Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench

Acclaimed actress Judi Dench talks all things Shakespeare

What started out as a series of conversations destined for the archives at Shakespeare's Globe have turned into a book. It was actor and director Brendan O'Hea's idea to capture Judi Dench's musings on her career, specifically as a Shakespearean actress, but when the recordings were heard by a third party it was suggested they be turned into a book.

The Man Who Pays the Rent was Dench and husband Michael Williams' nickname for Shakespeare. The playwright's expansive oeuvre kept them in work. For a book based on a series of conversations, you'd expect something light and frothy. Indeed, it is that. But so much more besides. Dench shows an impressive knowledge and incredible recall of lines, passages, dialogue, poetry and plot lines from the plays. There is also a detailed consideration of character, psychology and motive. Often Dench celebrates the mystery and subtlety of Shakespeare, advising that meaning is ultimately in the eye of the beholder.

A broad range of the plays are discussed – tragedies, comedies, histories and the so-called problem plays. Mini in between chapters discuss stagecraft, language and the role of critics. Dench peppers her commentary with amusing stories from her acting career – falls, stumbles, forgotten lines, wardrobe malfunctions.
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Like all wonderful books on Shakespeare, The Man Who Pays the Rent inspires the reader to return to the plays. A companionable book that mixes serious analysis with jolly, break-a-leg stories from the stage.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench. Published by Michael Joseph. $36.99

FEB24

Further Chronicles of Avonlea, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

This book follows on in the same vein as the first Chronicles of Avonlea that I wrote about a few posts back. In fact, I don’t have much to add to my original post. This is more of the same tales of rural life in Canada in the early part of the twentieth century.

I enjoyed them just as much as the first, and hence give this volume a hearty recommendation. Read my post for The Chronicles of Avonlea here.

It is worth noting here as well that a long lost volume in the Anne of Green Gables series is to be released. That will make volume nine. It was finished before Montgomery’s death, but has never been published in full, as the author intended.

Read about this ‘new’ book The Blythes Are Quoted here.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is not the first name you think of when coming to a book written about ‘Debt and the shadow side of wealth’. As everyone knows she’s a super famous novelist, poet and essayist. In my simple mindedness, I assumed that any book about debt must really concern itself with such technical issues as banking, national economies, regulation etc.

Atwood, however, tackles this subject from a different angle. She investigates rather the psychological, religious and literary aspects of debt. She has tried to uncover the very human essence of what it means to be in debt. Hence Atwood starts in antiquity, in ancient Egypt, and moves through the major religions. As ever happens, study religious texts and you find yourself discussing literature and philosophy.

A lot of time is spent discussing Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. In the final chapter the author creates her own version of Scrooge, called Nouveau Scrooge, a kind of young financial whiz kid from our own time. He is reluctantly taken on a tour of two possible worlds. One of environmental degradation, and one of harmony based on our current green ethos, turned into a virtual green utopia.

The moral lesson is: we have taken on loan so much from nature, indeed our whole economy is based on what we can squeeze out of the environment, that it is now time to ‘payback’ . We’re all in debt to nature, and must now settle accounts.

I really enjoyed this book, which was originally broadcast as part of the Massey Lectures, on Canada’s public radio service. Atwood employs a lot of humour and keeps the tone quite conversational and informal. It’s nice to feel like you’re sharing a chuckle when reading such an esteemed author.

I also liked Atwood’s unique thinking on the topic. She made me think about debt in an entirely new way. This is one of those books that leaves you ruminating on the questions it has raised for days and weeks to come.

Thanks to Mr Chris Hubbard for bringing this book to my attention.

Chronicles of Avonlea, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I must confess right off the bat to immensely enjoying this slim collection of stories by Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. The stories are set in the fictional village of Avonlea, where so much of the action in the Anne novels takes place. One presumes this was a selling point for the publishers (and Montgomery herself). The references to Anne Shirley, however, are few and far between.

Basically, all the stories here work independently and don't need the Avonlea of the title for readers to make any sense of them. If I was to name this collection, I'd give it a more prosaic title, like twelve tales of village life, or something like. (I prefer bland titles!)

So okay, why did I enjoy so much these rural tales of romance , sentimentality, friendship and family? When I opened the book, I presumed the stories would be leaning more towards the slight, as fancies that Montgomery had indulged in to while away a few hours. Yet I was hooked on them from the first page. As I read I tried to figure out why I was enjoying these simple stories of village life.

