Will Power

If there is one thing that makes me fume it’s the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare! Not only is the controversy, which dates back to the nineteenth century, entirely bogus but it’s also tinged with obvious overtones of condescension and snobbery. No ordinary man, the argument goes, could possibly be so literate and so accomplished as William Shakespeare of Stratford, no; so the plays and poetry had to be written by, say, Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, or William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby.

Oh, but one mustn’t overlook the fact that some commoners have been roped into the ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ industry. There is Christopher Marlowe, also a playwright of humble origins, a man who wrote, amongst other things, The Jew of Malta, and then proceeded under the pseudonym of Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice, a play with a similar theme but vastly superior in every way.

Francis Bacon is another candidate, undeniable one of the greatest scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, a man with a remarkably full life as a philosopher, politician, scientist and courtier who somehow managed to find time to compose the whole Shakespearean canon! He was first put forward as a possible candidate, interestingly enough, by one Delia Bacon, herself a failed playwright. For her Shakespeare, the real Shakespeare, was a “third-rate actor” without the “highest Elizabethan breeding”, suggestions that clearly reflect her own lack of success.

The defenders of the aristocrats are, if anything, even more self-deluding in their sheer loopyness. Those who advance the Oxford claim, known collectively as the Oxfordians, clearly believe in drama after death, because their man shuffled off this mortal coil in 1604, years before Shakespeare’s greatest plays were published. Chief among the Oxfordians, wait for it, was one J. T. Loony!

But not all loonies were, well, Loony. Sigmund Freud took the absurd view, in accordance with his psychoanalytic theories, that works of art are essentially confessional, and that an ordinary man could not have imagined himself among kings. I see in this yet more condescension, coupled with a belief that his own notions could be projected back through history; that an unconscious oedipal conflict was the solution to Hamlet.

I have to say that this is the point of deepest irritation for me, the notion that all art is autobiographical; that if Shakespeare wrote about courts and courtiers he had to be familiar with courts and courtiers. It’s a view that becomes increasingly absurd if projected back through time and on to others. Do we assume that Sophocles, Aeschylus and Ovid consorted with gods and heroes? Bacon, Loony and, yes, Freud, are ranged with all those who would deny the power of the imagination, the power of genius, the power of an ordinary individual to reach sublime heights.

As I have said before that it’s almost impossible to knock down a good conspiracy theory when it’s up and running. There will always be people, no matter what, who believe that aliens built the pyramids, Richard III did not kill the Princes in the Tower, the moon landing was a hoax and Elvis, like King Arthur, somehow never really died! There will always be people who do not believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Homage to Truth

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of his experiences as a volunteer on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War. But it's not just another memoir. No, it's far more. For it marks a decisive stage in his progress as a writer and a thinker. Indeed, if one wanted to understand the roots behind the major themes in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four this book is essential reading.

Orwell, who had developed a general but rather unfocused sympathy for socialism, came to Spain to fight against 'fascism' without any particular idea of what he was fighting for. Like the majority of the foreign volunteers he was likely to have ended up serving with the International Brigades, controlled by the communists and ultimately directed by the Comintern in Moscow. But he did not. Quite by chance he enrolled in the militia of the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista or POUM, a local Marxist and anti-Stalinist movement set up by one Andrés Nin, a former associate of Leon Trotsky. Yes, it was by chance, but politically and intellectually it was a decisive step in turning Eric Blair, the author's real name, into the mature George Orwell.

The Spanish Civil War was a struggle between the left and the right, between progress and reaction, between enlightenment and oppression. Well, no, it was far more complex than that. In 1937 on the republican side the struggle had become a war within a war, as Stalin decided to suppress all of the non-communist factions on the side of the government. This was the time of the Great Purge, of the Moscow Show Trails and the general attack on all 'Trotsky Fascists'. This was a time when every weapon was used in a campaign of disinformation, one based on the grossest abuse of language by the communist and socialist left, one based on the systematic rewriting of history. After all, he who controls the past controls the future.

Orwell, who had been serving on the Catalan front, returned to Barcelona in May of 1937. There he discovered that the free and comradely atmosphere that he had encountered when he first came to Spain had changed utterly. He was to be caught up in some extraordinary events now known as the Barcelona May Days, in which one left-wing faction fought against another left-wing faction. In the communist controlled press the POUM was denounced as 'fascist plotters'. With agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police at work, Nin was arrested along with many others, and subsequently murdered in custody. Orwell himself had to leave Spain in fear of his life.

