Martin Jones's Blog, page 33

Books About Trains – La Bete Humaine Meets Thomas the Tank Engine

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La Bete humaine reminds me of the Thomas the Tank Engine books.  There are a lot more stabbings, suicides and sexual encounters in La Bete humaine, but essentially Emile Zola and the Rev W. Awdry are writing about the same thing.  They both parallel human life with steam trains and the rail systems they run on.

Awdry presents his engines as having personalities of their own, who have to accept the direction of their driver if they are to find happiness and fulfillment.  The Thomas story that made the biggest impact on me as a youngster was a story about Gordon, the most powerful and proudest locomotive of them all.  I recall one time he had a new paint job, and was so pleased with it that he steamed into a tunnel and refused to come out, not wanting the weather to spoil his lovely blue paint.  Eventually the Fat Controller walls Gordon up in his refuge, and only allows him out when confinement in the tunnel had reduced him to a stiff, grimy, rusty shell of an engine.  That’s one way to punish the sin of pride.

In La Bete humain the trains are also presented as having personalities.  La Lison is a good, dependable engine, who until a terrible night of overwork in a snowstorm, has a loving relationship with her driver.  Engine 608 is a headstrong youngster who needs careful handling.  Like Awdry, Zola draws parallels between the life of steam engines, struggling against or cooperating with their drivers, and the lives of human beings, who struggle against or cooperate with the forces shaping their destiny.  The difference between Zola and Awdry lies in the nature of the driver, the controlling influence.   In the Thomas stories, we don’t really ever get to know the drivers.  They are an anonymous guiding presence whose wisdom in the end has to be accepted.  In Zola’s novel, the drivers can sometimes provide wise and gentle guidance.  At other times, they can be maniacs and drunkards who fight over women on the footplate.  Zola’s novel is much more modern and challenging in that sense.  It’s Thomas the Tank Engine for grown-ups.

However, in the final analysis I still think that Zola can offer the same reassurance as Awdry, the same sense that in accepting life, things can turn out right.  In the early pages, there is a short section where order somehow emerges out of chaos:

“It was all a jumble at that murky twilight hour, when it seemed as though everything should collide, and yet everything passed, and slid by, and emerged all at the same gentle crawl, vaguely, in the depths of the dusk.”

When I got to the end of the book, after Zola had pulled me through the most snarled of jumbles, I like to think the demoralised reader can at least remember those early lines where order somehow emerges out of chaos.

Books About Trains – La Bete humain Meets Thomas the Tank Engine

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La Bete humaine reminds me of the Thomas the Tank Engine books.  There are a lot more stabbings, suicides and sexual encounters in La Bete humaine, but essentially Emile Zola and the Rev W. Awdry are writing about the same thing.  They both parallel human life with steam trains and the rail systems they run on.

Awdry presents his engines as having personalities of their own, who have to accept the direction of their driver if they are to find happiness and fulfillment.  The Thomas story that made the biggest impact on me as a youngster was a story about Gordon, the most powerful and proudest locomotive of them all.  I recall one time he had a new paint job, and was so pleased with it that he steamed into a tunnel and refused to come out, not wanting the weather to spoil his lovely blue paint.  Eventually the Fat Controller walls Gordon up in his refuge, and only allows him out when confinement in the tunnel had reduced him to a stiff, grimy, rusty shell of an engine.  That’s one way to punish the sin of pride.

In La Bete humain the trains are also presented as having personalities.  La Lison is a good, dependable engine, who until a terrible night of overwork in a snowstorm, has a loving relationship with her driver.  Engine 608 is a headstrong youngster who needs careful handling.  Like Awdry, Zola draws parallels between the life of steam engines, struggling against or cooperating with their drivers, and the lives of human beings, who struggle against or cooperate with the forces shaping their destiny.  The difference between Zola and Awdry lies in the nature of the driver, the controlling influence.   In the Thomas stories, we don’t really ever get to know the drivers.  They are an anonymous guiding presence whose wisdom in the end has to be accepted.  In Zola’s novel, the drivers can sometimes provide wise and gentle guidance.  At other times, they can be maniacs and drunkards who fight over women on the footplate.  Zola’s novel is much more modern and challenging in that sense.  It’s Thomas the Tank Engine for grown-ups.

However, in the final analysis I still think that Zola can offer the same reassurance as Awdry, the same sense that in accepting life, things can turn out right.  In the early pages, there is a short section where order somehow emerges out of chaos:

“It was all a jumble at that murky twilight hour, when it seemed as though everything should collide, and yet everything passed, and slid by, and emerged all at the same gentle crawl, vaguely, in the depths of the dusk.”

