Losing my way

Perhaps the most taxing part of writing this first chapter is trying to remember to stay on topic. It ought to be easy, but I keep finding myself writing about poetry, or Interregnum duelling laws, or even just plays that aren't comedies.

Yet from the earliest days, my supervisor has always had to remind me to stick to the topic at hand. She suggested sticking a picture of two men duelling next to my computer.

It's not as though I don't find the topic of my PhD interesting; I do. I want to talk about Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Sedley's Bellamira, and Vanbrugh's The Relapse. I think they're funny, interesting plays that are minefields of discussion-points about masculinity. The difficulty is the process of getting there; I feel the need to explain the basic situation, and why, the response to it, and why, what this meant, and why...And why is the core of my PhD at the moment! I feel as though I'm going the long way round to get to the core of my argument, and when I finally get there, it doesn't stand out as the central notion I'm putting forward.

Blogger doesn't have the option to share my mood, the way I could in my teenage LiveJournal, but if I could, it would be "exasperated".

REVIEW: Guys and Dolls and Other Stories by Damon Runyon

When I began reading Guys and Dolls and Other Stories, Damon Runyon was an author I was previously entirely unfamiliar with, outside of the musical Guys and Dolls, based on his story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown". What struck me most - as I'm sure strikes most people - is the style of writing during these stories: the vernacular Broadwayese of the 1920s and '30s, and the near-absence of the past tense and contractions. For example, a description of a female character reads:

"One night I am passing the corner of Fiftieth Street and Broadway, and what do I see but Dave the Dude standing in a doorway talking to a busted-down old Spanish doll by the name of Madame La Gimp…Madame La Gimp is not such an old doll as anybody will wish to listen to…In fact, she is nothing but an old haybag, and generally somewhat ginned up. For fifteen years, or maybe sixteen, I see Madame La Gimp up and down Broadway, or sliding through the Forties, sometimes selling newspapers, and sometimes selling flowers, and in all these years I seldom see her but what she seems to have about half a head on from drinking gin." ("Madame La Gimp", 166)

This is a distinctive piece of Runyon prose, with all the characteristics that typify his writing. Particularly striking is his use of certain slang words which always replace the standard noun: most obviously, "women" are usually "dolls".

Yet aside from the writing style - I am by no means any sort of authority on American dialects - what drew me into the stories was Runyon's ability to make comically ridiculous his characters and his stories engaging and witty. I couldn't think of any respectable American male author before the sixties who writes in this way - O. Henry, perhaps, or Patrick Dennis, but nothing that really equals the slapdash, ironic, masculine cheerfulness that characterises Runyon's writing. Runyon's characters are clowns, and casting my mind around for a writer who also writes clowns, I came up with Wodehouse. Indeed, Wodehouse and Runyon are also similar in that they both use a stylised form of writing Runyon's writing style leaves room only for pure comedy.

Or is it pure comedy? There is an underlying conservatism that runs throughout the stories, in spite of the seedy speakeasies, the gambling, and the cavorting with starlets. Marriage remains a consistent, central preoccupation; marriage is something that women can expect, even if, as in "Romance in the Roaring Forties", the groom is switched halfway through the wedding. The subjects of homosexuality and the career woman get scarcely a mention in any of Runyon's writing here - unlike other literature of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s - and one could be forgiven for thinking that they don't really exist in the world he created.

Moreover, there is an ongoing need to restore order that makes it a conservative text. The typical Runyon story follows the pattern of SITUATION > EPISODE > SURPRISE > CRISIS > RESOLUTION > SITUATION. Thus in "Lonely Heart", the main character, Nicely-Nicely is a Broadway gambler (SITUATION) until he leaves to marry a widow in New Jersey (EPISODE). A farm-hand reveals that his new wife is something of a black widow (SURPRISE) which gives him some concern (CRISIS), until he convinces her that the ghost of an old husband is haunting her, and she commits suicide (RESOLUTION). Finally, Nicely-Nicely returns to Broadway and resumes his gambling lifestyle (SITUATION). We see this same basic plot in the majority of Runyon's stories: the denouement takes the characters back to where they were at the start, with little opportunity for growth. Again, this is a very Wodehousian mode of plotting: the restoration of order to a seemingly-impossible chaos is the bread-and-butter of the Jeeves stories.

There is no sense of life-death cycle in Runyon; his characters get engaged and married but there is an absence of birth and death in all but a small few of the stories; an absence of any world-altering event. In spite of the undercurrent of violence - Runyon's characters risk murder, kidnap, and assault on a near-daily basis - but there is only one actual death that I can recall, in the story "The Brain Goes Home". I was reminded of Orwell's essay on Dickens: "Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically."

Of course, Orwell's complaint of Dickens was that his plots were outlandish and rigid; Wodehouse and Runyon, by contrast, excel at making believable the intricacies of elaborate plots, and in Runyon's case this is frequently at the expense of individual characterisation. Harry the Horse? Dave the Dude? Regret? Nicely-Nicely Jones? These are all the same person, bar some superficial differences. Even the nameless narrator of the stories blends into the background, a passive character who observes and concurs with what is before him; he has poor blood pressure in the story "Blood Pressure" but otherwise I couldn't come up with a single fact about him.

During August, I read books that were better-written (The Day of the Locust, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Miracles of Life) and books that brought me more enjoyment (The Thin Man, The Magnificent Ambersons). Yet none of them made me think about them to the same extent as Guys and Dolls and Other Stories did. Colourful isn't quite the word for these stories - for, as I said, the characters are not so clearly defined. Yet it's a fascinating collection; an excellent example of what a talented storyteller is capable of.

Conference

I spoke at the conference yesterday - and now that it's past, what a weight off my mind! I think my paper went fairly well; I tried to be engaging and informative, not going into too much unnecessary detail as almost everyone there was a classicist rather than a historian of modernity. I was filled with a strange, nervous sensation - I was speaking in the same hall where I had my very first lecture when I was an undergraduate. To look up at an audience, to be from the opposite angle for the first time, felt oddly surreal, as though I wasn't meant to be there.

There were questions at the end, which relieved me - one of my worries was boring everyone into silence - and after the conference was over, a nice postgraduate came over to me to talk about both of our papers. I wasn't expecting that at all, so I was thrilled.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much my thesis work had been put on hold by preparing for the conference; looking at what I've written so far for my first chapter, I feel quite rusty. I think one of the most awkward things about holding down a job while doing a thesis isn't so much the lack of time to write as the lack of continuous time. I have to snatch hours here and there most days - such as on my lunch break or when I wake up in the morning. It would be far better if I were able to gather up all these loose hours and use them properly at the end of the week.

Oh, well, time to get back to my thesis now that the conference is over. No excuses!