Conference

This past month has mostly been spent preparing for a conference I am speaking at next weekend. Unfortunately this means that once more the thesis writing process is delayed. I can only hope that this is the slowest part of my PhD - I had planned to have finished chapter two by Christmas this year. Will it happen? Only I can be responsible for that.

The conference itself is exciting - I never have a problem with the idea of speaking to an audience - up until the last minute, at any rate! I'm taking it rather easy and basing my presentation on the one I had to give in June in order to be upgraded to PhD status. The conference is actually a classics conference, but the involvement of antiquity  in my research means that I'm able to contribute something on the subject. I feel as though I ought to have a big disclaimer at the beginning of my slideshow, saying, "THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT!" because I'm sure I'd get a great deal wrong if I were talking about classical Greece and Rome independently.

What I'm finding the most difficult - and this is really very good practice - is the difficulty of keeping on topic while still making the subject accessible. The fact that most of the conference attendees will have a background in classics rather than seventeenth-century literature will be both an advantage and a disadvantage to me. I can make some mistakes which may go unnoticed, but how can I talk about gentlemanly violence in the Restoration without going into some detail about the history and significance of duelling? It's a delicate balance.

Review: The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (and others)

I had a productive month's reading in July - the only low point being The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. This book tells the joint stories of HH Holmes, a serial killer active during the Chicago World's Fair at the end of the nineteenth century, and Daniel Burnham, the man who was a key player in the fair's creation. In the same tradition as In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the book tries to provide a semi-fictional narrative of true events, but the facts of the case worked to its detriment. An early chapter recounts an incident from Holmes' own autobiography but suggests that it played out differently, and far more sinisterly, than Holmes' description. There is no evidence for Larson's version; no reason why his version should be the case as it has no bearing on later events. The reader feels frustration rather than intrigue.

HH Holmes

I think that the book also suffered from its subject matter. True, there are interesting parallels between the lives of Holmes and Burnham. Unfortunately, there is no literary or dramatic tension in a business deal, even an important one regarding a large event like the Chicago Fair - particularly as the reader knows that it went through. Of course, the reader knows from the early chapters that Holmes will have committed murders by the end of the book and Larson still manages to retain some suspense - but conventional taste finds stories about murder interesting and exciting - it works as a narrative device in a way that a business deal does not.

This was, as I say, a lone example this month. I read two other books which had a connection to true crime: Jaycee Duggard's A Stolen Life, which shocked me in how much more candid it was than Natascha Kampusch's biography of her similar experience - and Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. This latter book was an entertaining look at the way that Ameri-English culture treats madness. It rather reminded me of Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap, in his discussion of the idea that there is a checklist of symptoms that can be used to judge a person abnormal, and the subsequent dangers of such a list existing. This is no great surprise, as Ronson and Curtis are friends - Curtis is even interviewed in part of the book. Entertaining and thought-provoking, The Psychopath Test extends its discussion to many people people who don't fit with usual ideas of normal behaviour.

A particularly interesting chapter is written on the awful case of Colin Stagg, the original suspect in the Rachel Nickell murder case. Stagg was notoriously the target of a sting operation by the police over a period of several months, who used a female police officer to attract his attention and try to draw out his violent fantasies, in the hope that he would confess to her that he killed Nickell. He was eventually arrested - although he hadn't confessed - and the case reached the Old Bailey, upon which the judge threw the case out on the grounds that the police had used "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" to entrap Stagg. It was a horrible case, perhaps loosely reminiscent of the Stefan Kiszko fiasco in the 1970s - for both Stagg and Kiszko were both arrested on loose evidence, chiefly because they fit the image of a murderer: Stagg was a pagan, interested in BDSM; Kiszko was an overweight recluse. A study on the case wasn't really what I was expecting when I picked the book up, but Ronson retold the story well, interviewing some of the key players in the investigation - and it certainly was an enlightening way of looking at the dangers of being too critical of people who appear to behave abnormally.

More journalism. More Awkward Situations for Men by Danny Wallace was a quick, comic read. Steinbeck's Travels With Charley took longer but was correspondingly far more brilliant: Steinbeck goes on the road, travelling across America in the 1960s and taking his French poodle, Charley, with him - following "the American tendency in travel. One goes, not to much to see but to tell afterward." My experience of Steinbeck had been limited to Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, and so this was an unexpected delight. It struck me as reading a book by a new and talented friend - rather shy in some places, deflecting attention onto Charley, but with many interesting stories to tell, and an earnest desire to be liked, without being sugary.