When I got to the end of the book, after Zola had pulled me through the most snarled of jumbles, I like to think the demoralised reader can at least remember those early lines where order somehow emerges out of chaos.

Writing and the Future of Formula 1

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Mercedes Pit at the 2017 Australian Grand Prix – photo by Richard Jones

Modern writers have often exploited the drama of powerful machines.  In the 1890s Emile Zola, in La Bete Humain, used steam trains to symbolise the human passions of people living on the line between Le Havre and Paris.  Steam trains fulfilled a similar purpose in Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, roaring by in the night, making manifest powerful emotions in the souls of ordinary English men and women.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby drives a cream coloured Rolls Royce with a windscreen mirroring a dozen suns.  This is a car conveying Gatsby’s supremacy as well as conveying him from A to B.

Aircraft play major roles in many modern thrillers, adding a sense of power and glamour to stories by the likes of Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy.

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Scene from Brief Encounter

While these machines express drama, technical progress over time leads to greater efficiency, more power, and ironically, less drama.  People think of a steam train as romantic because it gives a visual and audible display of power.  A steam engine ready to leave a station, hissing, burbling and smoking, appears to be working hard just standing still.  Modern locomotives turn all that wasted energy into efficient movement, with the result that they are not as theatrical.  Modern locomotives are a step forward in power, but tell less of a story because we cannot see the power.

The sport of Formula 1 motor racing is facing a crisis for just this reason.  The future for car technology is clearly electrical.  Hybrid technology is already widely used, with fully electric cars ready to break into the mass market.  This is a problem for motor racing, which as a form of dramatic entertainment has not only to use energy, but also demonstrate it.   Formula 1 has always been a place to push the boundaries of automotive expertise, until it reaches a point when that expertise becomes quiet and undemonstrative.  It is more difficult to create a narrative of sporting drama out of efficient, silent electric engines, than from howling V10s.

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A Formula E electric racing car

No doubt, elements of motor racing will stop technically.  Parts of the sport will remain in a nostalgic past, with fans taking their place alongside steam train enthusiasts. For the most part, however, it will make no sense for motor racing to stand still while cars in general move forward into an electrical future.  The sport will have to follow wider trends, just as trains moved on from steam.  Fortunately, most people watch motor racing on television or some other electronic device, where noise doesn’t really register.  Maybe a dominant electric series will find its place in a world of electronic media, using communication technology to express drama in innovative, immersive ways.

The moral of this tale is that technical development prioritises efficiency:  narrative development prioritises wasteful drama.

 

 

 

Rural Rides on the Medway Bike Path

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“From Maidstone to this place (Merryworth) is about seven miles and these are the finest seven miles I have ever seen in England or anywhere else.  The Medway is to your left with its meadows about a mile wide… From Maidstone to Merryworth I should think that there were hop gardens on one half of the way both sides of the road.  Then looking across the Medway you see orchards and hop gardens two miles deep, on the side of a gently rising ground.”

This is from the classic nineteenth century travelogue Rural Rides, written in the 1820s by MP, farmer and journalist William Cobbet. Although the hop fields Cobbett wrote about have gone, those mile wide Medway meadows are still there, now given over to pasture, orchards, gardens and parkland.

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Cobbett’s route took him along what is now the A26.  Although I often think of Cobbett as we drive along the A26, this busy, modern road makes it difficult to get back to his nineteenth century idyll.  There is now, however, another option.  I would suggest taking the recently opened foot and cycle path, which starting from Aylesford continues through Maidstone riverside, and then runs below the A26 to Barming.  I might not be Cobbett, but I’m going to say that this is the finest seven miles (or so) of bike path I have ever seen in England or anywhere else.  The riding is easy and flowing, the Medway Valley scenery beautiful and varied.  Cobbett would have loved this rural ride.

Rural Rides

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“From Maidstone to this place (Merryworth) is about seven miles and these are the finest seven miles I have ever seen in England or anywhere else.  The Medway is to your left with its meadows about a mile wide… From Maidstone to Merryworth I should think that there were hop gardens on one half of the way both sides of the road.  Then looking across the Medway you see orchards and hop gardens two miles deep, on the side of a gently rising ground.”

This is from the classic nineteenth century travelogue Rural Rides, written in the 1820s by MP, farmer and journalist William Cobbet. Although the hop fields Cobbett wrote about have gone, those mile wide Medway meadows are still there, now given over to pasture, orchards, gardens and parkland.

