The Truth About Lies

Thursday, 19 November 2009

English in its underwear

Scots is English in its underwear. It's difficult to be pretentious in a language like that. - William McIlvanney

McIlvanney has pointed out more than once that the lower down the social ladder you get, the more metaphorical, the more idiomatic, and quite simply, the more poetic the language gets. His books deal with people across the whole social strata but he will be best remembered for his Laidlaw crime novels and Docherty, a story about a working-class miner. What is particularly distinctive about his style is that when people speak McIlvanney writes what they actually say and doesn't try to Anglify the text. A short example:

'Ah'm gonny kill 'im.'

'You dae. An' Ah kill you. No question.'

My background is not that dissimilar to McIlvanney’s. We both come from working class families, we both received better educations than our fathers and we both had fathers who didn't quite get us. Neither could see the point in reading fiction, “summat someone’s jist made up oot o’ their heed,” but both did read non-fiction. We both started off as poets before we became novelists (him, successful, me, not so much) – in spite of, or because of, all the Burns we had to read growing up (it’s hard to be sure) – but neither of us could leave the poetry alone; like a toddler, it gets into everything.

My own writing is quite different to McIlvanney’s – I never felt the need try and emulate his style even in the couple of short stories I’ve written in dialect – but the simple fact is he was the first writer I ever met in the flesh and got to talk to and, do you know what? He was just a bloke: no airs and graces and certainly no pretensions, as if being a writer was no different from being a miner or a teacher or the guy whose job it was to lock up the swings at night, something maybe I could be.

A number of Scottish writers have chosen on occasion to write in dialect rather than plain old English. This can cause problems for some readers so why bother? I'll come back to that but first a question: what's the difference between an accent and a dialect?

When you listen to someone like Billy Connolly talking nowadays no one would doubt that he was Scottish. He has a Scottish accent. Wrong. The thing is there is no such a thing as a 'Scottish' accent just as there is no such a thing as a 'Southern' accent – I'm talking about south of the Mason-Dixon Line here. Someone in Aberdeen sounds quite different to someone from Glasgow just as someone from Belfast sounds quite different from someone from Dublin. It's even imprecise to say that Connolly has a Glaswegian accent because someone from Kelvinside sounds completely different to someone from Partick where Connolly grew up; Connolly describes the Kelvinside accent as talking "wi jawries in yer gob" (marbles in ones mouth). But if we gave representatives from all the above a copy of the Sermon on the Mount to read we'd know in seconds where each of them was from. That's an accent, speaking your country's dominant language with a regional twang.

Billy Connolly on visiting Scotland

A dialect is another thing completely. It's not a language in its own right – Scottish isn't a language – but it is local variant of a language although there are those who would strenuously argue to the contrary (see here). I had a friend once who hailed from Stranraer in south-west Scotland, She talked about '"the bairns' meaning children, whereas in Glasgow the term is 'weans' (pronounced 'wains'); also she often used the expression 'ye ken' – which non-Scots assume we all say all the time (along with 'och aye the noo') – but that's not something you'd hear in Glasgow.

Dialects have rules. Let's take the word 'not'. In Glasgow we use 'no' most of the time. For example: "I'm not doing that" would become "Ah'm no daein that" however it all depends on where the word comes in a sentence, because "It was not me" would be rendered as "It wisne me". Likewise the difference between 'was' and 'were' – "I was there" becomes "Ah were there" and "We were there" becomes "We wis there." And, yes, I know that's the wrong way round but it's consistently that way.

Wherever you go in the world you'll encounter dialects and those dialects have rules. For example:

Speakers of African American English add the word 'be' before a verb to indicate that the action is habitual or ongoing. The sentence 'He be sleeping on the couch' means 'he sleeps on the couch on a regular basis', while 'He sleeping on the couch' mean 'he's sleeping on the couch now.' - Writing Accents and Dialects, Grammar Girl

For many kids, the English they learn at school is for all intents and purposes a foreign language.

Contrary to any still prevalent notions among academicians and educators that nonstandard dialects are simply sloppy, slovenly or careless usage, "broken English" or "bad grammar", scholars from various academic disciplines have been studying these dialects and have revealed them to be highly systematic and socially viable, with their own valid, linguistically describable rules of phonology, morphology and syntax. Indeed the very systematicity of such nonstandard dialects as American Black English Vernacular and its Caribbean Creole cousins suggests one reason for their persistence among students we are confronting in our inner-city classrooms. – Writing: Variation in writing, functional and linguistic-cultural, p142

Although attitudes to non-standard accents have become more tolerant in recent years – just look at the BBC announcers these days – non-standard syntax is still widely stigmatised.

Talking about the BBC, the first writer I ran across who wrote in dialect wasn't actually McIlvanney, although they were writing at the same time, it was the poet Tom Leonard. I bought his collection Intimate Voices – it was more than likely the first poetry collection I bought. In it we find probably his most (in)famous poem:

THE 6 O'CLOCK NEWS

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

A reading of ‘The 6 O’Clock News’

Now I know a few of you struggle with my 'Aggie and Shuggie' sketches when they appear so why do I do it to you? It's because I hate pretension. I use this family to poke fun at myself and even at the good people who do the reviews I'm hoping you'll read. It's far better than a post every few days pleading with people to buy my books. Am I poking fun at working class Scots. Yes. But then I've been a working class Scot all my life and we're more than happy to poke fun at ourselves. Aggie and Shuggie are my proxies. But I could be accused of writing in dialect simply because people who talk that way sound funny. Correction, that’s how people talk around here. It's all of yous that sound funny (no, 'yous' is not a typo).

Is Tom Leonard poking fun at Scottish people? No. He's poking the finger at the pretentious twats at the BBC who used to read the news in Received Pronunciation, that strangled version of English they insisted on broadcasting in for decades, as if the truth was only valid if spoken in BBC English. The fact is that no one has a monopoly on truth.

Leonard doesn't write all his poetry like that. In fact as far as I'm aware he's not written any poetry like that since 1979. It wasn't a fad though. He had a point to make and that was the best way to make it. Leonard's urban phonetic poetry is hard to read. When McIlvanney chose to use more realistic dialogue in his books he decided that a middle ground would be the best place for him. Consider this paragraph from the short story 'How Many Miles to Babylon?':

'Christ we're everywhere,' Benny said, raising his beercan in a toast to the empty room. 'We are the people. Open an alligator's gub in the Congo an' a Scotsman'll nod oot at ye. We're everywhere. Australia, Canada, America, South America, Asia.' He paused, running out of places. 'Russia. There was always Scotsmen in Russia. An' all over Europe. For centuries. India. A lotta Scottish graves in India.' He started to sing. 'There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier. We are the people. Scotsmen can go anywhere. An' why no' me? Why not Benny Mullen? Ye can go anywhere. Ye could even go –' His mind eddied with the drink and he waited to find what exotic flotsam it would throw up. 'To Babylon.' The word shimmered in his head. 'Babylon.' He laughed and drained his can. 'Correct. Ye could even go to Babylon. How many miles wid that be?'

Just on its own this is a wonderful character study and we learn to so much in this single paragraph. The use of dialect isn't intrusive and, once you realise it's a Scot talking, don't you find that a Scots accent appears too?

Hawd yer hosses! Whit's tha aboot a Scoats accent?

Sorry, Shuggie. He's perfectly right. There is no such a thing as a Scots accent. We've already established that but just like I have a 'Southern accent' in my head when I read Tennessee Williams so I appreciate that non-Scots will do their best to approximate the right accent so I imagine a few of you had Aggie and Shuggie talking like Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons or even (perish the thought) Shrek. My wife can tell the difference between a Louisiana accent and a Georgia accent but it all blurs into one in my head. But then unless you're familiar with all of McIlvanney's characters you won't know if the paragraph above is set in Graithnock (where he would have an Ayrshire twang like McIlvanney himself) or Glasgow. To be totally honest I can't remember but I tend to hear all his books in his voice when I read them irrespective of where they're set.

William McIlvanney in a TV advert

If we have a closer look at the dialogue here we have to admit that (and this is also true of the writer James Kelman) McIlvanney uses language that is neither "standard" nor "dialect," but trades on both in pursuit of specific literary ends. Let's just consider this wee bit from that last paragraph:

'There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier. We are the people."[1]

There's nothing inherently Scottish in those sentences but because we know a Scot is saying – well singing in first sentence and chanting the second – we 'hear' the accent. In reality what he’d say would be more like:

[sings] 'Thur wis a soja, a Scoattish soja. [shouts] We arra peep-puuul!'

The fact is that only the first sentence is part of the song, the opening line of 'The Green Hills of Tyrol'. The second is basically a war cry, part of a football chant.[2] There is no way someone who isn't very familiar with Scotland is going to get the cultural references here.

On the east coast of Scotland lies Edinburgh. It also has its own accents and dialects. Just as Glasgow's posh speak with a Kelvinside accent, Edinburgh's affluent speak with a Morningside accent – both are variations on Standard Scottish English. You would immediately recognise them as Scottish but the amount of Scotticisms would be limited to the occasional 'aye' or 'wee'. It could, of course, be argued that these are social dialects rather than geographical ones.

I've written about the relationship between Glasgow and Edinburgh before but Edinburgh is not without its deprived areas and common folk. We get to meet some of them in the work of Irvine Welsh. Here's a wee taster of his style. Renton, the hero of Trainspotting (his best known work) muses on the Scottish identity:

Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that’s different; pakis, poofs, n what huv ye. Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.

Irvine Welsh interviewed

The language is coarse. Of course the language is coarse. This is the same Scot's voice that Tom Leonard uses in the poem I quoted above. You could just imagine Groundskeeper Willie spouting off like that. The fact is Willie is quite unrealistic – he should swear like a trooper.

Okay, we've had monologues so far, but the best place to get the feel of what Scots are all about is to look at a bit of dialogue like this between two co-workers in a chicken processing plant from Mark McNay's Fresh:

Albert?

        Aye pal?

        Ye'll no believe this.

        What?

        Ah've just counted sixty-seven seconds between two chickens.

        Sixty-seven?

        Aye sixty-fuckin-seven.

        Is that a record for ye the day?

        Fuckin right it is.

Albert picked a chicken off the belt and hung it on a hook.

        D'ye think it'll stay a record?

        Course it will. Sixty-seven seconds. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.

        Ah would but smoking shite gies me a soar throat.

        Jealous eh?

        Of course Ah am. Sixty-seven seconds is a great achievement.

        Fuck off ya sarky old cunt.

Albert laughed.

        Ah'm messin with ye. Sixty-seven's no a bad score.

Sean held a chicken up like a trophy and shook it by the wings.

        No bad? It's pure fuckin champion.

        It's no quite champion son.

        How d'ye mean?

Albert pushed his cheek out with his tongue.

        It's no as good as seventy-three.

        When did ye get seventy-three?

Ah got that between two Sunday roasters before we went for breakfast.