The reason is pretty obvious. Pardon my language, gentle readers, but Montgomery is a damned fine writer.

I have a theory about writers. At one end there are the organic writers, whose words seem to grow like something original in nature. Shakespeare is a perfect example of this. His language is a law unto itself. Then there are the more polished, urbane writers, whose work is like sophisticated architecture. Think Alexander Pope, or Jane Austen. Lucy Maud Montgomery I think leans towards the organic end of the scale. Her style is naturalistic, that of the born writer: simple, clear and uncluttered. Mixed with this are her beautiful descriptive passages. She draws you into a world she clearly loves and cherishes, so as a reader, you too long to be in her world.

Then there are her characters. There's a psychological truth to the people and situations she writes about. Montgomery is very much interested in the human. People do wrong and make petty mistakes in their lives, but these situations are in the end resolved. And isn't that what we really want in fiction, a moral? Reading these stories made me realise that, indeed, I do like a story to have a moral.

This is a really enjoyable collection of stories that you don't want to miss!

You can access Chronicles of Avonlea online here.

What's Wrong With The World, by G. K. Chesterton

After enjoying Chesterton’s collected newspaper columns in Tremendous Trifles, I decided to try another collection of this author’s critical writings, published by the good people at Dover. The back of the book says that the writings in this slim volume were ‘culled from thousands of essays he contributed to newspapers and periodicals over his lifetime’. This doesn’t make sense to me, because the whole book seems entirely cohesive.

There are five parts to the book, each comprising of up to 14 chapters. Each chapter in each section seems to neatly segue into the next, picking up themes and ideas from the previous chapter. So if you’re thinking that this book sounds like a hodge-podge or Chesterton’s writings, think again.

In essence, this is more of Chesterton’s war with the fripperies of modernity. Modern politics, modern thinking on social questions, the primacy of markets over people, fashionable ideologies with no correlation to reality, all are put under Chesterton’s critical lens. The strange effect is to make this adherent to common sense seem almost eccentric.

Reading Chesterton today, he does seem quite mad. And yet, he makes arguments that are amazingly relevant to today. For example, Chesterton talks about the demands of modern capitalism putting too much pressure on families (remember this argument being launched when attacking John Howard’s industrial relations reforms?).

Writes Chesterton: ‘For the plain truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory is this, that If he wants the family to remain, if he wants it to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and try to equalise property.’

Chesterton writes in a subtle, poetic manner that demands much attention, and I confess to not always catching his drift. However, I was amazed by how much cheered to read some of his arguments. For example, his ideas on thrift, and how they can necessitate much creativity, is something I’ve long thought about.

‘Thrift is really a romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance.’

And again:

‘Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference; it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral message the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.’

My god, imagine if Chesterton knew how much stuff we throw out in our own day!

In another section, Chesterton talks about a person’s household being a work of art, as it is the one place where they are free to do exactly what they want.

‘For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions – the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and although he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot pain the sunset whole colours he admires; but he can paint his own house with what colour he chooses; and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of democracy.’

As you can see, Chesterton offers something for all sides of politics. I can imagine John Howard finding that last passage music to his ears. But then he can say things that would most certainly upset the freewheeling capitalists of our age:

‘Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wire, wheels, systems, specialities, physical science and frenzied finance for one half hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a tavern. I do not say that the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.’

Ah, Chesterton, a haven of common sense in our mad modern era of systems and rationality.

Political Writings, by Cicero

Recently I read Jenny Hocking’s biography of Gough Whitlam and she started it off with this terrific quote from Cicero. It went something along the lines of, those who do not study history are condemned to always remain children. Hence I quickly borrowed whatever I could find from my local library on Cicero.

This Penguin edition of Cicero’s political speeches contains ten of the famous lawyer, writer and politician’s orations. It was the custom in those days (106-43 B.C) to publish written versions of speeches after they were given. The published speeches as a result could be a bit different here and there to the ones actually given.

These ten speeches are probably most interesting for the information they give us about Roman culture, money and politics in that day and age. Cicero is famed for his elegant writing, and on that count this volume doesn’t disappoint.

What does disappoint though is the fact that a lot of these speeches were given to push a particular political point or advantage. As a result you don’t get much of Cicero’s personal and philosophical views. This is more of an historian’s book (which I guess contradicts my intro to this post!).

I have read another book by Cicero, which dealt with his philosophical writings. This book I found very satisfactory. The political speeches included here I found interesting ( translator Michael Grant also provides an excellent introduction and notes), although not as compelling as Cicero’s other writings.