Steinbeck with Charley

The Bill Bryson style of travel-writing is still very fashionable these days and, as entertaining as it is, I came away from Travels With Charley feeling deeply acquainted with Steinbeck. And the book is funny: there's an excellent part where Steinbeck stays at a motel and acts as detective in trying to glean information about his room's previous occupant. He christens him Lonesome Harry, recreating his evening in a passage that is funny and insightful: Harry's letter to his wife, his evening with a date, his troublesome stomach, his loneliness. The final paragraph is particularly wonderful:

Three things haunted me about Lonesome Harry. First, I don’t think he had any fun; second I think he was really lonesome, maybe in a chronic state; and third, he didn’t do a single thing that couldn’t be predicted - didn’t break a glass or a mirror, committed no outrages, left no physical evidence of joy. I had been hobbling around with one boot off finding out about Harry. I even looked under the bed and in the closet. He hadn’t even forgotten a tie. I felt sad about Harry.

What a book.

Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway by Alyn Shipton was well- researched and for the most part interesting. I thought that it was rather top-heavy - a great deal is written on his life up until the mid-1940s, with the final fifty years being relegated to two chapters at the end. This struck me as rather odd - for if there was any 1930s personality who still had a thriving career in the second half of the twentieth century, it was Calloway - but perhaps Shipton had less of an interest in his later life. Certainly Calloway's great period of creativity was in the '30s. At any rate, Shipton's book is a far better example of a well-written biography than Stefan Kanfer's biography of Bogart, which I found so abhorrent a few months ago.

So I read several good books - some of them very good - throughout July. The best one, however, was one that I didn't like at all, initially: Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It's a simple story, of a man who discovers that his wife and his friend were having a long affair - written in a way that goes backwards and forwards over the story. And for the first twenty pages I found it very slow-going - I didn't like that it wasn't clear what had happened; I didn't like John Dowell's impressionistic version of events. Then something happened - I'm not sure what - but something clicked. Everything that I had disliked up until that point made sense, and The Good Soldier became one of the most realistic books I've read. Every time Dowell revisited an event, each time with a slightly different perspective on the subject - I understood it the better, for isn't that how all events are filtered through our memories, changing with each mood and with each new bit of information? Although Dowell admits that he's biased and that it's hard to give a complete version of the truth - isn't that the point of the book?

Beyond that, I can't offer much more - other than to say that Dowell's wife, Florence, must be one of the most unlikeable characters in English literature. But it was a book I loved, was sad to finish, and cannot imagine improving. I can't think of anything constructive to say about it - nothing that isn't immediately obvious, anyway. Not that I wouldn't enjoy reading an essay on The Good Soldier - but it's a book upon which impressed me so thoroughly that my only response can be applause.

Technical update

Blogging is on hold for a little while as I need a new adapter for my laptop. Should be back to normal by next week. In the mean time, enjoy this picture of a Spanish don from 1688 from a collection of drawings known as The Cryes of the City of London - note his swagger, his fashionable clothes, his long hair, and particularly his enormous sword(!).

(Source.) 

 

Review: The Collector by John Fowles (and others)

Two thirds of the way into July so I'd better post this before it gets any further into the month.

I have already recorded that I didn't read any books for leisure throughout May, so it seems that throughout June I made up for last time. I finished Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire, her history of the complex, paradoxical, and often retaliatory relationship between Britain and America during the American Civil War; it was thoroughly, thoroughly excellent. I would review it but I lack the ability to do it justice; indeed, it is such a long book that a comprehensive review would take longer to write than I have time on my hands. Foreman has done a wonderful job; the inclusion of cartoons from Punch spread throughout the book alongside the text was an inspired decision.

I also read Alexander Masters' Stuart: A Life Backwards, which was what they call a moving read. This sensational biography of Stuart Shorter, a homeless man, is novel for starting with the end of his life and moving backwards into his past to show what influenced him to become the man he was by the time of his death. The idea is to look at Shorter's life as a kind of murder mystery: what killed the innocent boy he once was? The device works, and the final third of the book is extremely bleak indeed.