        Aye right.

        Ah'm serious.

        What really?

Albert breathed on his hand and rubbed it on his shoulder.

        Aye. Seventy-three.

        Bet ye counted fast.

Albert pointed at Sean.

        No as fast as you ya wee cunt.

        Ah count slow ya old bastard.

        Yer too tight to count slow.

        Ah used my watch.

Albert turned his back.

        Liar.

        Aye. Ah know ye are.

Bear in mind that these two men are friends. This is friendly banter, two workmates passing the time of day. Derision is a part of Glaswegian humour. That whole conversation could have been the prelude to a fight, the exact same words, but you'd have to hear the tone to determine whether these two were squaring up for a fight. If the next line involved Sean grabbing a hold of Albert and knocking him to the ground then you'd know. And as soon as the other men saw what was happening someone would shout out "Square go!" and they'd probably all gather round until someone decided it had gone too far. Chickens aside the above is a playground conversation.

But why write like this? Is realism so damn important?

I think it is. And clearly a lot of my fellow Scots think it is too. So where are all the novels in a Newcastle dialect or a Birmingham dialect? Or what about other countries? I'm just reading a novel by a New Zealand writer at the moment and it's set in Watford, England. But even if it hadn't been I doubt he would have gone to the same extent as someone like Irvine Welsh to capture the flavour of the place. And why not? Surely Scotland is not the only country with such a strong national identity. This is what Irvine Welsh had to say about the subject:

"There's a big fuss about the language in some of my books … [b]ut it's like the book is the only cultural artefact now that has all these walls. ... Why is it only in the novel — the English novel — that everyone's got the same narrative voice? They're still stuck in these kind of standard poems. Every other medium has exorcised it. People just don't talk like that anymore. They don't talk in standard English anymore. So why present [novel dialogue] in it?"

He goes on to answer his own question:

"Because if you're a novelist in Britain, you're almost seen as a custodian or something, like a curator, and that's just stupid. Then you get all this angst about death of the novel, and why people aren't reading the novel. Well, no duh. You know, right? It's like the standard English, the Queen's English, is an imperialist language set for us to control our knowledge. Therefore, it's not very interesting. It's an administrative language. It's not got many beats, it's not got any rhythm. It's terrible to write with." – interview with Benjamin Arnold in Flakmag

Which bring us to Lallans. I'm not going to talk about Gaelic because that is another language but there are terms kicking around to try and describe the Scots' tongue: Lallans and Doric are the two best known. Lallans is a variant of the Scots word 'lawlands' meaning the lowlands of Scotland. There's no specific geographic area that you could call 'the lowlands'. In simplistic terms, however, the lowlands are everywhere in Scotland that aren't the highlands. So, broadly speaking, Lallans refers to the dialects of south and central Scotland and Doric refers to the dialects spoken in the north east of Scotland.

Robert Burns' poetry is written in Lallans. To illustrate:

They took nae pains their speech to balance,
Or rules to gie;
But spak their thoughts in plain, braid lallans,
Like you or me.

from 'Epistle To William Simson'

I think of it as the Scottish equivalent to Shakespearian English only less intelligible and you'd think we were done with it. But no.

The term Lallans was also used during the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century to refer to what Hugh MacDiarmid called synthetic Scots, i.e., a synthesis integrating, blending, and combining various forms of the Scots language, both vernacular and archaic. This was intended as a classical, standard Scots for a world-class literature, although it was more often than not Scots words grafted on to a standard English grammatical structure somewhat removed from traditional spoken Scots, its main practitioners not being habitual Lowland Scots speakers themselves. – Wikipedia

I'm not sure I personally approve of this trend. I can't see the point of a language that exists as a purely literary form. Writing poems and songs in Gaelic is another matter entirely because Gaelic is still alive although not very well and the same goes for Welsh; pockets of resistance against the English invaders. MacDiarmid's detractors often referred to it as plastic Scots – a play on synthetic as in synthetic plastics – to underline its artificiality.

A short documentary about the poet especially interesting because it includes an old BBC radio broadcast in Received Pronunciation

But is Aggie-and-Shuggie-speak not artificial since you don't talk that way?

Good point. I think that my sketches would be better if I didn't have to translate what I want to say into an approximation of Govan-speak but they're just a bit of fun. What I decided quite early on was to provide all my characters with an idiolect, basically a family dialect, and try and stick to it, e.g. when Shuggie means 'never' he says 'neffer' and instead on 'review' we get 'refyoo'. I'd take the whole process a lot more seriously if I was trying to get them published. I have written stories in dialect. You can find two of them in an early edition of Ranfurly Review. Here's an excerpt from 'Just Thinking':

Jack:

Should Ah stay or should Ah go? That’s a song isn’t it? Who the hell did that now? Some punk outfit. The Skids Ah think. OK, ten reasons to stay. Ah can do that. Wan: she’s got huge tits, two: she laughed at your jokes, three: she’s OK in bed, four: she’ll fill the gap till you bump into Little Miss Right at the dancin, five: it’s been far too long since you had a real girlfriend, six: she hasne got nuthin pierced – Ah hate body piercin, seven: she likes you – that’s important – I think she likes you, eight: she disne punce me out the door as soon as we’d done the business – another plus, nine: her pal went off wi Mikey so Ah’d better no drap her till Ah see whit the score is wi the two of them an ten: sod it, Ah’ll give her tits two points – they fuckin deserve it.

Ah guess that means Ah’m stayin put.

Looking back over it I can see places where I'd change it. It really is an impossible task trying to get it right and it's hard to know where to draw the line. Take 'nothing' for example – I've written 'nuthin' above but when I read it I hear 'nuhin' in my head because that's how it would be said . . . probably, depending on who was talking, because we all put our own twists on language. One of the first things my wife commented on was how I pronounce the word 'poem' – apparently I say 'poyem'. So there you go.

I have no doubt where you live people have their own unique way of talking. As a writer do you embrace the local speech idiosyncrasies and incorporate them into your work or smooth out the rough edges? I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

There are examples to be found all over the world, like the opening lines of this one from the Trinidadian poet, Miguel Browne:

TRINI TALK

Trinidadians are a special people of dat there is no doubt,
Doh care what odders say of how dey run dey mouth.
But of all de special talents dat we Trinis possess,
Is de way we talk dat ranks us among de best.
At de street corners, in de shop or at work on any given day,
Is to hear us speak and carry on in our own special way.
De colourful words, de antics and de accent all combine,
To create a whole language dat has stood de test of time.

But I suspect the problem has its roots in our education systems. There is prevalent opinion that people who can't express themselves in the official language of a country are somehow stupid. Here's what a teacher in the Caribbean wrote:

I interviewed each of my Caribbean students one by one. They shared with me that they had never written in their vernacular because they were not allowed to in their school systems. One student said she had been told by her teachers that the dialect she spoke was "broken English" and not worthy of being written. Another told me it was hard for her to write in patois because she had never been taught how to do it.

Elsasser and Irvine found in their work with Caribbean students:

. . . their reluctance to write (was) directly attributable to the denigration of their native language and to their conviction that they do not, in fact, possess a true language but speak a bastardized version of English. It is difficult if not impossible to write without a language, and it is emotionally draining to attempt to develop voice and fluency in an education system that has historically denigrated one's own language. (1985, 406)[3]

My students who spoke vernacular Englishes seemed to suffer from the stigmatization that Elsasser and Irvine described. Their dialect had been devalued and banned from the classroom. [4]

We then have an excerpt from a student:

I definate hate writing. Takes too much time when you can talk about what you want. Writing is a bore and a process we can live without. Writing is a very difficult process that involves a lot of thinking especially if you don't have a command of the English grammar . . . In my country, we spoke `Patois,' as a result, is sometimes confuses my tenses and my punctuation. Everytime I tried to write exceptionally well, thinking that my grammar is intact, the end result is always watch your grammar. I really feel down at times when I have to write.

I think this is an important issue. A lot can be lost by trying to get people to confirm to the 'Newspeak' of the day be it Hindi (the official language of India) or English (the official language of too many places to list). When a 13-year-old Scottish girl handed in an essay written in Textese, she explained to her flabbergasted teacher that it was easier than Standard English. Part of me is appalled at this but that's just because I'm old and struggle with texting. It's not my lingua franca but it is fast becoming many people's. Should we cling to English as it stands just now or let it evolve naturally just like Scots did and is continuing to do? Good question. There is room for all kinds of speech. As Thoreau put it:

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. – Walden; or, Life in the Woods

This wee article’s drifted away from Glasgow where we started off so I’d like to bring us back there with a song written and performed by Billy Connolly, a serious one and one that reduced me to tears listening to it again and not for the first time:

Monday, 16 November 2009

The Wrong Miracle

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar – Pablo Picasso

This is book about ordinary things, getting you hair done, having breakfast, going to church and eating gobstoppers. It's about childhood, the strain of being part of a family, the joy of sex, the question of love, the problems surrounding married life and life's little and not-so-little losses. It is about art and music and what was on TV last night. It is about all those daily miracles and disasters that make up an ordinary life.

Sure there's some fancy word play and clever metaphors to be found in this collection but these poems are not puzzles to leave you scratching your heads, these are not things to be solved so much as things to be savoured. By that I mean don't gulp them down. Let them sit on your tongue a while and appreciate the sweets, the sours, the salty and the bitter. Some will leave a bad taste – well, that's life – and others will provoke washes of nostalgia, of childhood mainly for me but other times too.

Selecting poems to go in an anthology is a difficult thing. I would imagine if Liz is anything like me she has a lot of very similar poems in her collection but there's no real sense of having the same old truths hammered into you page after page. Yes, there are a lot of poems about family and many of these touch on religious topics but this was clearly a part of her upbringing (as it was with many of us) and so I felt on familiar ground. Granted I was never a Catholic girl in Ireland (unless in a former life I've no memory of) and yet a poem like this one resonates strongly for me. It begins:

My father's call for spare silver
for the priest's money box
is a Sunday ritual. So too is the rag
my mother uses to polish shoes
that she later positions in front
of the fireplace. My father's hair refuses
to stay up at the sides, it is flattened
in place by a smear of Brylcreem . . .

from 'Sunday with Ritual

I don't need to taste this poem. I can smell it. For those who don't know, Brylcreem is a brand name of a men's hair grooming product which probably had its heyday in the seventies (in the UK) with it's advertising slogan: "A little dab of Brylcreem on your hair gives you the Brylcreem bounce". Brylcreem was sold in a tube in the States and tubs in Europe and Canada. I remember those tubs and the feel of the white cream. Very much a part of my childhood. And the same with the routine for polishing shoes. It's not the rags I remember so much as the brushes and the shoehorn which I always regretted forgetting to save when my parents' house was emptied. There were so many mundane moments like that growing up. Who would ever imagine that I would pine after them? At the time this poem evokes a feeling of resentment – all the atheists got to sleep in on Sundays.