The Best Australian Essays of 2008, edited by David Marr

The best Australian essays, as decided by David Marr and the people at Black Inc. books. Being publishers of The Monthly, you can rest assured there are lots of lengthy essays from that particular publication.

Actually, this is a really good collection. There were only really a small handful of essays that I didn’t enjoy very much. But for the most part, I thought there was plenty of interesting stuff in this collection.

Favourites were by Tim Flannery, on the ocean deep. John van Tiggelen on Aboriginal Australia (this was a riveting essay, read it if you can). Robert Manne’s essay titled Sorry Business, on the apology. Gideon Haigh offers a fascinating Monthly essay on the Packer empire and the Bulletin magazine. I even enjoyed David Marr’s essay on Patrick White.

But I must give a separate paragraph to Barry Humphries and his piece on Arthur Boyd. I absolutely love the way Humprhies writes. He’s so witty and amusing, and basically such a good writer. I didn’t want his article to end. (I wish Humphries would write another book for us.)

As I said above, there was some stuff I didn’t like, by writers I’ve never really liked anyway. So I won’t bother going into that.

On the whole, this is a good, strong collection, worthy of the titles Best Australian Essays.

Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell

The recent airing of the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford inspired me to read some of the Gaskell novels I had missed. Ruth is where I’ve started, and intend to finish with Sylvia’s Lovers.

I became a big fan of Mrs Gaskell after reading her political novel North and South, which explored the question of labour versus capital. I next read Cranford, which being a witty, surreal social novel, came as a bit of a surprise. The terse drama of North and South left no clue that Gaskell could write comedy. Then I tried her first novel, Mary Barton, which dealt with themes similar to North and South. I didn’t enjoy this as much, and left off reading Gaskell for a while. Then I picked up Wives and Daughters, and was happy to discover the writer’s great masterpiece.

Ruth is the first novel I’ve read by Mrs Gaskell since Wives and Daughters. Like Mary Barton and North and South, the novel has a moral aim. Gaksell explores the theme of the ‘fallen woman’, and pleads for greater understanding and sympathy. This understanding is of course based on Christian ethics.

Ruth Hilton, who falls pregnant to the weak and mother-dominated Henry Bellingham, in the end redeems herself through her own good works, inspired by her Christian faith. The great success and moral truth of the novel is found in the fact that these forthright Christian precepts can resonate so powerfully in our own secular age. Even though I’m a non-believer, your heart is moved by Ruth’s faith and the way she puts that into action. Being a Christian makes so much sense!

Ruth is elegantly written and carefully constructed. The author’s sincerity and absolute belief in her message comes through in every line of the text, without the book ending up mawkish or sentimental. We know from Gaskell’s life that she was a tireless social worker, for whom novel writing was a bit of a side hobby. Yet Gaskell obviously wanted to improve life for the downtrodden and unfortunate by educating and informing the public through her fiction. Despite the novel’s aim as propaganda, it succeeds as art also. You can read it today and get a completely satisfying aesthetic and moral experience.

Having said that, I would still have to put Wives and Daughters up at the top of my list of favourite Gaskell novels. North and South would come next. Then Cranford. Ruth is not up there with the best of the Gaskell novels, and I place it perhaps just above Mary Barton.

I hope this ranking I have devised does not put readers off, as I certainly think it is a very good novel. And it did confirm for me (once again) what a formidable artist Elizabeth Gaskell is. If anything, I would like this post to highlight the vital importance of reading every Gaskell novel and story, as I indeed hope to myself!

Selected Father Brown Stories, by G.K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton wrote some 52 stories in the Father Brown series.

This volume by the good people at Collector’s Library collects 18 of those stories. The Collector’s Library editions are nicely bound in a red cloth board, with a little red ribbon to keep your place. The books are small in size, small enough to slip in your pocket, with wafer thin pages edged in gold to give them that extra touch of class. If you’re precious about reading from nice books (and I am), then reading from one of these volumes will make the experience all the more special.

Despite Chesterton’s prolific output, his reputation rests mostly on his Father Brown stories. They’re detective mystery stories, mostly involving murders, finely written with sometimes a touch of humour.

Father Brown is a paradoxical figure. He’s a Catholic priest who doubles as a crack detective. Nowadays we think of a Catholic priest as a quaint kind of anachronism, and I presume Chesterton’s contemporaries were leaning to that opinion as well.