Homage to Catalonia is a straightforward account of his experiences at the front and in Barcelona, packaged in some general political musings. The language, as one would expect from one of the great modern masters of English prose, is limpid. It's an honest book, too honest for some; Victor Gollancz, the left-wing publishing house for whom he had previously written, refused to accept his account of his Spanish experience even before a single word had been written. Why? Because he had served with the POUM, that's why. It should be remembered that Gollancz was not even controlled by the Communist Party. This attitude, this unwillingness to say anything critical of the official Soviet line, not stopping short of the Moscow Trials, was to be found right across much of the left-leaning and liberal opinion of the day. Of the British press Orwell was to write:

In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship that is implied by an ordinary lie...I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."

Orwell, as I have said, went to Spain with his politics largely unfocused. He came back a committed anti-Stalinist. He came back believing that there was a standard of objective truth that had to be defended, a standard of truth that should corrupted by the demands of propaganda or the exigencies of dictatorship. He came back believing that two plus two equals four; and if that is granted all else follows.

Venerable History

The History of the English Church and People has a clear polemical and didactic purpose. Bede sets out, not just to tell the story of the English, but to advance his views on politics and religion. In political terms he is a partisan of his native Northumbria, amplifying its role in English history over and above that of Mercia, its great southern rival. He takes greater pains in describing events of the seventh century, when Northumbria was the dominant Anglo-Saxon power, than the eighth, when it was not. The only criticism he ventures of his native Northumbria comes in writing about the death of King Ecgfrith in fighting the Picts at Nechtansmere in 685.


This defeat Bede attributes God's vengeance for the Northumbrian attack on the Irish in the previous year. For while Bede is loyal to Northumbria he shows an even greater attachment to the Irish and the Irish Celtic missionaries, whom he considers to be far more effective and dedicated than their rather complacent English counterparts.


His final preoccupation is over the precise date of Easter, which he writes about at length. It is here, and only here, that he ventures some criticism of St Cuthbert and the Irish missionaries, who celebrated the event, according to Bede, at the 'wrong' time. In the end he is pleased to note that the Irish Church was saved from error by accepting the 'correct' date for Easter. And for men like Bede this was no trivial matter.

April Fool, no, Just a Fool.

Sine we are drifting in to April Fool’s Day I thought I would mention one of my favourite pranks from history

The great Jonathan Swift hated all forms of superstition, especially when it took the form of astrology. He had a particular loathing of one almanac-writer and astrologer by the name of John Partridge. Partridge compounded his offence in Swift's eyes by being a Whig, who attacked the Tory Anglican establishment. He was also in the habit of using his almanacs to predict the deaths of notable figures, achieving a few hits and far more misses. Swift took revenge in January 1708 by publishing a letter, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, entitled Predictions for the Year, in which he forecast Partridge's death of a 'raging fever.'

On April Fool's Day itself, another letter was published, purporting to have been written by 'man employed by the Revenue', in which it was announced that Partridge had indeed died. Swift went on to compose a 'eulogy', damming both Partridge and, more particularly, damming those who took his nonsense seriously.

Before long Partridge, who was very much alive, had regular crowds of mourners calling at his house, so dense that the trades people could get nowhere near the front door to make deliveries. He published a letter, saying he was still alive, to which Bickerstaff responded that nobody who was alive could possibly have written "such damned stuff as this." Partridge's reputation is said never to have recovered.

The Revenge for Love

Now here is a scholarly scoop to die for! Daisy Hay, a Cambridge graduate, has discovered a manuscript, part of a memoir by Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelly’s step-sister, while researching for a book on Mary, Percy, her husband, and Lord Byron. In this, Claire, looking back from old age, condemns both Byron and Shelly as “monsters of lying, cruelty and treachery.” She accuses both poets of ruining lives in pursuit of “free love” and “evil passions.”

This document, which Hay found tucked away in the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection, one of the most important Shelly-related archives in the world, is being hailed by historians as a major discovery. The memoir was know to exist but was assumed to have been lost. It’s important because it gives a quite different interpretation of Claire’s attitude towards the poets, a quite different attitude towards Byron in particular.

She had every reason to be bitter. Love may have been ‘free’ for Byron but it carried a price for Claire. It’s true enough that it was she who set out to seduce the famous poet, who became infatuated with her temporarily in 1816. But he soon tired of her, treating her with callous disregard thereafter. They had a child, Allegra. But after the relationship ended Byron even refused to allow Claire access to her daughter, openly questioning if the ‘brat’ was his. Having no regard for Claire he clearly had less regard for the ‘brat’, sending her off to a convent, where she died aged five.