So you can see that it was the family poems that managed to reach me whereas others like the first poem in the collection, 'Decorum' (about flamenco) missed the mark completely, but that's only to be expected. I did find it an odd choice for an opening poem mind. Liz may have lived in Gran Canaria for the past fourteen years (they're a group of seven islands and six islets set off the coast of western Africa) where flamenco is apparently a big thing (it's the Spanish connection) but that's one of the few poems with a distinct sense of place, though of course anyone not reading the blurb on the back might assume the poem was set in Spain or perhaps even the Donegal Flamenco Club. The fandango makes a late appearance on page 17: 'Spring the Life Fandango'. To my mind both of these poems felt out of place. There's nothing wrong with them as poems just not here. I would rather have seen a poem about 'Lanigan' Ball' which gets mentioned in passing on the previous page. (My wife, on the other hand, felt that ‘Decorum’ was an excellent choice to set up the collection, but then she has a gypsy soul.)

If we can just consider the title of that last poem for a moment, I don't know about you but it reminds me of the phrase “trip the light fantastic”, an expression which means “to dance nimbly or lightly” according to Wikipedia. Were there not a few other odd expressions like this in the collection I might have dismissed this but I suspect it was deliberate; like any good poet she's making the words work overtime: For example:

...I use my secret voice that I keep for gut
reactions and the garters of the insides...

from 'Finding the Right Silences'

and the music snapping at heart strings, not
enough to fiddle and bow about, only to jig and
reach out about...

from 'Search Me (All Else Failing)'

Spanish dances well and truly aside the poems are peppered with plenty of other cultural references to make me feel comfortable. I remember watching Land of the Giants on TV in the late sixties and I remember Leo Sayer in the mid-seventies. This was a time when The Magic Roundabout was a gentle stop-motion animation shown across the country at 5.40pm on BBC1 just before the early evening news each day not some appalling animated action movie which Americans will know as Doogal (yes, I know the spelling's wrong).In the late seventies we had Watership Down and that moany N° 1 single by Art Garfunkel – 'Bright Eyes' – that never seemed to be off the radio.

I felt at home in these poems. They were comfortable and familiar. Then she moves onto the eighties (a reference to the guitarist The Edge and 'Fairytale of New York') and even the present day (The Dark Knight gets a nod). These were touchstones for me. Anyone born after 1980 (which apparently a lot of you were) will miss out a whole (and important) layer of this collection although that's what's Google's for I suppose. I spoke to Liz about this and she feels that you can still get the poems without being necessarily "au fait, so to speak, with the references", and I agree up to a point but the poems are so much richer if you can tap into the associations that come with those references.

So, how do you explain the ordinary? In what terms? In magical terms: loudness becomes a skin that can be shed, a truck can haul away the dawn, a story can be a place of retreat and beauty is something we can soak in. Most of us don't realise how metaphorical our language is, so it's easy to miss on the beauty of these poems because there are so many throw away lines like these and very few punch lines; it's not that kind of poetry.

There are 58 poems in this collection. There is no way I can comment on them all but they can be grouped. This is a Venn diagram collection. There is much overlap: the war poems are never simply about war and the religious poems are not only about religion. These are backdrops just as I imagine Ireland is the backdrop for a great many of these poems but one doesn't feel as if they're all lying in its shadow. As I've already mentioned most of the poems don't have a great sense of place: people have sex the world over, it rains the world over and others go for strolls in graveyards the world over. This is a plus to the collection because ordinary things happen the world over to ordinary people and that's who this book is aimed at, me and you

I don't know what it is but we are always willing to assume that poems are autobiographical and so when I read the start of this poem:

When she died they used soapy steel wool to clean
the black smoke stains beneath the Sacred
Heart picture. A cotton sheet was hung over the TV.

The mother filled the Virgin Mary holy water font
with water from Lourdes. She scolded that they should
have rung the chimney sweep at least a year ago. A red

haired daughter with a black haired mother came to see
the corpse – their hands covered their mouths as they sat
on a very old sofa.

from 'Waking a Grandmother'

I wouldn't have thought twice about the daughter's hair colour if I hadn't read this poem at the start of the collection:

I had asked for cappuccino-coloured
hair. I triangulated my choice. Cappuccino morphed
into the afterword – red. So now I am a redhead
by a miscalculation of the otherness of colour.

from 'Woman in a Redhead'

(Clever observations, Jim, but in 'Waking a Grandmother' I am the poet in the bathroom weeping not the red haired daughter! but yes, in 'Woman in a Redhead' it's me! - Liz)

This is where the reader needs to use their own imagination but I imagined this dour little wake with everyone in shades of black bar this one girl with flame-coloured hair sticking out like a sore thumb. But there was another thing about 'Waking a Grandmother' that struck me. For such a personal poem all the characters in it are depersonalised: the mother, a red-haired daughter, the father, the man who had ECT, the poet, the man she really loved. This is a simple thing Liz has done here – I didn't even notice it on the first read – and yet this poem leaps out at you especially since it's surrounded by poems written in the first person. Perhaps there's good reason for this:

The man who had had
electric shock treatment and who once touched the poet's
breasts through a brown school uniform said that when
we die a white light takes the fear away.

Families have histories, skeletons in cupboards, and so many of us live in families we really wish we weren't a part of.

I'm assuming that the poet is the red-haired girl and that she was the twelve-year-old girl in the 'Small Acts', the previous poem, preparing for chapel with her grandmother. My first thought that this was a first communion service but not if she's wearing a 'green crimplene dress' and a 'white polka-dotted cap. 'She's twelve and she's starting to question things: 'I shred bible parts looking for an iota of truth, / the mote in my eye.'

(Liz tells me that was not a communion but rather a "confirmation – where one can forego the bride-look and look like the mother-of-the-bride instead". I think this underlines my point earlier about how we bring ourselves to a poem. I was not brought up as a Roman Catholic and so I only have an academic appreciation of the religion – it doesn't resonate for me in the same way that it will for anyone who has been brought up a Catholic.)

I'm assuming too that Liz is the girl in the next poem gardening with her dad:

My father rises to snip bushes

into circular shapes. He says the moon's orbit round the earth
is not circular. I follow him with a leaf-blower that I cannot
handle.

from 'My Father Shows Me How to Sharpen a Bush-Trimmer'

And I'm assuming that this is the girl who has sex in coal shed and believes that '[l]ove exists in the back-boiler room', that she's the girl on 'a city roof top' with a guy with a beard who wants to 'tumble' her:

He measures me by finger
lengths. As far as I know I'm fine. Sometimes I

use 'I' like a scalpel. I can't answer
with ordinary answers. I come

completely clothed. He gives solid
gifts. What matters is where my mind places

itself at the point of countdown. We wrap
legs round a whole revolution and push

the war away.

from 'City RoofTop'

I'm assuming that the man is going to war, the same war that appears in half a dozen of the poems and that she is the woman on the end of the phone here:

When I lift the receiver and they tell me the news,
I will think of your face, you lying there, skin
with the sheen of polythene. I imagine the hum
of small talk as neighbours place endless

cups in a stainless steel sink. The silence is dotted
and stares me in the eye. Night is stitched
at the corners. Threadbare light does not stand
a chance.

from 'A Woman with All Her Curtains Drawn'

This is not a novel though. There might be no connections between these poems other than the fact that Liz Gallagher wrote them. But that's the problem with all poetry collections, we try and make sense of all the poems presented as a unified body of work. I assume that is what Liz intends me to do. I don't know. My assumptions may be all wrong.

What I do know is that the first time I read this collection I missed just about everything. This is not a criticism, merely an observation; it says more about me than Liz I fear.

I do have a favourite poem however. The one that stands out for me was this one:

A Poem that Thinks It Has Joined a Circus

A handkerchief is not an emotional holdall.
A cup of tea does not eradicate all-smothering sensations.
A hands-on approach is not the same as a hand-on-a-shoulder
willing chin to life and an upper lip to stiffen.
A forehead resting on fingers does not imply that the grains
of sand in an hourglass have filtered through.
A set of eyes staring into space is not an indictment that the sun
came crashing down in the middle of the night.
A sigh that causes trembling and wobbly knees should be
henceforth and without warning trapped in a bell jar and retrained
to come out tinkling ivories with every gasp.
A poem trying to turn a sad feeling on its head does not constitute
a real poem, it is a cancan poem, dancing on a pinhead
a walking a tightrope with arms pressed tightly by its sides.

Why this one? I like poems that are self-reflective. I like when a poet comments on what she sees poetry to be. Personally I would have made this either the first or more likely the last poem in the collection.

I would love to recommend this collection unreservedly but I can't. There are too many cultural references that non-Brits will struggle with as will younger Brits. I was surprised to find that Sunsilk was still on the go for example but it was the can my mother used that I saw when I read about it in one of her poems; the same goes for 'Daz-blue' and the Colgate 'ring of confidence'. These subtleties will be lost on many but for those who get them then a whole world of images and associations will open up to them.

Many of the poems have very long lines, the majority in fact. Let me just say that they took some getting used to and leave it at that.

This is a book that will grow on you if you give it time. I've been picking it up and putting it down for the past week. I certainly won't be selling my copy on eBay after this, for starters there's hardly a page that doesn't have underlining in five colors and notes in the margins cross-referencing the different poems and that's not counting the three A4 pages of notes I wrote before I even began typing this up most of which I simply don't have room to talk about. These poems made me think and they made me remember. A lot of them made me sad but sad in a good way if that makes any sense to you at all. Liz is a poet – I'm sure she'll know exactly what I mean by that.

***

Liz Gallagher was born and brought up in Donegal, Ireland. She has been living in Gran Canary Island for the past 14 years. She has an Education degree where she specialised in Irish language. She also has a Computer Science degree. She is at present doing research into online debating for her PhD. She began writing about 5 years ago and has won a variety of awards in both Ireland and the US: Best New Poet 2007 (Meridian Press, Virginia University) First Prize in The Listowel Writers’ Single Poem Competition 2009 and she was selected by Poetry Ireland for their 2009 Introductions Series in recognition of her status as an emerging poet.

The Wrong Miracle, Liz's first full collection, was published in July 2009 and is available from Salt Publishing. All the royalties are going to Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Beckett the tinkerer (part two)

Here’s a link to Part one if you missed it.

What Where was Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself. My Wikipedia article was thoroughly researched and is quite comprehensive but let me explain the gist of the play for you, at least how the play stands on paper. I'm referencing the (you would have thought) definitive Grove Centenary Edition here. First a summary courtesy of The Modern World:

After preparing the stage through a wordless rehearsal, a quadrille of identical figures entering and leaving, V calls Bam to the stage and sets events in motion.

Bam, who will remain onstage until the last moments of the play, greets Bom, and asks him for the results of his interrogation of an unnamed subject. The answer is not good – although Bom gave him "the works" until he wept, screamed, begged for mercy, and finally "passed out," Bom was unable to make his subject "say it." Bam accuses him of lying, and V summons Bim.