Being a priest, Father Brown of course has his own ideology. The ultimate truth is beyond doubt: God created the earth and universe. This is a truth so self-evident, so based on the powers of human reasoning, that it gazumps modern day science, and its ugly little sister, atheism. Indeed, sometimes the usually placid Father Brown gets quite hot under the colour when he people think otherwise.

Father Brown’s Catholicism isn’t the main theme of the stories though. In fact it’s a bit of a side issue really, part of the priest's many interesting philosophical and theological digressions.

What enchants the reader is Father Brown's odd character and strange manner. We love how he turns up when we least expect it; we marvel at how he knows so much about a crime that has already happened. We gasp in astonishment when he picks up some details that we the reader have overlooked. So powerful and subtle is his intellect that even us staunch atheists feel that Father Brown could quite possibly turn us into believers.

So it is this mixture that makes the Father Brown stories a great success: the unconventional priest who sees things we ordinary mortals merely pass over. When our ignorance is shown up, we feel that our modern, secular intellectual framework is not all it is famed to be.

In the afterward by David Pinching, the writer says how much G. K. Chesterton is like Samuel Johnson ‘whose very flexibility tends to baffle the modern reader’. I couldn’t agree more. Both were conservative Christian men of powerful yet subtle intellects who quite frequently baffle the reader. They seem like visionaries, and you wonder, what do they see that we always seem to miss?

These stories also reminded me very much of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and it seems obvious that he must have been extraordinarily influenced by Chesterton's fiction. Hitchchock’s plots centre on human psychology and motivation, themes all mirrored in the Father Brown stories.

Dead Souls, by Nikolay Gogol

Gogol meant Dead Souls to be a three part ‘epic poem in prose’. The novel we have today is only part one; part two was apparently destroyed by the author and the third part never actually written.

When you come to the end of part one, you do get an overwhelming sense that this really is a prose poem, but it’s also very much a grotesque comedy. As the novel has no plot, and follows more the conventions of the picaresque tale, Dead Souls has a lot of the quixotic about it.

While Gogol may show little interest in the architecture of plot, his powers of description and ability to paint character are extraordinary. If anyone has ever seen the Dietrich / Von Sternberg film The Scarlet Empress, with its bold expressionistic sets and art direction, this will give you somewhat of an idea of Gogol’s style (in my opinion at least).

Add to this Gogol’s gift for grotesque comedy and you have something that is relentless in its weirdness. Just some of the descriptions of what people eat are amazing, you wonder if Gogol is describing a real Russian diet or just making something up.

I’d say if you were a young aspiring writer, you should study Gogol to learn what writing is all about. You open one of Gogol’s stories and are amazed by how fresh, vibrant and utterly alive his bizarre Russian world is.

His ambivalent attitude to all he describes will keep you scratching your head the whole way through. What does the author think of all these mad, larger than life people he describes? He describes the morally creepy main character Chichikov with so much relish. What’s that all about I wonder?

Gogol comes across as one of those fragmentary writers that never completed their superb initial promise. Maybe he was too much of a genius, and that’s why he burnt out.

Oh, how I wish Gogol had written so much more. I got to the end of Dead Souls and was sad that his story had finished and I had no other books of his to look forward to.

The Diary of a Mad Man and The Government Inspector, by Nikolay Gogol

It’s been so long since I actually spent money on a book. Actually, I didn’t even spend my own money when I bought this collection by Russian / Ukrainian writer Nikolay Gogol. I received two vouchers for a city bookshop. The other book I bought was the Dumas novel I wrote about a few days ago.

I don’t know why I picked up this collection of stories. Well, actually, I do know. I was intrigued by the titles: The Diary of a Madman (short story) and a play Gogol wrote, The Government Inspector. I’m a complete victim when it comes to a political comedy; I can’t walk past one.

My time lines for Russian literature aren’t good. (NB: even though Gogol is considered to be a Russian writer, he’s of Ukrainian / Polish extraction. He was very ambitious, and to be noticed and get ahead in literature circles, he wrote in Russian.) However, my understanding is that Gogol is one of the ‘fathers’ of Russian literature.

The tragic thing about him is he wrote so little and died so young (in his early forties). We should be thankful for his great stories and his hilarious play, The Government Inspector. I have a library copy of his only novel, Dead Souls, waiting to be read.

My critical response to the collection of stories I read in The Diary of a Madman? Wow! They’re totally amazing. This is the kind of writing that has such rich descriptions and strange subject matter that you become absolutely absorbed from the first sentence.

