Nicci French's Blog, page 9

Just wanting to say:

Happy International Women's day, Pancake Day and Spring! (Nicci)







 

Interesting Fact...

...I learned in the current issue of Word magazine. Writing about the vexed issue of class in rock music, David Hepworth observes that 'Bruce Springsteen's daughter is a champion showjumper'. Can this be true? It certainly can. And back in, say, 1965, what would people have made of the caption to a photograph in the current issue of Vanity Fair?: 'Sir Mick Jagger, the Maharani and Maharaja of Jodhpur, and L'Wren Scott.'

In his article, Hepworth argues that of course rock stars are social climbers. Yes, yes, but then when why does Bruce Springsteen still dress like a longshoreman? The idea of authenticity in pop music (and in literature and in art) is so slippery that it's hard to know where to begin. But I sometimes feel that the most 'authentic' of all pop performers were people like Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, poor boys who had made good, who were grateful for it and were putting on a show and never pretended anything else.

PS Looking at Tom Waits, I sometimes feel like saying to him: don't you get tired pretending to be Tom Waits all the time?

 

 

 

How to Be Funny

The most baffling maxim I've ever come across is the one about how you shouldn't 'talk shop'. Why not? 'Shop' is the most interesting part of most people's lives, the only thing they are experts on. For example, I have close to zero interest in stand-up comedy. Don't go to comedy shows. Don't watch stand-up DVDs. But I've been gripped by Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian. First, he reproduces verbatim one of his comedy routines, which was partly inspired by being threatened with prosecution for blasphemy (he wrote the book for Jerry Springer: The Opera). In the act he tackles the subject of blasphemy head on. The result is, you might say, challenging. Thirty years ago he would have been prosecuted. Three hundred years ago he would have been burnt at the stake. It's pretty funny, though.

More interestingly, he footnotes the act, explaining how the jokes are constructed, where they came from, what he meant by them, what response they got. It sounds a terrible idea and works brilliantly. It constantly reminded me of the process of writing fiction, that strange mix of following your own obsession and playing with the audience's expectation. Anyone interested in writing - or reading, come to that - will learn something from this book.

PS It's clear that people go to comedy shows to get what they used to get from music or fiction. Why? I'm genuinely baffled. Years ago Victoria Wood created a character who showed her general ghastliness by saying: 'I'm sorry but I don't find humour funny.' Sometimes I secretly agree with that. I'm not certain that Shakespeare's tragedies are necessarily greater than the comedies, but they're funnier.

 

Within and Without The Beatles

Peter Doggett had the very good idea of writing an account of the disintegration of The Beatles, starting with the disastrous creation of Apple records (as if their business affairs weren't already in a disastrous state). My two favourite grisly moments from You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of The Beatles (and there are a great many to choose from):

1) When not being a mystic, unconcerned with worldly matters, Harrison was a compulsive seducer. But couldn't he have stayed away from women married to members of The Beatles?

'[Patty] Boyd tried to warn Starkey, who didn't believe her until - as she wrote later - "George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo that he was in love with his wife. [He meant Ringo's wife.] Ringo worked himself up into a terrible state and went about saying, 'Nothing is real, nothing is real'" When the affair ended, the Starkeys' marriage soon collapsed. Maureen Starkey was so upset that she deliberately drove her motorcycle into a brick wall, causing such extensive facial injuries that she had to undergo plastic surgery.'

There is something rather impressive in Ringo reacting to his wife's affair with one Beatle by quoting from a song written by another one.

2) Unbelievably, in the middle of the escalating acrimony, three of The Beatles went into the studio. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were kept away by a car crash. Then Lennon appeared. For a moment it seemed like he might be alone, but then...

'...Yoko Ono hobbled into the studio, followed by four porters from Harrods department store, wheeling in a bed. Ono was still suffering severe whiplash after the car crash in Scotland, but Lennon insisted that she should attend the sessions. "Jaws dropping, we all watched as it was brought into the studio and carefully positioned by the stairs," engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. "More [porters] appeared with sheets and pillows and sombrely made the bed up. Then, without saying a word, Yoko climbed in, carefully arranging the covers around her." And there she remained for the next few days, as if she was staging some magnificently comic piece of performance art, a third bed-in, perhaps for the benefit of a very carefully selected audience. As McCartney noted, it was "not the ideal way for making records."'