After asking Bim "Are you free?" Bam orders him to give Bom "the works" until he confesses that his subject said "it," and "what." After a season passes, Bim reports back to Bam, but he's had the same results – though Bom wept, screamed, and begged for mercy, he passed out without "saying it" or saying "where." Ever mistrustful, Bam also accuses Bim of lying. V summons Bem, and the process goes through yet another iteration, with Bem torturing Bim to reveal what Bom was hiding from Bam.

After another season passes, Bem returns with the same negative results. Now the only one left, Bam is forced to give Bem "the works" himself. Bam leads Bem off the stage, returning alone after another season has passed, his head bowed in obvious defeat. Satisfied, the Voice remarks, "Make sense what may" and switches off.

Beckett's descriptions of the actors are as follows:

Players as alike as possible

Same long grey gown

Same long grey hair

and even the voice has preconditions set:

V in the shape of a small megaphone at head level

He also describes precisely the layout of the stage:

Playing area (P) rectangle 3 m x 2 m, dimly it, surrounded by shadow, stage right as seen from house. Downstage left, dimply lit, surrounded by shadow, V.

and, if that wasn't enough, he adds a wee diagram:

So, what's wrong then with this production by the Silverlake Company of Angels?

Well, V has found his body for starters.

Or what about this version which was part of the 2003 Beckett on Film project which tackled all of his stage plays with the exception of the early and unperformed in his lifetime Eleutheria?

Well, there was no book in Beckett's stage instructions and would you look at the size of that megaphone and where it's located! And where's all the grey gone?

There is a clear difference with this second version. The political undertones . . . well, there's nothing 'under' about them.

This is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four a few generations later, when even the eternal boot in the face becomes commonplace, making Bam's question to each new subordinate — "Are you free?" all the more ironic. There is no freedom here, there is nothing but the reflexive application of power, and not even their collective failure elicits any emotional response from Bam — just a vague, irritated resignation. Finally, Bam must face the fact that the instruments he uses to gain information have become useless, his resources exhausted: turning upon themselves, they only expose their hollow impotence. Indeed, it is likely that there is nothing really to confess. Left with only himself, Bam is the inheritor of a totalitarian regime of emptiness.[1]

You can read what the Damien O'Donnell had to say about directing the play here.

Interrogation and torture appear in other plays by Beckett. Catastrophe is an obvious choice for those looking for a political interpretation (even though when you dig into the play this may well not have been Beckett's intention) but Play is the closest in comparison to What Where, three ghosts up to the necks in urns, answering when the spotlight shines on them.

If I can go back to music for a moment, the first version of Holst's orchestral suite The Planets I heard was one conducted by his friend Sir Adrian Boult; it's a rather stiff, very "British", performance. Later on I got to hear other interpretations — I have one with Karajan conducting and another under Andre Previn – and although I didn't hate them they weren't what I was familiar with; they were somehow wrong. To be fair Boult's recording likely is the closest to what Holst conceived but the point I'm making is that that was the version I heard first and so it becomes my base line, my definitive version and all others stand or fall by comparison to it. The first version of What Where I saw was indeed the Beckett on Film version and so when I got to see Beckett's own films they looked strange and I didn't really care for them that much. What Where was apparently shown on TV at a time when it could have been seen by school children who would have seen it and thought: This is how it should be done. This is one danger of radical adaptations.

On the surface What Where is really just an arty "who's on first?" vaudeville routine and considering many of Beckett's other plays where he includes vaudevillian touches (e.g. the hat routine in Waiting for Godot) this too is an obvious interpretation – the play is one long gag albeit a serious one. What's Beckett saying, that life is a joke?

The four characters could be components of a split personality and Bam, the dominant one, could be torturing the others for information they are incapable of providing.

Or is it more of an epistemological puzzle? I suggest this based on how Beckett modified the play in later years. Take this example where we see Beckett caught on camera actually discussing his 1987 American TV production. There are also excerpts from the play and from the 1986 German TV production of Was Wo where Beckett first decided to do away with the megaphone and replace it with a large head (invariably blurred) which he called "a death mask"[2] the voice coming from “beyond the grave”[3] and the action taking place in a “field of memory”.^[4]In other words the only character who is sentient (as opposed to alive) is the big blurry head who is remembering what happened when he was alive.

When you consider Beckett's other work from this period this makes perfect sense because he often used the motif of a ghost in his works (both prose works and plays) even if not explicitly naming them as such (e.g. the mother's voice in Footfalls). This makes sense of the fact that the Voice 'pauses' the action / memory from time to time and 'rewinds' where the initial 'memory' is not the way he wants to remember it:

BAM:

But he didn't say anything?

BOM:

No.

V:

Not good.

I start again.

BAM:

Well?

BOM:

Nothing.

BAM:

He didn't say it?

V:

Good.

To my mind it does make that one aspect of the play clearer, that the disembodied voice is what's going on inside Bam's head — a typical Beckettian conceit:

Neither representation then of Bam is corporeal, Beckett representing instead a spectre and its mirror reflection, and the rest of the figures of What Where are ghosts as well, all the more so as they are re-presented by the patterns of dots on the television screen.[5]

But does that mean all of this invalidates any later productions that stage the play? And what about the later Beckett on Film version — why take a backwards step when all the technical jiggery-pokery would have advanced to improve on what was televisually possible in the eighties? I don't have an answer for that except to underline that the play has validity in all its different realisations but I do find a comment made by Jennifer Jeffers interesting:

The works composed for television . . . fare poorly whenever they have been performed as live theatre. […] The figures of Quad and What Where are conceived to dwell on a flat surface, backlighted and fluorescent, quite separate from the dimensional world of the viewer. On the screen they project a ghostly depthlessness; they move in a kind of spaceless no man's land. In contrast once these figures are placed on a stage in front of an audience, their material reality cannot help but be disappointing.[6]

Ignoring for the moment that What Where was originally conceived as a stage play her point really is that the original staged version of What Where was inadequate to encompass Beckett's vision. Beckett is famously reported as saying of What Where: "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object."[7] I don't accept that when he says he had no idea what the play is about he is being serious — he often gave answers like that just to shut people up or half an answer and he wasn’t beyond actual lying.

In 1988 the composer Heinz Holliger took What Where and turned it into a chamber opera as he had done with Come and Go in 1977 and Not I in 1980 all while Beckett was still alive. Yet another interpretation, one that could expose the musical aspects that are present in all of Beckett's theatrical works.

The last thing the voice says in the play is:

V:

I am alone.

In the present as were I still.

It is winter.

Without journey.

Time passes.

That is all.

Make sense who may.

I switch off.

And that is the point. We are the ones — and by "we" I include the directors who take on this and any other of Beckett's plays — we are the ones who have to make sense of his words.

I'll leave you to ponder that.

A production note at the front of the script has the heading ‘Process of Elimination'. Elimination, that is, of colour, visual, light and sound effects, with an unchanging black background.

Further reading

Katherine Weiss, 'What Where: Reading Faces and Surfaces on the Beckettian Stage and Screen', Ball State University English Studies Forum
Dr. Aylin Kesim, 'An Analysis of Themes in Samuel Beckett's What Where'
Mary A Doll, 'The Demeter Myth in Beckett'
Phillipe Albèra, 'Beckett and Holliger' in Mary Bryden ed., Beckett and Music
Steven Connor, 'What Where: Space and the Body' in Samuel Beckett: repetition, theory, and text
Christina Adamou, 'What Where Revisited: Answering the Question' in Marius Bunnng ed., Historicising Beckett: issues of performance

References

[1] 'What Where', The Modern World

[2] "‘In his Stuggart notebook Beckett wrote that “S (Stimme [Voice]) = mirror reflection of Bam’s face … S’s voice prerecorded. Bam’s but changed.’ This enlarged and distorted death mask … replaced the suspended ‘megaphone at head level’ of the original publication.” – Gontarski, S. E., ‘The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater’ in Moorjani, A. and Veit, C., (Eds.) Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p175

[3] Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p686

[4] Quoted in Gontarski, S. E., ‘Notes to What Where: The Revised Text, by Samuel Beckett’ in Journal of Beckett Studies 2.1 (1992), p12

[5] S E Gontarski, 'The body in the body of Beckett's theatre' in Angela B. Moorjani, Carola Veit eds., Samuel Beckett: endlessness in the year 2000, p176

[6] Jennifer Jeffers, Samuel Beckett: a casebook, p220

[7] Much as I try I cannot find out where this 'famous' quote comes from.

Monday, 9 November 2009

The Search

Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of reviewing this novel we need a short history lesson:

Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just north-west of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. - Wikipedia

There is so much history attached to Word War II that I couldn't tell you if I knew that or not. I sat and watch the whole World at War series with my dad back in 1973 so I must have heard about it. The fact is after a while the war just blurs into five years of wall-to-wall horror stories and atrocities with the odd act of heroism thrown in for good measure and it's hard to get emotional about it any more. At least 50 million people died in that war and since then we've heard many stories of entire villages being massacred in Africa and Cambodia, for example.

We have our own tragedies to mourn. Do we really need another book about World War II?

I had my doubts when I started to read this, not the author's fault I have to stress, but mine. I read the scene where the village's men are executed without batting an eye. Even the fact that the only witness is Jan (a ten-year-old boy) and one of the men is his father still left me dry-eyed. Then he returns home only to be captured by the Nazis where he sees his mother and elder sister rounded up with all the other women and shipped off to God knows where. This leaves him in charge of his little four-year-old sister, Lena.

It's hard to keep close to her though. Eventually they wind up in a children's home in Germany.

It isn't often he gets a chance to speak to Lena, for the girls and boys are kept apart most of the time. Weeks pass before he manages to find a moment when she is alone; when he tries to speak to her, he thinks she's changed. For one thing, she speaks German. When Jan talks to her in Czech, she screws up her face and tells him to speak properly.

"Only peasants speak the way you do."

Jan gazes at her wordless. It's not her fault; she doesn’t know what she's saying. Every day the women tell them lies like this, and she's only little. It's no surprise that she takes in and believes what they say to her.

"Our parents spoke this way," he reminds her.

Lena kicks a stone away. "Ich habe keine Eltern. Sie sind tod." [I have no parents. They are dead]

The blurb on the back of the book told me what to expect next. Soon his sister is removed too leaving him alone.

Now for the vast majority of kids his age that would have been pretty much the end of his story. All we would be left to find out was whether he survived the war or not. But I'm not an educational psychologist. Myant writes:

The men were killed, the women sent to Ravensbrück and some of the children were sent to Germany to be adopted. This raised questions for me as a psychologist. Quite apart from the appalling trauma of being torn from your family, what did it do to a child to have their identity stripped from them like that? Did they form bonds with their new family, how did they feel when reunited with what remained of their real family after the war, what did the people who were duped into adopting the children feel? The Search explores these issues in the story of Jan and Lena. – The Reading Agency

Virtually all the tales about the war we have are from the perspective of grown-ups with the obvious exception of The Diary of Anne Frank so I can see why this might have piqued her interest. It would never have struck me but this is what we need, the right writer to come in contact with the right material.