He has this genius to write about trivial, or day to day things, and bring out so much meaning.

His story, The Overcoat, is deemed to be his most famous, and it was this reader’s favourite. Anyone who has been a drudge, working in a dead end job, who has felt life’s humiliations, will relish every word of this story.

The play included in this collection, The Government Inspector, does not have the psychological depth of the short stories. But what it lacks in that it certainly makes up in sheer inventiveness and comic wit.

It’s basically a story about mistaken identity, and you could argue, the hollowness of power (for want of a better expression). Again, I found it thoroughly absorbing and entertaining right from the get-go.

I’m greatly looking forward to reading Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls.

Gogol seemed to write most of his material in his twenties and early thirties. The last decade of his life he devoted to essay and more academic writing. Drafts of the second part of Dead Souls he destroyed himself. People who read these drafts say they were of inferior quality.

Creativity is a strange thing. Why are some people given this gift, and only for a certain amount of time?

I’m constantly astonished that Shakespeare could write A Midsummer’s Night Dream at age twenty-eight. But that’s a digression that should belong in another post.

Anyone who should come across this post, and who loves Russian literature, you should give Gogol a go! I know you’ll find a new pal in his writings.

The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas

It’s been a while since I read a Dumas novel. I forgot how much fun they could be.

Dumas writes in what seems like a mad, improvisatory sprint, his literary landscapes sprouting flowers and gambolling characters as he proceeds apace.

Nor when adding ingredients to his exotic fictions does he hold back on the spices. In this novel, Dumas shows his fondness for fascinating little digressions. We learn about history, politics, art, psychology, and of course, the art of love.

Of all the ‘classic’ novelists I’ve read, Dumas is one of those who comes closest to writing the trashy, popular novel. He perhaps saves himself by freely admitting within his actual novels that they are transparently plotted.

Dumas appears to be saying that plots don’t matter, but character and psychological development do.

(In The Black Tulip he several times intrudes as narrator to comment on the obvious nature of his plot.)

Dumas took a real historical even, a political assassination, as a point of departure for The Black Tulip. Reading the opening chapters I wondered when this complex historical data would fade away and some compelling, central characters emerge.

The Black Tulip it turns out is a romantic tale built around a young man’s passion for cultivating tulips.

Dumas’s genius is to make such a novel seem like such an easy feat to accomplish. The novelist weaves such a huge array of material into a mere two hundred pages.

I was one hundred and fifty or so pages in when I started to sense the novel was drawing to a resolution and I felt a pang.

I was enjoying Dumas’s wizardry so much that I didn’t want it to end.

Fans of Dumas will find this a marvellous read that ends too soon.

The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

This is my first Melvyn Bragg book, and I was very satisfied with the experience.

Bragg has a good, clear writing style and intuitively knows which word to use and where. His intellectual and aesthetic judgements I found to be very agreeable.

For example, when talking about Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Bragg likens Twain’s accomplishment to that of Chaucer’s. I couldn’t have agreed more.

In fact, in the sentences leading up to this pronouncement, I was hoping as I read that he would draw such a conclusion and agree with me that the language of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most amazing literary achievements in English.

Bragg sets his book out in a nice easy time line, and treats the English language as a major character, almost like an adventurer, travelling far and wide and picking up all sorts of exotic words and phrases and expressions, then weaving them back into the language itself, like a tapestry.

First we have the invading Germanic tribes, then the Norman conquest of 1066, bringing in a wealth of French words. French would actually become the official language, that of the English monarchs and business and administration, for some 300 years.

Once the English language had again been liberated, we got the wonders of Chaucer’s poetry, which used to great effect the common English spoken by the people.

After the English language had won back the state, it went on to conquer religion.

The Bible had not been translated into English, and hence the commoners could not read it. They had to rely on the clergy that could read Latin. This allowed great power to reside with the church.

William Tyndale thus went about translating the Bible, most of it later used for the official King James version. For his trouble, Tyndale was executed. It’s extraordinary we don’t know more of Tyndale, as there are so many expressions he gave the English language that we all use: ‘scapegoat’, ‘let there be light’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘fight the good fight’, ‘stumbling block’, ‘sea-shore’. And on and on.

After Tyndale, another great: William Shakespeare, who gave us some 2000 words and expressions.

English then moved onto America, where it expanded again.

Happily, Bragg also gives us a chapter on Australian English, highlighting our propensity to put an ‘o’ and an ‘ie’ in front of our words. Sickie for sick day, arvo for afternoon, to name but two.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this book were the long lists of words and where they came from. The provenance of most English words would surprise most English speakers, words we take for granted as being quintessentially English. As it turns out, this isn’t necessarily so.