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Cobbett’s route took him along what is now the A26.  Although I often think of Cobbett as we drive along the A26, this busy, modern road makes it difficult to get back to his nineteenth century idyll.  There is now, however, another option.  I would suggest taking the recently opened foot and cycle path, which starting from Aylesford continues through Maidstone riverside, and then runs below the A26 to Barming.  I might not be Cobbett, but I’m going to say that this is the finest seven miles (or so) of bike path I have ever seen in England or anywhere else.  The riding is easy and flowing, the scenery of the Medway Valley is beautiful and varied.  Cobbett would have loved this rural ride.

Best of times worst of times – The 100 best novels in English

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I am working my way through the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels in English, enjoying it, but not because these novels really are the best of all time.  This is just a way of reading things I might not otherwise think of.  Rather than putting books in a special box, it’s a way of getting outside the box of my own preferences. I think it is important to approach the list in this way, because efforts to create best of all time lists have always caused problems. For example, back in the Asia of 2000BC, medical progress ran up against the sanctification of ancient medical texts.  Written in Asia around 2000BC, The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon of Medicine, and The Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica, had the status of scripture.   In the face of these unchallenged medical authorities, no research or progress was possible.  A similar thing happened when Renaissance scholars sanctified the medical writings of the ancient Greek world.

Another example of a “Top 100” gaining untouchable status is The Bible.  For centuries, it wasn’t even possible for most people to read the stories collected in The Bible, written in Latin and protected by a possessive Church hierarchy.   The sixteenth century brought the Bible-reading enthusiasms of Protestantism, and large scale printing technology, but The Bible remained set apart, a situation that continues to this day.  I remember on one of my first days at university in 1983, going into the University Bookshop to buy books for my course.  Aware that The Bible was the most influential book in English literature, I added a copy to a pile of other books.

“You won’t find that on any reading list,” said an assistant with airy superiority.

He really did not want to sell it to me, seemingly offended to see this fat, brown paperback perched on top of The Iliad.  I thought this odd and said so.  He was right though. My university did not include the most influential book in English literature on any literature course. The Bible was something different, something other than “normal” literature, too special for students to read in the same way.

While The Bible sat in its little box, writers got on with the business of exploring life in more lowbrow forms, such as plays performed in unfashionable parts of London, in novels or poems.  Inevitably, however, over time these literary forms themselves gained a level of sanctification.  The nineteenth century poet and schools’ inspector Matthew Arnold decided in a famous essay called Culture and Anarchy that literature could work with religion as a “social cement”. With Arnold’s enthusiastic support, “English literature” really came into being as an adjunct to official religion. The poet William Blake saw The Bible as the work of poets, usurped by the Church for its own purposes. He feared a similar fate for the poetry of his own time.  The influential views of Matthew Arnold, and others like him, meant that in many ways those fears were realised. A sad result of official veneration was to make literature, by definition, difficult, the opposite of “easy reading”. Hard labour was required if English was to seem a respectable academic subject, and in this way literature was taken away from the people it was written for. Literature became something different, set apart, just like The Bible.

I am enjoying the Modern Library Top 100, but in conclusion, it is worth noting that one of the books I have read so far- The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy suffered a ban when first published.  This book was clearly on someone’s “Worst Novels of All Time” list.  This just goes to show that throwing up a wall around certain writing is impossible.   Good writing tears down walls, mines the depths beneath them, or jumps mischievously over them.  It does not build them.

 

The Mystique of Music in the Age of Streaming

I’m reading Sophie’s Choice, William Styron’s famous novel about Stingo, a struggling writer who meets a beautiful concentration camp survivor in the New York of 1947.  Stingo has learnt about Sophie’s happy childhood in Poland and her terrible ordeal during the Second World War. Sophie has also described her experience of reaching America, where two things define a better life – plentiful food and music.  Following a doctor’s advice not to gorge herself on food, Sophie revels carefully in all the gastronomic variety that New York has to offer.  In the same spirit of heightened appreciation, she goes to hear Yehudi Menuhin play the Beethoven Violin Concerto at Lewishon Stadium in Manhattan.