But he was wrong. It was the perfect way for making records. It produced Abbey Road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sound of Mucus

That was Christopher Plummer's term for his most famous movie appearance. Another person who turns out to be less than a fan is Stephen Sondheim. In one of my favourite passages from one of my favourite books of the year, Sondheim mentions a line from the title song - 'A lark that is learning to pray' and comments: 'How can you tell a lark that is just learning to pray from one that's actually praying? Wait a minute - a lark praying? What are we talking about?' 

The full title of Sondheim's book is Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), with attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes. It's one of the best accounts of the creative process by a practitioner I've ever read. And the heresies (for example a near total dislike of Gilbert & Sullivan and Noel Coward) are genuinely startling - and thought-provoking as well. The man is scarily clever.

Down With Thrillers

The controversy about whether thrillers are as good as literary fiction is like the murderer in Halloween. It just won't lie down and die, whether it's shot, stabbed or pushed out of a window. Now, in the current Observer, Edward Docx writes that a thriller is necessarily and intrinsically inferior to a literary novel: 'even good genre...is by definition a constrained form of writing.'

The trouble is that the only two authors he discusses are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, authors he considers to be bad genre. His listing of their failings is entirely beside the point. In order even to begin to make his point, Docx would need to identify a really good thriller, define its qualities, and then set it next to a second- or third-rate literary novel and show that the literary novel is still superior. 

If we're playing this slightly tiresome game, I would take a really first-rate thriller, like Simenon's The Widow and set it beside an obviously literary novel of the same era like Camus's The Stranger. Except that Andre Gide already did that at the time and he thought (as I do) that Simenon's novel is superior. Does that prove anything except that all that matters about books is how good they are? 

Docx's fallacy reminds me of a similarly illogical argument in Bryan Magee's generally outstanding book, Aspects of Wagner. He writes:

'When we consider opera - any opera, not just Wagner's - it is clear that the deciding factor in whether a particular work dies or survives is the music and the music alone.' He goes on to say (wrongly in my view) that many beloved operas have terrible librettos. And then continues: 'As against this, I would challenge anyone to give a counter-example and name an opera whose music is generally held to be worthless yet which goes on being performed for generation after generation because the story or the characters or the words have some special appeal.'

But that is clearly not the right counter-example. The more important question is whether there are operas featuring great music that aren't performed because the librettos make them unstageable and the answer is yes. Haydn and Schubert both wrote ones containing some of their greatest music but they are never performed because the stories they weaved them around remain hopelessly intractable. (Another example: many of feel that Berstein's score for Candide is even better than that for West Side Story, but it will never equal the earlier show's popularity because Bernstein could never get the book right, although he spent most of his lifetime getting it rewritten by different, very distinguished hands.)

Meanwhile, go and read Simenon's The Widow, and don't worry about whether it's really a thriller or not.

 

 

 

 

Out of Deptford

A few thoughts after seeing Squeeze with my two brothers at the Kentish Town Forum on Friday night:

1) I first saw them in early 1978. I was on my gap year, working as a stagehand for the production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre.

2) I saw them at their 'final concert' when they split up for the first time in 1982.

3) What would I have thought, if I had been told in 1978, that I would see them again in 2010 when I was fifty-one years old? And that the Rolling Stones would be about to go on tour again?  And that Elton John was married to a man?

4) My brother Karl and I played a game before Squeeze came on. We went for a walk in the auditorium. The winner would be the first to spot anybody in the audience who was definitely under the age of thirty. Neither of us won.

5) The most recent song they played was recorded in 1993.

6) A brand is a valuable thing. A few years ago my brothers and I went to see Glenn Tilbrook performing solo in a local venue. I'd guess it seated a hundred people and was less than half full. He played superbly for three hours so that I missed the train home and was happy to do so. When he and Chris Difford call themselves Squeeze again and play the same songs, they can sell out a tour.