There were some duds.  Through work I received a copy of David Almond's new book, The Monster Billy Dean, which disappointed me. It's a post-apocalyptical story about a boy brought up in near-isolation, taught about Christianity but not about the outside world; Billy Dean is special for being able to communicate with the dead. Words are spelt almost phonetically throughout the book which contributes to the sense of Billy Dean's isolation. Unfortunately, I didn't think that the story quite lived up to what was promised by its cover and the publisher's letter. I think I was expecting something darkly atmospheric, something bloodcurdling enough to be a little trashy, yet with enough pretensions that it might be literary. I wanted to be reminded of the eerier moments in Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I wanted a sub-Shirley Jackson story - perhaps something about feral children. The book didn't do any of these things for me, and I think that my dissatisfaction irreparably clouded my enjoyment.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell - the story of an Ozarks girl on the hunt for her meth-cooking father to turn into the police - was rather murky. It was well-written - and far more atmospheric than Billy Dean - but ultimately forgettable. It did have some engaging details that I wish the film had retained - Ree's loss of virginity, her relationship with her best friend, the horror of her uncle's face destroyed by an accident while cooking meth - but it's not one that I'd rush out to buy again.

I read Diana Wynne Jones' final book, Earwig and the Witch, which was as entertaining as anything else she wrote. I adore Jones' writing - Fire and Hemlock is a regular "top tenner" when listing my favourite books - and this last of hers managed to strike the right note of being "darkly adorable" (the illustrations help). It was the story of an orphan girl called Earwig who's adopted and enslaved by a woman called Bella Yaga, who only wants her around to help with her spells; Earwig, a girl used to getting her own way at the orphanage, now decides to scheme her way into becoming a witch herself. Only the ending felt a little rushed - I got the feeling that perhaps it was finished by well-intentioned family and editors after Jones' death - but I still loved it.

In fact, I was all set to make Earwig and the Witch the main focus of this post, even though it was written for young children - but then I read John Fowles' The Collector.  I thought it was an absolutely wonderful book - sort of as if Nabokov had written Emma Donoghue's Room. Set in the 1960s, a young man is obsessed with an art student, whom he abducts and keeps locked up in the cellar of his isolated cottage, storing her like one of the butterfly specimens he also collects. I imagine it was an extremely difficult book to write - Frederick Clegg actually seems almost reasonable during his narration. It is only in the second half of the book, told through a series of diary entries written by the kidnapped Miranda, that Clegg's "weirdness" is put into perspective.

In spite of any sympathy owed to her awful situation, Miranda herself is not wholly likeable - she's snobbish ("The ordinary man is the curse of civilization" (127)) hypocritical, self-obsessed - but I was impressed by how much her imperfections made me appreciate her, and to her credit, she frequently recognises the flaws in her character, reflecting on what she's written and done and criticising poor behaviour. We talk about "real" characters in books - she seemed real to me. I certainly appreciated her interest in and ability to discuss literature - she was able to compare herself and her situation to other literary moments. Halfway through the novel she thinks, "I am Emma Woodhouse" (157) - I am Miranda - or at least, I was when I was her age, twenty.

Curiously, there wasn't - or I didn't catch - a reference to Pamela, an obvious example of captivity in the western canon, and considering the frequent allusions to Emma, Sense and Sensibility, The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, Robinson Crusoe, various paintings, and (most notably) The Tempest, this omission appears to be an oversight. Perhaps Miranda simply wasn't familiar with the work. Clegg certainly wouldn't have been.

Religion is a modest-running theme throughout The Collector; not the prevailing subject (that's class) but it appeared often enough to interest me. There are frequent references to Clegg's semi-religious upbringing; he was "brought up in the atmosphere" (13) of Christianity in spite of his nonconformist aunt and still retains the loosely puritanical beliefs of childhood. Certain things are "not nice", such as sexual promiscuity in women.

Miranda does not appear to have had a particularly religious upbringing - at most, we can imagine that it was vaguely Church of England, in the way that most girls of her class in the 1960s were vaguely Church of England. She believes in God - and even prays to him occasionally - although a Christian God is not a defining aspect of her life until the end. Early on in the story she asserts herself as a Buddhist, although she does not repeat this belief. It appears to be part of her self-identification with the Left.

Yet religious lifestyles are far more important to Clegg and Miranda than either of them seem to realise. Each of them unconsciously follows a religious path. Clegg, surprisingly, aligns himself with western Buddhism, which as I understand it, promotes the acceptance of situations for what they are. Clegg is unwilling to alter his own lifestyle unless necessary and cannot understand why Miranda can't come to loves him. In fact, most of Clegg's motivation throughout the book comes from the belief that if Miranda contemplates her situation properly, she will realise that she loves him. He is unwavering in this principle and his position at the end of the book is much the same as it was at the beginning. Miranda's failure to love him is her fault, with her "la-di-da ideas and clever tricks" (282).