I really learnt a lot from this book on English. Maybe only dullards like me find this a fascinating subject. If you’re a fellow dullard, you will find this book very enjoyable.

As I Please: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1943-1945)

A couple of years ago I bought the complete essays and journalism of George Orwell, which comes in four volumes. I’ve just read the third volume, which is called As I Please after the regular Tribune column he wrote.

Much of the writings in this volume is comprised of the above mentioned columns for The Tribune. These columns cover a lot of the political situation in Britain near the end of World War II, so you’d have to be into the history of the period to fully understand and appreciate a lot of what is being written about. For me a lot of the columns weren’t that interesting, and I often found my mind wandering. The two previous collections I found much more interesting. (Maybe this is more to do with my lack of concentration.)

There are a few of his famous essays amongst the day to day fare of the columns, most notably his writings on Salvador Dali and P.G Wodehouse.

Perhaps some of the most interesting parts of the book are the snapshots of Orwell’s domestic life. For some reason on other the one thing in this book that really stuck in my mind was an As I Please column where Orwell talked about the drudgery of the doing the dishes, and how there was no possible way to make this necessary and dreary (to Orwell at least, I myself don’t mind doing the dishes) work more easily endured. One can’t imagine any of today’s male columnists writing about doing the dishes.

Another interesting part of the book was where Orwell described a job he would very much enjoy doing. It was trying to find out the authorship of anonymous pieces of war propaganda by studying the writing style of the authors.

I didn’t find this volume as edifying as the earlier volumes. A lot of it seemed like padding. This volume is more for completists. Having said that, reading all the major essays by George Orwell should be mandatory for any liberal education.

Two Novels by Richard Yates

Recently I read two novels by Richard Yates – his first novel Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, and The Easter Parade (1976). I’d never heard of him before. Revolutionary Road came recommended by someone very close to me.

Well, I must say, I was totally hooked on Revolutionary Road from the get go. Richard Yates has a marvellous way of describing mundane, middle class suburban life, its aspirations and failures, in such merciless detail, that it is utterly compelling. He makes himself invisible as a writer, so all you get is a very credible description of events and personalities, with no moralising, or tsk-tsking, isn’t middle class aspirational life miserable.

Why were there so many books written around the fifties or about the fifties by Americans that showed so much discontent with American life and its booming capitalist culture? You’d think everything would be fine and dandy in the post war years of I Love Lucy fifties America. The novel made me think of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces etc. Even Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a book written in the sixties (I think) about liberated young women studying for lives in the professions in the 1930s, whose lives go off the rails. Why does everything go wrong for these people?

The second book, The Easter Parade, is perhaps even glummer than Revolutionary Road. It describes two sisters and their lives over the decades. It’s referenced in Woody Allen’s film about three sisters, Hannah and Her Sisters. Indeed, throughout the book I couldn’t stop thinking of that film. By the novel's end I felt an almost unbearable sense of despair. It was like every single miserable, lonely Sunday you’ve ever experienced bundled into one book.

I’m now reading Yates’s short stories, and they’re really good too. Some of them are even mildly amusing. The collection comprises of two published collections of his short stories from 1962 and 1981, and then some uncollected stories. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give the dates on when these other stories were written, so you can’t really place them in a timeline in his career.

Yates seemed to live a pretty normal life. He married twice and wrote business copy to put food on the table. He did a short stint as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy. He died in 1992, his health made much the worse by years of heavy drinking and smoking.

Yates writes in a plain, straightforward style about what he knew best, the middle class suburban life of work and sex, its dubious successes and frequent failures. You should read Richard Yates, because you’ll most likely see yourself in his writings. This may comfort you on the one hand, and make you a little sad on the other.

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

The other day I re-read Shakespeare’s Macbeth for the umpteenth time. The introductory scene of the witches I once committed to memory. Let’s see how much I remember:

When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lighting, or in rain?
When the hurley burley’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Where the place?
Upon the heath.
There to meet with MacBeth.
Come Graymalkin,
Paddock calls anon.
Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I made a small boo-boo now that I check through my Penguin Shakespeare. Line eight should read, ‘I come, Graymalkin.’. A Graymalkin is a cat. Plus I forgot to put in first witch, second witch etc. Otherwise it’s pretty correct.

