe their ideal man, and then fashioned himself in self-portraits to fit the descriptions. Mildly amusing.
Karen Knorr (Germany)
Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981-83, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.
Talking of creepy, Messager is represented by a series from 1972 called The Approaches in which she took photographs of men’s crotches in the street using a concealed camera. I suppose it’s not quite upskirting, but if you tried this nowadays I wonder if you could be arrested.
In The Approaches, Messager trails men through the street and snaps photos of their crotches without permission. In this, she turns the tables on the traditional artistic norm of the male gaze, and in showing how uncomfortable and invasive this is, critique the viewing of women in a similar way, such as in gossip magazines. ‘It was a way of treating men as objects when it’s usually women who are treated as objects,’ Messager explained. ‘Men never stop checking out women’s bottoms, breasts, everything.’
Well that put paid to the male gaze, didn’t it. No longer a problem.
Richard Mosse (Ireland)
Artist Richard Mosse made a film by asking members of an American fraternity house to have a shouting competition, with the young student who could shout loudest and longest winning a keg of beer. Having contrived this artificial situation in which he films the faces of young American men shouting their heads off till they’re red in the face, Mosse then described his film as ‘a performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage’.
Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)
The Soldiers, The Nineties (1999-2020) is an installation of newspaper front pages and photos, blown up and arranged into different size images across the wall which show NATO soldiers in a variety of conflict zones – Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the Gulf – in a number of poses – resting, smoking, reading, partying – accessed from different sources – press clippings, magazines, newspapers, TV screenshots.
Tillmans presents the viewer with images of hypermasculinity rubbing shoulders with male apprehension, camaraderie and vulnerability while also embedding the queer gaze and homoeroticism in military space.
Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland)
A series of black and white photos Weinberger took all the way back in the early 1960s of homosexual men dressed up in leather jackets, caps and other clichéd outfits in what was, back then, very much Zurich’s hidden, secret gay underground.
Let’s Take Back Our Space: Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures from 1976-9 is a series of large frames in which Wex arranged sets of contemporary magazine photos depicting a row of men sitting in public places, in the park etc with their legs wide open, and in a row underneath photos of women sitting with their knees primly together. Manspreading.
These differences in posture are, Wex concludes, products of a social conditioning that defines one sex as strong and the other as weak, perpetuating a hierarchical distinction between the sexes in the form of patterns of physical behaviour.
Latin America (1)
Ana Mendieta (Cuba)
A series of seven large-ish colour photos from 1972 titled Facial Hair Transplants in which Mendieta glued fragments of her fellow student, Morty Sklar’s facial hair to her own face.
Tableau vivant… if you cool the sun always shines (2002) a large embroidery with images of black people sewn or attached to it, around the central image of an embroidered version of Leonardo’s Last Supper.
Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)
70s Lifestyle, 1975-78.
By day Fosso ran a commercial studio photographing the residents of Bangui while at night he created highly performative black and white self-portraits in which he adopted a series of male personas, alluding to the idea that gender is an artificial proposition.
Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola)
Represented by one piece, an absolutely enormous wall-sized photo The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda N’zombo Before the Great Extinction (Act I), 2017.
This is ‘Act I’ of a five-part series. the flamboyant figure in the centre is modelled on Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic president of Zaire. Kia Henda’s work:
reimagines the politics and history of Africa within shrewdly conjectured fictional scenarios.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria)
Stunningly posed, crystal clear studio art photos of black men’s bodies arranged in intriguing shapes and wonderfully aesthetic poses.
The work of the pioneering photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode calls attention to the politics of race, representation and queer desire.
Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa)
I Was Looking Back is a large installation of 18 photos in which he revisited every photo he’d ever taken,
in an attempt to formulate a new narrative that actively exposes and deconstructs white masculine power, a defining feature of Subotzky’s experience as a white, privileged, South African male.
They include photos of blacks being beaten up and intimidated by the police, photos from inside prisons or from grim wasted slums. The photos are, apparently,
an attempt to expose and destabilise the systems of hegemonic male power that enable and normalise these acts of violence.
Middle East (2)
Fouad Elkoury (Lebanon)
Civil War 1977-86 a photo record of daily life in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, including the series features here of militiamen posed against battle-scarred buildings.
Adi Nes (Israeli)
Soldiers a series in which Nes photographed young men posing as soldiers in the Israeli Defence Force i.e. they are not real soldiers. Nes is, naturally, gay.
Nes not only infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers, as well as inscribing the queer body into the military imagination.
Untitled from the series Soldiers (1999) by Adi Nes. Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles
Akram Zaatari (Lebanon)
Zaatari found damaged negatives of bodybuilders in the archive of the Lebanese studio photographer Hashem El Madani and blew them up far beyond their original scale to emphasise the damaged, degraded effect, conveying a poignant sense of the passage of time.
According to the curator the photographs:
examine the construction of Middle Eastern masculinity and virility while also reflecting on Western, Orientalising perceptions of masculinity.
Asia (3)
Masahisa Fukase (Japan)
Two series:
Memories of my father (1971 to 1990) – photographic record of the artist’s father, Sukezo, through life and death
Family (1971 to 1990) – over two decades a series of formal posed photos of Fukase and his family but in each one of them a young woman is present, often half dressed, in stylised or parodic poses, so that they:
meditate on the ways in which women are still systematically subordinated to men.
Christopher Street – street photos of gay men in New York, 1976
Exiles – gay men in India, often forced to hide their true sexuality, 1987
Pretended Family relationships – a work lamenting the way gay couples had to disguise their relationships after the Section 28 legislation was passed by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1988
This playful film from famed director and photographer Tracey Moffatt turns the tables on traditional representations of desire to examine the power of the female gaze in the objectification of men’s bodies. HEAVEN begins with surreptitiously filmed documentary footage of brawny surfers changing in and out of bathing and wet-suits. While the soundtrack switches between the ocean surf and male chanting, Moffatt moves closer to alternately flirt with and tease her subjects, who respond with a combination of preening and macho reticence. This witty piece is a potent and hilarious meditation on cinematic and everyday sex roles, voyeurism, power, and the thin line between admiration and invasiveness.
Russia (0)
China (0)
Summary
1. Lots of feminist women photographers (in the sense that all the women photographers were making points about men which were, as far as I could see, were entirely negative. None of them celebrating any aspect of maleness.)
2. At least half, if not more, of the male photographers are gay i.e. if the exhibition as a whole is about one particular type of masculinity, it is about gay masculinity.
3. No photographers and no photographs from Russia or China. Hmm. Because they don’t have men there? Or no photographers there? Or because not enough of them are gay (either the subjects or the photographers themselves)? Or because the curators don’t think Russia and China matter?
55 photographers in all, 23 from America, lots of the others covering American subjects – but none from Russia or China.
Books & Boots 