The book is written in the present tense, third person, so we go through this as Jan does without the benefit of hindsight. I think the present tense was a sensible choice but I would have liked, as with Anne Frank, to have a first person narrative – just a personal preference – but considering the fact there are two narrative threads she's made the sensible choice I think.

The first thread is Jan's story. A determined young boy, he decides not to sit tight and wait to see how things pan out, rather he resolves to escape from the children's home and try and locate his family. A bit of a tall order.

The second thread revolves around the Schefflers, Friedrich and Gisela, a German couple, and their grown-up son, Wilhelm, who is a soldier away at war. Having lost their own daughter they decide to adopt what they think is a German girl orphaned by the war. What they get is a little Czech girl who has been conditioned to speak German and think of herself as 'Helena'; the girl is, of course, Jan's sister, Lena.

She settles in quickly enough but they soon realise all is not right:

Upstairs, the little girl laughs. She's settling in now, though she's very quiet, and when she speaks, her words don't sound right. The accent's all wrong. When [Friedrich] mentions this to Gisela, saying he thought her language was very poor for a child of her age, Gisela frowned and shook her head. "Poor thing, what do you expect? She's lost both her parents."

"But she says so little. Perhaps she' retarded."

"Have you seen how she helps me round the house? She's smart all right, don’t you doubt it for a minute."

"But –"

"No more buts, Friedrich. She has no parents, and she's from Hamburg, That's why she sounds so different."

People believe what they want to believe . . . or what they need to believe.

Now Jan may be, as I've just said, a determined little boy but he's not especially resourceful. Like Lena he's been forced to learn German but he speaks with a Czech accent, has a very limited vocabulary (enough to do what's required of him) and cannot read German; actually he struggles to read joined-up writing full stop. It’s just as well he makes friends with an older boy called Pawel because he simply isn't equipped to make his escape alone. And, yes, of course, they both escape. It wouldn't be much of a book if they didn't. They learn the address of the farm in Germany where Lena lives and set off to reclaim her. Inconveniently, they wind up near Pawel’s home in Poland instead, but at least there they get some adult assistance and get pointed in the right direction.

Things don't work out, the boys get separated and if it wasn't for Marek, a sympathetic Resistance leader, Jan's story would probably peter out there. But it doesn't and he ends up joining a small band hiding out in the woods. This keeps him relatively safe but doesn’t help him with his task. He bides his time and waits for an opportunity which eventually comes and he gets a final shove towards his goal.

In the meantime we get to learn a bit about the Schefflers and their son who has deserted and ends up living in a hole in the ground in their barn. It's easy to see all Germans as the bad guys and certainly Jan does or at least he would like to. The thing is he keeps getting glimpses of their humanity. When he is up the tree watching the executions in Lidice a young German sees him and helps him escape before he is discovered and during an ambush he comes face to face with another German who pleads for his life before Marek shoots him. And when he finally makes his way to the Schefflers, he ends up in the middle of a situation he could never have anticipated.

In the final chapter everyone's stories collide and rarely does anyone walk away unscathed from a collision. The scars they're all left with are not what any of them could have expected. So, yes, from a plot perspective, all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed but it's not a neat ending, not in that respect, and I was rather grateful for that because in the rest of the book the plot shows through a bit too much for my tastes. It's a little too neat; the writing is clean and professional, like a film script where the action needs a nudge forward and so things happen when they need to happen, even the unexpected bits.

Did I enjoy the book? Is this a book you're supposed to enjoy? It's a book that makes you think. The last chapter certainly makes you think. It made me think and I'm positive it will drag a tear or two out of some of you. This was a side of the war that I knew of but that was about it. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, Ian McEwan's Rose Blanche and the more recent The Boy in Striped Pyjamas this is a story worth telling. Although not marketed as a young adult novel I suspect this book is one that teenagers would get a lot from.

Having got to this point in the review I felt like I'd been nitpicking, dwelling on the negatives rather than the positives, so I contacted the publisher to see if I could ask Myant a few questions. Once you read these I'm sure you'll realise that there's a lot to recommend this book.

Both Schindler's List and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas have been criticised for presenting unrealistic, even sanitised, pictures of their chosen subjects. How important was it for you to present an accurate picture of Jan's journey? (Please feel free to outline your research for the book.)

It was very important. I started the novel when I was working for a PhD in creative writing at Glasgow University. The final thesis comprised a novel about the repercussions of the Holocaust on the lives of three women along with a 40,000 word critical essay about issues relating to writing about the Holocaust. One of the issues was that of representation of the Holocaust. In the essay I argue that there are essentially three critical responses to writing about the Holocaust - the first being that the Holocaust cannot and should not be represented, the second that testimonial accounts are acceptable and the third being that fictional responses are acceptable.

Some critics argue that it is all right for survivors to write fiction about the Holocaust but not for those who were not involved. I think that as the distance from WW2 increases and there are fewer people around who can write about it from personal experience, we will come to rely more on fictional accounts. I feel strongly that this is something we have to keep alive and I've read with dismay about research which showed that many young people are unaware of the Holocaust (a poll in 2005 suggested 60% of young people under the age of 35 were unaware[1]). Part of my essay goes on to discuss my instinctive feeling that if I were to write about this topic I had to be as accurate as possible and this seems to be the general feeling of Holocaust specialists.

Some feel that inaccurate representations can be used to lend credence to Holocaust deniers (a lot of ire is directed at a TV series of the seventies called Holocaust which was erroneously set in a work camp which in the series was alleged to be a death camp). You mention two of the well known representations which have been criticised severely by some critics. Lanzmann, for example (the director of Shoah) took issue with Spielberg's representation of the gas chambers saying that 'I deeply believe that there are things which cannot and should not be represented.' I was quite critical of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in my thesis because of the inaccuracies in the text but now feel that I was perhaps a bit unfair as the text has stayed with me in a way that few do. But I was concerned about lots of things. There isn't space here to mention all of them but just to take one seemingly small thing: there is a mention of mud towards the end of The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas when Bruno takes off his shoes: 'At first it felt horrible putting his bare feet into so much mud; they sank down to his ankles and every time he lifted a foot it felt worse. But then he started to rather enjoy it (p. 204).' Many survivor accounts I read mention the mud at Auschwitz, one woman, an Italian Jew called Piera Sonnino[2], said of it:

It didn’t seem like earth and water: but something organic that had decomposed, putrefied flesh that had turned liquid. And at the same time, it had a presence of its own. As if death had given birth to monstrous, vermin-like form of life, treacherous and perfidious, which grabbed us by the ankles and kept us from moving quickly as we had been ordered.

I felt that Boyne's bland description was insulting to the perceptions of those who had been there. As you say, a sanitised account.

The research I did for the PhD novel was extremely helpful for The Search and gave me the broad background but in addition I read historical accounts which gave me details about Aryanisation programmes and the Lebensborn project. They gave me the details of how children were selected for these: the medical and psychological tests used (the latter of great interest to me as I work as a psychologist). I read about resistance groups in the occupied countries and how children were used in these. There's not a great deal written about Lidice but I read everything I could about it. I also visited the memorial site at Lidice which has photographic and film evidence of the destruction. Most movingly, it has interviews with some of the children (now in old age) who were sent to German families and the effect this had on them. Some talk about how they have no memory of being taken from their birth mothers but do have vivid memories of being brought back to Czechoslovakia and the wrench they felt leaving the people they had come to think of as their parents. They had lost the knowledge of Czech which they'd had and one man talked about how he felt he never caught up at school because of it. There were differences between siblings, between those who were old enough to have some memory of Lidice and those who were too young to remember it. I was pretty immersed in that time period while I wrote the book.

You must have considered at some point including a third plot thread talking about the trials of Jan's mother and sister. Why did you choose to reject it? I have to say towards the end I half-expected the book to end on a cliff-hanger and wondered if a sequel was coming.

Although I didn't consider a third plot thread about Jan's mother (in my mind, Maria is dead) The Search is based on the true story of the village of Lidice and no one knows for sure what happened to the children who weren't selected for Aryanisation but most agree they were likely to have been gassed at Chelmno), I have wondered about a sequel. This would be a novel from Jan's mother's point of view which follows her to Ravensbruck and then to the reunion with Jan and Lena and what happens to them then. I also wanted to write more about Pawel and his experience. I haven't ruled either of these possibilities out for the future.

Anne Frank's diary's narrative is, of course, in the first person. Although I agree that your choice of the present tense has its pluses I think I lot could have been gained by using a first person narrative to help us really get inside Jan's head. How do you feel about that?

This is a really interesting question. I didn't at any point consider using the first person voice for Jan and so I have to think retrospectively about this. It's pretty unusual for me not to consider all the options; my computer is full of various versions of things I've written with changes to tense, point of view etc. The novel I wrote for my PhD for example, went through seven or eight serious drafts (by that I mean substantial changes to structure, not just editing). In The Search I used the present tense to try to gain a sense of immediacy and I hope I've been successful in this. I also wanted to keep a certain distance emotionally. This is quite hard to explain. While researching for the PhD, I read a large number of accounts about the Holocaust. These included fictional and biographical accounts as well as historical ones. The Holocaust is obviously a highly emotive topic and there were books I read that had me sobbing for hours. That said though, it is the more measured ones, the ones that report calmly what happened, that have stayed with me. I'm thinking of works like Anne Frank's diary, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's On Auschwitz. I think that at a subconscious level, I was afraid that if I wrote in the first person that I would become over emotional, perhaps even lapse into sentiment and I really wanted to avoid that. Maybe I didn't trust myself as a writer.

I'm always concerned when it comes to marketing a book that the cover attracts a certain demographic. I'm not sure for example that I would have picked up this book based solely on the cover. That said, I actually think this is a novel that a lot of young adults would appreciate because it's not too graphic although it is honest. Do you agree?

I like the cover! The Search was published first in Spain (as La Cancion de Jan) and then in Holland (as Zoeken Naar Lena). When Alma picked it up in the UK, they suggested staying with the Spanish cover and I was happy to go with that. I wouldn't have been too happy if they'd chosen the Dutch cover - I'm not at all sure about that one. I suppose my only quibble with this cover is that the boy seems to me to be rather small for a ten year old. I know exactly what you mean about book cover design though - my particular hate are those books for women which have a photograph of a headless young woman on them, often upside down, doing a handstand or a cartwheel or something. What on earth are the publishers trying to say? And as for lime green and neon pink covers with that curly font in relief...