The day after I read this section, I put Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, played by Yehudi Menuhin, on my phone and took it to work.  I tried to imagine what it would sound like if I hadn’t been able to listen to music for years.  Rather than existing in glorious isolation, music is also a product of the situation of the listener, a situation often engineered to increase the power of the musical experience. In the case of orchestral music, there’s the buying of an expensive ticket, the dressing up, entering a beautiful hall, the cacophony of many musicians tuning to a single reference note, the tapping of a baton on a podium to bring the orchestra to attention. This all has the effect of shutting music away behind a ritual.  Listeners have to approach carefully with a sense of reverence for the importance of what they are to experience. Other genres had their tricks, from the artful secretiveness of Prince, to the courting of controversy by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which leads to a ban serving only to boost sales.

In some instances, this wrapping of the musical experience has amounted to an art form in itself.  Take for example Miserere Mei Dues written by Gregorio Allegeri around 1640. Religious authorities literally kept this piece locked away, securing all copies of the sheet music in the Vatican vaults.  There was only one performance a year, at the Sistine Chapel, no less.  In 1770, however, a young musical genius called Amadeus Mozart heard Miserere Mei Deus, immediately memorised every note, carried them home in his head and wrote them down.  Mozart’s theft was part of a chain of events, making music ever more accessible, eventually allowing me to take Beethoven’s Violin Concerto to work on my phone. It is wonderful to have this easy access to music, but even imagining years empty of music helped Menuhin give a performance that lifted me through my day of toil.

Since music streaming cannot offer unlimited access and the denial of access at the same time, I suggest attempting to imagine a world where music is hard to find.  For that, we need to go outside our usual experience, which is where reading comes in.  A book can take us to a different world with different circumstances.  This is another illustration of one of the fundamental values of reading.  We are able to share in other people’s experience, which helps us understand the lives of others and look with new eyes at our own.

Sophie’s Choice makes me appreciate a lot of things  that I take for granted, not just music; but it was through music that  I had the emotional experience of seeing things in a new light.

 

The Heroism of Antiheroes

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An early Superman story, self-published by high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933

People like to identify with a central character in a story.  Often they want to identify with someone strong and powerful.  Most people, however, are sensible enough to realise that we are not all world-conquering heroes, not every day anyway.  It then makes sense for antiheroes to shuffle out of the shadows – characters who we can identify with in their weaknesses.  There are examples going all the way back to ancient Greece.   The Iliad, dating to around 700BC, is generally peopled with gods and supermen, but there is a minor character called Thersites, lame, round shouldered and ugly, who speaks unpalatable truths and gets shouted down for it.  Aesops Fables dating to around 600BC contains many unlikely heroes, including a tortoise who wins a running race against a hare.  From the time of ancient Greece onwards, less than epic characters continued to make various apologetic, ill-mannered or clumsy appearances.  There was the delusional Don Quixote in the seventeenth century,  Lawrence Sterne’s mischieveous Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century, and the helpless, beaten down, twentieth century protaganists of Beckett, Kafka, Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre.

So, what happened when antiheroes shambled diffidently over to America, land of winners?  Like the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, America following World War II, was the world’s leading power  It made sense that post-war America created modern versions of Greek and Roman heroes.  Building on the costumed adventures of the Scarlett Pimpernel (1903), Zorro (1919) and Shadow (1930) the superhero leaps into existence to save the world as Superman in 1938, with Batman coming to help in 1939.  The link with ancient heroes is made obvious in Wonder Woman.  Debuting in 1941, authors William and Elizabeth Marston conceived Wonder Woman as a demigoddess, a new Diana with powers conferred by old Greek and Roman gods.  So are these the heroes of a society considering itself so powerful that it can turn its back on failure and smallness?

The answer to this question has to be, no.  Crucially, modern superheroes have an antihero behind the costume, an ordinary alter ego.  Superman out of costume is mild mannered Clark Kent, a reporter working for the Daily Planet.  Batman is the crime fighting incarnation of eccentric and emotionally damaged billionaire Bruce Wayne.  Wonder Woman hides in the identity of Diana Prince, a United States Army nurse.  This duality would become a typical feature of superheroes, a particularly telling twist coming along in 1962 with the arrival of Spider-Man, the alter ego of orphaned adolescent Peter Parker who faces problems of rejection, inadequacy and loneliness.  These non-heroic alter egos parallel many American literary and movie antiheroes  – Dean Moriarty in On The Road, Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye,   Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Strabler in The Wild One.  While these characters are an inversion of Superman, they are actually exploring the same territory from the opposite direction.  Their primary identity is as ordinary people, who search for heroes hiding inside themselves.  Holden Caulfield is not so different to Peter Parker.  Johnny, the motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One, even dons a kind of superhero outfit, the black leathers which make him into a different person during his weekend road trips.