Macbeth is about eighty pages, and boy how quickly everything moves along. Macbeth’s valiant and noble performance as a soldier gains him a promotion. From Thane of Glamis he picks up the title Thane of Cawdor.

For anyone who knows the story, and what MacBeth ends up doing, you gasp when you realise that the previous Thane of Cawdor had lost his title, and his life, for treason. ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ the King laments after having pronounced a sentence of death on the man's head. (Interestingly, George Orwell thought your face was pretty well fixed by age 50.)

What a bad omen that Macbeth should have this honoured title bestowed on him, straight from such a ‘disloyal traitor’. ‘What he hath lost,’ King Duncan says, ‘noble Macbeth hath won.’
Are the odds stacked against Macbeth behaving properly from the beginning?

Like the Greek tragedies, Macbeth’s destiny appears pre-determined. The play begins by three witches tantalising Macbeth with a prophecy that he will be Thane of Cawdor, then King. Yet right off the bat these seemingly happy fortune tellings are mixed in with so much darkness. The three witches are hardly the types you’d like to get this news from – they represent foulness and filth, able to conjure up evil merely at the ‘pricking of my thumbs’.

They also give Macbeth a strange kind of consolement. They tell him that no man of woman born shall harm him. Hence he thinks himself utterly invincible.

His inability to think a little more subtly undoes him, for Macduff tells him,
‘Despair they charm,
And let the Angel whom thou still hast serv’d
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripped.’

D’oh! Then there’s the highly improbable Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. Macbeth rightly thinks this is impossible (‘That will never be’), but an inability for subtle thinking again undoes him. The soldiers cut off branches from Birnam wood to use as camoflaugue. Didn’t Oscar Wilde say something about the improbable always happening? How right he was.

Macbeth is given a false sense of security by this advice, allowing him to plunge headlong into some of his maddest exploits. Strange how it is women who spur on so much of the action – after all, it’s Lady Macbeth who eggs him onto the first murder which makes all the other murders possible. Then of course there are the witches.

Reading Macbeth you also marvel at how Shakespeare actually imagined Macbeth, imagined someone so deep and wide. It’s as though Skakespeare could completely, utterly and truly realise things he’d never experienced.

Then there's the language. Camille Paglia said that Shakeapeare wrote in a super tongue. I think he wrote in his own language entirely. I'm not one for sporting analogies, but Shakespeare took the English language and kicked it so far into the future that we'll never be able to catch up with his genius.

Indeed, open up the play at any of Macbeth’s major speeches and there you have the genius of the English language. And to think, he never bothered to get any of his great works published, but would have been content (or so one presumes) to let them slide into obscurity.

My Country Right or Left 1940-1943, by George Orwell

Anyone following the recent Terry Lane controversy in Australia, where he cited fake video material of apparent chronic human rights abuses to boost his anti-Iraq war line (he was duped, but should have double checked his facts), will find the following Orwell quote from his war diaries of utmost pertinence.

‘Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless towards people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests and sympathies. What is most striking of all is the way sympathy can be turned on or off like a tap according to political expediency.’

To Terry Lane’s credit, he confessed that he believed the video material was authentic because he wanted to:

“I was completely taken in … I fell for it because I wanted to believe it.”

These two quotes are interesting to juxtapose, showing how things have not changed much in sixty years. I confess to doing the same thing, believing certain things because politically it fits your world view.

This second volume of the Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus edited collected works runs at some 500 pages and features many of Orwell’s famous essays. It’s a mixture of mostly politics and literature. His review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler is especially interesting, as Orwell confesses to actually liking Hitler, as a charismatic personality, but despising him politically.

The essay on Mark Twain was also an eye opener. Orwell in it demonstrates that Twain was always one who followed and supported those in power. I thought his reputation was one of a die hard democrat. Here’s a quote:

‘In Roughing It there is an interesting account of a bandit named Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel.’

Well, as an unabashed Orwell fan, you can never go wrong with a volume of his essays and letters and reviews. Many of them I re-read here, and got more out of them the second time around. Especially his war book The Lion and the Unicorn.

Every home should have the collected Orwell on its shelves!

The Collected Works of George Orwell, 1920-1940

This is volume one of a late sixties publication of the complete works of George Orwell, including letters, essays and journalism. It’s edited by Sonia Orwell (his second wife) and Ian Angus. Poor Sonia wasn’t married to Orwell for very long. He said he married her (a woman much younger than himself) in the hope that it would give him some sort of subliminal will to live. Despite his hopes that love/sex would save his life, it didn’t

Orwell fans like myself will find this a treat. Through the chronologically placed letters and essays we get a clear idea of Orwell’s development as a writer, plus his place in the literary milieu. Indeed, one letter lists the possible names he might go by for the publication of Down and Out in London and Paris. (Many of Orwell’s letters to the literary big wigs of the time are reproduced as well, including Cryil Connolly and Stephen Spender.)