I agree that the novel might appeal to young adults and this has been suggested to me by friends and colleagues who have read it. I hope that its honesty will appeal to a wide audience though.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Having carefully read through these answers I have to say that I have come to look at this book a little differently. That said I've not edited what I wrote before because that was my initial reaction and I can't change that. So what would I have done differently, maybe added in pages and pages of existential angst? I don't know.

Certainly my respect for historical fiction writers is growing.

***

Maureen Myant is a senior educational psychologist based in Glasgow. In 2004 she was awarded a New Writers’ Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council and she has completed her MLit in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She is married with three grown-up children.

The Search is her first novel to appear in print however her short story 'Tea in Tashkent', one of a series of linked short stories set in the USSR appear in the print anthology Knuckle End: An Anthology of Emerging Scottish Literary Talent. You can read 'A Parting Gift', another story from the collection, here. At the moment she is working on a novel about a trip to the USSR in the late seventies by a British tour group.

The Search is published in the UK by Alma Books and retails at £12.99 which sounds like a lot but it is printed on good paper and it feels like a substantial volume in your hand.

REFERENCES

[1] Last year a comprehensive BBC poll found that only 55 percent of Britons (and just 40 percent of those aged 18 - 35) had heard of Auschwitz, the death camp where one fifth of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered.

A new BBC poll reveals that 94 percent of respondents now say they have heard of Auschwitz, including 86 percent of those under 35.

This change is likely caused by:

(a) The comprehensive and generally accurate media coverage of the commemorations surrounding the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

(b) The widespread media coverage of the scandal around Prince Harry wearing Nazi regalia at a costume party.

(c) The BBC itself must take some credit after it broadcast in late January of its program "Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution," parts of which were watched by more than one-third of the UK population.

- Tom Gross, "Holocaust Memorial Day raises awareness among Britons" (AFP / Yahoo news, March 17, 2005)

[2] Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Thursday, 5 November 2009

Beckett the tinkerer (part one)

We're not entirely restrictive. We're not . . . conservers of museum pieces. Not at all. — Edward Beckett

There is a school of thought (passionately held by many) that holds that it is tantamount to sacrilege to tamper with one of Samuel Beckett's texts. In the most recent (and most successful) run of Waiting for Godot some have criticised the production for playing for laughs. Had they forgotten that this was supposed to be a comedy?

It is true that his estate now keeps a wary eye on new performances and has waded in where it thought the director was overstepping the mark. And some have done exactly that. A famous one is where director Deborah Warner tampered – slightly – with Beckett's one-woman play, Footfalls. She made two main changes:

[T]here were two occasions when a small number of lines had been purposely reassigned, spoken not by the ancient mother (who is present in the play just as a voice) but by her daughter.

[and]

Rather than pace up and down the one narrow strip of stage, Fiona Shaw's May has two fields of operation: a rostrum erected at the front of the dress circle where, on each turn of her robotic shuffle, she has to clutch nervously at the overhanging masonry; and the dark vast void of the main stage.[1]

There were also some issues concerning May's costume. For one critic, the effect of Warner's changes was "a bit like seeing someone doodling on a Rembrandt".[2]

Most people frankly wouldn't have noticed the changes nor objected once they were pointed out but the Beckett estate had the play shut down and a planned production in France stopped.

While condemning the production, Edward Beckett, the playwright's nephew and executor, said: "I don't want to preserve the plays in aspic. I think that would be harmful to Sam and to the estate. We're not trying to produce cloned productions, but we insist they play the play as Sam wrote it."

Watching the production at its opening performance, he thought, in the manner of a Beckett character, "This can't go on." In that performance, five lines of dialogue had been transposed from mother to daughter. At the estate's insistence, the lines were returned to their original speaker. But there were other problems. "The production destroyed the play's timing, atmosphere, the ghostly aspect," Edward Beckett said. "The hypnotic effect of the words was shattered by the perambulation. And for what purpose?"[3]

You can read an interview with Edward Beckett here.

But where did the man himself stand? Should his plays be simply performed as opposed to interpreted? Since Billie Whitelaw has already given the definitive performances of Winnie in Happy Days, May in Footfalls, W in Rockaby and Mouth in Not I — each under Beckett's exacting personal direction — why don't we simply set up a screen in front of the audience showing her doing it right and be done with it?

Beckett rehearsing Footfalls with Billie Whitelaw
at the Royal Court Theatre, 1976

If we can take a cinematic example, what about the 1998 remake of Psycho which duplicated Hitchcock's 1960 original only this time in glorious colour? In general this wasn't well received. And the big question was: Why not? The consensus was that it brought nothing new to the table, so what's the point of it? At least Tim Burton's "reimagining" of Planet of the Apes was a genuine attempt to update the material even if it too didn't succeed.

The fact of the matter is that "[t]hough protective of his plays' integrity, [Beckett] was always ready to approve or admire when he saw something unorthodox that worked (italics mine)."[4] It is true that Beckett did, on occasion, made a fuss. He tried to stop the first New York production of his 35-second play Breath on the grounds that his stage directions weren't being fully adhered to. One has to bear in mind that Breath consists of nothing but stage directions. Certainly, the producers of Oh! Calcutta, to which the sketch made a contribution, must have realised that there's a significant difference between 'Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold light about five seconds' and the same orders with the phrase 'including naked bodies' tagged on after the word 'rubbish'.

This was an exceptional case though. In most instances Beckett actually sought compromise if indeed he did anything. He did make every effort to stop productions of Waiting for Godot where women took the leads. To his mind it was ludicrous to tamper with the roles: "Women don't have prostates,"[5] he commented at one point, referring to Vladimir's constant need to urinate because of his ailing prostate.

Many of the appeals made to Beckett requesting permission for performances of this kind were of a fervently personal nature, and he actually yielded in at least one case, telling a German director that her production could go on as long as it had only one run, and as long as the publicity for the production made clear his position of "total disapproval" (his German publishers, however, refused to authorise this Godot).[6]

He had no problem with the tramps' colour though:

[O]ne of the productions in which Beckett became most deeply invested in a personal sense took place in South Africa, during a period of particularly bad political turbulence. Beckett despised the policy of apartheid in South Africa, and had ruled that his plays could only be performed in non-segregated theatres. […] But in 1976, the young director of a new, mixed-race Johannesburg troupe wrote to Beckett's agent requesting permission to stage Godot as its debut production. The cast was intended to be multi-racial, as was the audience, and Beckett consented, but the cast turned out eventually to be entirely black and the scanty audiences almost entirely white, due to the great risk involved for black people in attending the production.[7]

Kyle Manzay, left, and Wendell Pierce perform
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

The director Herbert Blau, who introduced American audiences to some of the country's first productions of Samuel Beckett, found Beckett's often vehement objections to his texts being adapted both a little strange, and out of character:

Beckett taught us before theory that paratextuality[8] is built into the language, and, as with the gospels derided by Didi and Gogo, no text is sacred. That people are inclined to do odd things with Beckett's own texts is, one might say, a matter of poetic justice.[9]

When it came to directing his own plays things were a little different:

Between 1953, when Waiting for Godot was first staged in Paris, and 1967, Samuel Beckett served a fourteen-year theatrical apprenticeship, moving from being a consultant in the staging of his dramatic works to taking full responsibility for their direction. During his twenty-year directing career, 1967-1986, Beckett staged some seventeen productions of his work in three languages, English, French, and German. Each time he returned to his plays — most often to texts already in print — to prepare them for staging, he was dissatisfied. He found his plays wordy and incompletely conceived for the stage, and so he set about revising them as he staged them. Of Godot, for instance, he has said on more than one occasion, "I knew nothing about theatre when I wrote it," and during rehearsals in Berlin in 1967 for Endspiel (Endgame) he conceded that the play was "not visualized" (Theatrical Notebooks. Vol. II xv).

[…]

As Beckett grew increasingly dissatisfied with his plays as published, he decided in 1986, after years of suggesting that theatrical directors not stage the published scripts but follow instead his directorial revisions, to authorize publication of his theatrical notebooks and what he called "corrected texts" for his plays, that is, texts which incorporated the revisions he made as a director, along with the notebooks in which the rationale of those revisions was worked out. This was an extraordinary decision on Beckett's part, essentially repudiating his dramatic cannon as published and available to the public, and offering instead a much more fluid and multiple series of performing texts.[10]

The changes he made in his plays were sometimes minor and sometimes not: in Not I he excised the role of the Auditor completely, brought it back and then removed it again (to date though no script for the play suggests that the elimination of the Auditor is a directorial option); in Krapp's Last Tape he changed Krapp's costume and appearance, fiddled with the stage directions (most noticeably removing the slapstick element from the play) and in What Where, which I'll come back to, he took advantage of modern technology to reduce the actors to talking heads floating in space, a radical departure from the written text.

In 1985 Samuel Beckett directed Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame as stage pieces with the San Quentin Players:

Though the initial productions as staged in 1985 already brought forth substantial changes in the published acting texts of the plays, each time a re-mounting of the productions occurred additional changes were made. The same was true during the production period for these television versions, with Beckett sometimes making textual changes on the telephone even as a given scene was being taped.[11]

These films are now regarded as the definitive productions as far as the text goes but who is to say what further changes Beckett might have made had he lived longer. You can see all of these here:

DOWNLOAD or STREAM from UbuWeb

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 1 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 2 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Endgame (1985)

I never got to see the most recent production of Waiting for Godot, the one featuring Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart but I did get to see some snippets care of the Theatreland programmes on Sky Arts 1. One thing that was brought up several times by the actors was the ephemeral nature of theatre. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the arguments but the simple fact is that the vast majorities of productions of Beckett's plays worldwide come and go and will be forgotten in time. And in time he will be just another Shakespeare with people questioning the productions of the day and arguing about the validity of any given performance or interpretation and there will be no on left who worked with Beckett or even knew him to say yea or nay.

And that is how it should be. A play is a thing to be discovered in exactly the same way as a symphony is. Have you any idea how many times Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has been recorded? I think I have four copies myself. And who is to say which one is right? For starters they don't make instruments the same as they used to. But each performance brings out something the conductor saw and thought deserved to be highlighted. Plays are no different.

There was a recording of Krapp's Last Tape that Beckett got to see where, as the lights faded, all we were left with was the red light of the tape recorder. This fortunate happenstance delighted Beckett. It wasn't scripted because he's never thought of it at the time he wrote the play being pretty unfamiliar with how this new-fangled mechanism worked. In a letter to Alan Schneider Beckett described it as "the beautiful and quite accidental effect in London of the luminous eye burning up as the machine runs on in silence and the light goes down."[12]

Likewise when Carey Perloff had the opportunity to direct Charlotte Rae in Happy Days she had her daughter on set with her and at the time:

At the time of rehearsals my daughter Alexandra was just a year old, that age when the favourite game is pulling everything out of Mummy's purse. Often during the Happy Days rehearsal process Lexie would sit in the corner of the theatre, stealthily opening my purse and removing the contents. . .