By contrast, Miranda, for all her modern views, is demonstrative of one of the ideals behind western Christianity: that a person is imperfect and must strive for self-improvement. Her development is only partly spiritual, going from subservience to God to hatred - "he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness…God is impotent…I hate beyond hate" (255). Similarly, her experience with violence until her capture has been observant - the "H-bomb" and teddy-boys harassing Indians - and the idea of violence makes her "feel weak". Yet eventually a physical attack is something she must do.

Her experience has aspects of a religious retreat - albeit one of luxury. Being kept in isolation in a cellar for months, she has time to think and reflect. She must discard her former principles and compromise her beliefs in order to have a chance at survival and escape. Unlike Clegg, she does go through several transformations. Enlightenment is perhaps too strong a word for her path but her development throughout the book, her ability to think and question herself, are certainly increased. Would it be too hideous to retain the butterfly metaphor here?

The Beggar's Opera at Regent's Park

Last night I went to see The Beggar's Opera at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre - a wonderful performance. They used an eighteenth-century setting - unusual for older drama, these days - and managed a perfect evocation of old London. I was overwhelmed with emotion, almost to tears, during the opening: a Newgate prison scene, wordless, semi-comic, with traditional music playing in the background - it was so well staged. As a theatrical achievement it was aesthetically marvellous - as the Open Air Theatre always is - and was the perfect tonic for reinvigorating my interest in the subject.

Although there hasn't been a place for The Beggar's Opera in my work so far, the performance has made me look at it in a new way - made me think, "Ooh, maybe...!" I'm looking forward to getting down to work this coming week in consequence - it's so thrilling to be excited and interested in work.

Farces

I've read quite a few farces over the past few days - a fantastic dramatic genre for my research as they frequently emphasise the extravagance and bombasticity of heroic drama.

Picking plays to use is a dicey subject, though: I spent ages on Sunday looking for William D'Avenant's The Playhouse to be Let (1663), the fifth act of which, I had read, is one of the earliest examples of English burlesque. It features several characters typical of heroic dramas, tragedies, and romances - Cleopatra, Marc Anthony, and Caesar - presented in a decidedly unromantic way. Once I had finally found a copy online, through EEBO, it was a little disappointing. It was very short (not even five pages long) and about the best joke was the consistent naming of Anthony as "Tony" - as farcical jokes go, rather weak.

Reading Thomas Duffett's The Empress of Morocco (1674) now, which is slightly more interesting - especially as the cast-list reveals that the female characters were all played by men in its original run. It's a direct spoof of Elkanah Settle's own The Empress of Morocco and turns the London underclasses into a sort of alternative Moroccan nobility: Morena, the titular empress, is also an "apple woman", for example.

Speaking objectively, I do feel that a lot of farces of this period have fallen out of popularity deservedly. There's a lot of pantomime humour in them, which makes them extremely useful to use as sources to tell us what was popular in the late seventeenth century - the humour in The Playhouse to be Let, for example, derrives from the baseness of Cleopatra et al's behaviour, and indicates that the official take on them was far more serious. By burlesquing their characters in suggesting an everyday humanity to their behaviour, pretension of taste and ideology is being lampooned. As I say, this is interesting for what it tells us about seventeenth-century cultural. beliefs. Yet at the same time, no one can expect a modern audience to go to a play fully briefed on all the intricacies of Restoration culture and society. And as much as anything else, a lot of the humour is very cheap, frequently with a rushed feel about it.

All the same, I'll defend The Dragon of Wantley to the death. Cheap or not, any hero who wins the day by kicking his adversary in the bum is pretty funny.

The Assignation - Dryden

I read Thomas Sourtherne's adaptation of Oroonoko earlier this week and it was rather a strange play. I'm not sure whether I like it or not; I think I need to write a blog so that I can puzzle it out for myself.

That will come later, though. At the moment I'm reading Dryden's The Assignation, a standard little drama which I'm not sure I'll use. However, I did just come across an interesting scene. Ascanio, a man about town, and Hippolita, a novice, are talking about their friends' budding romance - and doing a bit of flirting themselves. They then have the following charming exchange:

HIPPOLITA: Dare you make all this good you have said of your Master?

ASCANIO: Yes, and as much more of my self to you.

HIPPOLITA: I defy you upon't, as my Lady's Second.

ASCANIO: As my Masters, I accept it.  The time?

HIPPOLITA: Six this evening.

ASCANIO: The place?

HIPPOLITA: At this Grate.

ASCANIO: The Weapons?

HIPPOLITA: Hands, and it may be Lips.

ASCANIO: 'Tis enough: expect to hear from me. II:I 

Duelling language! To arrange a romantic tryst! More than anything, this gives a good example of the sort of duelling language that a mid seventeenth-century audience would be familiar with. I was very excited.