Claire’s anger at the egoism, selfishness and moral baseness surrounding the whole Byron milieu is well captured in her blazing manuscript;

Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England…become monsters. …what evil passion free love assured, what tenderness it dissolves; how it abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life into a destroying scourge…the worshipers of free love not only preyed upon one another but also on themselves turning their existence into a perfect hell.

My, how the sparks just leap off the page! It’s as well to remember, though, not just the past history of Claire and Byron, but that this three-page memoir was written by an old lady in her seventies who had converted to Catholicism. Distance in attitude, distance in morality and distance of judgement have all come to play. Even so, the rawness of her grief, of her anguish, has clearly not been soothed by the balm of time.

The extracts I have read in the Sunday press are at their angriest in the depiction of Byron, whom she describes as “a human tyger [sic] slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women.” Shelly is condemned rather in the abstract, almost if his guilt is one of mere association with the monster. Anyway, the full fragment is set to be published in Young Romantics, Hay’s forthcoming book.

Salome

I love the plays of Oscar Wilde, all of his witty, intense comedies but it is Salome, his single tragedy that intrigues me most. As a play it’s fully consistent in its presentation with Wilde’s theory of drama. In one of his letters he says that "...I like comedy to be intensely modern, and tragedy to walk in purple and be remote." And I don't suppose it is possible to get more purple and remote than Salome!

Though obviously based on the Bible story, the play had more contemporary sources of inspiration. It was through a reading of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À Rebours that Wilde became aware the Salome paintings of Gustave Moreau, which Des Esseintes, the hero of the book, obsesses over. It was an obsession that the playwright came to share.

There is a third source of inspiration for the play, beyond Huysmans' novel and Moreau's paintings. In 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette published Salome, a dramatic poem by an American named J. C Heywood. This in turn draws on Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, in which the ghost of Herodias kisses the head of John the Baptist. Heywood's innovation was to make her do this while still alive. It was Wilde who took this one step further, to make Salome kiss the lips of the Baptist in the great dramatic climax of his play;

Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love.

Purple and decadent; who else but Wilde could have achieved that?!

The Wonder of Wonderland

When I was growing up there were so many books that I enjoyed, so many authors. I think I’ve read everything by Anne Fine and Roald Dahl, Matilda being a particular favourite. But the novels I liked best of all go back further, novels supposedly for children that I can still read today; novels like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

If pressed I would have to say that Lewis Carroll was my favourite writer and Alice my favourite character. Wonderland still amazes me, that crazy, topsy-turvy universe that built around a hard frame of logic; a world, surreal before surrealism, which possibly could only have been created a mathematician and an imaginative genius. Carroll was indeed an imaginative genius, the author of some of my all-time favourite quotes;

'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

"'Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!'"

`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'

Well, now that we HAVE seen each other,' said the Unicorn, `if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?'

And I still know the lyrics of the Walrus and the Carpenter after all this time!

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"


The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead--
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat--
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more--
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf--
I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

Tim Burton’s new movie Alice in Wonderland premiers here on Friday. I’m so looking forward to it not just because Alice is such a favourite but because I think he is a super director, one with a playful gothic imagination; an imagination just like my own. :-)

Swift Wit

Jonathan Swift was perhaps the greatest satirist who ever lived-I love him to bits! Here are just a few of my favourite quotations:

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

It is useless to try to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy

I first read Gulliver’s Travels in a bowdlerised children’s version when I was about seven years old. It wasn’t until I was at school that I read the full version, and –oh, my – what a revelation that was, how biting the satire, how uncompromising in its bleak and pessimistic view of humanity. He wields irony and humour in the way that some people wield weapons, cutting to the heart of things with the sharpest of thrusts. In the English language he has few equals.

An Exceedingly Good Writer

Rudyard Kipling is another of my favourite writers, though he is well out of fashion now because of his political views; well out of fashion because he is the high priest of the golden age of imperialism. His eclipse is rather a pity because his prose is vivid, earthy and captivating. He also loved India, a love that is no longer returned, at least by some.

Plans to turn the house where he was born in Bombay into a Kipling museum have been shelved for fear of an adverse political reaction. Instead the place will be used to display the work of local artists, with no mention of its past associations. Mukund Gorash, in charge of the restoration project, was reprimanded by the local authorities for referring to the building as the Kipling House, insisting that it be called the Dean’s House, a reference to its former use.