I should interject here that by 'purse' she means 'handbag' — I have an American wife, I know about these things.

. . .arranging everything in a circle around her. She knew the contents of the bag by heart; it was not the surprise factor that kept her returning to the "empty-the-purse" game but, instead, the sheer joy of recognition in seeing those familiar objects reappear every time the game was played. She exhibited so many of Winnie's behavioural traits that Charlotte and I would stop rehearsals and watch Lexie perform her illicit game.[13]

Needless to say the women took this joy from Lexie and incorporated it into the performance. Was that wrong? Beckett fathered no children so it's unlikely he was around them enough for them to have a direct effect on his writing but, had he been the director, might he not also have taken opportunity of the synchronicity of the moment?

Beckett only started making major changes in his plays after watching them over and over again, till they were in danger of becoming stale, till he could really distance himself from the text and see the thing as a work apart from the words on the page. In Nacht und Träume we have the following stage directions:

9. From same dark R appears with a cup, conveys it gently to B's lips. B drinks, R disappears.

10. R reappears with a cloth, wipes gently B's brow, disappears with cloth.

and that's it. In his production "Beckett used a wine glass and a studiously folded napkin, which evoked association of objects used during mass" whereas when Antoni Libera directed his version he used "a 'poor-looking' cup and a 'poor-looking' wrinkled cloth . . . to intensify the impression of the poverty of the Dreamer: even in his most extravagant dream he sees objects that he probably uses every day; only the fact of who uses them and for what is remarkable."[14]

Was he wrong or are Beckett's stage directions simply imprecise? Is that what the problem is? Or does it really not matter? Considering how pernickety many of Beckett's directions are — at least the aspects he considers important — one has to say, no, not in this case; the overtones that the choice of vessel and type of cloth are clearly secondary to what's going on. This doesn’t mean they shouldn't be given some consideration — what else is a director supposed to do when faced with a Beckett play? — but they are not the be all and end all.

Performance became an increasingly important part of the creative process for Beckett. But as far back as 1956 he was becoming aware that what he had written had its limits. As he wrote to an American friend, Pamela Mitchell, on 28^th September 1956: "The new play [Fin de partie] is now as finished as it is possible before rehearsals (italics mine).[15] And the same in 1963 when he wrote to Barney Rosset: "I realise I can't establish definitive text of Play without a certain number of rehearsals."[16]

This of course is simply fine-tuning but it sets the groundwork for the discoveries he made during later rehearsals and performances when actors did more than simply repeat his words parrot-fashioned. A simple example would be the "personal relationship" between Krapp and his tape recorder that Patrick Magee projected in his performance; this goes beyond words.[17] One would have imagined though in the 24 years between that first performance of Fin de partie and the 1980 performance by the San Quentin Drama Workshop that he would have ironed out the creases but apparently not. The actor Alan Mandell (who played Nagg in that production) remembers:

Beckett was a tireless editor, making many cuts and changes in the text during the rehearsal period. 'There's too much text,' he would say with irritation in his voice, and then he would make a cut. It had to do with the way a line scanned, so that a change in a line, though minor to the actor, was major to the playwright.[18]

A scene from the San Quentin Drama Workshop's production
of Endgame featuring Alan Mandell as Nagg

In his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, his friend James Knowlson acknowledges that his reputation "as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his own work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause" was somewhat exaggerated and "the truth of his position was more complex and certainly more interesting than this caricature suggests."[19]

Let's take two examples, the American Repertory Theatre Company's 1984 production of Endgame in a subway and the 1983 Belgian production in a former warehouse flooded with water. Which do you think he made a fuss over? I would have though the both of them but that wasn't the case. The Belgian production went ahead unchallenged whereas the American version almost reached the courts; a compromise was met — "Beckett insisting in an agreed programme insert that that the play, as it was being staged, was no longer his play."[20] Understandably the director was aggrieved. He saw this as double-standards and once you get down to it he was right. "It made a tremendous difference [to Beckett] if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different."[21]

My own personal opinion is that I welcome innovation. The Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache is well known for his unorthodox interpretations of the works of major composers like Beethoven and Mahler. Indeed his recorded performances differ so widely from the majority of other recordings that this has led them to be seen by some as collectors' items rather than mainstream releases, 'one-offs' rather than reference recordings. Is that a bad thing? When you've heard Beethoven's Fifth as many times as I have it does lose some of its magic and what you need is someone to make you look at it afresh. Celibidache's version is the most stately I've ever heard; it never gets ahead of itself. Celibidache is not saying that this is the way is must be done, rather this is how it can be done. And I accept new interpretations of Beckett's work in much the same way.

In Part two of this article I'm going to look in close detail at one particular play, What Where and show how Beckett couldn't leave this one alone.

In the meantime let me leave you with a graphical score animation of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

References

[1] Paul Taylor, 'Theatre, Way Our of Line', The Independent, Friday, 18 March 1994

[2] Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian

[3] Mel Gusson, 'Modify Beckett? Enter, Outrage', The New York Times, Saturday, March 26, 1994

[4] Katherine Worth, 'Beckett on the world stage', Christopher Murray, ed., Samuel Beckett – 100 Years, p154

[5] Linda Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett: performance and critical perspectives, p x

[6] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[7] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[8] Paratextuality incorporates every secondary “text” e.g. reviews or author interviews all become part of the paratext. How many people come to the Bible without some prior knowledge that colours their interpretation of the text itself?

[9] Interview with Herbert Blau in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p57

[10] S E Gontarski, 'Editing Beckett', Twentieth Century Literature, v. 41 (Summer '95) p. 190-207

[11] Beckett Directs Beckett, Grey Lodge

[12] Letter to Alan Schneider, 4 Jan. 1960, qtd. in M. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 59.

[13] Carey Perloff, 'Three Women and a Mound: Directing Happy Days' in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p165

[14] Interview with Antoni Libera in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p123

[15] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p199

[16] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p201

[17] Maurice Harmon ed., No Author Better Served: the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, p50

[18] Alan Mandell in James and Elizabeth Knowlson eds., Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett, p201

[19] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 691

[20] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692

[21] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692, 693

Monday, 2 November 2009

Travels in the Scriptorium Part II

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing. - from Paul Auster's acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters

If you have not read Part I then here is a link. You may not want to read this at all afterwards.

Paul Auster is an American writer, based in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Newark, New Jersey to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. As well as prose he has also written poetry, screenplays, essays, memoirs and an autobiography in addition to editing collections and translating other people's work. Before the publication of The New York Trilogy, three existential detective stories, Auster was best known for having edited the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and for having written several insightful literary essays – not the stuff best sellers generally grow from. He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie.

His writing style has been described as “finely-wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences and mysteries.” Most critics would label him as post-modern (occasionally post-apocalyptic) with a fondness for metafiction; characters migrate from one novel to the next, as do props (a red notebook, the same kind in which he writes, in particular) and he occasionally inserts himself into the narrative, sometimes as the pseudonymous 'Mr Trause', sometimes as 'Paul Auster'.

Michael Dirda puts it this way:

Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots—drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography—keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through. – 'Spellbound', The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008

Auster wrote Travels in the Scriptorium whilst trying to raise funding to film his screenplay, The Inner Life of Martin Frost:

I was on the phone all day every day to producers, getting nowhere. Finally, Siri said: 'You have to get out of the house. Go to work in your office (he writes in a Spartan rented room near his Park Slope home). Go doodle, you noodle!' she said. 'You can't keep knocking your head against a brick wall.' Siri was right – always is! – so I wrote Scriptorium... – Jackie McGlone, 'A voice in the darkness - Paul Auster interview', The Scotsman, 1st August 2009

Now I don't know about you but when I think of “a Spartan rented room” two things jump immediately to my mind, the empty room – empty bar an upright piano and stool – where Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring and the various rooms that Samuel Beckett has written in throughout his life. The photograph on the cover of my copy of Travels in the Scriptorium shows such a room, a room that also appears in many of Beckett's later television plays (e.g Eh Joe, Nacht und Traúme and Ghost Trio) and his only film.

There is a stronger connection with Beckett than that though. Auster edited the recent 4-volume Grove edition of Beckett's (almost) complete works. I never really thought about it at the time nor did I wonder why he gets a chapter in Beckett Remembering – Remembering Beckett since at the time he was just a name to me and no more. As it happens he was a friend of Beckett's although he admits not a close one; perhaps had he continued in France he might have become on. They first met when, as a young man of twenty-four living in Paris, he chanced his arm and wrote Beckett a letter asking to meet him. Three days later he received an invitation to meet with him at La Closerie des Lilacs. Over the years they shared correspondence – Auster would send him copies of his work – and Beckett was very supportive when Auster got the job of editing the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and contributed translations of Apollinaire, Breton and Eluard. Auster admits that as a young man his love of Beckett's work “bordered on idolatry” and it's easy to see Beckettian influences in his work. Reading reviews and articles about Auster Beckett's name crops up frequently. But, is there a stronger connection yet?

In the book that follows Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, Auster makes quite obvious nods towards him as with this little quote which combines thoughts from Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable and Worstward Ho:

Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m trying to tell to the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give it my best effort.

In Travels in the Scriptorium he draws inspiration from other writings. The protagonist here is one that features in a great deal of Beckett's writing, an old man:

The only fact that can be set down with any certainty is that he is not young, but the word old is a flexible term and can be used to describe a person anywhere between sixty and a hundred. We will therefore drop the epithet old man and henceforth refer to the person in the room as Mr. Blank.

Sounds like a character from Watt. We learn later from a woman called Sophie who is described as being “somewhere in her late forties or early fifties” that Mr. Blank is “a lot older” than she is but we never learn his exact age nor do we ever learn his first name.

Like many of Beckett's characters he is struggling with issues of identity and memory; the man in That Time is a good example. Like him Blank is dependent on external forces to generate memories. The first comes when he sits in the chair at the desk. He gets a wave of pleasure from the experience especially when he discovers that “an invisible spring mechanism … allows him to rock back and forth at will”. This brings back a childhood memory of a “rocking horse that sat in his bedroom when he was a small boy … whose name was Whitey and who, in the young Mr. Blank's mind, was not a wooden object adorned with white paint but a living being, a true horse.” The next comes when he looks at one of the photos on the desk; a picture of a young woman conjures up the name “Anna” and a feeling of “overpowering love” The image is not a million miles away from Krapp sitting at his desk wallowing in his own past.

Then a phone call from one James P. Flood, “a minor character”, at least that is how he describes himself, who wants to visit him. From Flood he discovers that he is being cared for by a woman named Anna, who, Flood tells Blank, “[o]f all the people involved in this story, she's the only one who's completely on your side.” Is this the same Anna in the photo? For some reason he thinks she might be dead and that he is somehow responsible for her death.