7) Back in the seventies, nobody had any idea that careers were going to last this long. One of the many problems for young musicians starting out is that all the old ones are still around and almost all of them are on tour.

8) It was a fantastic evening. I was hoarse the next morning from singing along. 

9) I'm so old I remember when the Forum was the ABC Kentish Town Road. When I saw Ice Station Zebra there, someone set fire to a seat.

 

 

 

Snow Business

My fun fact so far during Britain's winter chaos came from a report in The Guardian:

    'On the rain network, meanwhile, it emerged that two de-icing trains were away being service at the height of the big freeze in the south last week.'

    You can imagine the conversation in some Network Rail office during the summer:

    'Two of the de-icing trains need servicing. The depot say the de-icing service engineering department is competely booked up but they're free for the whole of December.'

     'Great. Book them in then.' 

The Rules

When doing public interviews, we've repeatedly talked about the supposed 'rules' of Golden Age detective stories. Until I read Nade Pedersen's interesting article about the 'butler did it' trope, I hadn't realized that the rules really existed, that they had been written down, that there are twenty of them. But they were, by S.S. Van Dine, and you can find them here. 

Some of the rules have certain period flavour. Rule eleven, for example: 'A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit...' because he or she 'must be a decidedly worth-while person - one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.'

Some are sensible enough. Rule eight: 'The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic seances, crystal-gazine, and the like are taboo.' The important truth here is that whatever kind of artist you are, whether you are Samuel Beckett or Antonioni or Agatha Christie, you have to establish the rules of your own fictional world. It would be just as disappointing to discover the murderer at the end of Blow-Up as it would be not to discover the murderer at the end of And Then There Were None (as we now have to call it. I first read the book under its original title, and with the original name for the island on which it was set, and was shocked even as a ten year old).

Some rules are just a bit depressing. Rule sixteen: 'A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations...'

What mainly strikes me is how grossly every whodunnit I can think of violates the rules, and I don't just mean the ones about 'literary dallying'. As is well known, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd almost had Agatha Christie burned at the stake for its blatant violation of one of the most important rules. But And Then There Were None violates an important rule (no detective) and Murder on the Orient Express violates several of them. And of course every one of the rules is not just stamped on but danced and then, having been danced on, fed through a mincer and then danced on again, in the great stories of Poe, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, G.K.Chesterton. 

In fact, there's only one rule, it's what you do so that the reader gets to the end, says 'That was good' and does that most wonderful thing that any reader can do: recommends it to someone else.

 

 

 

You Should Use This In One Of Your Books!

Anyone interested in writing should check out this brilliant blog post. Briefly, Josh, a screenwriter, describes a bizarre crime he got mixed up in and at the same time imagines pitching it as a story to a network. The point he is making is something that Nicci and I have discovered over and over again while working on our books, which is that there is a complete difference between what happens in real life and what is believable in a story. Much of what happens in the real world is simply too bizarre to work in a book or a movie, and sometimes it is too uninteresting. Also, however realistic you are being, your material has to be shaped, tweaked, turned into a story. 

Philip Larkin wrote an extraordinary letter (dated 23 December, 1978), to a woman who had sent him a novel she had written, derived from the experience of her son dying in an accident:

'...you have done amazingly well to describe what happened in so dispassionate and calm a way, but for you this is enough, the events speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the reader it isn't: the reader wants that impure thing, literature - plot, suspense, characters, ups, downs, laughter, tears, all the rest of it. Your narrative isn't a story, it's a frieze of misery; your characters are numb with unhappiness; there is no relief, no contrast. Now I can quite see that to 'play about' with the kind of subject-matter you have taken would seem heartless, frivolous, even untrue, an offence against decency or decent feelings, something you couldn't do, and yet in literature it somehow has to be done - one might almost say that it's the mixture of truth and untruth that makes literature.'

I suspect that by that date, Larkin was speaking about himself as well. His depression had taken such a hold that he was no longer capable of shaping his bleak view of life into anything more than a howl of pain.

By the way, I was steered to the above blog post by the indispensible longform.org's selection of The 10 Most Ridiculously Entertaining Reads of 2010, and if that isn't a deadly distraction from work I don't know what is.