The different sides of heroism then come together with an almighty bang in the hugely successful modern tale of good and evil, Star Wars.  In Star Wars, the mystical Force gives strength to both the heroic Jedi, and to the Jedi’s dark enemies.  The Force is vague enough to encompass heroes and villains, and people like Han Solo who are neither one nor the other. Star Wars crystalises the suggestion that amidst the primary colours in Marvel comics, and the black and white of Obi Wan and Darth Vadar, there is no easy division of the world into hero, villain and ordinary person.  The endless struggle of people to see a better version of themselves, while still accepting their humble, imperfect reality, reaches a contemporary high point in the multifaceted heroes of American culture.

As writers, we can learn from this. There are two kinds of protagonist- a hero with an ordinary person inside them, or an ordinary person hiding a hero.

 

 

 

Orwell and Tarkington In Support of American Journalists

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Sales of George Orwell’s novel 1984 are apparently increasing in response to events in the United States. Orwell’s Doublethink and Two Minute Hate readily lend themselves to parallels with “alternative facts” and the whipping up of hatred against perceived “others”. But it’s not only a writer like Orwell who we can turn to for enlightenment. Any writer with a eye to human nature could help us. I’d like to refer you, for example, to Booth Tarkington, Princeton Graduate and author of the sparkling, good humoured novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Wealthy, patrician, conservative Tarkington seemingly has little in common with Orwell; but yesterday I read the section in The Magnificent Ambersons where Eugene Morgan tries to help his daughter understand the characteristic combination of arrogance and inability to accept criticism. Eugene’s observations will strike a chord with any number of contemporary American journalists:

“That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.”

In Praise of King Log

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Since the earliest days of organised human society, people have recognised the value of a leader who does little.  One of Aesop’s Fables dating from the sixth century BC, has advice for a populace who think a strong leader is the answer to their problems.  In The Frogs Who Demanded a King, a group of frogs irritated at their disorganised manner of life, ask Zeus to provide them with a king.  In response, Zeus throws a lump of wood into the frog’s swamp.  The noise scares the frogs, who hide beneath the mud. Eventually realising the lump of wood is not actually doing anything, they emerge from their hiding places, sit on their king and complain to Zeus.  This time Zeus sends a water dragon as the frog king, who proceeds to eat all his subjects.

Many leaders, particularly in Britain, have tried to be a lump of wood rather than a water dragon.  Queen Elizabeth I, one of the country’s best-known monarchs, was famous for doing as little as she could get away with, particularly with regard to warfare.  Later in history, this policy of calm inaction would become the guiding philosophy of the British monarchy. Queen Victoria was the first officially non-active constitutional monarch.  Her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, tutored her in this policy; and Melbourne himself – as Dorothy Marshall has written – “had the capacity to do absolutely nothing unless driven, and then do as little as possible.”  Melbourne worked in a tradition set by Robert Walpole, the man often seen as Britain’s first Prime Minister, who with his “calculatedly uneventful administration,” dominated Parliament for twenty years through the 1720s and 1730s.

In the subsequent history of British prime ministers, there are many examples of wise attempts to do as little as possible.  Henry Addington, prime minister 1801 – 1803, provides one telling example.  After peace negotiations with France failed in May 1803, Addington followed the safe but unspectacular course of doing nothing.  Napoleon’s army was sitting in France ready to invade, but if it tried to do so, the Royal Navy was waiting for them.  If only Britain could continue to do nothing, then Napoleon’s army sitting around on the French coast would be defeated either by disease and indiscipline; or by lunging over the Channel in frustration, straight into the waiting guns of British ships. Waiting made perfect sense, but was not popular. Addington’s term did not last the year.

Perhaps Addington made a mistake in failing to combine his non-action with fighting words.  However, even fighting-talk prime ministers are not as active as they seem once you get passed all the words. Winston Churchill might appear to provide definitive active leadership, with his blood curdling speeches of resistance in 1940. In reality, he wisely left most of the actual running of things to others.  The occasions when he interfered did not tend to go well.  It was fortunate, for example, that Air Chief Marshall, Hugh Dowding, talked Churchill out of sending the RAF to its destruction in the Battle for France.  Only because of Dowding’s actions did Britain have the aircraft to allow Churchill to make his famous speeches during the Battle of Britain.

Wisdom coming down to us from the sixth century BC is more relevant than ever.  Political leadership is often at its best in providing a calm centre as King or Queen Log, rather than contributing to the chaos as King or Queen Water Dragon.  The frogs should be careful what they wish for.