Apart from the photos there are also pages, some handwritten, others typewritten. The typed pages appear to be a story, a report actually, written by a man in a cell in the garrison town of “Ultima: the westernmost tip of the Confederation, the place that stands at the edge of the known world … overlooking the unmapped expanses of the Alien Territories. The law says that no one is allowed to go out there. I went,” the man writes, “because I was ordered to go and now I have returned to give my report.”

So, what is this? Is this an allegory? Is the room, as in Endgame, the inside of a human skull? Are these characters in a story? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? Or is this set in a strange future? Is the Confederation friend or foe? Has the world been invaded by aliens? Who are the “shadow-beings” that invade his thoughts when he closes his eye? Did he write the story he's been reading? Is it a story or an actual report? He sounds like Moran after writing his report of Molloy's disappearance – in the book of the same name – and wondering if Molloy really existed. So many questions.

Anna arrives with his breakfast but she is not the same woman as in the photo; she has aged and could be anything between forty-five and sixty; the photograph apparently was taken thirty-five years earlier. She encourages him to breakfast before the meal gets cold but first his pills which he stubbornly only agrees to take if she gives him “a real kiss” which she does without squabbling with him. The pills make him twitch so badly that he can't feed himself; Anna takes over.

Afterwards she wants to know if he needs to use the bathroom and whether he requires any assistance. Yes, he does and no, he doesn't. Nothing is glossed over:

The pyjama bottoms fall to his ankles; he sits down on the toilet seat; his bladder and bowels prepare to evacuate their pent-up liquids and solids. Urine flows from his penis, first one stool and then a second stool slide from his anus, and so good does it feel to be relieving himself in this manner that he forgets the sorrow that took hold of him just moments before. Of course he can manage on his own, he tells himself. He's been doing it ever since he was a little boy, and when it comes to pissing and shitting, he's as capable as any person in the world. Not only that, but he's an expert at wiping his ass as well.

Beckett, of course, never shied away from the scatalogical. The novella The End springs to mind here. Blank cannot get his pyjama bottoms back up and Anna has to help him. He wants to bathe but agrees to a sponge bath instead. The woman's ministrations cause him to have an erection:

We're feeling frisky today, Mr. Blank, Anna says.

I'm afraid so, Mr. Blank whispers, his eyes still shut. I can't help it.

If I were you, I'd feel proud of myself. Not every man your age is still . . . still capable of this.

It has nothing to do with me. The thing has a life of its own.

With that and without fuss or further discussion she relieves Mr. Blank of his problem. This recalls Beckett's short story 'Enough' although the method of release differs. Did you notice no inverted commas around the speech? Another Beckettism.

Afterwards Anna provides Mr. Blank with some more tantalising clues. He had apparently sent her on a dangerous “mission” (his word) which she barely survived; she was once married to a man called David Zimmer who has now died, something Blank is only indirectly responsible for. And yet she is clearly devoted to the old man, above and beyond the call of duty. He apologises for everything he's put her through:

I'm sorry

Don't be. Without you, I never would have met David in the first place. Believe me Mr. Blank, it isn't your fault. You do what you have to do, and then things happen. Good things and bad things both. That's the way of it. We might be the ones who suffer, but there's a reason for it, a good reason, and anyone who complains about it doesn't understand what it means to be alive.

She helps him dress – all in white, “a special request . . . [f]rom Peter Stillman” – and then leaves. Mr. Blank, all dressed in white, now that's got to be a clue for us and not him.

At this point we're 25 pages into a 130 page novella. I haven't got a clue what's going on but my head is buzzing with ideas.

Did you ever watch Masters of Science Fiction when it was on? There was one episode called 'A Clean Escape' that's very similar to this, a man in a room who can't remember. It's based on a short story by John Kessel. The man happens to be the president of the United States, the very president who finally pressed the button. Outside, although in the safety of his bunker he is unaware of it, a nuclear winter is raging. The problem is he can't retain memories for more than forty-five minutes. The whole episode revolves around a female psychiatrist's efforts to get him to remember so that he can be held accountable for his actions.

Was something similar happening here? Is that why Flood wants to see him? Is that why Auster goes to pains to point out that he's an ex-policeman? Are there no more policemen?

In the previous post I mentioned that the Guardian said that “[f]ans wouldn't be able to resist consuming [this book] whole” but what I didn't realise was that there's a clue here, the word “fans”. I think most people would agree that if you're going to start reading Beckett then The Unnamable should probably not be your first port of call. The book's intertextuality would miss you. Names like Molloy, Watt and Murphy would be simply that, names, however “fans” of Beckett's writing would recognise these as important touchstones – each of these three has their own book for starters – and it's the same with the world Auster has created for Mr. Blank, it's populated with names (or is it characters?) from his previous books: Peter Stillman is a character (actually two characters, father and son) in City of Glass, the first book in the New York Trilogy; David Zimmer is the main character in The Book of Illusions; James P. Flood appeared first in Moon Palace and In the Country of Last Things Auster describes the odyssey of nineteen year-old Anna to find her brother in a post-apocalyptic vision of New York, told to a childhood friend in a letter that will never be read. There are more. I won't list them all. But what connects all these disparate characters? Mr. Blank, that's who. And who is he?

Fans will pick up on more subtle stuff. The story that Mr. Blank begins to read about the Confederation, “why does the prose sound like something written in the nineteenth century?” Perhaps because the American transcendentalism of the early to middle nineteenth century is a major influence in him, specifically authors like Hawthorne and Melville. The subtle inside jokes and a-ha moments like this are endless. For example, a character called Fanshawe makes an appearance later in the book too. Fanshawe is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A certain Mr. Trause also pops his head in too.

There is a precision to Auster's writing that suggests Beckett's mature prose where he meticulously covers all options in painstaking (and sometimes painful to read) detail. The language is stripped down (shades of the mature Beckett again) and reads like a report which we are told at the start of the book this is. In an interview Auster had this to say:

It's stripped-down because it's the language of the report. That's the form of the novel; it's a report. So it doesn't read necessarily like a piece of fiction. So much the better, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a fascinating read but the ending may well frustrate many because much is not answered. People who love shows like Lost where we're drip-fed clues will get caught up in this book right away but woe betide the network if that last episode doesn't answer all their questions. Auster does provide us with an answer if you've not worked it out yourself. No, Blank's not the president and, no, aliens haven't landed on earth. Having read a great number of reviews of the book I can tell you that not everyone was pleased with how things get wrapped up. And some of these were “fans” too. But there are fans and there are fans. I'm the kind of fan of Beckett's who spends six weeks researching Waiting for Godot and who gets silly-excited when I discover some nibblet of information that I never knew before.

I wouldn't go so far as to say: “Don't read this book,” because you don't need to know his entire canon by heart to get where he's coming from. In the same interview he says:

People who come upon this book not having read anything of mine before will read it in one way, and I'm hoping that there's enough in it so that it will be compelling. That's the gamble I've made. People who are familiar with my work will get more out of it, I think. But I don't think not knowing is going to make for a bad experience. At least, I hope not.

How do I feel about Auster after reading this book? I want to read more and soon. I've already ordered a copy of The New York Trilogy from Amazon. At 1p plus postage, what's there to lose?

Travels in the Scriptorium Part I

I knew very little about Paul Auster when I bought this book. I knew the name. I knew of him and that he was a respected, probably American, author. It was certainly why I picked the book up although I suspect its size – it's only 130 pages long – would have been the first thing that attracted me to it. The austere cover was striking, although I'm sure I only saw the book's spine; I doubt the book's title had even registered at this point, however, once it did, this would have been a definite plus.

I expect I flipped the book over in my hand and scanned the blurb. I sometimes do I sometimes don't; it's a mood thing. Since I can't remember – I bought the book well over a year ago – let's assume that I did. This is what I would have read:

An old man wakes alone in an almost empty room, unable to remember his past. The only clues to his identity are a manuscript, a pile of photos and a visitor called Anna who sparks memories of forgotten love and tragedy. A mystery about memory, growing old and our responsibilities, Travels in the Scriptorium is a brilliant new work from one of America's best-loved and lost intriguing storytellers.

That I can tell you here and now would have done it for me but now I've begun to write about it I'm sure I opened the book and read the first page:

The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor. He has no idea that a camera is planted in the ceiling directly above him. The shutter clicks silently once every second, producing eighty-six thousand four hundred still photos with every revolution of the earth. Even if he knew he was being watched, it wouldn't make any difference. His mind is elsewhere, stranded among the figments in his head as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him

Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all. For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions.

There are a number of objects in the room, and on each one a strip of white tape has been affixed to the surface, bearing a single word written out in block letters. On the bedside table, for example, the word is TABLE. On the lamp the word is LAMP. Even on the wall, which is not strictly speaking an object, there is a strip of tape that reads WALL. The old man looks up for a moment, sees the wall...

And that's probably as far as I went. Is this a cell or a room in a hospice? Is he prisoner or patient? Based on the above information, would you buy the book? Yes, or no? Fine, then I'm done. This could be my shortest book review ever.

I read the book in two sittings one night after the other although once I'd reached the halfway point I was so embroiled in the story that the man is reading that I wanted to continue. Forty pages is usually my limit at one sitting, after that my concentration starts to go and I need to do something different, answer e-mails or maybe something physical. That I'd read sixty-five pages and wanted to go on does say something.

I didn't mention the quote on the cover. I didn't mention it before because I don't generally pay much attention to quotes no matter how illustrious a paper they're from. This particular one was from the Guardian:

Fans won't be able to resist consuming it whole.

For what it's worth I concur with that assessment. Had I become a fan by this point though? It's probably safe to say, no, but I was well on the way to becoming one. My one overriding fear at this point was that I was going to get to the end and he was going to let me down.

A part of me would like to leave you there. You already know more than I did. In fact I'm going to. Another post will go up in a couple of minutes which will talk about what I've learned if you're interested but I'm still not going to tell you what the book is about and I am absolutely not going to give away the ending, which, depending on who you are will either have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming: “How could I not have seen that? All the clues were there.” or chucking the book across the room going: “Was that it? For Christ's sake, was that it?” Personally I veered towards the former although I have to confess to being a bit disappointed that what I had imagined in my head was so far from the mark.

And with that I'll leave you. If your curiosity gets the better of you then there's a link to the second part of this review below.

Part II

Thursday, 19 November 2009

English in its underwear

Monday, 16 November 2009

The Wrong Miracle

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Beckett the tinkerer (part two)

Monday, 9 November 2009

The Search

Thursday, 5 November 2009

Beckett the tinkerer (part one)

Monday, 2 November 2009

Travels in the Scriptorium Part II

Travels in the Scriptorium Part I

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Poetry

BAM:	But he didn't say anything?
BOM:	No.
V:	Not good.
	I start again.
BAM:	Well?
BOM:	Nothing.
BAM:	He didn't say it?
V:	Good.

V:	I am alone.
	In the present as were I still.
	It is winter.
	Without journey.
	Time passes.
	That is all.
	Make sense who may.
	I switch off.