But there are Indians who do understand that Kipling was so much more than an avatar of imperialism. Sharad Keskar, Chairman of the Kipling Society, said “You have a fairy ignorant officialdom in India, who don’t know much about Kipling apart from the fact that he was an imperialist or part of the Raj. Officially he is still persona non grata. I think that is changing, but it’s rather a slow change.”

It really is time that India woke up to the fact that imperialism was not always a bad thing; that the country owes as much to the British as it does to the Mughals, the previous conquerors. Modern India, it seems obvious to me, is inconceivable without the influence of the Raj, particularly in the use of English as a language that unifies a vast country without a past history of unity.

This brings me back to Kipling. Most people- perhaps even the officials to whom Keskar alludes –know, as if by reflex, at least the first two lines of the “Ballad of East and West”;

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat.

Do they know how it continues I wonder; do you know?

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

And if Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, could describe Kim as his favourite novel then that should be good enough a recommendation for anyone…even Indian bureaucrats. :-)

Finding the Ancient Mariner

A Shropshire writer has discovered the real Ancient Mariner in what must count as a first class piece of historical detective work! Robert Fowke’s findings are now published in The Real Ancient Mariner. The mariner himself, the man who inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write one of the most memorable poems in the English language, vivid in word and image, was Simon Hatley, born in Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

Coleridge is thought to have come up with the idea for the poem about a sailor who is becalmed at sea after shooting an albatross in 1797 while walking with William Wordsworth in the hills above his home in Nether Stowey, Somerset. Fowke says;

Scholars have always known what gave Coleridge the idea for the poem because Wordsworth said they had talked together about a book by Captain George Shevelocke during their walk, but nobody has ever taken up the story.

It seems such an incredible oversight, that over the years nobody has seen fit to take up this lead. But there it is, in A Voyage round the World by way of the Great South Sea written by Captain George Shevelocke and published in 1726. Sailing in the Speedwell around Cape Horn, Captain Shevelocke logs the following incident:

We observed that we had not had the sight of one fish of any kind since we came into the southward of the streights of le Maire, nor one sea-bird except a disconsolate black Albatross, who accompanied us several days, hovering above us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley, my second Captain, observing in one of his melancholy fits, that the bird which was always hovering near us, imagined, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen…he after some fruitless attempts at length shot the Albatross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it…

Fowke, tracing Hatley through some other contemporary sources has pieced together a remarkable picture. At one point he was lost at sea and rescued by a Spanish ship which took him to Lima in what is now Peru. There he was tortured, possibly by the Inquisition, the author surmised, so off he went to Madrid to check the records. He found reference to one Simon Hatley born in ‘Yudstock’ which he took to be Woodstock. Now back in England, he discovered an entry in the register for Simon Hatley born in the parish in 1685.

Interest in Haley goes beyond the albatross incident, for there are other remarkable incidents in his life. Amazingly, as Fowke has discovered, on another voyage he sailed with Alexander Selkirk, whose story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, and with William Dampier, an adventurer and author whose work inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels. A fascinating life; a fascinating story.

Not PC-in Praise of a Great Englishman

Lovers of the English language, or words in general, will be mindful that this year marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Doctor Samuel Johnson, the compiler of our first dictionary. His namesake, the equally larger than life Boris Johnson marked the occasion with a piece in The Daily Telegraph, pointing out how ill-fitted he would be as commentator in our PC world: Polly Toynbee would be in a permanent state of apoplexy! He was certainly no believer in the equality of the sexes;

Public practices of any art, and staring in men's faces, is very indelicate in a female.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Now add to the mixture an explosive xenophobia, one that still embraced the traditional English dislike of the Scots, the Irish and the French. Even the Americans don't escape a swipe;

Sir, they are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of a hanging.

The French were a dirty lot and Ireland was worth seeing but not worth going to see. But his sharpest barbs were directed against the 'Scotch';

What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?

Asked by a Scot what Johnson thought of Scotland: "That it is a very vile country, to be sure, Sir" "Well, Sir! (replies the Scot, somewhat mortified), God made it." Johnson: "Certainly he did; but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen, and comparisons are odious, Mr. S------; but God made hell."