This collection really concentrates on the period 1930-1940. There are only three pieces from the previous decade. So you really get to see how Orwell grows as a writer. By 1940, Orwell the essayist is in full flight, with his excellent collection Inside the Whale.

If you want to piece together your own biography of George Orwell from his letters and development as an essayist, this fun book (fun for Orwell fans that is) is a good place to start.

Christopher Marlowe, by Park Honan

After reading Park Honan’s overly academic and frankly dull biography of Shakespeare I really didn’t think I’d make it through the first fifty pages of this biography of Christopher Marlowe, the brilliant Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare. To my surprise I actually found it, for the most part, a rather absorbing book.

Like the Shakespeare biography, there’s not really that much actual historical detail that allows us to really get a clear picture of Marlowe; it’s more conjecture and speculation. The biography covers three main aspects of Marlowe’s life and character: his time at Corpus Christi College; his recruitment and work as a spy; and lastly his plays. The biography is finished off with two interesting chapters about Marlowe’s homosexuality and his untimely death (he was stabbed above the eye after an argument over a bill at a tavern).

My favourite part of the book was Park Honan’s discussion of The Jew of Malta, surely one of the most brilliant, odd and original of plays. How odd it is that anti-semitism has given us such literary works of art as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ Oliver Twist (Dickens tried to make amends by later writing a more philo-semitic novel, I forget which one it is.)

The Jew of Malta exploits contemporary anti-semitism to create a compelling love-to-hate character in Barabas. Park Honan rightly disputes whether Marlowe was anti-semitic at all: the anti-semitism of The Jew of Malta is so over the top that it reads like a spoof on Jew hating. Here are the author’s worthy remarks on The Jew of Malta:

‘It’s success might be a sign that Marlowe has capitalized on his ability to shock, while appealing to racial prejudice. He focuses on an obsessive Elizabethan concern with Judaism and, in fact, counters anti-semitism, but keeps prejudice in the air to examine society. Barabas is what the alien is popularly taken to be; but, as a hero or anti-hero, he is also profoundly ambiguous, elusive, even sympathetic in his gaiety and role-playing, despite his violence and depravity. His portrait does not fit categories; it will never be ‘politically correct’. If we are offended by anti-semitism, Marlowe might ask that we be even more outraged, indignant, or mortified by the author and drama.’

The book also contains reproductions of letters from Thomas Kyd and Richard Baines detailing all of Marlowe’s blasphemous sayings. (Remember Thomas Kyd shared a writing room with Marlowe and when he was charged with atheism – I think it was atheism – he blamed it all on Marlowe.)

The first customer review at Amazon.com of this biography is worth checking out. The author of it points to a few inconsistencies and shares my complaint about Park Honan being too academic and a bit of a dullard. Frankly, he overwrites. One wonders how such difficult books hit the shelves of big book stores. But if you are a Marlowe fan I feel you will find this a very rewarding book. The sections that deal with the plays are excellent. If you are a patient reader, you will find his discussions of Marlowe’s homosexuality well thought out and fair.

Park Honan is a very subtle writer. You’ll need some patience.

The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

The Innocents Abroad was Mark Twain’s first book. It details his travels throughout Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Reading through this book I felt like I was stuck in a bubble inside Mark Twain’s head, trusting to his descriptions of whatever he saw. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I felt I got more of Mark Twain’s writing style than actual descriptions of what he was seeing. Let me try again. Mark Twain’s writing style coloured and perhaps obscured everything he saw.

That is not to say that Mark Twain’s writing style is a bad thing. Anything but! His writing makes the book a very pleasant read. Yet I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’n Head Wilson.

I was surprised too by how much he disdained the Middle East and its peoples. He didn’t seem to have much that was nice to say about them at all. His descriptions of The Holy Lands showed what a chasm there is between literature believed to be the word of God, and the places and peoples from where those great events took place. It made one ponder heavily the difference between myth and reality.

Perhaps The Innocents Abroad is not a good place for Mark Twain novices to begin with. Start with Huckleberry Finn to find out why Twain is so good. This one is more for the student or devoted fan of his work.