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

His distaste even makes its way into The Dictionary, where the definition of oats is given as;

A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Still for all that, for all of his curmudgeonly grumpiness, and the generally reactionary, high Tory nature of his views, he had a huge generosity of spirit. Though no believer human equality in general he was outraged by slavery. After the outbreak of the American Revolution he remarked;

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

One of his most intimate human relationships, moreover, was with his black servant, Francis Barber, generally known as Frank, whom he treated more or less like a son, solicitous over his education, and making him the chief beneficiary of his will. And despite all of the barbed humour and sallies directed at the Scots his most fruitful intellectual relationship was with James Boswell, a Scottish lawyer, whose tome-like Life of Johnson, one of the true landmarks of English literature, is the source of some of the more memorable bone mots, including a few of my favourites;

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.

A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

It was his own great project, The Dictionary of the English Language, the standard reference work until late into the nineteenth century, which caused the most astonishment when he was alive:

Adams: But, Sir, how can you do this in three years?

Johnson: Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years.

Adams: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.

Johnson: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

Thus is the proportion of Samuel Johnson, a great lexicographer and a great Englishman. So, here is to you, Doctor Johnson, with all your sexism, with all your xenophobia, too big for this little age.

Orwell and the Development of Despair

When I was in sixth form at school I wrote an essay for my Eng Lit class, to which I gave the rather grand title The Development of Despair in the Work of George Orwell. Yes, there is indeed a consistent theme in Orwell’s writing, which it is possible to pick up as early as Burmese Days, his first novel, through his essays and reportage, all the way to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The theme is one of cultural and political pessimism, of the little man drowning, of a world corrupted by the abuse and misuse of language, a world set on the destruction of individuality and all sense of the self.

Orwell manages to combine a belief in socialism-which barely lightens his deep sense of disquiet-with a kind of nostalgia for a world lost in the Great War;

From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breath forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates-an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on the green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.

In many ways his perspective is really that of an old-fashioned 'muscular Christian', standing on the island of simple decency, threatened by the rising waters of ideological intolerance of all kinds.

In one of his most brilliant essays, that on Charles Dickens, published in 1939, he concludes by describing the face of the author which emerges from his writings;

It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

His experience of the 'smelly little orthodoxies' is fully described in Homage to Catalonia, his account of his own experiences during the Spanish Civil War. It was from this point that he began to perceive the corruption of language-and the deliberate rewriting of history-as a serious problem for the modern age. In his novels the type depicted most consistently is the 'little man', always from the same lower-middle class background (Orwell's own), who is being submerged by an impersonal modern world.

As novels most of them are actually not of a particularly high order, especially Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with the tiresome and self-pitying Gordon Comstock, a character later to emerge as George Bowling and, later still, as Winston Smith, his final hero. But the novel, it seems to me, that reveals most about Eric Blair the man, as opposed to George Orwell the author, is Coming Up For Air, by far his best since Burmese Days, and the one that anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is in a sense Orwell's David Copperfield, combining his political ideas, his personal experiences, his sense of the 'powerlessness' of the individual, his nostalgia and his fears about the future;

I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it is this. It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. I know it's all going to happen. I know it-at any rate I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen

Oh, my, how I knew it all. :-))

Loving Emma

Emma is my favourite Jane Austen novel by far. I love everything about it, I love the language, I love the humour, the wit, the characters; I love Emma herself for all of her conceit and all of her fallibilities. I think I understand Emma, for I almost fell into the same trap myself once, believing that one understands other people and their emotions, believing that they can somehow be managed to a desired set of ends.

I enjoyed the movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow, who was quite convincing in the lead. So I was really looking forward to the new BBC four-apart adaptation by Sandy Welch, which finished last Sunday evening. Yes, it was a free adaptation and, yes, some of the nuances of Austen’s book have been lost and the characters ‘liberalised’ in point of deportment and expression but I really loved it, loved the whole thing, not in the least put off by the curmudgeonly review in The Daily Telegraph. The soufflé rose and rose!

The cast were super. I particularly liked Michael Gambon as the fussy and hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse, and Jonny Lee Miller was a lovely and sexy-and scolding!-Mr Knightly, but Romola Gari was Emma, she was Emma as I see her; impish, mischievous, expressive, thoughtful, self-assured and scheming. In her face, her eyes alone she conveyed so much liveliness; she deserves recognition for that if nothing besides. I suppose the purist will be horrified, perhaps preferring a ‘stiffer’, less modern version, but not I. Great books and great characters always adjust to the times. I feel sure Jane would have loved this Emma for a modern age.

The production values, the period settings and the costumes were all wonderful; the whole thing was simply splendid. There will be such a gap in my Sunday evenings now. What shall I do? Yes, I know; I’ll read Emma yet again. On second thoughts, I might just go look for a Harriet Smith. :-))

My Idea of Good Romantic Fiction

I suppose it really depends what is meant by ‘Romance.’ I hate soppy pulp fiction, I always have, but I adore high romance; romance as the most sublime form of literature.

Knut Hamson’s Victoria is one of the most beautiful love stories ever written. The ending came close to breaking my heart; I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard over a book. But the love story that captivates me more than any other is that of Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Alas, nobody-apart from me, that is!-seems to understand the elemental force that is Heathcliff. Cathy is his anchor; without her he is lost, blowing through the novel with all the unrestrained energy of a great tempest. Theirs is a mutual passion, with echoes of an ancient tragedy, which goes well beyond the cosy domesticity that Jane brings to Rochester in her sister Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre. Charlotte did not understand the force of Emily's great novel, a work of unsurpassed genius, going far beyond anything she ever achieved; going well beyond the limits of the Victorian imagination itself.

We buried him, to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood, as he wished. Earnshaw and I, the sexton, and six men to carry the coffin, comprehended the whole attendance. The six men departed when they had let it down into the grave: we stayed to see it covered. Hareton, with a streaming face, dug green sods, and laid them over the brown mould himself: at present it is as smooth and verdant as its companion mounds - and I hope its tenant sleeps as soundly. But the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that he WALKS: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death:- and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening - a dark evening, threatening thunder - and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided.

'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

'There's Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t' nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darnut pass 'em.

For me Heathcliff and Cathy will walk those Yorkshire moors, hand-in-hand, forever.

Picturing Dorian

I saw Dorian Gray recently, a movie directed by Oliver Parker and based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, the only novel of Oscar Wilde. It’s not bad; it’s just not that good. Colin Firth is super as Lord Henry Wotton, the hedonist and wit who cuts life to pieces with his razor-sharp epigrams, oh, but Dorian himself! He is played by Ben Barnes, a really yummy guy, chosen quite clearly for his looks rather than his acting ability. As one review I read put it, Barnes is “tall, dull and handsome.” The screenplay itself, written by one Toby Finlay, lurches from the darkly entertaining to the outright ridiculous.

The novel caused a great fuss when it was first published, being seen as an example of literary decadence. But it’s really quite a moral book, almost to the point of being a kind of parable on the consequences of a life pursued solely in the pursuit of selfish pleasures. Dorian has his portrait painted by his friend Basil Hallward (played in the movie by Ben Chaplain) while in the presence of Lord Henry. When he sees the finished product he despairs, realising that the image of beauty will always remain the same while the real man will age and wither. He wishes for the reverse and his wish, by some trick of fate, is granted. Time passes and all signs of change, all signs of the sin he immerses himself in, show in the painting, not in Dorian, who remains the same, young and beautiful. The painting in essence is a depiction of his soul: it shows the steady corruption of his soul.

And now for the movie. If you have read the novel, if you love the novel, it’s probably best avoided; for it’s not just the portrait that’s corrupted! I don’t wish to be entirely negative. As I say, Colin Firth is an excellent Lord Henry, though writer and director take astonishing liberties with his character. Parker, fair to say, creates a very convincing Victorian London, partially by means of special effects. Overall, however, the movie is nothing but a rather shallow gothic horror, losing all the subtlety of the novel.

We see Lord Henry at the outset almost as Mephistopheles to Dorian’s naïve Faust. Indeed, one gets a feeling from a look in Firth’s eye that it is he who curses Dorian with the ‘gift’ of eternal youth. But by the end, in a chapter of the screen-writer’s invention, he turns into a protective father, determined to keep Dorian, a product of his own corrupt influence, away from his daughter; yes, he has a daughter. Oh, no; this kind of man is not for daddy’s little girl!

This is a movie where even the portrait has a life, part satyr, part werewolf clearly trying to jump free from the canvas. The novel ends with Dorian, who murdered the artist long since, hoping to recapture his virtue by stabbing his debased image, but in doing so the process is reversed: he dies aged and horrible as the picture returns to pristine youth. But the movie ends hilariously with Lord Henry rushing to the rescue of his daughter (played by Rebecca Hall), while Dorian, locked in the attic with the painting, is blown up in a gas explosion. In the end we see Lord Henry with the painting, which miraculously survived the inferno, in his own home. There are some things one would rather forget. :-)